We Saw Spain Die Read online

  The managing editor of the New York Times was the short, stick-toting Virginian, Edwin L. ‘Jimmy’ James. He wore brightly coloured suits, looked like a bookie and was nicknamed ‘Dressy James’ by Damon Runyon. A keen bon viveur, James was always keen to get off in the evening and so gave enormous freedom to the night managing editor, the deeply conservative Presbyterian, Raymond McCaw. In turn, McCaw gave considerable liberty to his deputy, Neil MacNeil, a fiercely partisan Catholic, and his assistant, the equally fanatical convert, Clarence Howell. These night editors controlled the group of desks in the newsroom known as the ‘bullpen’. They decided what stories would get prominence and how they were edited.38

  Matthews was convinced that these men treated his copy with ‘suspicion, anger, and, at times, disbelief’, tampered with his wording and buried entire stories because they were perceived to favour the Republican side. In contrast, they printed unashamedly partisan material from William P. Carney, his counterpart in the rebel zone, despite knowing that it was sometimes faked. McCaw issued orders that, whenever Matthews wrote about the ‘Italian troops’ who fought with the rebels, the phrase was to be replaced by ‘insurgent troops’. Matthews had gone to Guadalajara after the Italian defeat there. He reported what Italian prisoners had told him and what he had seen of captured Italian weaponry and documents. McCaw’s device made nonsense of his despatches. Moreover, McCaw cabled Matthews, accusing him of simply sending Republican propaganda handouts.39

  Matthews, in fact, took enormous pride in his work and his personal ethic demanded that he never wrote a word that he did not fervently believe to be true. In Spain, he would endure the bitterness of seeing the side he supported lose. Over thirty years later, he concluded:

  All of us who lived the Spanish Civil War felt deeply emotional about it… I always felt the falseness and hypocrisy of those who claimed to be unbiased… those of us who championed the cause of the Republican government against the Franco Nationalists were right. It was, on balance, the cause of justice, morality, decency.40

  Matthews was savagely denounced as ‘a rabid Red partisan’ by the leading Catholic propagandist Dr Joseph Thorning. Nevertheless, it did not diminish his passionate commitment to writing the truth as he saw it: ‘the war also taught me that the truth will prevail in the long run. Journalism may seem to fail in its daily task of providing the material for history, but history will never fail so long as the newspaperman writes the truth.’41

  Writing the truth meant, to quote Martha Gellhorn again, ‘explaining that the Spanish Republic was neither a collection of blood-slathering Reds nor a cat’s-paw of Russia’. She would have no truck with what she called ‘all that objectivity shit’, refusing to adopt a morally repugnant neutrality equidistant between two very different sides. Like Matthews and so many others, she felt that to write passionately and vividly about what they saw was no distortion of the truth. They came to believe that those who fought and those who died in defence of the Spanish Republic

  whatever their nationality and whether they were Communists, anarchists, Socialists, poets, plumbers, middle-class professional men, or the one Abyssinian prince, were brave and disinterested, as there were no rewards in Spain. They were fighting for us all, against the combined force of European fascism. They deserved our thanks and our respect and got neither.42

  A few who became loyalist partisans went further than just writing the truth, indeed well beyond their journalistic duties. Hemingway gave an ambulance and dispensed advice to military commanders. Fischer helped both to organize the Republic’s press services and to repatriate wounded International Brigaders. Jay Allen lobbied tirelessly for the Republic in America, then went into Vichy France to help Spanish refugees and imprisoned International Brigaders. In consequence, he suffered incarceration in a German prison. George Steer campaigned on behalf of the Basque government to get Britain to permit food supplies to get through to a blockaded Bilbao. The Russian, Mikhail Koltsov, wrote so enthusiastically about the revolutionary élan of the Spanish people that, in the atmosphere of the Soviet purges, he became an embarrassment and was executed.

  It has been possible to reconstruct the experiences of some of the world’s best newspapermen in Spain partly through their despatches, letters, diaries and memoirs. Moreover, many details of their activities and of their relations with the censorship apparatus have been revealed through the memoirs left by important figures in the Republican press bureaux in Madrid, Valencia and Barcelona: Arturo Barea, Kate Mangan and Constancia de la Mora. What was written by the foreign newspapermen was crucial at the time to the formation of public opinion in the democracies. Thereafter, the body of work produced by war correspondents during the Spanish conflict, endlessly mined by subsequent historians, was truly ‘the first draft of history’. Herbert Matthews believed that ‘a journalist who writes truthfully what he sees and knows on a given day is writing for posterity. The scepticism and criticisms that I met in some quarters during the Spanish conflict made me feel at times that I was working more for the historical record than for the daily reader.’43

  2

  The Capital of the World: The Correspondents and the Siege of Madrid

  On 21 September 1936, General Franco made a surprising decision that would affect the entire subsequent course of the Spanish Civil War. On that day, in their vertiginous advance from Seville to Madrid, his African columns had reached Maqueda in the province of Toledo from where the road north-east to the capital lay open. Madrid was at his mercy, yet Franco did not let his troops race onwards to an easy victory but decided instead to divert them south-eastwards to relieve the besieged Alcázar of Toledo. What seemed a major military blunder was actually a part of the orchestration of Franco’s complex scheme to take control of the rebel forces, become Generalísimo and Caudillo. Ignoring warnings that he was throwing away an unrepeatable chance to sweep on to the Spanish capital before its defences were ready, Franco had decided that he would garner infinitely more prestige both among his fellow rebels and internationally if he liberated the besieged garrison. He thus chose to inflate his own political position by means of an emotional victory and a great propagandistic coup at the expense of the early defeat of the Republic. When his troops entered Toledo on 27 September, the accompanying war correspondents were prevented from witnessing the bloody massacre unleashed by the attacking legionaries and Moroccan Regulares Indígenas. They took no prisoners. Corpses littered the narrow streets, down which trickled rivulets of blood. Webb Miller of the United Press told the US Ambassador that he had seen the beheaded corpses of militiamen. Four days later, Franco’s fellow generals rewarded him by electing him Caudillo, head of the rebel armed forces and head of the rebel state.1

  Although newspaper correspondents had been excluded, the gruesome story of what had happened got out soon enough. In any case, for two and a half months, refugees from the south had flooded north carrying horrendous tales of the slaughter unleashed by the African columns as they pillaged town after town. The massacre at Badajoz on 14 August had been intended as a warning to the citizens of Madrid of what would happen to them if they did not surrender. News of this latest horror in Toledo sent a shudder of terror through the city as, after a few days’ rest, Franco’s forces renewed their push on Madrid. In fact, the delay from 21 September until 6 October had inadvertently provided a breathing space which would eventually see Russian aircraft and tanks and the volunteers of the International Brigades arrive to help save Madrid. At the time, however, the population in the capital awaited the rebel assault with doom-laden trepidation. War correspondents from around the world, burning to be the first to announce the fall of the capital, constantly pestered the Republican authorities for passes to the front. One of the more persistent and intrepid was Hank Gorrell of Washington, DC.

  Until 14 September, Gorrell had been working for the United Press in Rome but had fallen foul of the Fascist authorities. As a result of reporting a police round-up of a Communist resistance group, he had been summone
d to Mussolini’s Ministry of Information and ‘invited’ to leave Italy.2 He was reassigned to Madrid, where he arrived one week later. On 3 October, with a Spanish colleague named Emilio Herrera, he had gone in a car provided by the Republican press office to the front just north of Toledo at the town of Olías del Teniente Castillo (previously Olías del Rey). They were stopped by Loyalist officers. Despite Hank carrying an American passport and a pass issued by the Ministry of War authorizing his visit to the front, they were arrested when he was heard speaking Italian. They were sent back to Madrid under motorcyclist escort, taken to a military headquarters located in the old royal palace and questioned. Having answered his interrogators satisfactorily, Gorrell was soon released, although Herrera was kept in custody. As Hank reported to the American Embassy,

  the officers who ordered me detained apologized profusely and told me that since I possessed the proper documents, I could proceed at any time thereafter to Cabanas and Olías. One officer recommended however that I request an additional pass for that particular war zone from the Colonel in command of the loyalist troops at Olías. I accepted the officer’s apologies, telling them I was disposed to forget the incident.

  On the following day, Hank Gorrell returned to the front at Olías and went to Loyalist headquarters to get the necessary pass. Before he could see the Colonel, he and his driver were detained by armed militiamen. The driver, Rafael Navarro, of Philippine origin, was also an American citizen. Under suspicion of being spies, they were held for four hours. They were then taken, on a bus full of more militia, to police headquarters in Madrid. There they were kept in considerable discomfort in a dirty cellar for several hours until the arrival of the chief of the Republican Foreign Ministry’s press office, Luis Rubio Hidalgo, who quickly secured their release. When Gorrell reported on these two detentions, his principal complaint was that he had not been allowed to contact either his office or the American Embassy. Nevertheless, his captors had informed Rubio Hidalgo, who in turn alerted Lester Ziffren, the thirty-year-old head of the United Press bureau in Madrid. Ziffren had been in Madrid for over three years, knew his way around and was able to mobilize the aid of the Under-Secretary for War, General José Asensio Torrado. The consequence was not only the liberation of the prisoners and profuse official apologies but also an invitation to dinner at the Ministry of War.3

  How different would be Hank Gorrell’s experience three weeks later on another trip to the front. On 26 October, Hank set out from Madrid with a car and driver provided by the Republican press office. North of Aranjuez, he had been wandering behind the lines when advancing rebel troops opened fire on them. He was left behind when he ignored his driver’s shouted invitation to jump for it and join him in dashing for Madrid. Hank took refuge in a ditch from an Italian whippet tank that was trying to run him down. When it toppled over, stunning the driver, Hank helped him out of the tank. He was rewarded for this when the rescued Italian officer intervened to prevent his execution by the Moors. However, the Moors did steal all his money, his gold watch and cuff links. He was taken to nearby Seseña where he was joined by two other correspondents, the Englishman Dennis Weaver of the News Chronicle and the Canadian James M. Minifie of the New York Herald Tribune, who had also ventured inadvertently beyond rebel lines and been captured.

  The rebel authorities issued a statement to the effect that Gorrell, Weaver and Minifie were ‘guests of the rebel command pending their departure for the border’. In fact, their situation was significantly more unpleasant than the press release implied. The driver and escort of Weaver and Minifie had been shot in front of them. They had been transported to Talavera, where the field commander of the African columns, General José Varela, had his headquarters. They were interrogated as spies and repeatedly told that they were about to be shot. Eventually, they were transferred to Salamanca for Franco himself to take the decision about what to do with them. There, they were harshly questioned by the notorious Luis Bolín, Rubio Hidalgo’s counterpart in the rebel zone. The blustering Bolín threatened to have them hanged. After a further five unpleasant days in custody, and being obliged to send dispatches saying that they had been treated courteously, all three were expelled from Spain. Gorrell later returned to the Republican zone.4 Not long after, Lester Ziffren narrowly escaped a similar fate: ‘There was no indication where the respective lines lay. I missed being taken prisoner because a lone militiaman returning along a deserted road warned me that I was heading for Rebel territory.’5

  Gorrell’s three arrests showed that, in both zones, troops near the front were understandably jittery and indeed trigger-happy when confronted by prying civilians who might be spies. Nevertheless, the contrasting treatment received – apologies and dinner from the Republic’s authorities, death threats and expulsion from the rebels – was representative of the attitudes of both sides towards journalists. To put it simply, the Republican press apparatus tended to facilitate rather than impede the work of correspondents. A section of the Ministerio de Estado (the Ministry of Foreign Affairs) had been set up within a few days of the military coup. The Madrid press office was housed in the thirteen-storey Telefónica building, the headquarters of the American International Telephone and Telegraph Company, situated on the central avenue known as the Gran Vía. It was from there that the journalists delivered their stories to the censors before they were allowed to telephone them to their papers. At night, camp beds were set up for those who were waiting to send out their stories. In a chaotic din of languages, ITT employees who acted as the first censors had to listen in to ensure that what was read out did not diverge from the censored text. If the newspapermen deviated from the approved wording, they were immediately cut off. By early November, as rebel forces approached, ready to occupy the city, the Telefónica, Madrid’s tallest building, became a daily target for artillery fire and was regularly hit. Despite the shelling, the censors, the switchboard girls and the correspondents simply carried on.6

  In the early days of the war, the censorship in Madrid was inefficient and sometimes heavy-handed. None of the early censors understood English and articles had to be submitted with a Spanish translation before approval for transmission was granted. There were no fixed guidelines and each censor exercised his authority as he thought best. One correspondent might see his dispatch passed for transmission while the same story worded differently by a colleague would be censored shortly after. Lester Ziffren described this situation in his diary on 23 August 1936:

  Rebel planes made their first raid on Madrid’s environs and bombed the Getafe aerodrome. The government confirmed the news in its 10 p.m. broadcast. The censor would not permit transmission of cables carrying the text of this broadcast. Apparently decided such news may be all right for the Spanish people but not for the press abroad. In view of this situation, I instructed my Paris office to pick up the official broadcasts because I could not send the texts out of Spain by cable.7

  The position of the censorship was put on a more rational basis from the first week of September with the appointment as Foreign Minister in Largo Caballero’s cabinet of Julio Álvarez del Vayo, himself a one-time journalist. Born in Madrid in 1891, the highly cosmopolitan Álvarez del Vayo had studied with Sydney and Beatrice Webb at the London School of Economics in 1912 and then in the following year at the University of Leipzig, where he became friends with Juan Negrín. He also came into contact with Rosa Luxembourg and Karl Liebknecht. He later wrote a biography of Rosa Luxembourg, La senda roja (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1934). In 1916, he met Lenin in Switzerland. He visited Russia several times and wrote two books about the Soviet experiment, La nueva Rusia (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1926), and Rusia a los doce años (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1929). On 18 September 1936, Álvarez del Vayo appointed his friend Luis Rubio Hidalgo, another experienced newspaperman, as Chief Censor at the Foreign Press and Propaganda Office of the Ministry.8 Henceforth, it was much easier for correspondents to get their stories transmitted. Having known him for some years as a colleague, Lester Ziffr
en found Rubio Hidalgo to be helpful and co-operative. However, he was considered by others to be a suave scheming careerist. Rubio Hidalgo was, according to the highly experienced Daily Express correspondent, Sefton ‘Tom’ Delmer, ‘an opportunist official who went out of his way to look as Machiavellian as he could with a thin streak of a black moustache on his upper lip, a superior cynical smile when he talked, and dark glasses hiding what were really timid eyes beneath the traditional mask of the international conspirator’.9

  Ziffren felt that Rubio tried to make the censorship less irksome, and confined censorship to prohibiting references to troop movements, military plans or atrocities. Previously, the censorship had applied the same criteria to news for domestic use and the stories submitted by foreign correspondents: ‘Defeats were never admitted in the Loyalist press which was engaged principally in publishing material intended to strengthen the public morale.’ The hardened American journalist Louis Fischer was shocked by the fact that the Republican press did not tell all the truth:

  The first question put to me when I arrived in Barcelona was, ‘Have we lost Irún?’ It has been lost weeks ago. The government has never announced it. Nor does the public know officially about the surrender of San Sebastián. The daily War Office reports are replete with victories; no repulse is recorded. It would be difficult to understand after collating all these broadcasts why the enemy is approaching Madrid. The Loyalists should, instead be approaching Madrid.10

  Fischer put pressure on his friend Álvarez del Vayo to recognize that reporting of the truth would benefit the Republic. Rubio was authorized by Álvarez del Vayo to permit news of government defeats after he too had argued that it made more sense to admit a fact immediately rather than try to deny facts which would any way be broadcast by the rebels. Consequently more accurate news had been published abroad about the true situation than was printed in Spain. Ziffren wrote warmly that Rubio Hidalgo’s efforts to improve on the previously inefficient and clumsy censorship rendered it ‘more tractable and workable’.11 It is more than likely, however, that the changes noted by Ziffren were actually the work of others. It is certainly not difficult to find criticisms of Rubio Hidalgo from those who wanted to see the working conditions of correspondents made even easier, on the grounds that they would then be more likely to write in a manner that favoured the Republic.