We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  Sir Percival Phillips, correspondent of the Daily Telegraph, claimed that Bolín ‘made himself hated like poison by the English and American correspondents’.8 He was disliked and feared by the entire foreign press corps partly because he would not permit visits to the front other than under military escort, but much more as a result of his frequent threats to shoot newspapermen. The censorship never permitted any mention either of the atrocities committed by the Nationalists or of the increasing numbers of Germans and Italians in their zone. Three days after the massacre of 14 August 1936, the cameraman René Brut of Pathé news-reels reached Badajoz and filmed piles of bodies. He was arrested in a Seville hotel on 5 September and imprisoned for several days, during which time he was threatened with death by Bolín. He escaped being shot only when Pathé sent a carefully doctored version of the film to Franco’s headquarters.9

  An account of the Badajoz massacre was published in the Paris edition of the New York Herald Tribune on the basis of a United Press agency report. The report used the name of Reynolds Packard, a UP journalist who had not in fact sent the story. When the original article was mentioned in the Manchester Guardian in January 1937, Bolín summoned Packard to Salamanca, where he threatened him. A terrified Packard cabled Webb Miller, the United Press’ European Bureau chief in London, pleading with him to inform Bolín that he had not written the offending piece, which he did. A similar incident took place when Bolín made comparable demands of Jean d’Hospital, the representative of the Havas Agency in Nationalist Spain. Both the United Press and the Havas Agency pointed out that the cables in question had not come from Packard and d’Hospital, but they did not deny the veracity of the offending reports. Bolín then passed the replies on to the British enthusiast for the Francoist cause, Major Geoffrey McNeill-Moss, who used them to ‘prove’ that the reports of the Badajoz massacre had been fabricated.10

  In the third week of August 1936, the correspondent of the French centre-right newspaper L’Intransigeant, Baron Guy de Traversay (sometimes rendered Traversée), was shot by the rebels in Mallorca. Traversay had travelled with the Republican expedition which had tried to recapture the island in mid-August. He carried credentials from the Catalan Generalitat signed by Jaume Miravitlles, who would later become the head of the Comissariat de Propaganda. When captured, Traversay had pointed out that he was a journalist. When the rebel officers saw the document signed by Miravitlles, they hesitated only briefly before shooting Traversay. The French Catholic writer, Georges Bernanos, was called upon to identify him and he was appalled to be confronted by the blackened and shiny cadaver of Traversay, which had been doused in petrol and burned on a beach along with the corpses of a number of Republican prisoners.11

  On 25 September 1936, as the African columns moving on Madrid made their detour down from Maqueda towards Toledo, Webb Miller of the United Press was arrested at Torrijos. A telegram had been intercepted from his office requesting that he investigate rumours circulating about a plot to murder General Mola. The telegram had been read by the censors who misinterpreted the words ‘RUMOURS PLOT ASSASSINATE GENERAL MOLA’ as an instruction to Miller to carry out the murder himself. Apparently, shortly before Miller’s arrival, a man claiming to be a newspaper correspondent had been executed in Burgos on suspicion of being involved in the plot. Without anything resembling an investigation, the rebel military authorities were about to shoot Miller when he had the good fortune to see the press officer attached to his group, the English-educated Captain Gonzalo Aguilera y Yeltes. After Miller had been left to sweat for some hours, told that he would soon be shot, Aguilera managed to sort out the misunderstanding.12

  It was Bolín who ensured that no correspondents were permitted to enter Toledo during the two-day bloodbath that followed its occupation on 27 September 1936. The excuse given to correspondents who had previously been taken into battlefield situations was that it was ‘too dangerous’. They knew only too well that it was to prevent them testifying to the atrocities taking place while, in the words of Yagüe, ‘we make Toledo the whitest town in Spain’.13 Accordingly, they had to make do with propaganda material given to them by Bolín. One such was the apocryphal story published in the Daily Mail by Harold Cardozo on 30 September 1936, in which it was claimed that Colonel Moscardó, the rebel commander of the Alcázar, was telephoned on 23 July by the Republican authorities and told that, if he did not surrender, his son would be shot. When Moscardó refused, it was alleged that his son was shot immediately. In fact, Luis Moscardó was killed, along with other prisoners, in reprisal for a Nationalist bombing attack on 23 August.14

  Nevertheless, what they saw on entering the town two days later was still deeply disturbing. Webb Miller told Jay Allen that, after he saw what the rebels did to the wounded and to the nurses and the doctors in the hospital in Toledo, ‘he came close to going off his rocker’. He began drinking more heavily than usual and, once in St Jean de Luz or Biarritz, telephoned the New York office saying that he absolutely had to write an account of it. The answer was that if he did so, the United Press would be thrown out of rebel Spain. Without a correspondent on the rebel side, the agency’s best customers in Latin America, who were desperate for news of the Civil War, would be lost. Accordingly, Miller wrote nothing for the United Press about what he had seen and his 1937 memoirs are also relatively circumspect about it.15

  On 26 October 1936, Denis Weaver of the News Chronicle, and the Canadian James M. Minifie of the New York Herald Tribune, set out from Madrid to tour the front in a car provided by the Republican press services, a chauffeur and an escort in the form of a white-haired retired seaman. Weaver had been in Madrid for only a week and had already had the hair-raising experience of lying in a ditch while his car was strafed by rebel aircraft. Now, driving from El Escorial to Aranjuez, near Seseña, they were stopped by Moorish troops. The chauffeur and the seaman were shot immediately. The journalists were manhandled and threatened, and then were taken to General Varela’s headquarters, where they found Henry T. Gorrell of the United Press, who had been captured in similar circumstances. After being interrogated as spies, they were detained, their concerns heightened by being repeatedly told that they were about to be shot, and seeing a lorry laden with terrified women and teenage prisoners being taken, presumably, for execution. Eventually, they were driven to Salamanca for Franco himself to decide their fate. Once there, they were individually interrogated by Luis Bolín, who threatened to have them hanged. Weaver learned later that on the same day that he had been captured, Bolín had refused a request by his paper, the News Chronicle, for permission to send a correspondent to the Francoist zone, and stated that ‘if any representative of the News Chronicle were found in Franco territory it would be the worse for him’. After a further five days in custody, and being forced to send despatches saying that they had been treated courteously, Weaver, Minifie and Gorrell were expelled from Spain and into France.16

  On reaching Hendaye, Weaver immediately wrote a disclaimer of the article that had secured his release. He described how, far from being given courteous treatment, he was repeatedly interrogated during his captivity. He pointed out that: ‘My chauffeur was not killed by a stray bullet, but shot down in cold blood within a yard of me’, adding that ‘I was fired at, and from close range, repeatedly’. He went on to stress that:

  The report also failed to state that among the lethal weapons used to arrest two harmless journalists was a machine-gun in an Italian whippet tank, and that an Italian officer was among the many who raised venomous objections to my request to be taken to headquarters at once. […] Even this morning in San Sebastian I was threatened with the cells if I persisted in asking to be allowed to telephone the British Consulate.17

  Even before Weaver’s arrest, because of the News Chronicle’s consistently pro-Republican stance, Franco’s representative in London had already rejected outright its first application for permission to send an accredited correspondent to the insurgent zone. However, in late October 1936, the editor Ge
rald Barry had decided to take advantage of having a young reporter, the New Zealander, Geoffrey Cox, available in France to try again. Cox took the train to St Jean de Luz, the elegant border resort awash with diplomats and wealthy Franco supporters. At the Bar Basque, a nest of spies and arms dealers, he made contact with Franco’s local agent, an Irishman. He agreed to pass on the newspaper’s application but warned Cox: ‘I doubt if they will let you in, and if they do, you had better watch your step. They detest the News Chronicle, and if you put one foot out of line, you could find yourself in gaol, if only as a hostage for better behaviour on the part of your paper.’ While waiting for a favourable outcome, but mindful of the Irishman’s dire warning, Cox made contact with the British Embassy in case he might later need help should he find himself thrown into a Francoist prison. The pompous and self-satisfied Ambassador, Sir Henry Chilton, a staunch admirer of Franco, had set up the embassy in a residence in St Jean de Luz, where he remained until his retirement in late 1937, rather than return to Republican Madrid. Chilton was not remotely sympathetic to Cox’s potential situation, commenting irritably: ‘I have never heard of anything like this in my diplomatic experience. You come here and tell me you are about to go into a foreign country and act in a way which may land you in gaol, and then expect us to get you out. If you obey the law – and I expect a British citizen to obey the laws of any country he enters – then you will come to no harm.’ When Cox protested that the rebel generals were likely to be cavalier in their interpretation of the rule of law, Chilton dismissed him, saying: ‘I know these generals. They will behave properly. If you don’t, you can’t expect us to help you.’ In the event, it didn’t matter since, three days later, Burgos bluntly refused the application. Ironically, as a result of Weaver’s arrest, Cox would soon find himself in Madrid.18

  With Madrid apparently about to fall, Gerald Barry had to get another correspondent to the besieged city to cover what was assumed to be Franco’s final victorious attack. In the light of the hostility already demonstrated to the paper by Bolín and Franco, Barry believed that whoever his correspondent might be, he would face at best expulsion, and maybe imprisonment or at worst death. Accordingly, he was reluctant to send one of his stars such as Philip Jordan or Vernon Bartlett and so turned to someone he regarded as more expendable, the eager young Geoffrey Cox. On the afternoon of Tuesday 27 October 1936, the news editor put his head around the door of the reporters’ room in London and said: ‘I’m afraid you’re for it Geoffrey. We’ve still no word of what has happened to Denis so you are to go to Madrid right away.’19 Thus, as a result of the hostility of the Francoist authorities to foreign journalists, there was sent to Madrid a brilliant young correspondent whose writings would inspire immense sympathy for the cause of the Republic.

  Later on the day of Weaver’s arrest, two English businessmen from Madrid, out for a drive, also ran into Nationalists. They were arrested and later viciously interrogated by Bolín. One of them, Captain Christopher Lance, later celebrated as ‘the Spanish Pimpernel’ for his exploits in organizing the escape of Nationalists, remembered Bolín as ‘sneering, sarcastic and contemptuous’, ‘quite the most unpleasant creature I’ve ever met’.20 In late November 1936, Alex Small of the Chicago Tribune was arrested in Irún, where the military commander announced that he was to be shot for the crime of publishing an article in which he prophesied that Madrid would not fall. According to Arthur Koestler, the order to shoot Small emanated from Bolín personally. Small was saved only as a result of the fuss raised by another American colleague.21

  In February 1937, the French right-wing newspaper, Figaro, which was fiercely pro-Franco, reported a similar case, that of Henri Malet-Dauban, the correspondent of the Havas Agency. Since his arrival five weeks earlier, Malet-Dauban had written articles that had been consistently in support of the rebel cause. He was a fluent Spanish-speaker who had once been secretary to Eduardo Aunós, of the extreme right-wing group Acción Española, a minister in the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and to be so again under Franco. Nevertheless, Malet-Dauban had been arrested at his hotel in Ávila at the end of January. His room was searched and allegedly compromising documents were found, as a result of which he was accused of spying. He was imprisoned in solitary confinement and denied the right to communicate with anybody. The senior Havas correspondent, Jean D’Hospital, was prevented from communicating the news by the censorship and prevented from leaving rebel Spain. He managed to send messages to Figaro through both M. Perret of Le Journal and M. de Lagarde, the correspondent of the even more ferociously pro-rebel Action Française, who had been in Ávila and reported that they were seriously worried that Malet-Dauban was going to be shot, if he were not already dead. D’Hospital wrote to Franco asking what had happened and was told only that his colleague was suspected of espionage. Bolín made every effort to keep journalists from discussing the case of Malet-Dauban, but D’Hospital managed to get news out that a trial was imminent and that he feared that his colleague would be executed. In the event, Malet-Dauban was kept in prison for four months until, at the end of May 1937, the Basque Government managed to get him released as part of a prisoner exchange.22

  One of the most dramatic examples of the mistreatment of correspondents by the rebels was the case of Arthur Koestler. He had worked sporadically for the Comintern propaganda wizard Willy Münzenberg between 1934 and 1936. When the military coup took place in Spain, Koestler approached Münzenberg for help in getting into Spain to join the International Brigades. When Münzenberg realized that Koestler carried a Hungarian passport and a press card for the conservative Budapest newspaper Pester Lloyd, he suggested that he use this ‘semi-fascist’ credential to get into the rebel zone and collect information on German and Italian intervention on behalf of Franco. Proof of Nazi and Fascist contravention of the non-intervention policy of the British and French Governments would be an important propaganda coup. In fact, the Hungarian press card had little validity, having been given to Koestler by a friendly editor, to facilitate his life as an exile in Paris. Even though Münzenberg, Otto Katz and Koestler assumed that no one in Franco’s headquarters would bother to check, they did think that it was implausible that a small Hungarian newspaper would be able to afford a correspondent in Spain and so Katz arranged for him also to be accredited by the liberal London News Chronicle. En route to Seville, he stopped in Lisbon, where he discovered that his passport had expired. A visit to the Hungarian Consul, who was married to a fiercely right-wing Portuguese aristocrat, led to introductions to the local circle of Franco supporters who took him to be a fellow rightist. As a result, he left Lisbon with two documents that would secure him entry into the lair of the bloodthirsty viceroy of Andalusia, General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano – a letter of introduction from Franco’s unofficial ambassador in Lisbon, the leader of the Catholic CEDA party, José María Gil Robles, and a safe conduct signed by Franco’s brother Nicolás, which described Koestler as a ‘reliable friend of the National Revolution’.23

  Koestler’s trip was proving a success in terms of being able to gather information damaging to the rebels. In Lisbon, he had found ample proof of official Portuguese support for Franco. In Seville, he saw numerous German airmen whose Spanish air force overalls carried a small swastika in the middle of their pilot’s wings. More dramatically, he managed to get an exclusive interview with Queipo de Llano, who happily repeated the same sort of virulent sexism that littered his daily radio broadcasts:

  For some ten minutes he described in a steady flood of words, which now and then became extremely racy, how the Marxists slit open the stomachs of pregnant women and speared the foetuses; how they had tied two eight-year-old girls on to their father’s knees, violated them, poured petrol on them and set them on fire. This went on and on, unceasingly, one story following another – a perfect clinical demonstration in sexual psychopathology.24

  However, on his second day in Seville, Koestler was recognized in a hotel lounge by a German journalist who knew that he was
a Communist and denounced him to the airmen present. Shortly afterwards, a German officer demanded to see his papers. In an effort to bluff his way out of accusations that he was a spy, he demanded loudly that they telephone Luis Bolín. At that moment, into the hotel lobby swept Bolín himself, the ‘tall, weak-faced, tough-acting officer of Scandinavian descent, who had already become famous for his rudeness to the foreign press’. When Koestler, still bluffing, demanded an apology from the German officer, a furious Bolín shouted brusquely that he was not interested in their silly quarrel. Koestler was able to use this to walk out of the hotel apparently ‘in a huff. He then left for Gibraltar as soon as he could. He learned later that a warrant for his arrest had been issued about an hour after his departure and that Bolín had been heard to swear that he would shoot Koestler ‘like a mad dog if he ever got hold of him’.25 Bolín’s determination to exact punishment on Koestler can only have been intensified by the publication on 1 September of his powerful account of rebel Seville, ruled over by a deranged Queipo de Llano and thronged with Nazi officers.

  Unfortunately for Koestler, five months later, Bolín did get hold of him. Indeed, Bolín would gain a kind of international fame by dint of his arrest and mistreatment of Arthur Koestler shortly after the Nationalist capture of Málaga in February 1937. In the intervening time, Koestler had been spending his time between London, Paris and Madrid working on pro-Republican propaganda with Münzenberg and Katz. In London and Paris, he worked for the Commission of Inquiry into Alleged Breaches of the Non-Intervention Agreement in Spain. Thought up by Willi Münzenberg, the commission was run by Otto Katz as a vehicle to campaign in favour of the Republic. By demonstrating the scale of Nazi and Fascist breaches of the non-intervention pact, it was hoped to demonstrate the absurdity of a British and French foreign policy that denied the Spanish Republic its rights in international law. In October 1936, Katz also arranged for him to receive an invitation from Julio Álvarez del Vayo to go to Madrid to search the papers of right-wing politicians who had fled, for material that would demonstrate that Nazi Germany had been involved in the preparation of the military coup. By the beginning of November, he felt that he had found as much material as he could and with the Franco forces apparently about to occupy the city, he was anxious to leave before Bolín arrived.