We Saw Spain Die

by Preston Paul

  Once established at Puy, he began to publish the series of books that obliged the Franco regime to change its falsified version of its own past. The most celebrated was the first, The Myth of Franco’s Crusade, the devastating exposé of right-wing propaganda about the Spanish Civil War.21 By putting up the money for Ruedo Ibérico, to publish it, he inadvertently saved the house from financial collapse. In fact, because the French printer had little experience of typesetting in Spanish, the first edition contained so many errors that it had to be pulped.22 Nevertheless, it appeared in 1963 and a year later in a much expanded French edition, it was decisive in persuading Manuel Fraga to set up the department solely dedicated to the modernization of regime historiography. Its director, Ricardo de la Cierva, in a losing battle with Southworth, went on to write over one hundred books in defence of the Franco regime. This feat was achieved by dint of having the resources of the Ministry of Information at his disposal until the death of Franco, and by a lack of inhibition about self-repetition. Jay Allen sent a copy of El mito to Louis Fischer, describing the book as ‘an extremely detailed and able job’. Aware that Herbert was facing significant financial problems, Jay asked Louis in his capacity as a distinguished professor in Princeton if he could use his influence to persuade the university to acquire the Southworth collection ‘and Fritz along with it’.

  In 1967, Southworth wrote a second book, Antifalange, also published by Ruedo Ibérico, a massively erudite commentary on the process whereby Franco converted the Falange into the single party of his regime. It had significantly less commercial impact than El mito, because it was a minutely detailed line-by-line commentary on a book by a Falangist writer, Maximiano García Venero, Falange en la guerra de España: la Unificación y Hedilla. García Venero was the ghost-writer for the wartime Falangist leader, Manuel Hedilla, who had opposed Franco’s take-over of the single party in April 1937.23 Having been condemned to years of imprisonment, internal exile and penury, Hedilla saw the book as an attempt to revindicate his role in the war. José Martínez, the director of Ruedo Ibérico, asked Herbert to provide detailed notes expanding on the things that García Venero had chosen not to say about Falangist violence. Given his exhaustive knowledge of the Falange, those notes eventually grew to a scale that required their publication in an accompanying volume. Meanwhile, Manuel Fraga had become aware of the imminent publication, and had ensured that the Spanish Embassy in Paris put pressure on García Venero to prevent publication and indeed cause fatal damage to Ruedo Ibérico. Since the enormous book had already been typeset at great expense, José Martínez refused and, after labyrinthine legal complications, the two books were released.24 Southworth’s devastating demolition of García Venero’s text revealed such knowledge of the interstices of the Falange that it provoked considerable surprise and admiration among many senior Falangists. As a result of his prior research for his projected book on the Falange, Southworth had long since been engaged in a flourishing correspondence with major Falangists, among them Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Jesús Suevos and Ángel Alcázar de Velasco. This continued until his death and was notable for the tone of respect with which many of them treated him.

  In the mid-1960s, Herbert had entered into contact with the great French hispanist, Pierre Vilar, who had persuaded him of the utility of presenting a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne. Initially, he had planned to do so with a complete annotated bibliography of the Spanish Civil War along the lines of a vastly expanded version of Le mythe de la croisade de Franco. As he worked on this, however, he got more and more involved in one element, the propaganda battle over the bombing of Guernica.25 In 1975, Herbert Southworth’s masterpiece appeared in Paris as La destruction de Guernica. Journalisme, diplomatie, propagande et histoire, to be followed shortly afterwards by a Spanish translation. The English original appeared as Guernica! Guernica! A Study of Journalism, Diplomacy, Propaganda and History. Based on a staggering array of sources, it is an astonishing reconstruction of the effort by Franco’s propagandists and admirers to wipe out the atrocity at Guernica – and it thus had a very considerable impact in the Basque Country. The book did not reconstruct the bombing itself, but actually begins with the arrival in Guernica from Bilbao of the Times correspondent, George L. Steer, together with three other foreign journalists.

  It is a work of the most fascinating and meticulous research, which reconstructs the web of lies and half-truths that falsified what really happened at Guernica. The most exaggerated Francoist version, which blamed the destruction of the town on sabotaging miners from Asturias, was the invention of Luis Bolín, the head of Franco’s foreign press office. To evaluate the work of Bolín and the subsequent manipulation of international opinion about the event, Southworth carefully reconstructed the conditions under which foreign correspondents were obliged to work in the Nationalist zone. He showed how Bolín frequently threatened to have shot any correspondent whose despatches did not follow the Francoist propaganda line. After a detailed demolition of the line peddled by Bolín, Southworth went on to dismantle the inconsistencies in the writings of Bolín’s English allies, Douglas Jerrold, Arnold Lunn and Robert Sencourt.

  It might normally be expected that a detailed account of the historiography of a subject would be the arid labour of the narrow specialist. However, Southworth managed, with unique mastery, to turn his study of the complex construction of a huge lie into a highly readable book. Among the most interesting and important pages of the book there is an analysis of the relationship between Francoist writing on Guernica and the growth of the Basque problem in the 1970s. Southworth demonstrated that there was an effort being carried out to lower the tension between Madrid and Euzkadi by means of the elaboration of a new version of what happened in Guernica. For this, it was crucial for neo-Francoist historiography to accept that Guernica had been bombed and not destroyed by Red saboteurs. Having conceded that the atrocity was largely the work of the Luftwaffe, in total contradiction of the regime’s previous orthodoxy, it became important for the official historians to free the Nationalist high command from all blame. This task required a high degree of sophistry, since the Germans were in Spain in the first place at the request of Francisco Franco. Nevertheless, the neo-Francoists set out to distinguish between what they portrayed as independent German initiative and the innocence of Franco and the commander in the north, General Emilio Mola. Therefore, Southworth analysed the massive literature on the subject to advance a clear hypothesis: Guernica was bombed by the Condor Legion at the request of the Francoist high command in order to destroy Basque morale and undermine the defence of Bilbao.

  This conclusion was not apparently remarkable, scarcely went beyond the first chronicle sent to The Times by George Steer and was no more than had been regarded as axiomatic by the majority of Basques since 1937. However, the great French historian, Pierre Vilar, in his prologue to the book, pointed out the importance of what Southworth had achieved in returning to the event itself and removing layer after layer of untruth laid on by censorship, by diplomats serving vested interests and determined propagandists of Franco. In Vilar’s view, what gave Southworth’s work an importance far beyond the confines of the historiography of the Spanish Civil War was his determined quest for the truth, and his exposure of the way in which journalists, censors, propagandists and diplomats distorted history. In a terrain in which truth has always been the first casualty, the ‘passionate objectivity’ of Southworth rose up like a beacon and made it an object lesson in methodology. Southworth’s research was based on an astonishing array of sources in seven languages, amassed in many countries. On the advice of Pierre Vilar, the manuscript was presented in 1975 – successfully – as a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne. He had already lectured in universities in Britain and France, but this was the beginning of a belated academic recognition of Southworth’s work in his own country. In the mid-1970s, he became Regents Professor at the University of California.

  Herbert was never fully welcome in the US academic community, because
of his inveterate subversiveness and his mischievous humour. He made no secret of his contempt for Washington’s policies in Latin America, which evoked for him the betrayal of the Spanish Republic. Every day, as an avid observer of what he considered to be the hypocrisy of political theatre, he devoured a stack of French and American newspapers. Along with his political passion, he had a wonderful sense of the absurd and an irresistibly infectious laugh. He was particularly keen on multilingual puns, never ceasing to be tickled by the delivery to any restaurant table in Spain of a bottle of mineral water with its label ‘sin gas’. I remember on one occasion at a conference in Germany, the assembled participants were led by the director of the host foundation to see a sumptuous carpet which, we were proudly told, had once belonged to Adolf Hitler. Herbert dropped to his knees and began shuffling around, peering closely at the pile. Herr Direktor asked with concern what the matter was and was completely nonplussed when Herbert replied in his slow Texan drawl: ‘I’m looking for the teeth marks!’ His demolition of the fake scholarship of others was often extremely amusing, most notably in his chapter entitled ‘Spanica Zwischen Todnu Gabriet’, in which he traced minutely how Francoist author after Francoist author cited a book they had never read (Peter Merin’s Spanien zwischen Tod und Geburt (Spain between Life and Death)), but merely mis-copied its title. He once asked me to ensure that his gravestone carried the epitaph ‘HIS WRITINGS WERE NOT HOLY WRIT / BUT NEITHER WERE THEY WHOLLY SHIT’. Despite his austere inquisitorial style, he was a rotund and jolly trencherman.

  After the death of Franco, Herbert was regularly invited to give lectures at Spanish universities, where he was a major cult figure. His influence was seen in the work of a new generation of British and Spanish scholars. Southworth’s remorselessly forensic writings imposed new standards of seriousness on writing about the war. A pugnacious polemicist, he regularly took part in literary arguments, most notably with Burnett Bolloten and Hugh Thomas. Regarding his great Francoist opponent, Ricardo de la Cierva, he had already published a devastating demolition of his sloppy scholarship, ‘Los bibliófobos: Ricardo de la Cierva y sus colaboradores’.26 Herbert wrote to Jay: ‘People say I am destructive and ill-tempered and never say a good word about anybody, but somebody has to say who are the sons of bitches and the good guys. In the academic world, all is politeness and you scratch my back and turn around. I like to think of myself as a fresh current of air.’27 However, he ceased publishing for a time because he was working on his massive study of Guernica. As his letters revealed, he also faced severe financial problems. In 1970, he saw that his outgoings on books dramatically exceeded income and he decided that he must sell the collection. It was sold to the University of California at San Diego as ‘The Southworth Collection’ and remains the world’s single most important library on the Spanish Civil War. With income from savings dwindling, he and Suzanne also had to sell the Château de Roche in 1978.

  I had assumed that, as they had both entered their seventies, they would move to a modern house. Instead, they bought a medieval priory in the village of St Benoît du Sault, an intriguing but inconvenient house in which every room was on a different level and whose long and narrow stone spiral staircase led eventually to another bat-infested study. Inevitably, Herbert began to rebuild his collection and had started to write again. He enjoyed the friendship of the Pierre Vilar, of numerous Spanish scholars and of the venerable Dutch anarchist thinker, Arthur Lehning. They lived happily in St Benoît until Suzanne’s health broke down in 1994. Herbert nursed her devotedly until her death on 24 August 1996. He never recovered fully from that blow and, after a subsequent stroke, his health deteriorated dramatically. Nevertheless, although bed-ridden, with the devoted help of an English neighbour, Susan Mason-Walstra, he continued to work.

  Initially, he had intended to revise El mito de la Cruzada de Franco. However, just as an earlier attempt had seen the research expand until it became his monumental book on Guernica, now something similar happened. The consequence was a two-fold final historiographical legacy. In 1996, he published a long analysis of the way that the ex-Trotskyist Julián Gorkín had, through his work for the Congress for Cultural Freedom and his falsification of the memoirs of Communist dissidents, distorted the historiography of the Spanish Civil War. The Welsh historian Burnett Bolloten was also the target of devastating criticisms. Bolloten had been a United Press correspondent during the war and was close to Constancia de la Mora. He had set out to write a history of the war which was initially pro-Negrinista, but he had become fiercely anti-Communist as a result of the assassination of Trotsky. His subsequent writings had been somewhat influenced by Gorkín, something mercilessly pilloried by Southworth.28 Then, only three days before his death on 30 October 1999 in the hospital at Le Blanc, Indre, Herbert Southworth delivered the manuscript of his last book, a detailed analysis of two related elements of the military coup of 1936: the fabrication of a Communist plot to take over Spain in order to justify the coup and the influence on Franco himself of his relationship with the extreme rightist Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale.29 The book was a more fitting epitaph than that quoted above.

  12

  Epilogue: Buried Treasure

  You are eternally right in saying that for the Spanish crimes the three great democracies must take full responsibility in history.’ Thus, on 7 August 1939, Josephus Daniels, under whom FDR had served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy during the First World War, wrote to Claude Bowers.1 For the duration of the Spanish Civil War, despite the reports of their own diplomats and of countless correspondents in Spain, the governments of Britain, France and the United States chose to ignore the fact that Hitler and Mussolini were sending unstinting help to the rebels and tilting the balance of international power against the democracies. Despite the fact that it was normal practice under international law to permit an established friendly government to purchase arms and supplies, all three governments denied this right to the Spanish Republic. Neither Anglo-French non-intervention nor the American ‘moral’ embargo and the subsequent extension of the 1935 Neutrality Act to encompass Spain were neutral in their consequences.2 They damaged the cause of Spain’s legally elected government, limited the Republic’s capacity to defend itself and threw it into the arms of the Soviet Union.

  The fact that Leon Blum frequently burst into tears when reminded that, if the Spanish Republic was crushed, France and the rest of Europe would be next, suggests that he was tortured by regrets about his policy, without needing the reminders of journalists such as Louis Delaprée.3 There is no record of Neville Chamberlain ever expressing regret for his betrayal of the Spanish Republic, although it was a significant stepping stone on the way to his loss of power in June 1940. In contrast, when Claude Bowers went to report to Franklin D. Roosevelt on Franco’s victory, a crestfallen president told him: ‘We have made a mistake. You have been right all along.’4 In 1944, the Assistant Secretary of State, Sumner Welles, recognized that ‘Of all our blind isolationist policies, the most disastrous was our attitude on the Spanish Civil War’, and ‘in the long history of the foreign policy of the Roosevelt Administration, there has been, I think, no more cardinal error than the policy adopted during the civil war in Spain’.5 At least Roosevelt felt regret, but it can have been as nothing in comparison with the bitterness felt by the many liberals and leftists in America and Europe who had watched the policy of the democratic powers strangle the Spanish Republic and hasten the triumph of fascism.

  Through their despatches, the correspondents, and in the case of Jay Allen, Louis Fischer and George Steer, through their campaigning activities, had tried to bring this home. Thanks in large part to the correspondents, millions of people who knew little about Spain came to feel in their hearts that the Spanish Republic’s struggle for survival was somehow their struggle. The work of the correspondents and their letters to his wife Eleanor had an impact on President Roosevelt’s thinking about the threat of fascism. In turn, the fact that he placed
electoral interests before wider moral issues had an impact on them. It contributed to Jay Allen’s plunge into depression and Louis Fischer’s turn to Gandhian pacifism. Herbert Matthews wrote bitterly that Roosevelt was ‘too intelligent and experienced to fool himself about the moral issues involved’ and that his ‘overriding consideration was not what was right or wrong, but what was best for the United States and, incidentally, for himself and the Democratic party’.6

  The Spanish Republic was a defensive bulwark against the threat of fascist aggression. But its appeal was not just negative. In the grey and cynical world of the depression years, the cultural and educational achievements of the Spanish Republic seemed to be an exciting experiment. However, for most of the correspondents, the most important element of their support for the Republic was the fight to defend democracy against the advance of fascism. To their disappointments in Spain were added vilification at home from those who believed that Franco was conducting a crusade in defence of true religion against Bolshevik bestiality. The consequence was what F. Jay Taylor called ‘one of this generation’s most impassioned political and religious controversies’. Indeed, so intensely conflictive was the polemic provoked within the United States that the British Consul in New York reported in February 1938 that the city was ‘almost assuming the likeness of a miniature Spain’.7 Nearly thirty-five years after the defeat of the Republic, Herbert Matthews declared: ‘No event in the outside world, before or since, aroused Americans in time to such religious controversy and such burning emotions.’8

  Yet despite vilification, defeat and the bitter frustration of witnessing the culpable negligence of the democracies, almost all those who supported the cause of the Spanish Republic carried for the rest of their lives the conviction that they had participated in a struggle that mattered. It was a feeling shared even by George Orwell, whose memoir of his brief time in Spain has given much succour to those who wish to claim, whether from the far Left or the far Right, that the defeat of the Spanish Republic was somehow more the responsibility of Stalin than of Franco, Hitler, Mussolini or Neville Chamberlain. On leaving Spain, Orwell stayed for three days in the French fishing port of Banyuls. He and his wife ‘thought, talked, dreamed incessantly of Spain’. Although bitter about what he had seen as a foot soldier with the semi-Trotskyist POUM, Orwell claimed to feel neither disillusionment nor cynicism: ‘Curiously enough the whole experience has left me with not less but more belief in the decency of human beings.’9