We Saw Spain Die (28 page)

When he said ‘I think we shall understand one another’, Dick took it as a threat.
³⁰

Millán Astray remained in overall charge of the rebel press and propaganda machinery during the advance on Madrid. However, on 12 October 1936, he had brought the insurgent cause into considerable international disrepute by his behaviour during the celebrations of the anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America. He had clashed with the world-famous Rector of the University of Salamanca, the philosopher Miguel de Unamuno. His hysterical intervention had provoked from Unamuno words that went around the globe: ‘You will win but you will not convince. You will win because you have more than enough brute force; but you will not convince because to convince means to persuade. And to persuade you need something which you lack: right and reason. It seems to me pointless to ask you to think about Spain’.
³¹
As far as Franco was concerned, Millán Astray had behaved as he should in his confrontation with Unamuno. Indeed, it was Franco himself who had recommended that Millán Astray take on, as his assistant, the deranged sycophant Ernesto Giménez Caballero, self-styled founder of Spanish surrealism, and author of a book admired by the Generalísimo, the extraordinary panegyric of fascist
mysticism,
Genio de España.
Nevertheless, even Franco had to recognize that there was a need for a more tightly run operation than could be provided by Millán Astray and Giménez Caballero.
³²

Accordingly, on 24 January 1937, the Oficina de Prensa y Propaganda became the Delegación para Prensa y Propaganda, under the direction of Vicente Gay Forner, a virulently anti-Semitic professor of the University of Valladolid. Gay had contributed enthusiastically pro-Nazi, and virtually unreadable, articles to
Informaciones,
under the pseudonym Luis de Valencia. Vicente Gay had also received subsidies from Goebbels’ Propaganda Ministry for his pro-Nazi writings, including the book
La revolución nacional-socialista.
He chose as his deputy Ramón Ruiz Alonso, the ex-CEDA deputy for Granada, who has been accused of responsibility for the murder of Federico García Lorca. Vicente Gay’s lack of diplomatic skills and his ideological confusion soon earned him the hostility of most of the key groups in Salamanca. Ramón Serrano Suñer, Franco’s brother-in-law and effectively his political factotum, replaced Gay in April 1937 with the military engineer Major Manuel Arias Paz, on the extraordinary grounds that he had built a radio transmitter in La Coruña. Arias Paz would be no more than a figurehead with the real task of organizing Nationalist propaganda assumed by the monarchist intellectual, Eugenio Vegas Latapié.
³³

The daily contact with journalists was left in the hands of Captain Gonzalo Aguilera y Yeltes, who was also a Stonyhurst product. For journalists already sympathetic to the rebels, the clipped Oxford English of these men gave an added credibility to their passing on of atrocity propaganda. Other journalists, especially Americans, tended to be much more sceptical, particularly of Aguilera. He was a deeply reactionary
latifundista
with lands in Salamanca and Cáceres, who told journalists that all Spain’s problems were the result of the interference with the natural order constituted by the introduction of sewers.
³⁴
He had retired from the army in protest at the requirement that officers swear an oath of loyalty to the Republic, taking advantage of the generous voluntary retirement terms of the decrees of 25 and 29 April 1931 promulgated by the newly installed Minister of War, Manuel Azaña.
³⁵
On the outbreak of war, Aguilera had come out of retirement and volunteered for the nationalist forces. He had been informally attached to the general staff
of General Mola, commander of the Army of the North. Because he spoke fluent English, French and German, he had been given the task of supervising the movements and the production of the foreign press correspondents – sometimes serving as a guide, others as a censor.
³⁶
When Mola’s Army of the North finally made contact with Franco’s African columns in early September, Aguilera had moved south to take charge of the press accompanying the columns during the remainder of their march on Toledo and Madrid.
³⁷

Unlike most press officers, who felt responsible for the safety of the journalists assigned to them, Aguilera operated on the principle that, if risks had to be taken to get stories then, so long as they were favourable to the Nationalists, he would help the reporters take them. He regularly took his charges into the firing line and was ‘bombed, machine-gunned and shelled’ with them.
³⁸
It was the most frequent complaint of the journalists in the Nationalist zone that they were expected to publish anodyne communiqués while being kept away from hard news. This was more often the case when the Nationalists were doing badly and especially so for journalists regarded as too ‘independent’. Even favoured individuals were subjected to humiliating delays while waiting to be issued with passes for accompanied visits to the front.
³⁹
Accordingly, Aguilera was extremely popular with the right-wing journalists who met him because he was prepared to take them dangerously near to the front and would use his influence with the censor to help them get their stories through.
⁴⁰

A journalist who had enormous personal regard for Aguilera was Sefton Delmer of the
Daily Express.
Delmer was most welcome in the Nationalist zone since he was reputed to be a personal friend of Hitler. Born and educated in Germany, he spoke the language fluently and had accompanied the Führer on Nazi election campaign tours. Indeed, he had famously joined Hitler when he inspected the smoking ruins of the Reichstag after the February 1933 fire. He made little secret of his admiration for the German leader.
⁴¹
On reaching Perpignan after leaving the anarchists of Mollet, his editor instructed him to head for Seville. He went to Toulouse, where he linked up with H. R. Knickerbocker, the internationally famous correspondent of the Hearst press, and Louis Delaprée of
Paris-Soir,
for the first leg of the flight which took them to
Burgos. On arrival, Knickerbocker was especially outraged that his celebrity went unrecognized when they were all arrested and their aircraft commandeered. After an interview with General Mola, they were permitted to stay. Delmer discovered that Burgos shared with revolutionary Catalonia the inconvenience of nightly executions:

Punctually at two o’clock every night I was awakened by volleys of shots. They were the shots fired by Mola’s executions squads who night after night dragged their captives from the crowded prison to carry out the summary death sentences passed by the courts martial during the day. And day after day more prisoners – civilians, not soldiers taken in battle – were being brought in to take the places of those killed the night before.
⁴²

Delmer and the others were permitted to send reports to their papers only after they had pointed out that the more lenient conditions in the Republican zone favoured the enemy. Knickerbocker was deputed to take the reports of all three to Bordeaux for onward transmission. The many atrocities that Delmer witnessed were reported only years later in his memoirs. In his first article for the
Daily Express
from Burgos, he quoted the rebels’ claims to be freeing Spain from the ‘Red Marxist tyrants’ and, understandably given the scale of censorship, failed to mention any rebel killings. Nevertheless, after six weeks, in September 1936, Aguilera expelled Delmer from Nationalist Spain on the grounds that one of his despatches published information likely to be of use to the enemy and also was ‘calculated to make the Spanish armed forces look ridiculous’. The report in question had recounted an air-raid on Burgos by an aged Republican DC3. Delmer had described how, in the midst of it, a small British plane returning Knickerbocker from France had inadvertently arrived. It had been mistaken for an enemy aircraft, attracted the anti-aircraft fire of the Burgos batteries and still managed to land unscathed. The despatch, Aguilera told him over a drink, ‘not only encourages the Reds to attack Burgos again. But it makes our ack-ack gunners look inefficient.’

Aguilera liked Delmer and so confided in him that he did not give a damn what the reporter said about the artillery since he was a
cavalryman himself. He also told him that the real motive behind the incident was that German agents had requested that he be removed because they considered him, not without justification, to be an agent of British Intelligence.
⁴³
Expelled by the Nationalists, Sefton Delmer then represented the
Daily Express
in the Republican zone. Other correspondents who knew him regarded him as fiercely independent and extremely clever but, in the Republican press office, he would be viewed with some suspicion. This was not entirely surprising given that in his memoirs he referred to Republicans throughout as ‘Reds’ and to Aguilera as ‘dear Aggy’. Moreover, he and Aguilera were friends in London after the Spanish Civil War.
⁴⁴

The fiercely pro-Nationalist Harold Cardozo, of the
Daily Mail,
was considered something of a leader by other British and American correspondents – they called him ‘the Major’.
⁴⁵
Edmund Taylor thought Cardozo ‘a courageous cool hand and a cheerful travelling companion, apart from politics’.
⁴⁶
However, despite his enthusiasm for, and friendship with, Francoist officers, there was a noticeable tension between Bolín and Cardozo. Sir Percival Phillips thought that Bolín enjoyed bullying and humiliating correspondents in general but had a particular grudge against Cardozo. He claimed that, because the
Daily Mail
had refused to publish articles submitted by Bolín while he was in London, ‘he’s now treating the
Mail
men as if they were dirt beneath his feet’. Cardozo made little secret of his opinion that Bolín’s articles had been rejected because they were ‘damned rubbish’. Without mentioning Bolín by name, Cardozo complained that the Nationalist press censorship was rigidly applied even to those journalists, such as himself, who were ‘heart and soul for the movement’. Frustrated by the bureaucratic obstacles imposed even on ‘responsible war correspondents’, he even commented enviously that in Madrid and Valencia, cables ‘were transmitted with a fairly lenient censorship and with a minimum of delay’. Cardozo was not alone. The enthusiastically pro-Nazi Nigel Tangye, of the
Daily Mail
’s sister paper, the
Evening News,
despite a close personal relationship with Bolín, soon grew equally exasperated by the contemptuous treatment given to journalists. William F. Stirling, who briefly represented
The Times,
wrote to London to complain that Luis Bolín regularly hindered
his work because he ‘suffers from acute Anglophobia with
Times
complications’.
⁴⁷

Phillips similarly commented: ‘on the other side, correspondents are treated much better. I have met dozens of fellows who are in Barcelona and Madrid, and they told me that, though there was hopeless confusion, they were always treated like brothers.’
⁴⁸
The difference between the two zones in this regard was that, in Nationalist Spain, the military had no time for newspapermen. Phillips noticed that officers who were ready to be friendly with journalists were warned off by the press censors or by their own superiors: ‘I never felt so isolated in any army. I cannot make contacts with anyone. There seems to be a deliberate policy to prevent the British and American correspondents from making any contacts.’ When he was seen talking to an officer who spoke English, a member of the Press and Propaganda Office came and reprimanded the man, who never spoke to Phillips again. The result was an icy atmosphere: ‘You go into a room full of officers, but the Press censor, who is with you, carefully forgets to introduce you to a single one of them, and a few whom you happen to know shake hands with you coldly, and then hastily turn their backs on you without a word.’ He was told by one officer that ‘all the generals begged the Generalísimo to exclude correspondents from the country till the war was over’ and F. A. Rice, despite being the correspondent of the conservative
Morning Post,
was told by another that ‘there are too many reporters here’.
⁴⁹

Randolph Churchill, who represented the
Daily Mail,
echoed Sir Percival’s envy of the Republican press services. In March 1937, aware of the British Tory Arnold Lunn’s close friendship with Bolín, he said to him: ‘I wish you’d go back to Salamanca and tell those damned people at the Press Office that they’re losing this war by their idiotic censorship. The Reds have got them beat so far as publicity is concerned. They let the Press go where they like, and consequently the Press send back great human stories from the front.’ He was exaggerating, however, when he expostulated that ‘in Salamanca they’re more interested in killing stories than in killing Reds’. Sir Percival Phillips concluded with regard to Bolín’s failings as a propagandist: ‘I would describe him as a preventive rather than a propagandist: he has a positive genius for preventing news from getting out.’
⁵⁰
It was illustrative of the military
attitude to journalists that, while he was in charge of the Oficina de Prensa y Propaganda in Salamanca, each morning, General Millán Astray would summon with a whistle those journalists who were not at the front and form them up in lines to listen to his daily harangue. Bolín was clearly impressed by his example.
⁵¹

The more junior press officers who were given the job of accompanying the correspondents were, according to Sir Percival Phillips:

young grandees or diplomats, amiable weaklings for the most part, ruled by Bolín with a rod of iron. He telephones them at all hours of the day and night, scolding, ordering, but never advising, and, as a result of this drilling, they never express an opinion, even on the weather, lest some correspondent should cable that such-and-such a view is held ‘in GHQ’ or ‘in well-informed circles’ or ‘by spokesmen of the Generalísimo’. As they also keep all officers away from us as carefully as if we had the plague, we are confined to the official Press reports and to the edifying but monotonous stories of Falangist valour which fill the Spanish newspapers every day.