We Saw Spain Die (30 page)

Gerahty was greatly outdone in his desire to please his hosts by F. Theo Rogers, an American Catholic born in Boston who had served in his country’s wars against Spain in both Cuba and the Philippines, in the course of which he had developed a friendship with Colonel Theodore Roosevelt. Rogers became a journalist and eventually became editor of the
Philippines Free Press
and a relatively wealthy man. In the spring of 1936, he left the Philippines for a long vacation in Spain, where he had many friends among the aristocracy and the military. The fruit of his observations was
Spain: A Tragic Journey,
a fierce denunciation of the Republic and a hymn of praise for the rebels which sported an enthusiastic introduction by Theodore Roosevelt. In it, Rogers claimed that the election campaign for the Popular Front had been funded by Moscow and victory achieved by ‘terroristic influences’ and
‘huge electoral frauds’. In fact, violence and electoral fraud had been exercised, but by the Right. Rogers also repeated the absurd story that there existed a Communist plot to impose a Soviet government in Spain. He portrayed the military rising as a reaction against the ‘gangsterism’ of the Republican Government.

With regard to the issue of foreign aid, Rogers quoted as ‘absolutely true’ the claim by his Spanish friends that ‘there are entire regiments of Russians, officered by Russians, fighting for the Madrid government’. In contrast to his assertion about the Russians, he wrote that ‘I have travelled through White Spain from end to end. I never saw an Italian soldier or officer. I saw probably 150 Germans at the most, all of them attached in a technical capacity to the foreign legions.’ Elsewhere he praised Hitler’s support of Franco on the grounds that the Führer ‘is fearful of what Communism will do to our civilization’. Life in Republican Spain was described as a constant wave of terror, assassination, rape and theft. Of the mass shootings and the terror in the rebel zone, he was totally ignorant. Rogers asserted that, during his extensive travels in White Spain, ‘I saw no trace of disorder, no sign of unorganized rabble’. His view of the Francoist repression was sanitized in the extreme. He knew of no violence, only of a few executions, ‘but there was at least a trial, summary though it might be’. He gave a naïve account of what happened when the Francoists took a town: ‘the word goes forth to the working men to return to their daily tasks. They may have heretofore sided with the Reds. Now they are to forget politics and war. It is their present and future that counts not their past.’ He claimed even to have found ‘workmen who approved of the executions ordered by the White forces’.

When Roger’s book was published, a prominent Jesuit, Father Francis Talbot, wrote a preface in which he expressed his hope that
Spain: A Tragic Journey
would ‘serve to disillusion every American who still backwardly believes in the myth of Spanish democracy as professed and practiced in the so-called Loyalist territories’. He went on to affirm that the book’s conclusions indicted the Loyalists of ‘abrogating fundamental rights, of violating every liberty, of producing a reign of terror and chaos. They affirm that Nationalist Spain fights for law, for order, for culture, for justice.’
⁷¹

If not quite on a level with Rogers, William P. Carney of the
New York Times
was certainly an enthusiastic supporter of the rebels. In New York press circles, he was nicknamed ‘General Franco’s press agent on
The Times
payroll’.
⁷²
To an extent he had paid his passage with his damning farewell article to the Republican zone which had been published as a pamphlet in the United States and helped influence Catholic opinion there in favour of Franco. Constancia de la Mora later claimed that, as a reward for revealing the exact details of the gun emplacements around Madrid, when Carney abandoned Madrid, the rebels rewarded him with ‘a fine fascist uniform’. She also alleged that, after the Civil War, Carney signed a letter to Cardinal Gomá, the Primate of Spain, congratulating him on Franco’s ‘glorious victory’.
⁷³
As a result, Carney tried to sue her for damages. His lawyer did not, as he could not have done, dispute the claim about the anti-aircraft guns, but argued rather feebly that Carney was ‘not a fascist, never owned any uniform of a fascist, and certainly never wore one’ and that the letter did not congratulate Gomá for glorious victory, but for the fact that Franco’s victory had saved Spain for Catholicism.
⁷⁴
On 18 May 1937, the American Ambassador Claude Bowers reported to the State Department that the Italian radio station in Salamanca was paying war correspondents up to ten thousand lire for propaganda speeches. William Carney had accepted and, in line with the conditions imposed, had ended his talk with the Francoist cry
‘¡Arriba España!
’
⁷⁵
Certainly, Carney was decorated after the Spanish Civil War by the United States Catholic fraternal Order of the Knights of Columbus. After the Second World War, he became a Cold War propagandist in the service of the US Government.
⁷⁶

It is certainly the case that, once in the Nationalist zone, Carney continued in a similar vein to that of the disputed Madrid article, manipulating the news in favour of the rebels and against the Republic. He began to quote the red atrocity stories from General Queipo de Llano’s virulent propaganda broadcast as if they were factually accurate. On the day that Guernica was destroyed, he sent a triumphant telegram to the
New York Times
euphorically reporting the captures of Eibar and Durango and giving a wildly exaggerated account of Basque strength, including a claim that they had an abundance of modern artillery and an
air force of one hundred aircraft when, in fact, their planes barely reached double figures.
⁷⁷
After the bombing of Guernica, he was quick to join the ranks of the pro-Francoists who argued that the town had been dynamited by the Basques themselves. He visited Guernica and wrote that ‘most of the destruction could have been the result of fires and dynamitings’. He also quoted approvingly the rebel slander of one of the prime witnesses, Father Alberto Onaindía, as ‘an unfrocked young priest’.
⁷⁸

On 22 July 1937, he had interviewed the American pilot, Harold Dahl, captured after bailing out over Brunete. Although Dahl had been badly threatened, Carney quoted him as saying that he had been treated with ‘kindness and consideration’ and ‘exquisite courtesy’. The bulk of the article was devoted to implying that the Republican air force was entirely Russian-controlled.
⁷⁹
On other occasions too, he had invented details in his articles. In December 1937, when the Republicans were still defending the recently captured Teruel, the overconfident rebels issued a communiqué claiming that it had been reconquered. Carney both reprinted the communiqué and added colourful details of Franco’s troops occupying the town. Herbert Matthews, disbelieving this, made a hazardous three-day trip from Barcelona to Teruel with Robert Capa, saw that the town was still in Republican hands and filed a story that implicitly reprimanded Carney. He wrote:

the Rebels never reached the city, never made contact with the garrison and refugees in the cellars of Teruel, never captured any Government general staff officers and in short never really menaced the provincial capital which remains firmly in Government hands. It has been axiomatic in this war that nothing can be learned with certainty unless one goes to the spot and sees with his own eyes.
⁸⁰

On reading Matthews’ article, Jay Allen telegrammed Hemingway: ‘
TELL MATTHEWS HIS STUFF CREATED MAGNIFICENT IMPRESSION EVERYBODY. CARNEY VERY HOTWATER BECAUSE HIS THINKING NOW OBVIOUS.
’ In fact, the water in which Carney found himself remained barely lukewarm, receiving as he did only the mildest chiding from the
New York Times’
managing editor, Edwin James.
⁸¹

In early April 1938, with some other reporters including Kim Philby, Carney visited the concentration camp at the Zaragoza military academy where captured International Brigaders were held. One of the Americans, Max Parker, said he would not talk to them if Carney was present because he believed him to be a Franco propagandist. Carney did not reveal his presence among the group of journalists and later published an account of the visit which bore no resemblance to the grim reality of the prisoners’ conditions. He sympathetically quoted the head of Franco’s juridical corps, Lieutenant Colonel Lorenzo Martínez Fuset, the man responsible for overseeing death sentences, to the effect that ‘foreigners were treated exactly like Spanish prisoners’. Carney omitted to mention that this meant overcrowding, starvation, beatings, executions and disease for the international volunteers just as it did for Spanish Republicans. He claimed that the prisoners were delighted with their treatment, were astonished by how well they were fed and felt that their conditions in captivity were far better than they had been when fighting for the Republic. Parker revealed later that Carney had falsified interviews by using the prisoners’ records made available to him by the Francoists. In the same article, Carney falsely reported that the North American Committee to Aid Spanish Democracy was recruiting volunteers, an assertion that damaged their subsequent fund-raising efforts. Later, he reported erroneously that the US Consul, Charles Bay, had claimed that the State Department would do nothing to defend American volunteers sentenced to death by the Francoists. He was obliged to print a retraction, but the intention to damage the recruiting efforts was obvious.
⁸²

Certainly Carney seemed very much at home in the rebel zone. Revealing of his ethics was the report that he produced after a visit on 9 July 1938 to the improvised Francoist concentration camp in the disused monastery of San Pedro de Cardeña six miles south-east of Burgos. Among the prisoners kept in the appallingly overcrowded conditions of the camp were a substantial number of International Brigaders. They were subject to regular beatings and torture. When the guards ordered the Americans to the assembly area to be interviewed by Carney, the prisoners quickly called the Irish brigader, Bob Doyle, having recently been savagely beaten, to substitute for one of them, and join another torture victim, Bob Steck. Carney interrogated the
prisoners, demanding to know who had provided the funds to send them to Spain and how many of them were members of the Communist Party. The prisoners were convinced that Carney was looking for information to besmirch the brigaders back in the USA. The Americans’ spokesmen, Lou Ornitz and Edgar Acken, himself a journalist, replied that all were anti-Fascists and they did not know how many Communists there were among them. They informed him about the atrocious living conditions and the beatings, but he was sceptical about their claims of brutality and refused to visit their quarters. So, they turned Doyle and Steck around and lifted their shirts to reveal the long red welts across their backs.

Carney was visibly shaken. Ornitz told Carney that if he was serious about helping the prisoners, he should tell the State Department about the appalling conditions. In fact, Carney informed the prison commander, Ornitz was beaten and had his rations reduced. Carney’s dishonest report in the
New York Times
described the camp in idyllic terms, claiming that the prisoners had adequate space and good food and water. He stated that any mistreatment was provoked by the prisoners’ rebellious attitudes. However, the publication of their names in the article ensured that they would not simply be executed by the Francoists.
⁸³
Carney’s article was lampooned in the prisoners’ clandestine news-sheet the
San Pedro Jaily News,
with a cartoon by the British prisoner, Jimmy Moon, portraying the prisoners relaxing, reading and fishing in the river while the wounded were attended by a voluptuous nurse.
⁸⁴

When fourteen prisoners were exchanged on 8 October 1938, Carney was present as they crossed the international bridge at Hendaye to be received by David Amariglio, the representative of the Friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. With funds passed to him by Louis Fischer from moneys made available by the Negrín government, Amariglio was there to arrange their passage home. According to Claude Bowers who was also there, Carney, ‘whom they heartily dislike’, was treated in a friendly manner. However, they reproached him for outright lies in his report from San Pedro:

He blandly admitted it. Shamelessly he told us that he lied because ‘it was the only way to get the story out’ – another
falsehood, since he could have sent it from France. His unqualified statement that we all admitted having been recruited by the Communist Party or the North American Committee was preposterous; the subject was never mentioned in the interview, and the facts were otherwise.

Carney’s own account does not mention the questioning of his ethics, but it is at great pains to insist that Amariglio was a Communist and the FALB a Communist front organization.
⁸⁵

Carney was one of the American and British correspondents who had few problems with the rebel censorship apparatus. One who ran into serious problems was, astonishingly, the world-famous Hubert Knickerbocker. The incident was to cause Aguilera, and his superiors, considerable embarrassment. The red-haired Knickerbocker was a world-famous journalist who, through his articles in the Hearst press chain during the early months of the war, had done much for the Francoist cause, and yet he was arrested during the campaign against the Basque Country in April 1937.
⁸⁶
When Knickerbocker had first wanted to join the African columns moving north from Seville, Juan Pujol, as head of the Gabinete de Prensa in Burgos, had written to Franco recommending him as an ‘outstanding figure of North American journalism, who has done great work with his always accurate reports on our Movement’.
⁸⁷

However, when he tried to return in April 1936, he was refused permission. The American Ambassador, Claude Bowers, reported to Washington on the background to Knickerbocker’s difficulties with the rebel authorities: