FRANCO WINNING A WAR OF MOVEMENT

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXV, Issue 23103, 30 July 1938, Page 22 (Supplement)

FRANCO WINNING A WAR OF MOVEMENT

By JULIAN AMERY

batteries to com entrate their fire on the same area. I was caught in what was afterwards described as a "heavy bombardment" near Lerida, and counted just over 200 shells in an hour and a-quarter. Distances are so great that almost all the troops are mechanised or organised in mule trains. The mechanised column has been a real success in preserving the freshness of troops, and preventing the consolidation of the enemy, but it is a far less pliable instrument than the marching column, and tends to lose contact with the supporting forces, and to block tho road in case of retreat. It was this loss of contact that led the Italians to advance 15 kilometres ahead of the main army at Guadala-

OWING to the intensely mobile character of the civil war in Spain, trenches and fortifications have been very little used. There has been no attempt to organise defence in depth. This has given offenco a definite superiority over defence, and the Republicans have never been able to take the offensive out of General Franco's hands. The results of this "weakness in defence are probably best illustrated by the Republican debacle in Aragon last April. Forty kilometres east of Saragossa the Republicans put up a hedge of barbed wire and dug and equipped a trench some 20 kilometres long, running from the mountains northeast of Saragossa across the valley of the Ebro to the hills beyond ; they had months at their disposal, but they neglected to construct a second line of defence. At the end of March the Nationalist troops broke the line at Quinto, crossed the Ebro and

forcing the position, drove the Republicans back 70 kilometres in one day to the next natural line of defence, the River Cinco. The last military manoeuvres before the war had established that the lina of the Cinco was impregnable and, well defended in depth, it would have proved so. As it was, a short cannonado north at Barbastro allowed the Nationalists to cross tho river, force the position, and drive the Republicans back to the line of the Segre, before Lerida. Thus, in five days, as a result of two relatively minor attacks, tho Nationalists had advanced 140 kilometres. Owing to the comparatively loose formation of the defence there has been an extensive use of tanks and cavalry. Both have been found useful while properly supported by infantry, the first for forcing a break-through, and the second for exploiting it. Because the war has been so much a "war of movement." heavy bombardments have not been in evidence in any part of thw line. Even at Madrid nothing like a "Western front" barrage has ever been seen. Tho five-inch field gun with high explosive shells is the artillery generally used, and it is rare for more than three

British Observer in Describes Recent Fierce Fighting

CAPTURED TOWNS PRESENT TRAGIC SCENES

The London Daily Telegraph's Special Correspondent with Franco s Forces,

jara, and tho clumsiness of tho lorries on a narrow road turned tho setback into a rout. Perhaps the most interesting lessons of tho war have been learned in the sphere of aircraft and air raid precautions. Practically tho only successful air raids have been those delivered from Majorca against the Republican coast towns where the bombs have been the first warning of the raid. All over Nationalist Spain strong buildings, and underground stations which would he safe from anything but a direct hit, have been chosen as "refuges," and experience has shown that, provided there is o to 10 minutes' warning, casualties can be almost eliminated.

Towns like Burgos and Salamanca, which are only a-quart;r of an hour from tho front, have hardly suffered at all, while even Hucsea, which was hesieged for two months, lost only .'i.'i dead and i) 7 wounded from air bombardments. Terrorist bombing, in fact, depends on surprise for all its eflects. Spaniards claim great successes for tho German anti-aircraft gun, though there is some doubt whether this success is duo to the quality of the gun or to the low morale of the Republican airman. Tho caso for the gun, as one Spanish pilot put it, is that its accuracy forces the bomber to change altitude continually; consequently the airman is unable to bomb accurately for some distance.

The only anti-aircraft shooting I witnessed was fairly wide of the mark, but proved sufficient to turn tho Republicans back. Tho decline in the morale of the Republican air fornj is probably due to the high percentage of foreign pilots. The Nationalists also started tho war with an almost exclusively foreign stair of pi'ots and suffered from the samo difficulties of morale, but thev have trained their own airmen, so that now 80 per cent of the pilots are Spanish. These "fighter" pilots' are the most spectacular of the war. Their most effective manoeuvre has been the "chain," which consists in diving toward an objective in single file and reserving fire until the machine in front begins to climb. Aeroplanes often reserve fire until they are only 30ft. from the ground. Single "fighters" have been remarkably successful in destroying transport, and all the roads of Aragon are littered with the burnt-out shells of Republican cars machine-gunned from the air. Fate of Prisoners It is difficult to get accurate information of conditions in the Republican Army, but 1. gathered from prisoners that their apparent demoralisation in April was due to scarcity of food supplies and heavy war material. J. hey have suffered from having no trainee junior officers, or young men of the officer class, and have found it impossible to improvise them during the war. Military commands have been disorganised by the introduction of political commissars in accordance with the Russian system. Every battalion has a commissar whose duty it is to raise the morale of the troops. They also have power to countersign, or countermand, the orders and requests of. battalion headquarters. This division in the command is probably responsible for much of the indecision which has characterised Republican strategy. All prisoners in Nationalist Spain are divided into four classes. First, there are the Republican deserters and known Right-wing sympathisers conscripted by the Republicans; these are drafted into the Nationalist Army. Second, there are the Republican soldiers who were not members of the Communist or anarchist organisations before the war; these are drafted into labour gangs, and Ket to work on the roads. They are reasonably fed and lodged and paid a peseta a day for their work. The third class are former members of the Communist or anarchist parties, who are imprisoned until the end of the war. Fourth como soldiers accused of murdering or looting, who are tried and sentenced if guilty to anything from six months' imprisonment to

death. As far as I could discover only 70 per cent of the capital sentences were actually carried out. The British prisoners I saw—there were about a hundred of them—had been captured by the Italians near Gandesa and were treated in exactly the same way as the Spaniards. xNeurlv all were unemployed workmen from Scotland and the Midlands who were persuaded to go out for a wage of os a dav, and in some cases on th,e promise that their families would be properly cared for in their absence. They travelled from Ixmdon to I aris on a week-end holiday ticket, thus avoiding the need for passports, and were taken from Paris to the I yrcnees, and thence by foot or lorry to their training camp near Tarragona, where they spent a month before going to the front. Their wages had been regular at first, but thev had received nothing tor three weeks when I saw them, and had suffered from food shortage and bad equipment. Their whole journey had been planned and paid for by a special organisation with which thev did not make contact till they reached Paris. Preparations were clearly very efficient, though the expenses of transport seemed out of all proportion to the military value of the men. The most tragic picture of the war is that of the conquered towns. Every-

where the civilian population has been evacuated, of its own iree will or by force. Everything that could be taken has been taken, and the rest, save iu rare instances where the owner has managed to remain, has been looted by t.he invading troops. Whole streets have been destroyed, burnt in retreat or bombed in advance, and always in the centre of the town is the burn-out shell of the church. In every town arid'village that I saw in Aragon, the Republicans had burned out the inside of the church, and had converted the shell into a collective market, with garages, toolshedsr and stalls. In Caspe one corner of the church had even been turned into a slaughterhouse. The worst example of this type of vandalism is to be seen in the cemetery at Huesca, once the camp of an anarrhist battalion during the siege of the town. When the Nationalists took the position they found the ground strewn with skeletons; more than 700 graves had been opened, heads had been torn from corpses, rings and jewels had been removed. On the tombstones were boastful inscriptions left by the soldiers who claimed to have ?,!ept in the graves. It is atrocities like this, and the trail of burning churches, more than all the heaps of murdered corpses, which make a settlement between Spaniard and Spaniard so hard.