The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

Nevertheless, in 1937 the nationalists sensed that they had started to lose the battle for international public opinion. Several factors operated against them. First, there was a fundamental difference of attitude between the opposing military commands in their dealings with the press. The nationalists often regarded journalists as potential spies and allowed them little freedom of movement, especially when they might witness a mopping-up episode. As a result their correspondents could not compete in the ‘din of battle’ personal accounts so beloved by the profession. Also, not all the nationalist press officers were as articulate and urbane as Luis Bolín. One of his successors was Gonzalo de Aguilera, Count de Alba y Yeltes, a landowner from Salamanca, who drove around nationalist Spain in a yellow Mercedes with two repeating rifles in the back. He proudly announced to an English visitor that ‘on the day the civil war broke out, he lined up the labourers on his estate, selected six of them and shot them in front of the others–“pour encourager les autres, you understand”.’⁷

Foreign journalists allowed to enter nationalist Spain soon discovered to their amazement that a hysterical relationship with the truth existed there. Anyone who doubted an invention of nationalist propaganda, however preposterous, was suspected of being a secret ‘red’. The American journalist Virginia Cowles, who had just been in republican Spain, discovered in Salamanca that people were eager to ask how things were in Madrid, but refused to believe anything which did not accord with their own grotesque imaginings. The degree of political self-hypnosis she encountered was so strong that ‘it was almost a mental disease’. When she told her questioners that bodies were not piled in the gutters and left to rot, as they had been told, and that militiamen had not been feeding right-wing prisoners to the animals in the zoo, they instantly assumed that she must be a ‘red’ herself. Pablo Merry del Val, the chief of Franco’s press service, admiring the gold bracelet that she was wearing, said with a smile, ‘I don’t imagine that you took that to Madrid with you.’ Cowles replied that in fact she had bought it there. Merry del Val was ‘deeply affronted’ and never spoke to her again.⁸

A modern public relations officer would blanch at some of the extraordinary speeches of General Millán Astray, the founder of the Foreign Legion, who had been so mutilated in the colonial wars. ‘The gallant Moors,’ he once proclaimed, ‘although they wrecked my body only yesterday, today deserve the gratitude of my soul, for they are fighting for Spain against the Spaniards…I mean the bad Spaniards…because they are giving their lives in defence of Spain’s sacred religion, as is proved by their attending field mass, escorting the Caudillo, and pinning holy medallions and sacred hearts to their burnooses.’⁹ Franco, of course, avoided such indelicate contradictions when he spoke of ‘the Crusade’.

One technical factor undoubtedly told against the nationalist version of events for much of the war. The overseas cable heads were in republican territory, so that journalists in that zone usually had their copy printed first. Accounts from nationalist Spain were, therefore, often out of date. Nevertheless, the nationalists had won the first round for several reasons. There were very few journalists representing foreign newspapers on its territory during the first days of rearguard slaughter, while Barcelona and Madrid had attracted vast numbers, so that the initial killings on republican territory were reported the most rapidly. The other key point for the early reports was Gibraltar, where many upper-class refugees were arriving, especially from Málaga.

On 21 August 1936 the New York Herald Tribune reporter Robert Neville wrote, ‘In Gibraltar I found to my surprise that most of the newspapermen had been sending only “horror” stories. They do not seem to be awake to the terrible international implications in this situation.’ Sensational accounts sold newspapers, but the initial ‘white terror’ just to the north in Andalucia was reported only by one or two correspondents, one of them Bertrand de Jouvenal of Paris Soir. This can be explained in part by the fact that most journalists were incapable of understanding the peasants who had fled from the Army of Africa, whereas middle-and upper-class Spaniards were more likely to speak a foreign language. However, journalistic or editorial bias could work both ways.