Posted on 08/17/2008 12:20:44 PM PDT by Homer_J_Simpson
Far to the northeast the Ebro bridgehead continues to hold out against all Rebel efforts to weaken it, it is stated. The Loyalist Eleventh Division in the Sierra de Pandos during the last week is declared to have withstood attack after attack by such excellent Insurgent shock troops as the Navarrese.
The communiqué tonight turns aside from its ordinarily dry recital of events to speak of the troops’ “extraordinary heroism” across the Ebro River. Newspapers here have many columns of messages of congratulations from all sources, including Premier Juan Negrin, to the Eleventh Division, formerly Major Enrique Lister’s command and now a part of his army corps. The division is and always has been entirely Spanish.
The political trouble here has been so completely smoothed out that Premier Negrin started for Zurich, Switzerland, last night to attend the International Congress of Physiologists. A physiologist by profession, he is likely to find himself more at home among his scientific associates than among the politicians here who endangered his government for five days.
Some persons here are taking consolation by reasoning that they have proved once again that Republican Spain is really a democracy. Such a political upset in the midst of a war would be inconceivable, it is held, under anything resembling a dictatorship.
As had to be expected, the Rebels tried to make the most of the situation, but there was not the slightest trouble, either in the army or in the rear guard. This time, for instance, the Insurgents passed the word around that all “friends of the Nationalists” [Insurgents] were to rise against the Barcelona government and overthrow it Monday night. The signal in Barcelona was to be an air raid at 10:30 P. M. There was such an air raid, but the government took precautions. Nobody responded.
In the north Insurgent General Andres Saliquet’s Central Army stood on the banks of the Guadiana River, dried to little more than a trickle, facing an opposite shore bristling with government machine guns. The government’s mountain troops, perched on Castilblanco and San Simon Ridges to the north, kept up swift guerrilla raids on the Insurgent left flank.
The struggle for the Ebro was most violent south and southeast of Gandesa, where the two armies fought over a few steep hills called the Pandola Mountains, dominating the road to Pinell de Bray and Tortosa. Insurgents said they “completely dominated” the hills in the afternoon, but government dispatches insisted their troops had recaptured positions on the east side of the highway.
Northwest in the Segre sector, government forces maintained a foothold on the bridgehead between Balaguer and Lerida, but strong Insurgent defenses apparently limited them to a dangerously small strip of land on the Segre River’s western bank.
TOULOUSE, France, Aug. 17 (AP).-The Spanish Government today asked the British committee of investigation on air bombardments of civilian centers to make a report on recent bombings of Alicante, important Mediterranean port of government Spain. It was the first time the committee had been called to work on either side in Spain.
The Spanish Consul here, Alfredo Nistal, transmitted his government’s request to Colonel Ruscombe Smyth-Pigott and Major Lejeune of the British artillery. This two-man committee was expected to go to Spain by air tomorrow morning.
Santiago Mendez de Vigo, first Spanish Insurgent Ambassador to Japan, said yesterday on his arrival here that the Rebels would win the war within the next three months.
Senor Mendez de Vigo, accompanied by his wife, the former Victoria Harris of Boston, was a passenger on the liner Columbus. He said he expected to leave for San Francisco immediately and that he planned to arrive in Tokyo on Sept. 10.
Complete memorandums will be prepared this week, the Governor’s office said, on which recommendations will be made to President Roosevelt and Administrator Elmer F. Andrews, who seek a thorough investigation of the island needlework industry and its ability to pay before imposing mainland standards. One representative put it this way: “We ought to hold an inquest before burying the body.”
We haven’t heard from Herbert Matthews for a while.
-- Tom Lehrer, The Folk Song Army
It is curiously difficult to find the answer to that. It may just be the name of a big mercury mine in the Ebro River area. Here is my response from the 7/29 post about a similar situation.
'I checked out a current road map of Spain and found just about all the place names mentioned in the article. They are all found on the road that runs from Tortosa to Saragossa. Since your map shows that area already in Insurgent hands in May ‘38 the fighting described in this story must have been a rear-guard, last-ditch sort of action.'
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