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A Sea of Papers: The International Press in The Spanish War

3.1. The War Correspondents

This chapter approaches the facts behind the scenes of the war correspondents and their relationships with the brigadists, some of whom were also journalists. These reporters assumed the responsibility of denouncing the drama of Spain to the world. Their voice –when not banned– joined that of the poets and contributed to expose what was happening in Spain at that time.

War correspondents put their professionalism above all, and they were the primary sources which many historians have based a great deal of their investigations on the Spanish Civil war, as for example, Paul Preston or Hugh Thomas. The importance of the press was also extended to the International Brigades, who had their own publications. The relationships between the war correspondents and brigadists, with their own professional writers and reporters, were very close and even developed into friendships.

The amount of literature which deals with the Civil War is enormous, and the press was the first to pour the development of the war into the world. The newspaper reporters became involved and were informing from one side and the other. In time, some of them also told their experiences. The press correspondents who were reporting from the Republican zone had more freedom to act, in spite of the censorship, than the press in the rebel zone. Some reporters embraced the republican cause by joining the International Brigades, such as, Jim Lardner from the New York Herald Tribune who died fighting in the Battle of the Ebro.

Others would die by accident or from attacks, such as Louis Delaprée, whose plane was attacked by mistake by a republican aircraft. However, there were correspondents who followed the fascist ideology in the rebel zone, not only Germans or Italians, but also English, French and Portuguese reporters. Another correspondent, John Whitaker, was threatened with death if he did not follow the rules of the game of the rebels:

Franco’s propaganda bureau let in no correspondents unless it felt certain that they were Fascists. They let me in because the Italians during the Ethiopian war had decorated me with the Croce di Guerra. Aguilera suspected I was no Fascist. He and a German Gestapo agent woke me one morning at 2:00 A.M…. The next time you’re unescorted at the front, we’ll shoot you (1943: 109-110).

Due to the special circumstances of the Spanish War, the front war was in large cities, such as Barcelona, Madrid or Valencia, or in small towns like Guernica. War correspondents were on the spot; therefore, they denounced the suffering of the Spanish population, but the chronicles were not always published; sometimes they were banned by the journals they worked for. This was the case of Jay Allen, Herbert Mathews or Ernest Hemingway, who suffered the strictness of censorship in their newspapers.

Virginia Cowles, a North-American correspondent, wrote a diary based on her experiences in Spain. She did not abandon her objectivity, in spite of the circumstances. For instance, in this sense, Cowles tells how she witnessed the informative manipulation of the bombing of Guernica, and how, finally, an officer of the rebel army not only recognized the bombing, but also proudly boasted about what the planes of the Condor had done, kill civilians with five-hundred-kilogram bombs. Her account substantiated the important relationship that existed between the correspondents and the brigadists. Both were foreigners and witnesses of the war; the journalists because they collected the news which they themselves experienced, such as the indiscriminate bombings of Madrid, and the brigadists because they lived the war at the front. The reporters were also involved in the action of the moment; they collected and wrote it in their notebooks to later transmit it by telephone from Telefonica tower in Madrid or from the palace of communications in Valencia. This relationship was extremely important for the investigation because it gave me a different point of view from that of the historians, because, as previously mentioned, they were witnesses of the war. The affinity between brigadists and war correspondents made me look for these reporters’ testimonies and I found them in books about their memories, such as those by Herbert Matthews (1938), John Whitaker (1953), Langston Hughes (2011), Josephine Herbst (1991) or Marcel Acier (1937).

The brigadists kept close contact with the reporters; James Neugass in War is beautiful: An American Ambulance Driver in the Spanish Civil War (2010: 195) refers to H.L. Matthews as a fatherly figure:

We are all profoundly grateful to Matthews for the many times he visited us in Cuevas and Teruel and because he displays more genuine courage and more interest in us than any other news-paperman in Spain. If there are others who have come to the Front lines, male or female, I should like to thank them for their bravery.

When the newspapermen visit us, we do not feel quite so much like international orphans.

Hemingway also appears as a very beloved reporter; at that time, he was a man of fifty who had already been a correspondent of the Great War.

The last days Virginia Cowles spent in Spain, she feared that she would not be able to leave Spain because the rebel authorities denied her travel permit. She described how, in the early hours of the morning, she escaped from the Gran Hotel in Salamanca, which was the rebels’ general headquarters. She narrated those events in her memoirs:

I will never forget the moment when we arrived to the International Bridge. The flag of the United Kingdom waving happily over the hood of the car, and when the Spanish guards went up to the car, Tommy handed them his salvo conducto. They inspected it very closely while I was waiting for the terrible moment when they will turn to me; but this moment never arrived. They nodded their satisfaction, returned the papers and saluted. The barriers were slowly raised, Tommy stepped on the accelerator and we crossed the bridge as fast as we could towards freedom. (Cowles, 2010: 99).

Photo war correspondents and cameramen, such as Gerda Taro, Robert Capa, Katy Horna, Elkan Vera, Alec Wainman, Harry Dunham and many more, carried out their work under extreme circumstances. Gathering evidence of the targeted civilians in the blitzed cities with their Leikas, or capturing the moment when soldiers of the popular army went into action under the rage of battle, they played their part by showing the world the atrocities of the Spanish war. Langston Hughes, the American poet, novelist and press correspondent for the Baltimore Afro-American who spent three months with Abraham Lincoln Brigade, remembered in his aforementioned memories I Wonder as I Wander, Gerda Taro. She was recognized as the first female war photographer to cover the front lines of a war and to die while doing so. She was 26 years old when she died:

I spent a week or so in Valencia before moving into Madrid and the battle fronts. Word of our coming had already been sent from Paris to the House of Culture in Valencia, so the poet, Miguel Hernandez [sic] and several other writers made Guillén and me welcome, and soon found for us a guesthouse where we might much cheaper than at a hotel. But the day we arrived the House of Culture was draped in mourning and the body of Gerda Taro, young Hungarian photographer, was lying in state there. Tacking pictures at the front during an attack, she has been smashed between a tank and a trunk the day before. She was Robert Capa’s friend in Spain, and like him took wonderful photographs, everyone said. Valencia honored her as the first foreign newspaperwoman to die in battle during the war (Hughes, 1993: 328).

3.2. The Press of the International Brigades in English

Talking about the press, some distinctions could be established. The foreign war correspondents reported their articles to their newspapers by telephone from the Telefonica building in Madrid. Meanwhile, as Nuñez Diaz-Balart (2006) points out, the press of the International Brigades was destined for the war front. This press was different from the one of the rear-guard, which focused on politics much more. The number of publications of this type rose to 71, whilst the ones of the popular army and militias rose to 477 publications (Nuñez, 2006: 15).

The official organ publication of the brigade commissariat was The Volunteer for Liberty. It was published weekly simultaneously in French, German, English, Italian, Polish, Spanish and Yiddish. Another weekly periodical of the brigades was Our Fight. The commissariat also published the News Bulletin of the International Brigades, from March 1937 to December 1937. This was a daily newssheet mimeographed in the trenches, in most of the languages spoken by the brigadists. International news was published in these periodicals, in particular, the ones related to the Spanish war, and others related to the Japanese invasion of China and its fight for freedom. Letters, as well as honours to the fallen, death notices, promotions for the brave men, or messages of encouragement were published.

As already mentioned, I visited the newspaper archive in the Municipal Public Library Conde Duque in Madrid to copy the microfilmed periodicals of The Volunteer of Liberty to a flash drive. Being there, I found the first problem because some newspapers were missing and they were only up to the month of February 1938, the date when the editorial moved to Barcelona.

Thereafter, I telephoned the archive of the Pavelló de la República, the Centre de Recursos per a l’Aprenentatge i l’Investigació in Barcelona. The director confirmed that, effectively, some issues of The Volunteer for Liberty were there because the newspaper editorial had moved to the capital of Catalonia due to the evolution of the war. Once there, I was surprised to discover that the archive building was a replica of the Pavelló de la República from the International Exposition of Paris in 1937 and which, paradoxically was located next to that from Germany.

The commissars of the brigades published their own periodical; they were the ones who administrated the contents. The leading role of The Volunteer for Liberty was to enhance cohesion among the members of the brigade, creating a common space in which the brigadists felt represented. One way to reinforce this comradeship and this representation was the brigadists’ participation, to the extent of their possibilities, in the newspaper, narrating some experiences, telling how they felt, or writing a poem; as they used to do in the leftist press in their countries of origin.

Some lines of The Book of the XV Brigade: Records of British, American, Canadian and Irish Volunteers in the XV International Brigade in Spain 1936-1938 give us a glimpse of the work of these publications:

The Brigade Commissariat daily publishes a mimeographed bulletin Our Fight, giving a news-digest in English and Spanish, and articles of special interest to the Brigade. When time and opportunity permit, it also publishes a printed journal under the same title.

The Commissariat has a special department of propaganda directed towards the enemy and also a Sound-Truck for that purpose. It maintains a library, a photographic department, and recently, it has begun the organisation of musical and drama groups. Special effort is given by the Commissariat towards eradicating illiteracy among Spanish soldiers (Graham, 1975 [1938]: 218-220).