Eleven O'Clock

The ancient Mediterranean city of Tarragona, famed in Roman days for its temples and wines and fortress, changed masters again last week. This time the city fell, with scarcely a shot fired, before the attacking legions of Spanish Rebel Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Actually a Roman ruler supplied guns, ammunition, warplanes and some of the warriors with which Tarragona again was taken, for Tarragona's capture was as much Dictator Benito Mussolini's triumph as Generalissimo Franco's.

On the southern Catalan front the Rebels thus came within 50 miles of Barcelona, while other columns to the west pressed beyond the stronghold of Cervera, to within 38 miles of the Loyalist capital. Barcelona Province, a month ago 40 miles from the front, became a theatre of War. The hitherto narrow Rebel corridor to the sea was widened to about 115 miles and contained the additional advantage of a good port at which Rebel supplies brought direct from Italy could be unloaded. And Loyalist Catalonia, jammed with 6,500,000 inhabitants and refugees, shrank to an area little bigger than that of Massachusetts.

Generalissimo Franco's hour of final triumph seemed near at hand, while for the Spanish Republic the clock struck eleven. The Loyalists' attempt to divert the crushing offensive of superior Rebel equipment by offensives of their own, first in Extremadura, next at Brunete, finally near Toledo, petered out. For the first time, the Rebels refused to be diverted.

Refugees from southern Catalonia fleeing before the Franco advance clogged all roads as the Loyalist Army retreated. Hundreds of Rebel planes bombed and strafed roads and bridges. For the Loyalists there was one slight consolation in the battle for Catalonia: their retreat was orderly, they allowed no great number of their soldiers to be taken by the Rebels, few Loyalist supplies were left behind.

Hard fighting was still ahead for the Franco troops before Barcelona could be taken, although the Generalissimo claimed that victory for him was inevitable. Even from his headquarters came the admission that no immediate capture of Barcelona could be expected. For the Generalissimo there have been many moments before in the 30-month war when victory seemed to be in his grasp, only to be snatched away by a sudden Loyalist stiffening. Eleven o'clock has struck many times before for the Loyalists, but one thing was certain last week: the well-trained but poorly equipped Loyalist Army would be forced to continue to retreat until it had better and more guns.

Those guns could be supplied only from abroad. At week's end the brightest spot on the Loyalist horizon was Paris. There the executive committee of Premier Edouard Daladier's Radical Socialist Party--without whose support he cannot remain in power--passed with only one dissenting vote a resolution asking a curb on Italian aid for Generalissimo Franco. The French General Staff has long viewed with misgivings the establishment of a Fascist power on France's southern frontier. There were signs that to "neutralize' Italian aid to Franco the French might unseal the Spanish frontier and allow military equipment to pour into Catalonia, as it poured in during the last big Franco offensive last March. Such an action would, of course, anger Dictator Mussolini (see p. 18), would be just the ingredient needed to produce a first-class European crisis.

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