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

The battle lines of the war in Spain were rapidly taken up in France, Great Britain and the United States. A foretaste of the propaganda struggle came in Great Britain just before the rising, when reports appeared claiming that Calvo Sotelo’s eyes had been dug out with daggers, a story to which even Spanish right-wing papers had not given credence. The Republic was supported by the News Chronicle and the Manchester Guardian. The Times and Telegraph remained more or less neutral, while the rest supported the nationalists. Immediate sympathizers with the rising were the Observer, whose editor, Garvin, was an admirer of Mussolini, and the Northcliffe press, which had backed Mosley’s British Union of Fascists. Its Daily Mail correspondent, Harold Cardozo, was accordingly accredited to the nationalist forces.

The practice of a newspaper sending a reporter to the side it supported became customary. In fact, Kim Philby, already a secret communist, developed a conservative image as The Times correspondent with the nationalists. An exception in the early days was another secret communist agent, the writer Arthur Koestler. Although representing the left-wing News Chronicle, he started with the nationalists in Seville, but had to escape when seen by a German journalist called Strindberg, who knew he was a communist. Luis Bolín, the nationalist press officer, was too late to arrest him as a spy. Koestler returned to republican territory, but Bolín caught up with him at the fall of Málaga, and only pressure from the British and American press saved him from execution.¹⁰

In the majority of cases the correspondent reflected, or adapted himself to, the political stance of his paper. As a result, Richard Ford’s comment of 1846 was equally true 90 years later: ‘The public at home are much pleased by the perusal of “authentic” accounts from Spain itself which tally with their own preconceived ideas of the land.’ At the beginning of the war correspondents were rushed to Spain, regardless of whether they spoke the language or understood the country’s politics. But then even a respected expert like Professor Allison-Peers was unable to differentiate the parties of the left accurately and attributed the peasant troubles in Andalucia to agitators who were profiting from improved communications. The ideas that Latin people had ‘violence in the blood’ and that military dictatorships were natural to them were reflected in the shorthand of headlines. As always, the pressure of space and journalistic simplification to make accounts easy to digest were bound to distort the issues.

Newspapermen were as much affected by the emotions of the time as anybody else. Many became resolute, and often uncritical, champions of the Republic after experiencing the siege of Madrid. Their commitment affected their coverage of later issues, such as the Communist Party’s manoeuvring for control. The ideals of the anti-fascist cause anaesthetized many of them to aspects of the war that proved uncomfortable. It was a difficult atmosphere in which to retain objectivity. In the United States, the Republic was supported by Herbert Matthews and Lawrence Fernsworth of the New York Times, by Jay Allen and John Whitaker of the Chicago Tribune.

There were also various types of censorship and pressure, which affected the accounts printed at home. These ranged from propaganda-orientated briefings from government press officers and republican censorship through to the political or commercial prejudices of the editor. At the end of the war Herbert Matthews of the New York Times was told by his editor not to ‘send in any sentimental stuff about the refugee camps’. In 1937 Dawson, the editor of The Times, blocked some of Steer’s accounts from the Basque country because he did not want to upset the Germans. On 3 May, a week after Steer’s report on Guernica, he wrote that he had ‘done the impossible night after night to keep the paper from hurting their susceptibilities’.¹¹ The most famous dispute was the one between Louis Delaprée and his editor on the right-wing Paris Soir. Shortly before his death (he was flying back to France when his plane was shot down), Delaprée complained that his reports were suppressed. He finished his last despatch by observing bitterly that ‘the massacre of a hundred Spanish children is less interesting than a sigh from Mrs Simpson’.