1, 350 Sq. Mi.

1,350 Sq. Mi.

Three columns under Rightist Generalissimo Franco last week staged in central Aragon the widest offensive of Spain's 20-month-old war. During the first six days the Franco forces, behind the largest aerial concentration the war has seen, advanced along a 60-mile front, extending from Fuentes del Ebro southward to Montalban, recaptured Belchite and gained approximately 1,350 square miles of Leftist territory. Some 3,500 prisoners were taken, the Rightists announced, including 400 U. S. citizens of the Leftist Abraham Lincoln Battalion. At week's end one Rightist column was only about 45 miles from the Mediterranean. Should Franco's drive reach the sea, he will have split Leftist Spain into two parts.

Laymen, who have puzzled over the many seesaws of Spain's war, with victory now teetering on the side of the Leftists, now tilting back to the Rightists, could thank the Satevepost last week for a professional military analysis of the war by Major Thomas R. Phillips, faculty member of the top-rank U. S. Army Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kans.

Ability. Carefully labeling his views as his own and not official War Department opinions, Major Phillips wrote in a vein contrary to most previous expert opinions on the war: "Franco has been almost constantly on the offensive and has been everywhere successful, excepting his failure to take Madrid early in the war. The [Leftist] government army has shown itself incapable of sustained offensive action. Each of their costly offensives has had some initial success, and finally bogged and fell back when Franco brought troops up to counterattack. Troops with amateur commanders and amateur staffs cannot maneuver, they only stumble.

"Government offensives have shown some initial success. The reason lies in the thinly held lines. About 400,000 men on each side are spread along more than 850 miles of front. In the World War, 4,000,000 men held lines less than half as long. Either side in Spain can attack with initial success if they achieve a measure of surprise. The true test comes when the hostile reserves have been rushed in to counterattack. By this test the Government has failed in every effort."

Manpower. "The days when a people's militia can stand against trained troops are gone forever. Government failure has been due, in the largest degree, to lack of trained officers and noncommissioned officers. Suspicious of the loyalty of the regular officers who joined them, led by left-wing writers, parlor pinks and Communist tub thumpers, the Government has been unable, even with considerable help from competent foreign advisers, after a year and one half of war, to develop an army capable of fighting on equal terms with Franco's men. Franco's battles have been fought and won with numerical inferiority in every case. The Government superiority of manpower has been nullified by military incompetence."

Advisers. Political commissars attached to each unit, an idea imported from Russia, and the presence of Russian advisers are other factors in the Leftist failure and have prevented the Leftist army commanders from developing a cohesive army, declared Major Phillips. The commissars "are a combination of civil spy, supply officer and morale officer [with] their own chain of authority, independent of the unhappy commander."

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