Franco's Aides

Safest way for a newspaperman to travel through Rightist Spain is to tread softly without stepping on the toes of Rightist Generalissimo Franco. Last week, safely perched on British Gibraltar after a six-week journey from end to end of Rightist territory, New York Times Staffwriter Harold Callender filed his first detailed dispatches on the German and Italian forces operating in Franco Spain.

"Some say there are only 3,000 Germans in Spain, while others say 10,000, mostly technicians and aviators," reported Correspondent Callender, "but there are said to be some 40,000 Italian soldiers sandwiched between the Spanish troops." Franco's Spanish soldiers sing a slightly obscene song about Italian fighting capacities, the refrain of which is "Spain is not Abyssinia."

This contempt Reporter Callender illustrated with the anecdote of the Spanish barber who, while shaving an Italian, put the question, "Why did you come here?"

The Italian dramatically replied: "I came to capture Santander and Bilbao and to smash Communism!"

To the next customer in line, a German, the barber put the same question. Said he: "I came to get shaved."

"The triple alliance between Chancellor Adolf Hitler, Premier Mussolini and General Franco is widely advertised and exalted by Rightist propaganda. Portraits of the three dictators appear on postcards. Every hotel this traveler has seen in Rightist Spain displays German. Italian and Rightist flags together," Callender wrote. "Mussolini's face, framed in a tin hat. glowers from the walls. Hitler's visage and book are shown in every town. . . . The Franco press, which uses foreign news selected by the German official news bureau, publishes nothing unfavorable to Hitler and Mussolini."

Newsman Callender was also able to throw additional light on the Yague Case. Fortnight ago, top-flight General Juan Yague, a personal friend of Franco and prominent in the recent Rightist march to the sea, was reported imprisoned because he had publicly rebuked the Dictator for indiscriminate bombings and the employment of German and Italian assistance (TIME, May 23). Last week. Callender revealed that General Yague had gone much further. General Yague is a popular Left-wing leader of the Falange Espanola, the blue-shirted group of some 1,000,000 members, officially recognized as an instrument of the State much like Il Duce's Fascists. To a group of these in a Burgos theatre, General Juan Yague last month announced: "Our leader [General Franco] has said that no home shall lack bread and fuel. He is a man of his word. Social justice there will be. The only question is how generous it will be. If a man fighting for Spain, although himself possessing nothing to defend, returns home without finding his wants satisfied, he will demand justice from men and from heaven. I am certain that heaven will agree that he has the right to take it with his own hands if necessary."

El Caudillo himself sprang to the radio and, without naming General Yague, rebuked "those who alarm the capital with bogies of demagogic reforms." He then summoned General Yague to his office, reported Timesinan Callender, dressed him down with the warning that "some persons would be shot for talking as he did." Last week, temporarily absent from active command in the field, General Yague scotched rumors of imprisonment by taking care to be seen at a bridge-opening ceremony near Caspe.

Based on his contacts with Rightist Spain's business interests, aristocrats, clericals and soldiers, Correspondent Callender concluded: If General Franco succeeds in winning the war, "some form of revolution or fundamental change is inevitable. . . . Landlords and industrialists seem ready to admit some reforms. These are new attitudes. . . . This never would have happened had they not been threatened by a Leftist revolution. So it seems accurate to say that the Left will achieve its revolution after all."

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