Distracting Franco

Following up the swift surprise offensive which carried across the Ebro River last fortnight to make a 240-square-mile dent in the north side of Rightist Generalissimo Franco's salient-to-the-sea, Spain's Leftists last week launched another. The second dented the south side of the salient, some 30 miles west of battered Teruel. Taking advantage of the fact that the Rightists had shipped 40,000 troops from the Teruel area to the Ebro front, bald-domed General Jose Miaja, commander-in-chief on the southern Leftist front, pushed his forces through thinly-held Rightist lines in the Universales Mountains. He drove down the Guadalaviar River valley for six miles, to within nine miles of Albarracin, which commands a broad, unfortified plateau leading to Teruel, only 19 miles away.

Thus Leftists last week continued the game of distracting General Franco. As long as they can punch him from one side, make him turn in that direction, then punch him from the other, they can keep him from following his own plan of battle. In the process they might possibly land a lucky haymaker. Meanwhile General Franco, fighting not only the Leftists but the heat which reached 113DEG, relied chiefly on his sun-baked Moorish riflemen, last week made relatively little progress in straightening out the dents in his fronts.

This week, as the heat lessened, the Rightists launched one of the most powerful assaults of the war. Along a ten-mile stretch on the farthest inland portion of the Ebro front, the Rightists hammered their way forward aided by strafing planes, hurled the Leftists back across the river and placed themselves in a position to make the rest of the Leftists' Ebro line untenable. Some 7,000 Leftists were reported killed, wounded or captured. Leftists claimed, however, that their offensive had upset Franco's summer plans and destroyed the possibility of a Franco victory before the end of the year. In Saragossa, the Rightist Defense Ministry called for recruits from among its 18-year-olds to enter infantry service by the end of the month.

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