Seven Against One

At 1 a. m. one night last week the 1,650-ton Spanish Loyalist destroyer Jose Luis Diez got up steam, weighed anchor, laid down a smoke screen and left Admiralty Harbor, on the Atlantic side of Gibraltar. Scarcely had she moved from the British-protected waters before her crew saw rockets flare from a housetop on the Rock. No one needed to tell them what those flares meant: they were signals from Rebel watchers notifying Rebel warships patrolling the Straits of Gibraltar that the Jose Luis Diez, having waited for weeks to make her getaway, was trying a second time to run the blockade to a Loyalist port.

Instead of prudently turning back the Loyalist destroyer rounded Europa Point, Gibraltar's southernmost tip. As she did so a Rebel cruiser hove into sight from the African shore. Six more Rebel warships, cruisers, destroyers, minelayers soon joined the chase. Guns from the 10,000-ton cruiser Carnarias, pride of the Rebel fleet, boomed. Batteries from Ceuta. in Rebel-held Spanish Morocco, some 15 miles across the Straits, bellowed. The destroyer, outclassed, nonetheless elected to fight. A shell struck the Jose Luis Diez's forecastle, killed four men. One of her own guns exploded and killed more of her crew.

The 2,000-ton Rebel destroyer Jupiter nosed in between the Jose Luis Diez and the Gibraltar shore. Convinced now that the blockade could not be run. Commander Juan Castro changed his course, ordered the ship back to British waters.

Meanwhile, all Gibraltar had been aroused. Shells fell in the little village of Caleta, on the east side of the Rock, destroyed two houses, damaged a power plant, wounded four British subjects. General Sir Edmund Ironside, commander-in-chief of Gibraltar, sounded an alarm, called out the entire British garrison. The British destroyer Vanoc and a French destroyer, the Basque, went to investigate. Gibraltar's guns fired blank shells to warn the Rebel warships that they were firing on British territory.

Desperate, the Jose Luis Diez deliberately rammed the Jupiter and disabled her. The Loyalist destroyer then floundered toward the shore and grounded 100 yards from Catalan Bay. The Vanoc and Basque moved between the Jose Luis Diez and her Rebel attackers, played searchlights on the scene and began rescues in boats. The Loyalists' battle toll was eight dead, eleven wounded. The dead were buried at sea from a British destroyer. A strong British guard was placed aboard the Jose Luis Diez after her Spanish crew was taken off and interned in military detention barracks in Gibraltar. Next day British tugs refloated the Loyalist destroyer and towed her back to Admiralty Harbor.

The Jose Luis Diez may herself be interned, but the difficulty in this procedure would be that the British, sticklers for international sea law, have no strict legal right to intern a Loyalist ship because: 1) they have not formally recognized the Spanish War as other than a civil conflict; 2) they still recognize the Loyalists as the "friendly," legal Government of Spain; 3) they have not granted belligerent rights to Generalissimo Franco. Out weighing these objections, however, might easily be the consideration that a third attempt of the Jose Luis Diez to run for safety would again endanger British life & limb at Gibraltar.

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