The Old Melodrama

MY MISSION TO SPAIN (437 pp.)--Claude G. Bowers--Simon & Schuster ($6).

The Spanish Civil War refuses to lie still in its political grave. It keeps haunting memories, arguments, books and loyalty files. For countless Americans now over 35, it was the first great meeting with history, the first passionate political love affair--or hate binge. Scores of keen-eyed witnesses, including Britain's late George Orwell in Homage to Catalonia (TIME, May 19, 1952), have shown that the war was not a simple melodrama of Franco vice v. Loyalist virtue, but a far more complex tragedy in which the Loyalist side itself fought a kind of civil war within a civil war, being first championed and then betrayed by the Communists. Many a sentimental liberal has since learned his lesson and lost the illusions of the 30s.

Not Claude Bowers.

Bowers was U.S. Ambassador to Spain from 1933 to '39. Besides having had a ringside seat for the war, Bowers was an able journalist (he was an editorial writer for the old New York World) and is a historian of some fame (The Tragic Era, The Young Jefferson). Unfortunately, in this book he has thrown off the historian's mantle and kept on only the form-fitting B.V.D.s of the sentimental liberal.

The Case for the Loyalists. The Bowers thesis is familiar: the war in Spain was an attack on the Spanish people, supported and largely engineered by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy as a prelude to World War II; if the democracies had had the sense and courage to support the Loyalists, the Axis would have learned its lesson, and the world would have been spared the general horror of 1939-45.

To support this conviction. Author Bowers has marshaled powerful arguments. He recalls that the Spanish government that Franco set out to overthrow did not include even one Communist or Socialist, that out of more than 470 members in the Cortes, there were only 15 Communists. He also presents convincing evidence that Italy and Germany were in the scrap from the beginning. His documentation of the murder by Franco's men of 15 pro-Loyalist Basque priests after the fall of Bilbao is tragic proof that not all the outrages against the church in Spain were committed by the Reds. He also argues fairly effectively that the Loyalists turned to Communist Russia for aid only after being denied the right to buy arms from Britain, France and the U.S. Even so, he insists (somewhat beside the point) that there were never more than 500 Russians in Spain during the war.

A Talent for Isolation. But Bowers damages his case immeasurably by overstating it. Essentially, he is retelling the same old preposterous melodrama. In his account, only Franco bombs and bullets ever kill women and children, only Franco soldiers ever murder their prisoners, only the Franco side ever lies. Frequently, Author Bowers sounds more like a pamphleteer than a competent historian, e.g., "It is ironical that the diplomatic representative of every nation soon to be trodden neath the iron heel of Hitler was openly smiling on the totalitarian crusade against democracy in Spain." Bowers writes much better when he is telling of his prewar rambles around the Spain he loved so well: Holy Week in Seville, wine-tasting in Jerez de la Frontera, a fiesta in Toledo, the running of the bulls in the streets of Pamplona.

Author Bowers, now 75, retired last year as U.S. Ambassador to Chile, where he had spent the 14 years since the Spanish Civil War puttering about the embassy in slippers, brooding about his book, and proving himself an effective diplomat who made many friends for the U.S. It is a strange fact that during 20 years spent in Spanish-speaking countries, Bowers never mastered Spanish. This suggests a talent for isolating himself from the world around him. which may be one reason why Bowers also never mastered the complexities of Spain and its tragedy.

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