'Official Truth' on Civil War Spain
SENDER, RAMON
WRITERS and WRITING 'Official Truth' on Civil War Spain My Mission to Spain. By Claude G. Bowers. Simon & Schuster. 437 pp. $6.00. Reviewed by Ramon Sender Teacher and critic; author, "The...
...Bowers from 1937 to 1939 coincided with the official truth presented by our Republic...
...But afterward we discovered too many things...
...A Communist leader answered: "Leave them in jail for Franco to shoot...
...Russian efforts to liquidate the Spanish problem have been futile...
...Matthews points out that 80 per cent were Communists...
...He got all he could, and it was a great deal...
...Such things apparently escaped Mr...
...Speaking of the leaders of the POUM, Mr...
...However, I knew most of the leaders of that organization, and I also knew like everyone else that the charges of disloyalty were ridiculous and were fabricated by the NKVD...
...Later, after we had lost the war, Roosevelt told Mr...
...Unfortunately, these errors will be used to justify other and greater errors, such as those of Carlton J. H. Hayes, Mr...
...author, "The Sphere" and other novels The Spanish problem is still alive...
...He decided to get all he could out of Spain, then play her as a marked card to ward off the Nazi danger on his own frontiers...
...Bowers was caught in the current of our propaganda, and he let himself be swept along by it...
...Bowers was our friend an honest man so impressed by the strength of our arguments that he refused to see the shadows being cast over us by Moscow's sinister Machiavellianism...
...yet, the latter was allowed to drown in its own blood...
...Those parts of Mr...
...Sometimes, for all the sympathy and affection that books like this arouse in a Spanish Republican, one wonders whether frank exposure of all the forces that operated in the Spanish Civil War might not have served our cause better...
...Bowers was assuring his superiors that Juan Negrin was not a Communist and was only defending democracy, the Communists themselves were saying to all who would listen: "We have given the power to Negrin...
...Bowers, or else he considers it improper to refer to them in his book except by timid and oblique allusion...
...Bowers's successor as Ambassador to Spain, whose recent book pleads Franco's cause...
...All we Spanish Republicans would have agreed with this splendid book in 1936-7...
...Bowers's unconditional and often uninformed enthusiasm produced a reaction in Washington that did us no good...
...But all the book's virtues are marred by its adherence to an official truth that of the Barcelona Government...
...We preferred heedlessness, confidence and the orgy of heroism...
...No liberal spirit can fail to be grateful to Mr...
...Bowers says that among the American volunteers in the Lincoln Brigade there were some Communists...
...Most of us Spaniards did not see them either...
...Bowers wanted Spain to he treated exactly as she should have been, but he reached his correct conclusions from confused premises...
...He understood many delicate and subtle things which he expresses with grace and clarity of style...
...The most curious thing about all this is that President Roosevelt, Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles and Ambassador Bowers were all favorable to the Spanish Republic...
...He also mentions errors in chronology and in military or political facts...
...Bowers for the eleven points in which he sums up his convictions at the time of the war in Spain...
...European history later confirmed them...
...The official truth presented by Mr...
...We have learned that the Russians never played fair from the very beginning, and that, after robbing Spain not only of the gold in her National Bank but of the lives of those Spaniards who disagreed with Russia, they sold our country to the devil...
...Hayes for accusing Largo Caballero and, indeed, all Republicans and Republican sympathizers of being either Communists or pro-Communists...
...While Mr...
...I was not a member of the POUM or of any other political party...
...And those men had been jailed as agents of Franco...
...They show that Stalin was responsible for the non-intervention policy...
...Stalin's and Malenkov's dialectic cannot explain and this must perplex the Kremlin why, after killing people, the problems those people represent are every day more and more alive...
...you were right...
...It is not that our disappointment has made us less republican and democratic, but it has taught us to see our own as well as others' errors more clearly...
...With this official truth we lost the war and Mr...
...Bowers's errors of "timidity...
...That all the wounds are still open is clear from this book by the former United States Ambassador in Madrid, Claude G. Bowers...
...If he does not help us, we will take it away from him, just as we took it away from Largo Caballero.' They know these things in Washington...
...Those shadows must be sought in the books by Spanish Communist leaders of that time who have since broken with Moscow...
...When the Republican Army abandoned Barcelona, someone asked: "What will we do with those of the POUM...
...All these facts, which disillusioned, angry Spanish Communists have broadcast far and wide, were apparently unknown to Mr...
...My Mission to Spain is the truth of our Spanish problem somewhat idealized in the style of the official propaganda then current...
...Bowers for being mystified by the activities of the POUM, however, than to pardon Mr...
...What were the reasons...
...the chief Communist politician, a minister in the Republican war government, Jesus Hernandez...
...And now we have the obligation to be better informed and more cautious...
...Perhaps we can guess from this book...
...Bowers's book which refer to non-political aspects of Spanish life are excellent...
...That may explain why Washington regarded his reports as personal opinions rather than accurate reflections of the situation...
...Bowers says that some of them were evidently in touch with the enemy...
...I believe he may have understood them later, hut his book as he himself admits is based on the reports he sent to Washington while he was Ambassador...
...Bowers: "We made a mistake...
...the chief Communist soldier, General Valentin Gonzalez ("El Campesino") all have told us the real truth about those days...
...But Hitler's cards were better, and Stalin lost the game on all fronts...
...Bowers lost his battle for the Republican cause in Washington...
...Herbert L. Matthews, New York Times correspondent in Spain during the war, has underscored some of Mr...
...The chief Communist organizer, Comintern member Enrique Castro Delgado...
...It is easier to pardon Mr...
...It availed us little, however, since it did not convince President Roosevelt in our moment of greatest need...
...He also played the marked card...
Vol. 37 • July 1954 • No. 27
