Word: alcs
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Dates: during 1936-1936
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Down next morning at 6:15 a. m. went the handles of the detonators and afternoon papers throughout the world shrieked such page-wide headlines as: COMMUNISTS BLOW UP ALCÁZAR! - NEARLY ALL DEFENDERS FEARED DEAD! An entire trainload of additional Red militia had arrived from Madrid to help the Toledo Militia swarm in over the ruins. To make the assault safer Red artillery poured a 15-minute barrage into the clouds of dust and smoke rising over the Alcázar. Then 1,500 militia led by four militia girls surged forward expecting merely to wade in White...
Even West Point spirit has its limits of heroic possibility and this week things looked black for the Alcázar cadets and Commandant José Moscardó as the Madrid Cabinet in a frenzy of frustration took another "terrible decision." This was to order to Toledo thousands of gallons of gasoline, to be squirted by means of fire engines into Spain's West Point, and, by setting it alight, flood the Alcázar with searing flame until the last cadet, woman and child and the two babies born during the siege were burned out in Spain...
...this moment with dynamite, shrapnel and gasoline gives an infernal aspect to this operation of war. An armistice of 24 hours may mean the lives of the women and children. I beg His Excellency the Spanish Foreign Minister to have these women and children who in the Alcázar are locked on the brink of Death placed in the care of the Diplomatic Corps...
...cursing. . . . She looked beautiful in her blue trousers with her blonde hair, wet, falling over her shoulders." Yindrich meanwhile found a "pretty girl'' from Buenos Aires amiably acting as interpreter for a Soviet cinema cameraman who had arrived from Moscow to film the fall of the Alcázar for worldwide Communist purposes. According to Ptlaum and Yindrich, net result of the GRAND BLAST operation was apparently the death of not a single White, the deaths of some 50 militia...
Gasoline squirting by Reds began with a frantic will, for meanwhile a White army under Generalissimo Francisco Franco had at last decisively taken Talavera de la Reina (see p. 19) and, advancing five miles per day, was within 25 miles of the Alcázar when torches were applied and gasoline blazed high. Cheering wildly a Red column swept up the rocky base of the fortress-only to be driven back by sickening gasoline fumes while the blaze soon guttered out on the rocks. To save his Red face after this fiasco, General José Asensio of the Red militia...