Word: asturian
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1930-1939
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...characterizations but in the graphic intensity of isolated scenes. A bomber emerging into calm moonlight after blowing up the gasworks at Talavera de la Reina; a fire fighter in Madrid atop his ladder, turning his fire hose in a last, hopeless, defiant gesture against an airplane machine-gunning him; Asturian dinamiteros, "the last body of men who can face the machine on equal terms," crawling forward to meet advancing tanks outside Toledo; the crew of a wrecked bomber carried out of the mountains by peasants, the long, winding, anguished procession stretching through vast ravines like a living symbol...
Every able-bodied man in Leftist Spain was promised by Premier Negrin death before a firing squad unless within 72 hours he should volunteer for the People's Army. The new Minister of Justice is picturesque Ramón González Peña, an Asturian firebrand who led squads of dynamite-throwing miners against the Rightists in the early days...
Some days after the Rightist capture of Gijón two months ago an extraordinary story reached foreign correspondents in Madrid and Valencia: several hundred Dinamiteros, bomb-throwing Asturian miners-whom Rightists hate so much that they are executed whenever captured-had slipped through the mountains by night, wormed their way through 300 miles of Rightist territory, and through another battle line, to reassemble with their officers, safe in Leftist territory...
...Dinamiteros! Los Dinamiteros!" shouted the troops, and out they tumbled, swaggering self-consciously, weighed down with their only weapons, home-made hand grenades. At dusk a few hours later he was able to see the Asturian Dinamiteros leading the final assault into the city, lit like gruesome fireflies by the flashes of their bursting bombs. That night though a handful of Rightist civil guards remained holed up in the ruins of Teruel's cathedral sworn to die by their guns. Teruel's citizens staged an exuberant torchlight parade through the streets, and captured searchlights floodlighted captured buildings...
...ultimate fall of Gijón was inevitable as soon as Santander was captured (TIME, Sept. 6). The only reason for keeping Italian forces on the Asturian front was Generalissimo Franco's insistence that "Gijón must fall before winter sets in," so that troops on the Asturian front could be transferred for another mass attack on Madrid...