Word: barcelona
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...push from behind Belchite went forward all week long. Objective was to reach the coast and split Catalonia off from the rest of Leftist Spain. The Rightists at latest reports had held Caspe against nine Leftist counterattacks. Leftists figured they had blocked any immediate Rightist advance via Lerida upon Barcelona, where Rightist bombers had slain over 1,000. This week Rightist artillery was pounding ahead of Rightist thrusts toward Gandesa, which is the junction point of two highways to the sea. Rightist planes were furiously bombing Tortosa and many other towns up and down the coast. As Barcelona at last...
...behind the enemy's lines, crack morale, force surrender. In Spain, Douhet disciples point out, the use by aircraft of poison sprays and bombs (which was decisive in Ethiopia) has virtually not been tried, and this was still true last week as modified Douhet methods suddenly subjected Barcelona, the largest and wealthiest Spanish city and the country's greatest industrial metropolis, to day after day of the heaviest, most destructive, most deadly bombing ever achieved...
Italian Savoia-Marchetti bombers and German Junkers, with Italian, German and Spanish crews, appeared over Barcelona at altitudes of some 16,000 feet. They were thus nearly invisible, could be only faintly heard, and their bombs were preceded by no warning scream, such as an artillery shell gives. There was just a "swiss" and instantaneously thereafter the crash of 600 pounds of bomb tearing down through floor after floor of a building by its own weight, then the dull, shuddering, colossal detonation from the cellar. In accordance with Douhet, the objective was considered to be the whole city: the shattering...
Leftist officials said this was a Spanish battle of Jutland,* would end Franco's threat to blockade the Loyalist east coast. Jubilantly announced Foreign Minister José Giral Pereira at Barcelona: "The engagement is as important as was the taking of Teruel.† It inaugurates a new phase in the war activities of the navy." The enraged Rightists retaliated by sending out war planes which attacked Cartagena five times, raining bombs on the Government naval base. Leftists denied suffering any serious damage...
...Barcelona a Cabinet spokesman said portentously: "We have no fear of our ability to defend ourselves militarily pending the clearing up of international problems." Presided over by President Azana, the Cabinet had meanwhile taken in the greatest secrecy what was openly called "a most important decision, which may affect world history...