Word: barcelona
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Flags decorated the cities, parades were held, anti-French demonstrations flared. To a cheering mob of black-shirted Fascists ordered to gather before the Palazzo Venezia, Il Duce struck his usual defiant pose on the balcony, shouted: "The splendid victory of Barcelona is another chapter in the new Europe we are creating. General Franco's magnificent troops and our fearless legionnaires not only have beaten [Premier Dr. Juan] Negrin's government, but many others of our enemies are now biting the dust. Their motto was 'No pasarán,' but we did pass and I tell...
...armies of Rebel Generalissimo Francisco Franco marched up to Barcelona on three sides last week and, with no more than a sniper's fusillade, the biggest city in Spain fell. No European military action comparable to it had taken place since the Prussians took Paris in 1871, and, according to all calculations, the Spanish Rebels like the Prussians, had won their...
Madrid had held out for two and a half years. But Madrid lies on a plain and behind a deep-cut river bed. Barcelona lies defenseless in a cup. Furthermore, when the Rebels tried to take Madrid in 1936 they were far inferior in numbers and not much better off in material than the defenders. And the defenders of Madrid were spirited militia, men like the "iron" regiment which snatched up its arms from the dead. The Republican Army that was forced back on Barcelona had been outnumbered and smashed for five weeks by the greatest concentration of war material...
Hegira. Even if men and materials were to be had, the problem of distributing them was next to insoluble. For every road in the area was choked with refugees, not only a half million that had left Barcelona, but thousands more that the advancing Rebels swept before them. It was one of history's greatest and most tragic hegiras. From heights on the French frontier as far as eye could see a steady river of humanity slowly rolled toward the border...
...world's first reaction to Barcelona's fall was perplexity. Why did a city of 2,000,000 people, the reddest town on earth outside Russia, surrender to the Fascists as soon as they reached the suburbs? The explanation was that a metropolis divided against itself-and hungry-also falls...