Word: bilbao
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...East or West but up in the air moved the focus of Spain's war last week. General Mola's land attack on Bilbao was temporarily halted after a bloody hand-to-hand with rifle butts and knives. Comparatively quiet too were all the other fronts. But overhead hell was popping. The week started with the shooting down, by Rightists near Bilbao, of a French transport plane carrying passengers from Biarritz to the besieged city. France had little cause for complaint. The transport, owned by the Air Pyrenees Line, had been running the blockade for weeks trusting...
Fifty-two, 53, 54-day after day the Basque soldiers defending Bilbao cut calendar notches in their dugout walls, as Rightist troops inched ever closer and still the city did not fall. Three times in the past century Bilbao has been besieged, in 1874 for 125 days, but Bilbao has never been captured...
...Bilbao has never been attacked by as modern an army as Generals Franco & Mola had at their command last week, nor was the capture of the city so vital a point in any of Spain's previous civil wars. On the hillsides northwest of the city are some of the richest coal and iron mines in Spain. If Italy and Germany could get access to these for their rearmament program, their entire investment in the Spanish war might be justified and the galling defeat at Brihuega might be forgotten. If the Basques could stem the drive against their capital...
...bloody air raid against the civil population like the massacre at Guernica (TIME, May 10) and poison gas. Rightist planes strafed the outlying districts and military airports, but had not attacked the centre of the city in force by week's end. Generalissimo Franco not only wanted Bilbao, the second industrial city of Spain, but he wanted it whole. Fearful of enraging world opinion, neither side in Spain has used poison gas as yet. Basques worried greatly last week at the capture of dozens of Rightist soldiers carrying gas masks, and word from secret agents that Rightist gas squads...
Authentic photographs reaching the U. S. last week (see cut) made perfectly clear why, though no mass bombing raids had yet been launched, Bilbao's children had to be evacuated...