Word: francos
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...predicted, when Generalissimo Franco's German-planned counterattack on Madrid failed month ago (TIME, Aug. 16), Italian staff officers were given their innings, permitted an attempt to re-establish Italian military prestige with a mass attack on the onetime summer resort of Santander. key point of the shrunken and crumbling Basque front. As predicted, the Rightist columns found ineffective resistance among the 25,000 Basques and Asturian miners defending Santander and last week Santander fell. As predicted, Italy threw aside the last vestige of neutrality in the Spanish Civil War. The three Italian divisions-Black Arrow, Black Flame, 20th...
Playing opposite Leading-Man Franco were the Italian Generals Sandro Piazzoni, Attilio Teruzzi, former commander of Il Duce's Fascist Militia, eager to avenge the Italian rout at Guadalajara (TIME, March 22 et seq.), the ignominious chasing by Basque fishwives during the Bilbao siege (TIME, June 28). A horse laugh went through Leftist lines outside Santander when they read a purported order issued by General Piazzoni to Le Frecce Nere (Black Arrows): "As the Black Arrows were the first to reach Bilbao, so they will be the first to enter Santander. With proud heart and bayonets raised, be ready...
Foreign military observers, totally unimpressed at Franco's proud declaration that Santander was "at his mercy," described Santander as a pushover because: 1) only about 25,000 half-hearted Basques, Santandrians and Asturians remain to defend the city against Franco's 60,000 Moors, Foreign Legionnaires, Italians; 2) successfully over the Cantabrian Mountains, the three Rightist columns can coast down the sloping hills into Santander; 3) no "iron ring" protects the city, only ill-concealed machine-gun nests on the hillsides, a few straggly strands of barbed wire...
While General Franco strutted in the theatre of war, in Brussels Revue Belge published an interview in which he greeted the Belgians, promised that after "my victory" Italy, Germany would not be specially favored by the new Spain, that even France, despite surface Leftist support, would be treated with equality. Franco said he wanted to be friends with all countries except Soviet Russia...
From Salamanca, Franco's raucous-voiced "Radio General" Queipo de Llano, with his usual indiscretion, roared over the radio: "France's day of reckoning is not far off. . . . She has always been a bad neighbor and always acted against Spanish interests...