Word: francos
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...114th day of this year's Spanish Civil War, the Radical Madrid Cabinet were driven to flee from the capital last week by the conquering White Armies of singularly humorous and carefree Francisco Franco, a commander who even in the darkest days of his campaign surprised correspondents by keeping up an ebullient and ever-smiling mien to be compared only to that of President Roosevelt...
...costs. You must give up your lives before yielding another inch of ground!" Meanwhile Madrid syndicalist newspapers excitedly explained the Government's flight. If the Whites were able to catch and imprison its members, they argued, then foreign powers would have no choice but to recognize Generalissimo Franco as actual head of the Spanish State. Only this consideration, the journals exclaimed, could overcome the Cabinet's reluctance to abandon the capital, move to safety...
...this time the forces of Generalissimo Franco, consisting of tough Spanish Foreign Legionnaires, non-Spanish speaking Moors who had put on layers of sweaters against the high-altitude cold, and regular Spanish Army troops had advanced into the suburbs of Madrid over a terrain on which battling females of the Red Militia had abandoned vanity cases, high-heeled slippers and powder puffs. This proletarian resistance was brave but it was scarcely war. When a wave of advancing Moors were suddenly faced by Red machine guns which popped up out of a trench they simply flung themselves prostrate and waited calmly...
Again and again Madrid proletarians were driven in mad, screaming retreat, but again and again their shattered lines reformed to attempt fresh resistance with Spanish stubbornness, then suffer another rout. Meanwhile, smiling Generalissimo Franco was exhibiting his other distinctive characteristics: caution, thoroughness, quick decision, forehandedness. The steep-banked Manzanares River still lay between him and the capital and he knew its six bridges were heavily mined, but along with attending to military details he was also ready with his own White police force and his own skeleton force of civil servants ready to install them in the Government buildings which...
...Madrid had fallen, and although what they sent could not be printed, editors were kept posted by the State Department in Washington and the British Foreign Office. Madrid's defenders appeared to have more airplanes and more ammunition than anyone in the journalistic camp had expected. Cautious Generalissimo Franco, with the Red Militia finally driven back across the Manzanares River, which opposed the Whites like a gigantic trench, swung his Moors around to a point where the bank sloped more easily and the water was shallower, then resumed bombardment and bombing which observers estimated to have killed and wounded...