Free We Saw Spain Die by Preston Paul Page A

projected book on the Falange, Southworth had long since been engaged in a flourishing correspondence with major Falangists, among them Ernesto Giménez Caballero, Jesús Suevos and Ángel Alcázar de Velasco. This continued until his death and was notable for the tone of respect with which many of them treated him.
    In the mid-1960s, Herbert had entered into contact with the great French hispanist, Pierre Vilar, who had persuaded him of the utility of presenting a doctoral thesis at the Sorbonne. Initially, he had planned to do so with a complete annotated bibliography of the Spanish Civil War along the lines of a vastly expanded version of
Le mythe de la croisade de Franco.
As he worked on this, however, he got more and more involved in one element, the propaganda battle over the bombing of Guernica. 25 In 1975, Herbert Southworth’s masterpiece appeared in Paris as
La destruction de Guernica. Journalisme, diplomatie, propagande et histoire,
to be followed shortly afterwards by a Spanish translation. The English original appeared as
Guernica! Guernica! A Study of Journalism, Diplomacy, Propaganda and History.
Based on a staggeringarray of sources, it is an astonishing reconstruction of the effort by Franco’s propagandists and admirers to wipe out the atrocity at Guernica – and it thus had a very considerable impact in the Basque Country. The book did not reconstruct the bombing itself, but actually begins with the arrival in Guernica from Bilbao of the
Times
correspondent, George L. Steer, together with three other foreign journalists.
    It is a work of the most fascinating and meticulous research, which reconstructs the web of lies and half-truths that falsified what really happened at Guernica. The most exaggerated Francoist version, which blamed the destruction of the town on sabotaging miners from Asturias, was the invention of Luis Bolín, the head of Franco’s foreign press office. To evaluate the work of Bolín and the subsequent manipulation of international opinion about the event, Southworth carefully reconstructed the conditions under which foreign correspondents were obliged to work in the Nationalist zone. He showed how Bolín frequently threatened to have shot any correspondent whose despatches did not follow the Francoist propaganda line. After a detailed demolition of the line peddled by Bolín, Southworth went on to dismantle the inconsistencies in the writings of Bolín’s English allies, Douglas Jerrold, Arnold Lunn and Robert Sencourt.
    It might normally be expected that a detailed account of the historiography of a subject would be the arid labour of the narrow specialist. However, Southworth managed, with unique mastery, to turn his study of the complex construction of a huge lie into a highly readable book. Among the most interesting and important pages of the book there is an analysis of the relationship between Francoist writing on Guernica and the growth of the Basque problem in the 1970s. Southworth demonstrated that there was an effort being carried out to lower the tension between Madrid and Euzkadi by means of the elaboration of a new version of what happened in Guernica. For this, it was crucial for neo-Francoist historiography to accept that Guernica had been bombed and not destroyed by Red saboteurs. Having conceded that the atrocity was largely the work of the Luftwaffe, in total contradiction of the regime’s previous orthodoxy, it became important for the official historians to free the Nationalist high command from all blame. This task required a high degree of sophistry, since the Germans were inSpain in the first place at the request of Francisco Franco. Nevertheless, the neo-Francoists set out to distinguish between what they portrayed as independent German initiative and the innocence of Franco and the commander in the north, General Emilio Mola. Therefore, Southworth analysed the massive literature on the subject to advance a clear hypothesis: Guernica was bombed by the Condor