SPAIN: Two Plans

A year after the opening of Spam's bloody, but undermanned civil war, neither Leftists nor Rightists lack able staff officers. What both sides do need is enough troops for effective action on five separate fronts that snake for nearly 1,200 miles down the midriff of Spain. For some months military observers on both sides have cynically propounded a convenient rule: they will concede definite military superiority to whichever side is able to maintain an offensive for three successive days.

By last week's end that rule was still unbroken, but plenty was happening on both sides to keep correspondents busy. Madrid observers reported that masses of troops and a dusty serpent of nearly 1,000 motor trucks were climbing the ridges, moving north for a final assault on Santander, last important stronghold of the starving Basque defenders of Bilbao.

Quickly correspondents in Loyalist Spain translated this as an admission that the potent Rightist assault against Madrid of fortnight ago had broken down. For many weeks they have been aware that the Italian and German advisers of Generalissimo Franco, gathering daily in the heavily guarded headquarters directly opposite the west door of Salamanca Cathedral, have advocated two different plans of campaign for the remainder of the summer. Basically the German scheme was to immunize every front but Madrid, try to lure the Leftists into one more half baked offensive, always fruitful of casualties, and then mass every available man from Malaga and the South, the Basque front, Toledo, Teruel to make one great conclusive drive against Madrid.

Basis of the Italian plan was to do something quickly to restore Italy's battered military prestige. Santander, once the favorite yachting centre of the Basque Riviera, is less protected by mountains than is Bilbao. There are not more than 5,000 exhausted Basque militiamen to guard it, and though Valencia has been able to sneak a few planes through to Santander in recent weeks, a service it could not perform for Bilbao, the overwhelmingly superior Rightist forces on the Basque front ought to be able to capture Santander in less than a week, any time the order is issued. Thousands of Italians are on that front, and Italy would dearly love to make a grandiloquent state entry into Santander and then, if possible, in the opposite corner of Spain, where other Italian thousands are quartered, extend that stalemated front from Malaga to Almeria for another publicized victory. It would then be time enough for a final decisive attack on Madrid.

The half-successful Leftist offensive of last month (TIME, July 19, et seq.) shelved the Italian scheme for weeks. By any scheme of tactics a counteroffensive was immediately necessary and it was undertaken with continuing but vague reports of Rightist successes. Then last week came that serpent of troops and trucks from Burgos and Vitoria. It meant that the Rightist offensive at Madrid had been checked too, and the Italian plan was getting another inning.