WAR IN SPAIN: Los Dinamiteros

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Some days after the Rightist capture of Gijón two months ago an extraordinary story reached foreign correspondents in Madrid and Valencia: several hundred Dinamiteros, bomb-throwing Asturian miners—whom Rightists hate so much that they are executed whenever captured—had slipped through the mountains by night, wormed their way through 300 miles of Rightist territory, and through another battle line, to reassemble with their officers, safe in Leftist territory.

Able U. S. correspondent on the field in the final Leftist assault on Teruel last week was the New York Tiniest much favored Herbert L. Matthews (once awarded a cross by Fascist Italy). Moving forward on the last day with a supporting column he reported that a sudden change in the weather had almost entirely melted the blinding snows of the first day of the attack, noted a pair of happy dogs gamboling ahead of the grim advancing line of skirmishers, announced that in this entire advance of 50,000 Leftist troops he saw but one foreign officer, a Bulgarian. Suddenly at mid-afternoon two truckloads of men pulled up by the roadside where Correspondent Matthews was standing.

"Los Dinamiteros! Los Dinamiteros!" shouted the troops, and out they tumbled, swaggering self-consciously, weighed down with their only weapons, home-made hand grenades. At dusk a few hours later he was able to see the Asturian Dinamiteros leading the final assault into the city, lit like gruesome fireflies by the flashes of their bursting bombs. That night though a handful of Rightist civil guards remained holed up in the ruins of Teruel's cathedral sworn to die by their guns. Teruel's citizens staged an exuberant torchlight parade through the streets, and captured searchlights floodlighted captured buildings. An additional 20,000 Leftist troops had poured into Teruel, preparing for the expected counteroffensive.

General Vicente Rojo announced and Barcelona repeated that there would be no executions, no pillaging, and a pardon for the defenders of the cathedral if they would surrender. All this was changed when word seeped through from Rightist territory that the best-hated Rightist General in Spain, Miguel Aranda of the siege of Oviedo, was leading the relief column against Teruel and none other than Jos Moscardó, hero of the Alcazar, was re-enacting that same siege inside Teruel. Tanks rumbled against the cathedral within the hour. Six-inch guns fired point blank into the seminary, the bank and cathedral where the last-standers were holding out with vanishing supplies and little ammunition.