The Spanish Civil War by Hugh Thomas

Author:Hugh Thomas [Thomas, Hugh]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: History, Modern, 20th Century, Military, General, Europe
ISBN: 9780718192938
Google: 4c4F7KM9UE8C
Amazon: B00BMF1UR4
Publisher: Penguin
Published: 2013-03-28T00:00:00+00:00

Privately, Eden ‘definitely wanted the republic to win’.5 On 14 April, Attlee moved a vote of censure. The British government, the greatest maritime power in the world, had given up trying to protect British shipping; yet the Basques had said that the mines in Bilbao harbour had been cleared, and that at night Basque armed trawlers (aided by searchlights) protected the port. Where did the government gain its information of the dangers? Did it do so from ‘those curious people, our consular agents, who seem so silent on the question of Italian troops landing’? Sir John Simon, the Home Secretary, next argued that if British ships were to be allowed to go to Bilbao, there would have to be mine-sweeping. That would constitute ‘a full dress operation of war’. Sir Archibald Sinclair, the liberal leader, argued that the government’s acceptance of the nationalist blockade spelled intervention. The Germans, after all, he said, recalling incidents of the winter, had always looked after their ships. Churchill spoke next, and, reiterating his Olympian detachment from either side in the war, indulged in a daydream of mediation through ‘some meeting in what Lord Rosebery once called a “wayside inn”, which would give the chance in Spain of peace, of law, of bread and of oblivion’. Then indeed these ‘clenched fists might relax into the open hands of generous cooperation’. Harold Nicolson, for the National Labour party, described the refusal to risk British ships in Basque waters as a ‘bitter pill. It is not pleasant. It is a potion which is almost nauseating’, but it had to be accepted. The Labourite Philip Noel-Baker suggested that it was the first time since 1588 that the British seemed to have been afraid of a Spanish fleet. Eden ended the debate by saying that, if British merchant ships were to leave St Jean de Luz, and so disobey the Board of Trade, they would be given naval protection as far as the three-mile limit. ‘Our hope is that they will not go, because, in view of reports of conditions, we do not think it safe for them to go.’1

The masters of the merchantmen at St Jean de Luz were growing impatient. Their cargoes (for which they had been paid handsomely)2 were rotting. Three vessels, all commanded by Welsh captains named Jones (therefore differentiated from their cargoes as ‘Potato Jones’, ‘Corn Cob Jones’, and ‘Ham and Eggs Jones’), gained notoriety by pretended attempts to set out from port. ‘Potato Jones’, whose cargo concealed weapons and whose motives were material, gained a sudden, if unmerited, reputation, from a series of breezy answers to a reporter of the Evening News, as a rough salt in the Conradian tradition. But it was not he (he eventually delivered his goods in Valencia) who broke the Bilbao blockade. First, the ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury, Dr Hewlett Johnson, a restless apologist for Russia, and now the republic, sailed from Bermeo, near Bilbao, to St Jean de Luz on a French torpedo boat without mishap; and told the Manchester Guardian so.

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