SPAIN: Homecoming

Sentimental, fiesta-loving Barcelonians declared a holiday and thronged by the thousands to the waterfront one afternoon last week to welcome home a shipload of all but forgotten men: the last survivors of the ill-fated and ill-famed Blue Division that Franco sent off in 1941 to fight in Hitler's Wehrmacht on the Russian front. Captured by the Russians, the Spanish legionnaires had spent some ten years in Soviet forced-labor camps, were released and sent home as another installment in the Communist peace offensive.

As the small Liberian steamer Semiramis, chartered by the Red Cross,...

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