The goal of a desperate seven-week campaign was almost reached last week by Generalissimo Francisco Franco's Army of Moors, Italians and Spaniards on the eastern front. Converging from a concave line in three directions, columns of Rightist troops pierced beyond the heavy fortifications of Albocacer, surrounded Lucena del Cid, were within easy gunshot at week's end of the ruined port of Castellon de la Plana (Big Castle of the Plain). In the north was reported the slow retreat toward France of the Leftist "Lost Division"of 10,000 militiamen, 3,000 peasants, trapped for eleven weeks in the high Pyrenees.
Castellon added to the territory, the Rightist corridor from Teruel to the Mediterranean will be almost doubled in width from 35 to 60 miles (see map). Even more important than a gain of square miles was actual possession of Castellon's harbor, into which munitions and food could be brought by Rightist ships to Rightist troops, at present forced to bring supplies hundreds of miles overland. Next Rightist goal will be Valencia, 40 miles to the south, for more than a year the capital of Leftist Spain, third largest city of the country. Advance down this rugged coast line will, however, present difficulties.
Stiff resistance, followed by orderly retreat, made the slow, steady Rightist drive a costly affair in men and munitions. Thousands more Moors and Riffs landed at Algeciras from Spanish Morocco. In Italy, no secret was made of heavy replacements of airplanes and pilots for the Rightist air force and it was freely predicted that Dictator Benito Mussolini might have to dispatch more "volunteers'' to Spain before the Rightists could win the war. At Burgos, Generalissimo Franco was reported to have ordered more air raids on merchant shipping at Leftist ports.
Meanwhile, persistent air bombings continued to take their tolls not only of Leftist Spain's civilian population but of British ships, British seamen. Typical daily list of civilian casualties read: Alicante, 30 dead, 118 injured; Valencia, 17 dead, many injured; Segorbe, 12 dead, 30 injured.
Attacks on British ships in the 23-month-old war were brought to 60 and the 78th British seaman was killed. The British-owned port at Gandia, with Union Jacks painted on the rooftops, was bombed and machine-gunned in what British Manager Edwin Apfel called a "deliberate brazen attack on British property." At Denia, a raisin exporting centre, the French merchantman Brisbane was bombed, five seamen were killed, a British observer for the Non-intervention Committee killed and the captain injured. Farther down the coast at Alicante the British freighter St. Winifred and the 5,387-ton ship English Tanker were hit, and the British oil tanker Maryat was destroyed. Although some British captains were reported as ready to give up the lucrative Spanish Leftist trade, in which handsome bonuses for safe deliveries have been handed out, off the ports of Valencia and Alicante numerous ships still waited to unload their cargoes.