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In Leftist Bilbao, Basque officials snapped: "May God have mercy on his soul."
Spurred by the death of Mola, Basque Leftists counterattacked viciously around Bilbao, regained much precious ground with heavy losses to the Rebels. To celebrate his new command Rightist General Fidel Davila ordered a massed attack on the important peak and town of Lemona. At the end of 24 hours Basque forces were still holding out. Star witness of the Lemona attack was Archduke Otto von Habsburg, pretender to the thrones of Austria and Hungary.* At the front to visit his youthful uncle. Prince Gaëtan of Bourbon-Parma, and accompanied by another uncle, Prince Xavier of Bourbon-Parma, he wore in their honor the red beret of the Carlist royalists, spoke fluent Spanish.
That most colorful of Spanish capitalists, illiterate Juan March, onetime tobacco smuggler, chief civilian backer of General Franco's armies, was back in Gibraltar last week after a hurried trip to impoverished Italy with the Duke of Alba in search of more aid. Loudly he reassured nervous Rightist supporters with the statement that he had authorized General Franco to spend $1,500,000,000 "subscribed abroad," by whom Juan March would not say.
As usual when things were not going too well, Rightists retaliated with a bloody shelling of the centre and working class district of Madrid. The New York Times's Correspondent Herbert L. Matthews had just emerged from the correspondents' hotel when one of the first shells smashed into it. Quickly he popped into Alfaro's haberdashery shop and began inspecting gloves. Shelling continued. Correspondent Matthews decided to look at handkerchiefs.
"Because I was glad to be alive," he wrote, "I bought more handkerchiefs than I needed. . . . Another shell broke in the street, and this time we heard a boy screaming six or eight times, each time weaker than the last. . . . 'Show me some scarfs,' I said to the clerk."
This week General Fidel Davila, taking over the Bilbao sector for the Rightists, won praise from Franco by loosing a thunderbolt attack on the Basque defenses. A monster fleet of 63 airplanes sent bombs whistling into the suburb of Lezama, more into the trenches at strategic Lemona Mountain. After heavy artillery preparation and machine gun strafing from the air, 30 tanks lumbered up the slope followed by Rightist infantry. Announced the Insurgents: "The hill is entirely in our hands."
After a day of dreamlike quiet in Madrid during which not a shot was heard another furious bombardment was launched in which correspondents counted a shell every ten seconds. Across the Straits of Gibraltar from Spanish Morocco, Generalissimo Franco rushed 14,000 more troops, some of them foreign volunteers and tatterdemalion striplings. In a few weeks he will sidetrack great numbers of troops to reap the July grain harvest if he wants his soldiers to have enough to eat this autumn.
*Loyalist sources claimed the plane had been exploded by a time-bomb.