(See front cover)
As predicted, when Generalissimo Franco's German-planned counterattack on Madrid failed month ago (TIME, Aug. 16), Italian staff officers were given their innings, permitted an attempt to re-establish Italian military prestige with a mass attack on the onetime summer resort of Santander. key point of the shrunken and crumbling Basque front. As predicted, the Rightist columns found ineffective resistance among the 25,000 Basques and Asturian miners defending Santander and last week Santander fell. As predicted, Italy threw aside the last vestige of neutrality in the Spanish Civil War. The three Italian divisions—Black Arrow, Black Flame, 20th of March — which had helped reduce the city, marched in triumphantly and, in good Roman fashion, paraded a column of hairy Basque prisoners. Back home, the controlled Italian press acclaimed the surrender of Santander as "typically and essentially an Italian victory," fit reprisal for the embarrassing Italian rout of Guadalajara (TIME, March 22 et seq.).
In point of fact, the Italians, although the most numerous of Franco's foreign allies, formed only one of the three columns that closed in on starving Santander. The other two columns consisted of Navarre royalists. Moors and regular cavalry, all under command of Spanish General Jose Fidel Davila. successor on the Basque front to the ablest of all Rightist commanders, the late General Emilio Mola.
To whomever belonged the glory of the victory, it was a pretty complete one. The Basque militiamen and the Asturian miners, those Iberian Celts who have been fighting each other or someone else since the first Century A. D., were digging in for a last siege in the mountains near Gijón. Gijón, a little cod-fishing port became the capital of what was left of the Leftist side of the Basque Republic—a narrow strip running 125 miles along the Bay of Biscay. In this strip there was no food, no trade. Jose Antonio de Aguirre, the fiery little Basque President who had retreated with his government from Bilbao to Santander, gave up the struggle as a bad job and boarded a boat for Bayonne, France.