At anchor behind Napoleon's breakwater in Cherbourg Harbor last week lay the huge U. S. battleship Oklahoma. Suddenly telephones jangled in the captain's cabin. Washington was calling with urgent orders. All leaves were to be canceled. Most of the Annapolis midshipmen aboard on summer training cruise were to be transferred to other warships. The ship and the Coast Guard cutter Cayuga were to proceed to San Sebastian immediately to rescue U. S. citizens from the inferno of Spanish civil war. Under way, the Oklahoma's petty officers doubled up in their cabins, and sailors cleared out the crews' recreation room for an emergency nursery. Plowing down the Bay of Biscay watch officers worried. U. S. Ambassador Claude Gernade Bowers had not been heard from in Spain for four days. He was not at the summer embassy at San Sebastian but a few miles away at his own villa at the narrow little seaport of Fuenterrabia. Was he alive? The engine room telegraph rang up more revolutions.
Spain was weltering last week in a revolution which experts had to certify as absolutely Grade A. Its authentic qualities of mass upheaval reduced to secondary stature both the government leaders and the revolutionary generals. The Spanish Government, a regime of Socialists, Communists and rattlebrained Liberals had emptied the jails of cutthroats to defend itself and swell what could be called "forces of law and order." These forces included an indefinite part of the Army. Other Army units had gone over to generals of loosely Fascist forces in which were scrambled most of the Spanish Foreign Legion, parts of the Civil Guard, peasants whose priests had told them about Bolshevism, hired Pistoleros and boys and girls in their teens just shooting for the fun of it. It was these adolescents who killed the pregnant wife of the Norwegian Consul at San Sebastian as her trained nurse was helping her into an ambulance. That was pure, crazy REVOLUTION and it lapped and slavered at Madrid two ways, up from the South under hot-headed Original Revolutionist General Francisco Franco and down from the North under calculating, professional General Emilio Mola.
Soon more than 30 rescue ships dispatched by anxious governments to take their nationals off the frying pan of Spain were in its harbors. Before the Oklahoma could reach San Sebastian, the French destroyer l'Indomptable and the British destroyer Verity had already arrived, hustled all foreigners away who wished to leave. None was more shaken than five Swiss tourists who had been lined up against a wall for execution by the Leftists until they could convince them that they were not Nazi agents helping the Fascist revolution. Word finally seeped down from Ambassador Bowers. He was marooned in his villa, barricades between him and San Sebastian. This week, with his wife and daughter, he scuttled up the coast by car through barricaded San Sebastian, across the border into France. There from St. Jean de Luz, he announced that he would set up a ''floating embassy" on the cutter Cayuga, had ''no intention of abandoning my Spanish post for the present."