THE TABLET A WEEKLY NEWSPAPER AND REVIEW

ESTABLISHED 1840 REGISTERED AS A NEWSPAPER

VOL. 171 No. 5100

LONDON FEBRUARY 5th, 1938

SIXPENCE

IN THIS ISSUE

GREAT BRITAIN AND ITALY

The Baseless Estrangement: An Editorial POPULATION PROSPECTS

III. Some Causes of the Decline in the Birth-Rate

By E. R. ROPER POWER

IMMORTALITY Count Keyserling’s Book Reviewed by T. S. Gregory

THE REICH’S BAN ON THE BUDAPEST CONGRESS

(Rome Letter and Church Abroad) Full List o f Contents on page 164.

THE WORLD WEEK BY WEEK Air Bombardment

From the beginning of the Spanish Civil War, both sides have engaged in air raids on the towns in which war manufacture goes on or which are serving as military headquarters and centres of concentration. The Intelligence on both sides is good, because there is a constant coming and going of individuals, by one route or another, between the two halves of Spain, and news about factory activity and the places where material is accumulated travels fast. Government Spain has now only three major centres left, Madrid, Barcelona and Valencia. All its war supplies have to be imported by sea or from France, or improvised in one of those places. A week or two ago there appeared in the French journal, L 1Occident, a signed article by General Kindelan, the head of the Nationalist Air Forces, describing the way the air arms under General Franco had had to fight “with clipped wings” because of F ranco’s determination to minimize indiscriminate killing from the air. The article, written from the professional point of view, common to the air forces of every country, argued that in fact a very high level of accuracy in air bombing has now been achieved, and that it is possible to hit important and specifically military objectives. The thesis of the article was that the few vital centres from which the Barcelona war effort must proceed are now known and exposed to attack, and that nothing will more quickly bring the war with all its widespread suffering to an end than air hostilities against those centres. That is the thesis ; it is very likely one with a strong professional bias. But it cannot be judged and dismissed on the strength of the communiqués issued by the authorities in the places bombed. One thing is common to the announcements from Madrid, Barcelona, Salamanca or Valladolid ; it is never admitted that anything of military importance, like a munition factory or a railway depot, has been destroyed. All the emphasis is put on the deaths of unhappy civilians, to convey an impression of wanton and futile death-dealing from the air. Last Sunday Barcelona was raided, with what results a rigid censorship, covered with an official story, leaves highly obscure.

What is unfortunately not obscure is the strong bias in the Press in Britain and America, which gives so much headline hospitality to these Barcelona versions, while it very briefly records raids on Salamanca or Saragossa. The first Barcelona version and the figure taken in most newspapers place the deaths at 350 and the injured at 750. The next day the Havas Agency, which is so close to the French Government, amended the figure to 155 killed. But the Daily Herald, true to its unenviable pre-eminence as a partisan organ, splashed across its front page on Monday a two-line heading : “ 1000 Reported Killed” ; in the text this emerged as the provisional estimate of the city’s police chief, and on the next page of the same issue of the Herald there was a description of the fighting which began ‘‘ Rigid censorship in Barcelona restricts news ’’ of the fighting to Government communiqués. The Tactics of Intervention

It must never be forgotten how whole-heartedly and skilfully the war is being waged from Barcelona in the twin fields of diplomatic action and propaganda directed to the public opinion of France and Britain. The extreme costliness of military attack has been brought home to the Government forces, and was admitted, according to Le Journal, by Señor Prieto,