The Spanish Situation in The Sunday Times

The Sunday Times reported that diplomats stationed in Madrid were surprised by Spain's invitation to the UN to conduct inspections to check out Polish charges that Nazi scientists had taken haven in Spain and were working on an atom bomb. All the diplomats knew about it, they said, was what they read in the papers. Spanish officials said the people leveling the accusations "know perfectly well where German technicians investigating the atomic bomb are." It really was the height of chutzpah for the Soviet bloc nations to claim that the missing scientists were in Spain.

A reporter for La Presse, a center-right French newspaper, had written that the US was building massive airfields in Spain and that American companies were doing business there. He said that this explained why America's was leaning toward preserving the status quo. France's border with Spain officially was closed.

Meanwhile ten factions of exiled Republicans held an anti-Franco rally together in London. The dispatch claimed that this was the first time representatives from all the factions had joined in common action since the end of the Civil War in 1939. In Mexico a Socialist member of the Spanish government in exile also issued a call for the ouster of Franco.

The Times reported dryly on the rally in Madison Square Park, also covered in the Sunday News. The Times said the participants were members of labor organizations, veterans committees and affiliated groups but the News identified the sponsor as the Action Committee to Free Spain Now, an organization that would be identified later as a Communist front. By voice vote the rally participants demanded an end to Fascism, the "rupture of commercial and diplomatic relations between Spain and US" and a UN blockade of Spain. Franco had supporters in the US such as the Knights of Columbus and other conservative Catholic organizations who saw him as a defender of the Faith against the godless Communists.