Guernica! Guernica!

"Yes. The author Herbert Southworth was always my inspiration. I think he probably knew more about the Spanish Civil War than any man who has ever lived. He was an absolutely extraordinary man who was born in Canton, a tiny Oklahoma town, in 1908. He worked in copper mines in Arizona in the 1920s. I think he was one of the few Anglo-Saxons to do so because most of the workers were Mexicans and that is how he learnt his Spanish. Initially he was self-educated but he managed to work his way through university in Arizona. Always fascinated by books, he went to Washington and got a job in the Library of Congress. When the Spanish Civil War broke out he became fascinated by the Spanish Republic and he started to review books that were coming out. And lots of books did come out almost immediately, as instant think-pieces from both sides. His reviews were noticed by the Spanish Republican ambassador in Washington, who invited him, with Jay Allen, to form a kind of unofficial office of information. And through that he was reading everything they could lay their hands on about what was going on in Spain. After the civil war he and Jay Allen continued trying to help Spanish refugees and when American finally entered World War II, Herbert volunteered and ended up in North Africa. After the war he bought a pile of army surplus radio equipment and created Radio Tangier and stayed on waiting for the day when Franco would fall. During that time he befriended lots of Spanish Republicans. He also became a great expert on the Falangists as well and through endless communication with them came to be recognised as an expert by them as well. To cut a long story short, he became a great collector of books about the Spanish Civil War, which he housed in the old French château where he went to live after Morocco gained its independence and he was forced to hand over his radio station. When he ran out of money he was forced to sell his collection to the University of California, where you can still find it today. But he couldn’t live without his books, so he started his collection again. I first met him in 1973 and he almost adopted me. My father was dead and we ended up with a very strong personal relationship and I used to go and visit him a lot. I also have a huge collection on the Spanish Civil War and some of the jewels in my collection were given to me by him. But to go back to his writing, Herbert had this mind-boggling recall which enabled him to collate almost everything that he read. His first book, which unfortunately never came out in English, was published by the same Spanish publishing company who published Gibson’s book on Lorca and was called El mito de la cruzada de Franco – the myth of Franco’s crusade. Yes. His first book written in Spanish dissected various myths put out by Francoist propagandists and their impact. After the bombing of Guernica there was a massive and quite successful propaganda effort claiming that Guernica had not been bombed, but had actually been blown up by Basques as part of a scorched earth policy in order to create a false atrocity. Herbert had always hoped that his book El mito de la cruzada would come out in English. Although it never did, he spent years revising it and particularly the part about Guernica. He chose it as the subject of the doctorate that he did at the Sorbonne, and worked on it as a visiting researcher at the University of California. The thesis became Guernica! Guernica! – a book not just about what happened but also about the myth. The full title of the book is, Guernica! Guernica! A Study of Journalism, Propaganda and History and it is about all of those things. It is just an astonishing treasure trove about many aspects of the civil war. It is all seen through the prism of Guernica, but there is so much in it about the propaganda services of the nationalists, how lies are disseminated. Obviously, he was interested in journalists, having been one and knowing most of the main journalists who worked on the Republican side. There is so much about the press which inspired my lifelong interest in the journalists. I wrote a book about war correspondents during the civil war which I wrote for Herbert. It came out after he had died but the book was dedicated to him. So Herbert’s book on Guernica is one that I would always include in the five most important books on the Spanish Civil War in any language. And he certainly had a lot of influence on other historians, particularly in Spain. Indeed, Helen Graham’s book The Spanish Republic at War is dedicated to him."