AIR BOMBS STRIKE ALICANTE MARKET; HUNDREDS FEARED DEAD

ALICANTE, May 25., 1938-05-25. — A devastating air attack has struck Alicante to-day, bringing death into the city's central market while the business of buying and selling provisions was proceeding. Italian bombers serving General Franco's cause have dropped their loads upon the Republican port, and the market district has suffered terribly. Several hundred people are feared killed, with many more wounded; no final reckoning can safely be given. The immediate fact is a civilian calamity of the first magnitude. A place to which households resort for the day's food has become the principal scene of destruction in an attack delivered far from the fighting front.

The raiding formation came from the direction of the Mediterranean, striking in the late morning. The city's warning arrangements failed to give the population effective notice before the bombs fell. Alicante possesses anti-aircraft defences, but these have not prevented the assault. Approximately ninety bombs were dropped upon the city, several falling in and about the central market. The concentration of people there made the consequences especially grievous. Whatever particular objectives the airmen were ordered to seek, the most conspicuous result of their work lies among the inhabitants who had assembled to obtain provisions.

The market is no incidental feature of Alicante's daily life. In a country enduring nearly two years of civil war, the distribution of food has acquired an importance which every household understands. Shortages and uncertain supplies make the gathering of buyers a necessity, not an amusement which can readily be abandoned. A warning, even when sounded, presents its own cruel choice to those who have waited for food. To-day the failure of effective warning denied many even that choice. The great number exposed within a limited space explains why a short bombardment could produce a disaster out of all proportion to its duration.

Alicante remains an important Mediterranean outlet for the Republic, and its harbour gives the city an evident place in the military struggle. Supplies brought by sea, communications along the coast, and the maintenance of Republican resistance all make the eastern ports objects of attention from General Franco's aircraft. But the existence of a harbour does not make every street a battlefield, nor does it erase the distinction between a military establishment and a provision market. The circumstances of this attack will therefore raise anew the question which follows so many Spanish bombardments: what protection, in practice, remains for the population of an open city?

The Italian air force engaged in Spain, known as the Aviazione Legionaria, has greatly extended the reach of the Nationalist campaign. Its establishment in Majorca places substantial stretches of the Republican Mediterranean coast within striking distance. Aircraft can cross the intervening water, discharge their bombs, and withdraw without any corresponding advance by troops upon the ground. Thus a city may remain securely behind its own army and yet find itself exposed to a sudden attack. The sea, formerly a measure of separation from the enemy's land forces, now provides an approach along which danger can arrive with little warning.

To-day's disaster follows the severe bombardments of Barcelona in March, when repeated attacks brought heavy loss of life and widespread destruction to the Catalan capital. Those raids have already demonstrated the power of air attack to reach beyond factories, railway lines, and harbour installations into the ordinary life of a great town. Alicante now adds another terrible instance. The problem is not merely the accuracy of an individual bomb. Where powerful explosives are released over closely built streets, the people below must bear consequences which no distinction drawn upon an airman's map can reliably confine.

The wider military situation gives these attacks particular weight. General Franco's forces reached the Mediterranean at Vinaroz last month, cutting the Republican territory into two parts and separating Catalonia from the central and south-eastern zone. Alicante belongs to the latter area, with Valencia and Madrid. The Republic must consequently maintain resistance across territories whose direct land connection has been severed. Pressure upon its ports is pressure upon the means by which that resistance is sustained. Yet military advantage and the killing of market-goers are not interchangeable propositions; the former cannot, without examination, be accepted as an explanation sufficient for the latter.

Abroad, the Spanish war continues to expose the distance between the profession of non-intervention and the fact of foreign assistance. Britain and France have pursued their policy of withholding official participation, while Italian and German support has strengthened General Franco and Soviet assistance has reached the Republic. The Italian aircraft operating over Spanish towns are a particularly visible expression of this international contradiction. Every new bombardment therefore carries a diplomatic consequence as well as a Spanish casualty list. Governments which seek to localise the war must confront the fact that foreign machines and foreign airmen are helping to determine its course.

The language of warning is already familiar. Speaking in Chicago last October, President Roosevelt declared: “Without a declaration of war and without warning or justification of any kind, civilians, including women and children, are being ruthlessly murdered with bombs from the air.” His words concerned the wider disorder of international affairs, not this attack, but Alicante gives them a fresh and dreadful application. Earlier still, Mr. Baldwin told the House of Commons that “the bomber will always get through.” What was then argued as a question of national defence is being experienced in Spain as an immediate danger to the household and the street.

For the Republican Government of Dr. Juan Negrín, the bombardment presents both an urgent civilian emergency and another burden upon the maintenance of public confidence. Food must still be distributed, the wounded cared for, and the port kept functioning. For shopkeepers and working families, commercial recovery cannot be separated from the elementary question of whether it is safe to gather in public. There is no sound basis at present for a precise estimate of the damage to trade. The destruction of a busy market, however, strikes directly at the system by which a city feeds itself, quite apart from any injury to warehouses or shipping.

The immediate outlook is governed by the same conditions which made to-day's attack possible: hostile aircraft within reach, limited protection upon the ground, and a population which cannot suspend its daily necessities until the war is over. Shelters and better warnings may diminish the danger, but they cannot restore those already lost, nor guarantee that another crowded place will escape. Alicante's dead must first be counted and its injured tended. Beyond that work stands a question for every Government watching Spain: whether the protection of civilians is to remain a declaration of principle, or become a restraint which belligerents can actually be made to observe.