Balearics as Fascist Outpost: Italian Salutes in Majorca Supplant Old Spanish Calm

Manawatu Times, Volume 62, Issue 19, 23 January 1937, Page 12 (Supplement)

Balearics as Fascist Outpost: Italian Salutes in Majorca Supplant Old Spanish Calm

ITALIAN ’PLANES WEP-E BALANCE OF POWER IN FRANCO'S SEIZURE. PALMA, Majorca, Dec. 30. The process of making the Balearic Islands safe for Fascism has now been under way for some time and no sooner is one ashore in Palma than one realiises how well-planned and effective that process really is. It can be understood, moreover, that nothing like it could either have been planned or carried out by the {Spanish unaided, because it is all quite apart from Spahish ideology. When one enters the lovely harbour of Palma, usually at this season gay with tourist activity, one is struck by the utter loneliness of everything. Ail the hotels along the harbourside arc closed and shuttered. Oue sees no one moving about where there used to be boating and swimming and brightlyawninged terrraces overlooking the seas, full of visitors. Exchange of Salutes. The only vessels iu the harbour are an English cruiser, a French destroyer and two Italian craft of similar typja. One of these is anchored close inshore and luuuches carrying officers are constantly going and coming. Steamer communication with the mainland is infrequent and irregular. The writer came on a French steamer, a slow craft from Marseilles to Algiers, with a stop of six or seven hours at Palma. It is clear that her arrival croates no enthusiasm here now. {She passes close beside one of the Italian destroyers, aud when the arms of the latter’s crew arc raised in the Fascist salute, to the accompaniment of more or less sardonic shouts, the French sailors reply with equal vehemence with the raised clenched fist of tho Communist greeting. A knot of them forward even breaks into a snatch of ‘‘The Internationale. ’ ’ C'ool Reception to Visitors. When the writer requested permission to go ashore it was determinedly refused. Au American, manager of a Palma utility couceru who has been acting as a temporary Uuited States foreign oflicial since it became necessary sorno time ago to evacuate Americans from the islands, undertakes to reason with the khaki-clad person who appears to be commandant of the port. This person has just come importantly down the pier and been greeted by everybody with the Fascist salute. At last he yields and grants permission to go ashore. There a person of superior authority to the commandant, though in civilian garb, interposes. He. it seems, is head of the so-called secret police. Nothing is more foreign to his intent than to let any visiting journalist loose in Palma. ’Planes Fly Close to Ground. Tho accommodating American commences the argument all over again. But it is interrupted by an extraordinary hubbub. Cheering starts, every eye turns upward and the Fascist salute is raised to the heavens. There is a roar of motors but it is drowned by more frantic cheering, and one discovers three silver-hued ’planes performing astonishing evolutions at a height of but a few hundred feet. “Italian ’planes,” says Mr. cau friend succinctly, and when the excitement is temporarily over resumes the argument with the police head. Af last, after much bowing, hat-raising, band-shaking aud saluting, a compromise is reached. One of the American’s employees, a young man from the {States who has been here through it ail and is cotlTersant with every detail and phase of the situation, is to be permitted to drive the correspondent about the town iu his car. There were to be no attempts to approach anybody, to converse with anybody or to take photographs. Succession of Sentries. There were a dozen sentries between the pierhead aud the town. Each of them is a lad of 16 or less, biue-shirted, shouldering a rifle he can hardly swing, yet full of a most precocious authority. Finally passage is permitted. News has been received that tho “Nationalists” have entered Madrid and the youth of Palma are filled with excitement. The elders appear quite unperturbed. But numberless truckloads of blue-shirted and khaki-clad boys of 16 and 18 are tearing through the streets, yelling, singing and “viva”-ing. Improvised bands are blaring, motor-horns shrieking, highpitched screams piercing the air. “Life is cheap here to-day,” says the writer’s host gravely. “There are 2500 suspects in the gaols.”