Herbert Matthews was getting a shave in the barbershop of the Hotel Majestic, the base for foreign correspondents in Barcelona, when an unending series of explosions made him realize that a more deadly stage of the war was under way. The Republic’s government had recently moved to that city from Valencia. “By March, 1938,” he wrote, “we thought we knew all about bombing and shelling, but we were innocents. It took eighteen raids in forty-four hours on Barcelona to show us.”
The heaviest the world had yet seen, these raids were executed mainly by Mussolini’s bombers based on Majorca. With a port and three airfields, that Spanish island had in effect become an Italian military base, conveniently within 15 minutes’ flying time of Barcelona and Valencia. German aircraft joined the raids as well, and some of the bombs they dropped may have been manufactured in Delaware by DuPont. Starting in January, the American chemical behemoth sold at least 40,000 bombs to Germany. Since that country was not officially at war with anyone, the sale was not considered a violation of the porous US neutrality law.
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