Thursday, March 28

The bombs of the Civil War that did not explode in Madrid and live with us


In a passage from his book The forging of a rebelArturo Barea narrates as “a 54-centimeter grenade, as big as a newborn” went through the wall of the Telefónica Building, the target of so many projectiles on the Gran Vía, without exploding. In this case, the projectile did not explode, according to the writer, due to the sabotage of the German worker who assembled it. A note was written inside: “Comrades: do not fear. The shells that I load do not explode -A German worker”.

This type of sabotage, the news of which until recently was believed to be the result of republican propaganda, is in any case nothing more than one of the casuistries that could mean that part of the bombs dropped against the enemy during the war of 1936 did not reach exploit. And many of these have continued to emerge later, in the open field or in the city, until today. Last Wednesday, January 27, without going any further, some works on the sidewalk of the couple on Sagasta Street led to the discovery of a howitzer from the war.

Madrid suffered from bombs throughout the conflict. First, from November 36, an intense aerial bombardment –with the intervention of the Condor Legion and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria– and then, after the attempt to end the war quickly, with a siege of attrition carried out above all by the artillery from the positions of the Casa de Campo and the Cerro de los Angeles.

Enrique Bordes is an architect and co-author (along with Luis de Sobrón) of Madrid bombed. Cartography of destruction. 1936-1939, an investigation that puts on the map –literally, as well as in a book– the result of the aerial and artillery bombardments of the city from November 1936 to February 39, shortly before the end of the war. Borders helps us to contextualize the area where the howitzer appeared the other day as a bombing hotspot.

“Reviewing the data we have, and according to the firefighters’ intervention book, in that same area there were affected by aerial bombardments on November 19, 1936”. According to the same archival documents, there were affected buildings on the other side of the street by the same bombardment, at Sagasta number 1 and between Luchana and Cardenal Cisneros. We could even establish a line of bombardment that begins in the nearby street of Apodaca, then continues towards Churruca with Sagasta, would continue through Luchana and continue along Calle Cardinal Cisneros.

But the researchers have recorded damage to the neighborhood from later dates, already from artillery: “All the areas that approached the center were quite affected, both by aerial bombardment and by the shells that continued to fall until almost the end of the war” .

About the surprise appearance of projectiles, here and there, he says that it is common currency: “The appearance of shells is constant throughout the Spanish territory. Last year we had the opportunity to hear the explanations in this regard from Tedax (Specialist Technicians in Deactivation of Explosive Devices of the National Police) and members of the Civil Guard’s Explosives Deactivation Corps. They indicated that the collection of this type of artifacts in the national territory is almost daily even today. The week after presenting the first version of our plan there, in 2019, the Madrid School of Architecture was evicted because they found a series of shells during the parking lot works. Situations like this are very common, much more than we think, both underground and on the roofs of buildings during restoration works”.

Antonio Morcillo president of GEFREMA (Study Group of the Madrid Front) explains the reasons behind a bomb that has not exploded. “A projectile is expensive -he clarifies-, nobody throws it lightly, so that it does not explode, but there are different reasons why this can happen and it is known that between 20 and 30% of those launched during the war did not they exploded,” he says.

What generates the necessary temperature for the projectile to explode is the fuse (at the tip) that has a cartridge inside of mercury fulminate (a very unstable explosive salt). This can detonate by percussion (with violent contact it goes inwards, causing the explosion of the trilite of the body of the projectile, the breaking of the walls and the exit of the shrapnel at high speed) or to times, with a mechanism that makes it explode at a certain number of seconds, during its trajectory.

Taking into account this operation, it is easy to understand what are the most common reasons why a projectile does not explode, explains Antonio Morcillo: “A blow to the fuse, for example, can cause the jet of fire to be directed to one side ; also a fault in the angle of incidence can lead to it falling laterally and not striking (and therefore not exploding); it may happen that the ground is very soft and the same thing happens, or even that there is a manufacturing defect”.

Towards the twenties the projectiles began to use trilite (TNT), which only detonates at more than eighty degrees, becoming more stable devices than those that were widely used until then. Before, picric acid was used, which is much less stable and could explode prematurely. “These kinds of artifacts were still around during the war because, although they were no longer made, there were stock in the powder kegs”, he indicates.

The expert explains that it is difficult for an accident to occur with one of these artifacts, since they did not explode at the time for any of the reasons listed above and over the years, their state of conservation has probably worsened. But he warns that, of course, it is not convenient to manipulate them. “There is a part that remains active for a long time (in the fuse), the Tedax must be called, they isolate it and make a controlled detonation. Once the charge explodes and the projectile is broken, it’s like a broken pot,” he notes.

Alejandro Pérez Olivares, author of the thesis Victory under control. Occupation, public order and social order in Francoist Madrid (1936-1948)), among other publications, talks to us about how the unexploded bombs that appear from time to time in the city are nothing more than the memory of a Madrid in which, after the war, the material remains of the conflict became part of the day to day.

“There is always talk of the parapets, the trenches or the effects of the bombing, but the work of securing a city that was a war front and, therefore, had become a militarized landscape is almost never taken into account. . In the early days of the occupation, of victory, it was normal – and it even became a kind of fashion – for people to visit the trenches on the Ciudad Universitaria campus and have lunch there, with their tortilla and everything. The authorities were forced to launch messages asking for caution. It also happened in Carabanchel, which had been a war front and where the front line separated Upper and Lower Carabanchel. When the population was able to return to their homes, the authorities had to clear the battlefield and reconvert it into a more or less urbanized landscape, connected to the city and safe,” he says.

“This type of thing we historians see in the documentation – Pérez-Olivares continues explaining -. There were plans to leave the University City in ruins and there are testimonies from authorities that speak of how in the first years of the postwar period, Carabanchel had serious problems of communication with Madrid. Accidents also appear in the sources, I remember a report preserved in the General Archive of the Administration that tells how a Falangist who was watching some works of the Home Union Work in the Comillas field, carried out by prisoners, he suffered the explosion of one of the bombs they found, which left him mutilated.”

Any family with several generations in Madrid knows stories of bombs that, whether they exploded or not, left a hole in the memory of the city that marks the scar of Madrid at war. A trained eye can recognize the shrapnel wounds in its walls and, from time to time, bombs continue to appear that, in their failure, make present the horror of the detonations and a world in which people got used to living with the remains of the destruction.





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