Spanish Civil War – Foreign Reporters Were Frequently Drunk, Lazy and Often Entirely Wrong

My grandfather, Irving Pflaum of UPI, was a journalist in the Spanish Civil War from 1936-1939. I have his memoirs. He paints a portrait of his colleagues as often back-stabbing, lazy, drunk, liars. Basically, a theme running through his unpublished memoir written in English in Alicante, Spain in 1982 is that the “rough draft” of history in the case of the Spanish Civil War is largely false, as reports in major papers in London, Paris, Buenas Aires, and New York repeated the same made up stories based on the writing of only a few young, inexperienced, lazy and unreliable reporters working under several false names for the same news agencies and other outlets. Also, the unscrupulous editors in the capitals didn’t care much whether the news was true of not… and allowed their reporters on the scene to make stuff up with no oversight.

Irv’s memoirs contain only existing written eyewitness account of [this incident](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombardment_of_Almer%C3%ADa). While my grandfather supported the Republic, he is absolutely sure that this “first direct German intervention” in Almeria did not occur at all and no one in Almeria died from combat on 31 May 1937, not one person injured or hurt in any way. There was only some superficial damage to one building, much like the damage that occurred on most of the previous days of May, 1937. Nothing of significance happened – he was there at the time and he was the only reporter on the scene. Unfortunately, by the time he made contact with Madrid, the fake story had already gone out on the wires and been published in Paris, London and New York … and is now a Wikipedia page that is entirely false. This kind of thing happened frequently and much of what people think they know about the war is not slightly wrong but wholly wrong and simply invented.