This summer marks 90 years since the failed landing in Mallorca by a group of Republican troops, mostly Catalan, led by Captain Alberto Bayo. In the wake of the anniversary, new editions of two recommendable classics have appeared: El desembarcament de Bayo a Mallorca (Publicacions de l'Abadia de Montserrat) by the late Father Josep Massot i Muntaner and Els grans cementiris sota la lluna by Georges Bernanos (Nova Editorial Moll, translation by Antoni-Lluc Ferrer). These necessary rediscoveries coincide with the appearance of an exceptional book: Una isla brutalizada (Documenta Balear).The uniqueness is at least triple. Firstly, to tackle the first research book dedicated to his native Mallorca, Joan Maria Thomàs (Palma, 1953) has immersed himself in the family archive, from which he has recovered documentation, photographs and, above all, an epistolary treasure. Thus, the 491 letters shared by his future parents during the first months of the war allow him to reconstruct its impact, both on the front and in the island's rearguard, the profound sociopolitical transformations, the terrible repressive consequences and the complexity hidden behind the Manichaeism of any civil conflict. Furthermore, the personal notes of the Catholic municipal judge and military volunteer Gerardo Maria (Palma, 1905-1985) and of the young woman from a good family and volunteer in passive defense Àngela (Palma, 1910-2016) enrich the narrative with custom, linguistic (the letters will always be in Mallorcan Catalan, except for some brief parenthesis) and localist notes.A cruel persecution

Furthermore, the emeritus professor at the Universitat Rovira i Virgili substantiates, in line with what previous bibliography has already pointed out, the decisive nature of the failed landing in strictly framing those in favor of the rebels and in cruelly persecuting the rest: whether they were the captured, harassed, and shot militiamen, whether we spoke of the thousands of islanders who suffered the different repressive gears, whether it was the author's uncle priest –the musicologist Joan Maria Thomàs Sabater– accused of Catalanism. “Because what was happening was not only the expansion of a great animosity against an enemy that continuously bombed the civilian population, but a massive preventive repressive policy, which detained and imprisoned thousands of Mallorcans who seemed to the military and public order authorities to be susceptible of forming part of the 'internal enemy', assassinating a part of them, although the first great wave of deaths would not arrive until the landing occurred”. According to the latest census, we would be talking about 1,993 victims with names and surnames, but only the remains of 329 have been located in 28 different places, and only 68 have been identified.And third and last, Thomàs constructs, with the mettle of good historians, a critical account that does not seek to exonerate but rather to understand and make understood the complexity inherent in those events. He does so, for example, by collecting the legal and Christian scruples of Gerardo Maria himself, who, despite voluntarily joining the rebels and sharing an eschatological interpretation of the conflict, distances himself from violent excesses and, faced with veiled threats for his lack of repressive enthusiasm, will leave for the Peninsula. This unease will never place him in public dissent with the dictatorship, but it surely explains that in 1953, as a judge, he carried out the exhumation of a victim murdered in Mallorca during the war by a prominent local falangist. And a civil war on an island is practically a war within the family.

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