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The bombing of Gernika was an aerial attack on April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War by the German Luftwaffe squadron known as the Condor Legion against the Basque city of Gernika (Spanish: Guernica). It was, at the time, the largest aerial bombardment of a town.

Guernica

Even before the bombardment, Guernica was a place of great significance to the Basque people. The Biscayne assembly traditionally met there under an oak tree, the Gernikako Arbola. In more recent years, the assembly had met in the Casa de Juntas, a neoclassical building next to the oak tree, which also housed the most important historical archive of the Basque Country.

At the time of the attack the town had a nominal population of about 5,000. There were, however, a much larger number of people in the town on the day of the attack; there were undoubtedly numerous war refugees present in the town. The day of the attack was a Monday (a market day then as now), which would have meant that there would also have been many people from the surrounding areas. However there is still debate over this situation. One group argues that there was no market because the Basque government had ordered markets to stop since it endangered the civilian population and Gudaris to the block the roads. The other group argues that the government had issued the act forbidding markets at a moment when not everyone received it on time and still went and that the Gudaris only blocked main roads when the majority of people used rural roads paths. Despite the arguments the compromise decision was that 'it would have been a market day'. (Larrazabal 2005)

At the time, the town was about 15 kilometers behind the Republican lines and, before that date, it had not been directly involved in the war and was probably considered a safe place to be. However, at the time of the attack the town had no air defenses because of the recent losses of the Republican air force.

The first five waves of bombardment

The bombing was a sequence of attacks by German and Italian forces, the first joint military operation between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. They came so rapidly that from the ground the impression was of almost continuous bombardment over a period of hours.

The first attack came about 16:30. A twin-engined Dornier Do 17, coming from the south, dropped approximately twelve 50-kilogram bombs over the town. People did their best to take cover or to flee for farmhouses and woods on the outskirts.

On its flight back to base, the Do 17 passed an Italian patrol of three Savoia-Marchetti SM.79s that had left Soria at 15:30, headed on a mission, according to their orders, to "bomb the road and bridge to the east of Guernica, in order to block the enemy retreat". Their orders clearly said not to bomb the town itself. According to César Vidal, in his book La Destrucción de Guernica (The Destruction of Guernica): "the Italians had been trying for some time to obtain… a separate peace agreement with the Basque nationalists", and were not inclined to jeopardize that effort. During a single one-minute pass over the town, from north to south, the Italian planes dropped thirty-six 50-kilogram bombs.

At this point (again, according to Vidal), the damage to the town was "relatively limited… confined to a few buildings", including the three-story headquarters of the Izquierda Republicana ("Republican Left" political party) and the church of San Juan.

Three more aerial attacks occurred between then and 18:00. The third wave consisted of a Heinkel He 111 escorted by five Italian Fiats under the command of Corrado "Rocca" Ricci; the fourth and fifth waves were each by German twin-engined planes.

At this time, eleven planes had attacked the town and its surroundings. Vidal notes: "If the aerial attacks had stopped at that moment, for a town that until then had maintained its distance from the convulsions of war, it would have been a totally disproportionate and insufferable punishment. However, the biggest operation was yet to come."

The Condor Legion attacks

Earlier, around noon that day, the triple-engined Junkers Ju 52s of the Condor Legion had carried out a devastating mission against the smaller town of Gerrikaraiz. They returned to their base to reload armaments and to eat their lunch, then headed to attack Gernika. The 3 Squadron set out with a cargo of heavy 250 and 50 kg bombs and 1 kg incendiaries, the latter forming a third of the payload. It is conjectured that the other two squadrons carried similar cargoes. The attack would run from north to south, coming from the Bay of Biscay and up the course of the Urdaibai estuary.

The 1 and 2 Squadrons of the Condor Legion took off at about 16:30, with the 3 Squadron taking off from Burgos a few minutes later. They were escorted from Vitoria by a Fiat squadron and by the Messerschmitt Bf 109Bs of the Lutzow squadron, for a total of twenty-nine planes, in addition to the eleven involved in the earlier attacks.

From 18:30 to 18:45, each of the three German squadrons attacked in a formation three Ju 52s abreast, resulting in an attack front of about 150 meters. Meanwhile, and continuing for about a quarter-hour after the bombing, the Bf 109Bs and the Heinkel He 51s strafed civilians on the roads out of town.

Consequences of the attack

The attacks created a firestorm and destroyed nearly the entire town. Three quarters of the city's buildings were completely destroyed, and most others were damaged. Among the few buildings spared were the arms factories of Unceta and Company and Talleres de Guernica and the Assembly House (Casa de Juntas) and the Oak.

There are no generally accepted official figures as to the number of casualties. The Nationalists, who took the town three days later, gave a patently false description of the events (claiming that the destruction had been caused by Republicans burning the town as they fled) and seem to have made no effort to establish an accurate number. At an extreme low, the Franquista newspaper Arriba claimed on January 30, 1970 that there had only been twelve deaths. The consensus stands close to the 1,650 dead and 889 wounded that the Basque government of the time gave as minimum numbers. (Brey 1977) The dead appear to have been mostly the elderly, women, and children. The most recent study, made by several academics, have estimated the deaths between 250 and 300. Figure espoused by academic centres and governments.(Larrazabal.2005)

Motivation of the attack

The Condor Legion was assigned aerial missions throughout Spain, as Nazi Germany's prime contribution to Francisco Franco's forces. It would appear that the motivation of this particular attack was simply to terrorize the civilian population and to demoralize the Republican side.

For the Luftwaffe, the bombardment was a test of what it would take to completely destroy a city. In a sense Guernica was an experiment that would come to fruition in the bombing raids of World War II. At the Nuremberg Trials, the then-marshall of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring declared: "The Spanish Civil War gave me an opportunity to put my young air force to the test, and a means for my men to gain experience."

In addition, the bombing occurred shortly after the capture and lynching of a German pilot who had been downed at Bilbao. The attack had raised the anger of his colleagues.

The Franquista press claimed that Guernica had been burned by the fleeing Republicans themselves. This had previously occurred in Irun, dynamited as part of a scorched earth strategy; however, various foreign correspondents happened to be present during the attack and witnessed the devastation. They also attested that the firemen of Bilbao were late in arriving and did little once they arrived, aggravating the damage, although César Vidal presents evidence to contradict the latter report and provides an apparently detailed account of the fire-fighting efforts.

In his book, César Vidal makes the following points about the motives of the Condor Legion and their commander Wolfram von Richthofen (cousin of the World War One ace, 'Red Baron' Manfred von Richthofen.)

• The lack of a reconnaissance pass before the bombing suggests that the Condor Legion intended the general destruction of the town rather than trying to hit specific military targets. This was in direct contradiction of a January 6 1937 order from Salamanca (then the rebel capital), signed by the Supreme Commander of the Air Force, mandating reconnaissance in order that air-raids over built-up areas could minimize civilian victims.
• The payload carried by the 3rd Squadron (and the presumably similar payloads of the other two squadrons) consisted of heavy bombs and incendiaries, intended to pulverize and to burn. A precision attack in a populated area would typically have used 10-kilogram bombs, and no incendiaries.
• Twenty-two tons of bombs was, for then, a large quantity for an attack on a town the size of Gernika. Vidal quotes multiple sources to the effect that on the first day of the offensive against Bilbao the units of the Condor Legion together dropped 66 tons of bombs on the front as a whole; he also remarks that the official German account of this part of the war, "The War in the North", stated (in contradiction to the above) that only 7.956 tons of bombs were dropped on Guernica.

Because this assault on Gernika contradicted General Emilio Mola's earlier plans for the pursuit of the war in this region, Vidal argues that von Richthofen must have had either approval from Mola or a direct order from Franco himself.

Symbolic importance

The bombardment of Gernika rapidly became a world-renowned symbol of the horrors of war. It inspired one of Pablo Picasso’s most famous paintings, known simply as Guernica. The display of this painting at the Spanish Pavilion during the 1937 World's Fair in Paris both reflected and enhanced the symbolic significance of the event.

The painting was a symbol for Basque nationalism during the Spanish transition to democracy. Today a copy hangs in the lobby of the United Nations Security Council.

Public Reporting

The extent of the damage, death and destruction in Guernica was first revealed the next day—April 27, 1937—by George Steer, a reporter for The Times, covering the Spanish Civil War. He published the full extent of the carnage and the clear German complicity in the action which was evidenced by three small bomb cases stamped with the German Imperial Eagle. At that time, Germany had officially adopted a neutral position in the Civil War and signed a Non-Intervention Pact but Steer's report revealed this to be false. His Times report was syndicated to the New York Times and then distributed worldwide; it shocked the world and outraged Pablo Picasso. Steer's reports on the horrors of Guernica were greatly appreciated by the local Basque people and Basque authorities who honoured his memory in April 2006 — on the 69th Anniversary of the bombing — by naming a street in Gernika after him (Calle George Steer) and unveiling a bronze bust of him with the dedication: "George Steer, journalist, who told the world the story about Guernica." .

It is claimed that the term weapon of mass destruction first appeared in a Times article later in the same year on the bombing of Guernica.

References

• Gérard Brey, La destrucción de Guernica, Tiempo de Historia nº 29, April 1977, accessed online 14 September 2006. This appears to be a review of Herbert R. Southworth, La destrucción de Guernica, (Ruedo Ibérico, Paris, 1975).
• Jesus Larrazabal, "El Bombardeo de Guernica", El Mundo, volume 12, October 2005
• Jesus Larrazabal, Guernica, 1990
• Juan Antonio Ramírez, Guernica: la historia y el mito,Electa, Madrid, 1999
• Nicholas Rankin, Telegram From Guernica: The Extraordinary Life of George Steer, War Correspondent (Faber & Faber, London, ISBN 0-571-20563-1)
• George Steer, The Tragedy of Guernica, Times of London, April 27, 1937.
• César Vidal, Chapter 9 of La Destrucción de Guernica, translated into English by Peter Miller. A detailed account of the attack and an (inevitably more subjective) account of its likely motivations. The sections of the article on the timing of the attacks and the particular planes and armaments used draw heavily on this source.

Further reading

• Arias Ramos, Raúl; El Apoyo Militar Alemán a Franco:La Legión Cóndor En La Guera Civil, La Esfera de los Libros, 2003
• Beevor, Antony; The Spanish Civil War, Penguin, 2001
• Carr, Raymond (Introduction; no editor named), Images of the Spanish Civil War, London (Allen & Unwin) 1986; Guernica: see p.116-121.
• Moa, Pío; Los Mitos de la Guerra Civil, La Esfera de los Libros, 2003.
• Preston, Paul, A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War, London (Fontana Press) 1996.

• Francoist Spain
• Basque history
• Spanish Civil War
• Battles of the Spanish Civil War
• Strategic bombing
• 1937 in Spain