The bombing of Guernica

On Monday 26 April 1937, from about half past four in the afternoon until dusk, German aircraft of the Condor Legion, together with a few Italian bombers and fighters, bombed the Basque town of Guernica (Gernika in Basque), which lies some thirty kilometres east of Bilbao. The raid was carried out as part of the offensive that General Francisco Franco’s Nationalists were waging against the Basque Country. High-explosive and incendiary bombs destroyed most of the buildings in the centre, and fighters strafed the people fleeing. The number of dead is still disputed: the Basque government gave a figure of 1,654 at the time, while most present-day researchers estimate it at around 150–300. Thanks to a British journalist’s report and to Pablo Picasso’s painting, the bombing of Guernica became the best-known symbol of air warfare waged against civilians, even before a similar fate befell Wieluń, Warsaw, Rotterdam and Coventry.

The offensive against Biscay

After the defeat at Guadalajara in March 1937 Franco gave up on taking Madrid quickly and decided first to eliminate the strip in the north that was cut off from the rest of the Republic: Biscay, Cantabria and Asturias. The region had mines and the heavy industry of Bilbao, and its defenders were poorly armed and almost without aircraft. The offensive was commanded by General Emilio Mola, with Colonel Juan Vigón as his chief of staff. On 31 March Mola announced that if the Basques did not surrender, he would raze Biscay to the ground. That same day Nationalist aircraft bombed the small town of Durango, killing more than two hundred people, including people gathered for Mass in the churches.

Air support came above all from the Condor Legion, the German air corps of General Hugo Sperrle. Its chief of staff, and in practice its commander on the northern front, was Lieutenant Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, a cousin of the famous First World War ace. The Legion then had three squadrons of old three-engined Junkers Ju 52s used as bombers, an experimental squadron of modern He 111 and Do 17 bombers, He 51 fighters and the first Messerschmitt Bf 109s. Alongside it operated the Italian Aviazione Legionaria, sent by Mussolini together with the ground corps.

At the end of April the Basque front was wavering. The Basque troops were falling back towards Bilbao, and Guernica, with its bridge in the Rentería district and its road junction, lay on their line of retreat. The town had some five to seven thousand inhabitants, and in recent weeks refugees from eastern Biscay had arrived. Two Basque battalions were stationed there and two arms factories were in operation, but there was no anti-aircraft artillery and no air cover. Guernica also had a special significance for the Basques: under the local oak, the Tree of Gernika, the assemblies of Biscay had met for centuries, and the rulers of Castile had sworn to respect Basque liberties. Monday was traditionally market day. Historians disagree over whether the market was held on 26 April, since the authorities were restricting gatherings, but there were certainly more people in the town than usual.

The raid

The course of the raid is known from witness accounts, reports and Richthofen’s diary. The first aircraft appeared over the town at about 4.20–4.30 p.m. and dropped a few bombs on the centre; the church bells began calling people to the shelters. Then came single He 111s and Do 17s, followed by three Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 bombers, which according to their orders were to strike the road and the bridge east of the town, not the town itself. The heaviest attack came from about 5.30 p.m., when three squadrons of Ju 52s approached Guernica from the sea in several waves of three aircraft each. They dropped a mixture of heavy high-explosive, fragmentation and incendiary bombs. He 51 and Bf 109 fighters and Italian Fiat CR.32s strafed the roads around the town, where fleeing people were seeking refuge. The raid ended before eight in the evening. In all, more than twenty bombers took part in the attack, and the weight of bombs dropped is estimated at anywhere from just over twenty to more than forty tonnes.

The high-explosive bombs smashed the houses, and the incendiaries set fire to wooden floors and interiors. There was no water, because the mains had been damaged, and fire brigades came from Bilbao but could do little. The fire consumed the town throughout the night. About three-quarters of the buildings were destroyed, and by some calculations even more. Yet the Rentería bridge, which was supposed to be the main target, survived, as did the Unceta arms factory, the Assembly House and the sacred oak, all of which lay outside the centre. Some people died in shelters that collapsed, including an unfinished shelter on Santa María Street.

How many died

From the outset the number of victims was a matter of dispute, including propaganda dispute. Journalists who reached Guernica that evening and the following day reported anything from several hundred to more than a thousand dead. The Basque government announced 1,654 dead and 889 wounded. These figures were repeated in the literature for decades. Francoist propaganda, for its part, played down the casualties for years, down to the absurd claim that a mere twelve people had died.

Research carried out since the 1980s has produced lower figures. The local historians’ association Gernikazarra identified 126, and later 153, victims by name, while stressing that the list was incomplete. The Spanish historians Josep Maria Solé i Sabaté and Joan Villarroya estimated the number of dead at about 300, Raúl Arias Ramos at about 250, and the American air-power historian James Corum at 300–400. Figures in the range of 150–300 are accepted today by most authors, including Stanley Payne and Antony Beevor. This is not, however, a unanimous view. The Basque historian Xabier Irujo, in a work published in 2017, defends the figure given by the Basque government and even considers it too low. The discrepancies arise because after taking the town the Nationalists conducted no proper investigation, some of the wounded died in hospitals in Bilbao, and the documentation is incomplete. What is certain is that Guernica was a defenceless town and that most of the victims were civilians.

Lies and truth

On the night of 26–27 April Franco ordered a denial that the town had been bombed. Nationalist radio, and in particular General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano in Seville, announced that Guernica had been set on fire and blown up by retreating “Reds”, Basque separatists and Asturian dynamiters, and that because of fog the air force had not flown at all. Berlin denied that German aircraft had taken part. On 29 April Mola’s troops entered the ruins of the town, and the version that the Republicans had set it on fire became the official truth in Franco’s Spain for almost forty years.

The truth was revealed by foreign journalists who drove in from Bilbao during the night. The most important proved to be the report by George Steer, correspondent of the London Times, published on 28 April in The Times and The New York Times. Steer wrote that Guernica was not a military objective and that the aim of the raid had been to demoralise the population and destroy the cradle of the Basque nation. As evidence of German involvement he described bomb casings with German markings found in the ruins. Steer overstated the number of victims, but he was right about the course of the attack. Noel Monks of the Daily Express and other reporters gave similar accounts. The president of the Basque government, José Antonio Aguirre, accused the German air force of a crime before the whole world. The news from Guernica caused outrage in Britain, France and the United States, but the democratic governments did not change their policy of non-intervention, and the ban on sending men to Spain, in force since February, did not prevent Germany from waging this war.

An attack on a bridge or on a town?

Historians still disagree about the purpose of the raid. According to one interpretation, whose supporters include James Corum, Richthofen wanted to block the roads and the bridge in order to cut off the retreating Basques; his diary mentions this. The bombers of the day could not hit a small target accurately, so the Legion “bombed out” the whole surrounding area, with no regard for casualties. Supporters of this view point out that the Assembly House and the sacred oak, symbols that would have been an obvious target for a terror raid, were left untouched.

According to the second interpretation, accepted by many Spanish and Basque historians and also by Beevor, among others, the aim was to destroy the town and break the will to resist. This is supported by the choice of bombs, especially the large number of incendiaries, which would have had no effect on a bridge, by the strafing of people by fighters, and by the fact that the bridge survived. Richthofen himself noted after the raid that the incendiary bombs had done their work and that Guernica had been “literally razed to the ground”. The dispute also concerns the responsibility of the Spaniards. Richthofen’s diary shows that he agreed the plan of attack with Mola’s staff, with Colonel Vigón, although it is not known whether the Spaniards expected destruction on such a scale. No order signed by Franco has survived, but Franco had earlier stipulated that the bombing of towns required his consent. No one was punished for Guernica. Sperrle, tried after the war at Nuremberg in the High Command Trial, was acquitted; Guernica was not the subject of that trial.

Picasso

In the spring of 1937 Pablo Picasso was working in Paris on a large painting commissioned by the government of the Republic for the Spanish pavilion at the World’s Fair. When he read the reports from Guernica, he abandoned his original subject and within a few weeks painted the monumental black-and-white Guernica: a screaming mother with a dead child, a horse torn apart, a burning house, the body of a soldier with a broken sword. The painting was shown in Paris in July 1937 and then in many cities in Europe and America to raise money for refugees. Picasso stipulated that Guernica would go to Spain only when democratic liberties had been restored there. For decades the painting hung in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and it came to Madrid only in 1981, six years after the dictator’s death. It became one of the most famous anti-war works of art of the 20th century.

On the road to war

Guernica was not the first town bombed in this war, nor even in this campaign, but it became a symbol. In the 1930s Europe lived in fear of air war. As early as 1932 Stanley Baldwin had warned the House of Commons that “the bomber will always get through”. Guernica seemed to confirm the worst predictions. Photographs of the ruins went round the world and strengthened the conviction in London and Paris that war with Germany would mean the destruction of great cities. This fear was one of the motives for the policy of concessions that culminated at Munich in 1938.

For the Luftwaffe, Spain was a testing ground. Hermann Göring admitted at Nuremberg that he had urged Hitler to help Franco partly in order to test his young Luftwaffe in combat. In Biscay Richthofen practised cooperation between aircraft and ground troops and the mass use of bombs against targets in built-up areas. In September 1939 he commanded German close-support aviation in Poland. On 1 September Luftwaffe aircraft bombed Wieluń, and at the end of the month Richthofen directed the bombing of Warsaw. In 1940 Sperrle commanded one of the air fleets in the Battle of Britain. After 1945 Guernica became a place of remembrance and reconciliation. In 1997 the German president, Roman Herzog, in a letter to the town’s inhabitants, acknowledged the guilt of the German airmen, and a year later the Bundestag decided to remove the names of members of the Condor Legion from the names of Bundeswehr barracks.