The town of Guernica is
situated 30 kilometers east of Bilbao, in the Basque province of Vizcaya.
Guernica was considered to be the spiritual capital of the Basque
people.
On the outbreak of the
Spanish Civil War Guernica had a population
of about 7,000 people. On 26th April 1937, Guernica was bombed by
the German
Condor Legion.
As it was a market day the town was crowded.
The town was first struck
by explosive bombs and then by incendiaries. As people fled from their
homes they were machine-gunned by fighter planes. The three hour raid
completely destroyed the town. It is estimated that 1,685 people were
killed and 900 injured in the attack.
General Francisco
Franco denied
that he had nothing to do with the raid and claimed that the town
had been dynamited and then burnt by Anarchist
Brigades. After the war a telegram sent from Franco's headquarters
was discovered and revealled that he had asked the German
Condor Legion to
carry out the attack on Guernica. It is believed that the attack was
an attempt to demoralize the Basque people.
Pablo Picasso, Guernica
(1937)
(1)
George
Steer, The
Times (27th April,
1937)
Guernica, the most ancient town of the Basques
and the centre of their cultural tradition, was completely destroyed
yesterday afternoon by insurgent air raiders. The bombardment of this
open town far behind the lines occupied precisely three hours and
a quarter, during which a powerful fleet of aeroplanes consisting
of three German types, Junkers and Heinkel bombers and Heinkel fighters,
did not cease unloading on the town bombs weighing from 1,000lb. downwards
and, it is calculated, more than 3,000 two-pounder aluminum incendiary
projectiles. The fighters, meanwhile, plunged low from above the centre
of the town to machine-gun those of the civilian population who had
taken refuge in the fields.
The whole of Guernica was
soon in flames except the historic Casa de Juntas with its rich archives
of the Basque race, where the ancient Basque Parliament used to sit.
The famous oak of Guernica, the dried old stump of 600 years and the
young new shoots of this century, was also untouched. Here the kings
of Spain used to take the oath to respect the democratic rights (fueros)
of Vizcaya and in return received a promise of allegiance as suzerains
with the democratic title of Señor, not Rey Vizcaya. The noble
parish church of Santa Maria was also undamaged except for the beautiful
chapter house, which was struck by an incendiary bomb.
At 2 a.m. today when I
visited the town the whole of it was a horrible sight, flaming from
end to end. The reflection of the flames could be seen in the clouds
of smoke above the mountains from 10 miles away. Throughout the night
houses were falling until the streets became long heaps of red impenetrable
debris. Many of the civilian survivors took the long trek from Guernica
to Bilbao in antique solid-wheeled Basque farm carts drawn by oxen.
Carts piled high with such household possessions as could be saved
from the conflagration clogged the roads all night. Other survivors
were evacuated in Government lorries, but many were forced to remain
round the burning town lying on mattresses or looking for lost relatives
and children, while units of the fire brigades and the Basque motorized
police under the personal direction of the Minister of the Interior,
Señor Monzon, and his wife continued rescue work till dawn.
In the form of its execution
and the scale of the destruction it wrought, no less than in the selection
of its objective, the raid on Guernica is unparalleled in military
history. Guernica was not a military objective. A factory producing
war material lay outside the town and was untouched. So were two barracks
some distance from the town. The town lay far behind the lines. The
object of the bombardment was seemingly the demoralization of the
civil population and the destruction of the cradle of the Basque race.
Every fact bears out this appreciation, beginning with the day when
the deed was done.
Monday was the customary
market day in Guernica for the country round. At 4.30 p.m. when the
market was full and peasants were still coming in, the church bell
rang the alarm for approaching aeroplanes, and the population sought
refuge in cellars and in the dugouts prepared following the bombing
of the civilian population of Durango on March 31, which opened General
Mola’s offensive in the north. The people are said to have shown
a good spirit. A Catholic priest took charge and perfect order was
maintained.
Five minutes later a single
German bomber appeared, circled over the town at a low altitude, and
then dropped six heavy bombs, apparently aiming for the station. The
bombs with a shower of grenades fell on a former institute and on
houses and streets surrounding it. The aeroplane then went away. In
another five minutes came a second bomber, which threw the same number
of bombs into the middle of the town. About a quarter of an hour later
three Junkers arrived to continue the work of demolition, and thenceforward
the bombing grew in intensity and was continuous, ceasing only with
the approach of dusk at 7.45. The whole town of 7,000 inhabitants,
plus 3,000 refugees, was slowly and systematically pounded to pieces.
Over a radius of five miles round a detail of the raiders’ technique
was to bomb separate caserios, or farmhouses. In the night these burned
like little candles in the hills. All the villages around were bombed
with the same intensity as the town itself, and at Mugica, a little
group of houses at the head of the Guernica inlet, the population
was machine-gunned for 15 minutes.
(2)
Manchester
Guardian (28th April 1937)
Guernica,
till 1876 capital of the Basque country, has been reduced to ruins
by rebel planes of German make.
The bombardment, which lasted for three and a half hours on Monday
afternoon, killed hundreds of the 10,000 inhabitants, and yesterday
only a few of the buildings remained standing. Many of the ruins were
still burning.
In
Guernica itself it is not known how many hundreds of people - men,
women, and children - have been killed; it may indeed never be known.
The town is in ruins. The buildings left standing can be counted almost
on the fingers of one had. Among them is, remarkably enough, the Basque
Parliament building, with its famous oak tree.
The
church of St. John was destroyed, but the principal church, St. Mary's,
is almost intact, except for the chapter-house and part of the tower.
The convent of Santa Clara, which was being used as a hospital, was
destroyed, with many of its inmates. Another small hospital, with
42 beds, was completely wiped out together with its 42 wounded occupants.
Yet a third hospital was wrecked with many victims.
The raid occurred on market-day when the town was full of peasants
who had come into sell their produce. The bombers, all of them said
to be German, came over in waves of seven at a time. Many of the people
who raced desperately for the open fields were systematically pursued
and machine-gunned from the air by swooping fighters.
The survivors spent a night of horror sleeping where and if they could,
awaiting with resignation their evacuation today. Since early this
morning the roads leading to the rear have been thronged with long
streams of peasants whose whole remaining possessions are dumped on
ox-carts.
Today
I visited what remains of the town. I was taken to the entrance of
a street like a furnace which no one had been able to approach since
the raid. I was shown a bomb shelter in which over fifty women and
children were trapped and burned alive. Everywhere is a chaos of charred
beams, twisted girders, broken masonry, and smouldering ashes, with
forlorn groups of inhabitants wandering in search of missing relatives.
I
picked up an incendiary shell which failed to explode. It was made
of aluminum, weighed nearly two pounds, and was liberally stamped
with German eagles.
Guernica,
like the other Basque country towns, was absolutely defenceless, and
was provided with neither anti-aircraft guns nor planes.
General Mola, who is in charge of the rebel offensive on the Basque
front, is apparently trying to carry out his threat "to destroy
the whole of Biscay Province" if the Basques do not immediately
surrender. When he made the threat early in April he added, "We
have the means of carrying out our intentions." Yesterday the
Basque Government alleged that Germans were piloting the German bombers
that carried out the raid.
It is reported that General Mola has now warned the Basque Government
that he will raze Bilbao to the ground unless the town surrenders.
But the Government states that after the destruction of Guernica surrender
of the Basque capital is less than ever possible. A report that the
Argentine Ambassador at Hendaye had been asked to act as intermediary
to arrange for the surrender is denied.
It seems, in fact, that the vicious bombing of Guernica will stiffen
the Basque resistance. The Basques were last night claiming that the
rebel offensive in the region of Durango had been "brilliantly
repulsed" and that the rebels were being held back form the Eibar
sector to the coast.
Senor
Aguirre, the Basque President, last night published a decree reorganising
the regular army into battalions, brigades, and divisions under a
new commander-in-chief. Under another decree all industries catering
for the needs of war are militarised and mobilised.
(3)
Father Alberto de Onaindia, witnessed
the bombing of Guernica on 26th April 1937. He was interviewed by
the author, Robert Payne, for his book, The Civil War in Spain
(1963)
Late in the afternoon of April 26th I was going by car
to rescue my mother and my sisters, then living in Marquina, a town
about to fall into the hands of Franco. It was one of those magnificently
clear days, the sky soft and serene. We reached the outskirts of Guernica
just before five o'clock. The streets were busy with the traffic of
market day. Suddenly we heard the siren, and trembled. People were
running about in all directions, abandoning everything they possessed,
some hurrying into the shelters, others running into the hills. Soon
an enemy aeroplane appeared over Guernica. A peasant was passing by.
'It's nothing, only one of the 'white' ones,' he said. 'He'll
drop a few bombs, and then he'll go away.' The Basques had learned
to distinguish between the twin-engined 'whites' and the three-engined
'blacks.' The 'white' aeroplane made a reconnaissance
over the town, and when he was directly over the centre he dropped
three bombs. Immediately afterwards he saw a squadron of
seven planes followed a little later by six more, and this in turn
by a third squadron
of five more. All of them were Junkers. Meanwhile
Guernica was seized with a terrible panic.
I left the car by the
side of the road and took refuge with five milicianos in a sewer.
The water came up to our ankles. From our hiding-place we could see
everything that happened without being seen. The aeroplanes came low,
flying at two hundred metres. As soon as we could leave our shelter,
we ran into the woods, hoping to put a safe distance between us and
the enemy. But the airmen saw us and went after us. The leaves hid
us. As they did not know exactly where we were, they aimed their machine-guns
in the direction they thought we were travelling. We heard the bullets
ripping through branches, and the sinister sound of splintering wood.
The milicianos and I followed the flight patterns of the aeroplanes;
and we made a crazy journey through the trees, trying to avoid them.
Meanwhile women, children
and old men were falling in heaps, like flies, and everywhere we saw
lakes of blood.
I saw an old peasant standing
alone in a field: a machine-gun bullet killed him. For more than an
hour these eighteen planes, never more than a few hundred metres in
altitude, dropped bomb after bomb on Guernica. The sound of the explosions
and of the crumbling houses cannot be imagined. Always they traced
on the air the same tragic flight pattern, as they flew over all the
streets of Guernica. Bombs fell by thousands. Later we saw the bomb
craters. Some were sixteen metres in diameter and eight metres deep.
The aeroplanes left around
seven o'clock, and then there came another wave of them, this time
flying at an immense altitude. They were dropping incendiary bombs
on our martyred city. The new bombardment
lasted thirty-five minutes, sufficient to transform the town into
an enormous furnace. Even then I realized the terrible purpose of
this new act of vandalism. They were dropping incendiary bombs to
try to convince the world that the Basques had fired their own city.
(4)
Maria Goitia, who witnessed the bombing
of Guernica, was interviewed by the French newspaper, Petit Parisien,
in April 1937.
Monday
was market day and the villagers of the neighbourhood were assembled
at Guernica. At four o'clock in the afternoon, when the crowd was
largest, an aeroplane appeared and dropped a few bombs, causing the
first
victims. The people fled from the marketplace to hide in the houses.
New aeroplanes then appeared and bombarded the houses and churches.
People were dying under the ruins of the demolished houses.
The houses were burning
as a result of the incendiary bombs. The people were obliged to run
out of the houses, and then they were fired on from machine-guns.
I saw all this from the house where I had taken refuge. Many people
remained lying in the street dead or wounded. In the houses you heard
the wounded howling with pain. Many were burned alive under the ruins.
When the house to which
I had fled began to bum I ran like mad. Machine-gun bullets continued
to whistle round me,
but I did not stop. When I got into a field I hid under a bush. People
were running across the field trying to escape the
bombs and bullets, which continued to pursue them. I remained under
the bush till eight o'clock at night until it grew dark
and the aeroplanes departed. Guernica by that time was nothing but
a horrible bonfire.
(5)
Elizabeth
Wilkinson,
The
Daily Worker
(27th April 1937)
Yesterday at about 1.30 pm I arrived in Guernica,
the ancient capital of the Basque country. It was a peaceful town,
with no factories, no munition works and no troops stationed there.
Peasant women and children were going quietly about the streets.
Then at four o'clock the
rebels began a brutal bombardment which continued without stopping
until seven in the evening.
More than fifty German
planes rained bombs on the town and machine-gunned the streets incessantly.
The surrounding villages were similarly bombarded. The rebel planes
even machine-gunned the flocks in the fields.
At eleven o'clock at night
the whole town was in flames, not a single house standing. The streets
and the square were crammed with goods and chattels snatched from
the inferno. The people are still searching for missing relatives,
for wives, daughters, husbands, sweethearts and children.
During the first few minutes
of the bombardment the Catholic priest blessed the people, Socialists
and Communists included.
The roads out of Guernica
are now thronged with refugees, driving their sheep and cattle and
carrying their rescued goods with them. Eleven thousand more people
are coming to Bilbao. Eleven thousand more to be fed.
(6)
R. C. Stevenson, British Consul,
letter sent to the British Ambassador (28th April 1937)
On landing at Bermeo yesterday I was told about the destruction
of Guernica. I went at once to have a look at the place and to my
amazement found that the township normally of some five thousand inhabitants,
since the September influx of refugees about ten thousand, was almost
completely destroyed. Nine houses in ten are beyond reconstruction.
Many were still burning and fresh fires were breaking out here and
there, the result of incendiary bombs which owing to some fault had
not exploded on impact the day before and were doing so, at the time
of my visit, under falling beams and masonry. The casualties cannot
be ascertained and probably never will, accurately. Some estimates
put the figure at one thousand, others at over three thousand. An
inhabitant who went through it all, told me that at about 4 p.m. three
machines appeared overhead and dropped H.E. and incendiary bombs.
They disappeared and ten minutes later a
fresh lot of five or six machines came and so on for several hours,
until after seven. All told he estimates the number of planes at fifty.
After two or three visits panic seized the population. Men, women
and children poured out of Guernica and ran up the bare hillsides.
There they were mercilessly machine gunned, though with little effect.
They spent the night
in the open gazing at their burning city. I saw many men and women
erring through the streets searching in the wreckage of their houses
for the bodies of their dear ones.
(7)
Kim
Philby, The
Times (28th April,
1937)
It is feared that the
conflagration destroyed much of the evidence of its origin, but it
is felt here that enough remains to support the Nationalist contention
that incendiaries on the Basque side had more to do with the razing
of Guernica than General Franco's aircraft. . . . Few fragments of
bombs have been recovered, the facades of buildings still standing
are unmarked, and the few craters I inspected were larger than anything
hitherto made by a bomb in Spain. From their positions it is a fair
inference that these craters were caused by exploding mines which
were unscientifically laid to cut roads. In view of these circumstances
it is difficult to believe that Guernica was the target of bombardment
of exceptional intensity by the Nationalists or an experiment with
incendiary bombs, as it is alleged by the Basques.
(8)
Leah
Manning wrote about
the bombing of Guernica
in her autobiography,
A Life For Education (1970)
I had arrived in Bilbao on April 24 and on
the next day had gone to Mass with the Foreign Secretary and his family,
spending the rest of the day in his office. The morning of the 26th
I spent quietly at the office of Asistencia Social, discussing in
outline the plans for evacuation.
In the afternoon I made
my way down to La Prensa where a group of journalists had invited
me for a drink, among them Philip Jordan and George Steer, who during
the next few weeks were to prove towers of strength and encouragement
to me. A day begun so quietly was to end in indescribable horror and
dismay.
"A raid's coming
up," said Jordan. "Do you want to go down to the shelter?"
I shook my head, so we went outside. Phil's ear had caught the sound
of bombers in the air, although there had been no warning. Across
the hills to the east the air was alive with Heinkels as wave after
wave drove in from the sea. They were followed by Junkers. Horror-striken,
the Basques amongst us shouted, "Guernica! they're bombing Guernica!"
It seemed incredible that such a monstrous thing
could happen to this quiet little market town, renowned from time
immemorial as the home of Basque liberation where, before the famous
oak tree, rulers of Spain had traditionally sworn to observe Basque
local rights. Helpless to do anything we watched from the hills. Until
nearly eight in the evening, incendiary bombs and high explosives
rained down every twenty minutes. The town was open and defenceless;
it was crowded with market day visitors and as people fled
from the destruction they were dive-bombed and machine-gunned from
the air. The roads out of the town were jammed with dead and injured:
1,654 killed; 889 injured.
(9)
Luis
Bolin was the Nationalist press chief
in charge of propaganda and censorship during the Spanish
Civil War. Bolin wrote about Guernica
in his memoirs, Spain, the Vital Years (1967)
During the advance on Bilbao, Guernica became part of the
front line. It contained several small factories, one of them engaged
in the manufacture of arms and ammunition. It was an important road
junction and a depot of substantial size for the massing of reserves
on their way to the trenches. The Republicans in Bilbao needed a sensational
story to offset their reverses. They dispatched Asturian miners to
dynamite Guernica and set fire to its buildings and swore that they
had been blown to smithereens by German bombs. To destroy an entire
small town, not hundreds but thousands of bombs would be required.
The resources for such wholesale destruction are entirely lacking
to either side in this war. It should be noted that the destruction
though involving many buildings spared the Guernica tree and adjoining
structure. Basque
separatists took great care not to damage the tree which they held
in special veneration.
(10)
The Manchester Guardian (1st
May 1937)
Whether Franco was informed or not in advance of the air
raid on Guernica and whether Germans alone were responsible are considered
here to be questions of secondary importance. What is considered to
be important is that Guernica may be regarded as the most glaring
example - more glaring even than the Italian methods in Abyssinia
- of the full application of the 'totalitarian war' principle in so
far as such a war must take no humanitarian considerations of any
kind into account. It is also regarded as an experiment in future
German warfare, and Guernica is aptly described by a French observer
as "Goring's air manoeuvres' - at the expense of innocent Spaniards.
The passport of a German
airman, Hans Sobotka, who crashed at Bilbao a few days ago, and photographs
of which were reproduced in the 'Soir', provides additional confirmation
of the concentration of an important German air force in the North
of Spain within the past few weeks. The passport was issued in Berlin
as recently as April 5 and stamped in Rome on the following day.
Attention is also drawn
here to a particularly significant article from the special correspondent
of the 'Frankfurter Zeitung' with the rebel troops in the North of
Spain, in which he said that the rebel authorities have concentrated
between 'twelve or fifteen dozen bombers and pursuit planes on the
Viscaya front, and with only a dozen "Red" aeroplanes to
oppose them they can fly over the whole Basque country practically
undisturbed'. He also admits that the rebels are ten times
better equipped with material than the Basques.
Further, a particularly
sinister episode is contained in the dispatch in which the system
of demoralising the unprotected
'Reds' by bombarding them first and then firing down on them from
machine-guns - a system fully applied at Guernica - is described in
every detail. The article appeared in the 'Frankfurter Zeitung' on
April 22 - that is, three days before the
Guernica massacre - and its author had obviously been in contact with
the German air authorities in the North of Spain.
The attitude of certain
French papers of the Right is now even more extraordinary than it
was during their subsidised
campaign in favour of Mussolini during the Abyssinian conflict. They
now actually proclaim even without question-marks that Guernica was
burned by the Basques themselves.
Spanish messages show that
the rebels are still actively explaining away the destruction of Guernica
and Eibar by
German planes by saying that they were destroyed by 'Reds'. A communiqué
issued by the rebel G.H.O. at Salamanca, received by Renter in London
yesterday, said:
"The destruction
of the richer part of Guernica, as of Eibar, by the retreating Reds
has aroused indignation among our
troops and is spurring them on to save the Basque people from the
Communists who are destroying their property."
(11)
Edward
Knoblaugh,
Correspondent in Spain (1937)
The bombing of the Basque town of Guernica
was one of the most fortunate bits of material for the propaganda
machine. Guernica had an arms factory. It was used as a Loyalist military
base, and it was in the path of Franco's march on Bilbao. But the
government propaganda workers exploited the fact that Guernica had
a venerated oak-tree in a central plaza. The bombardment became "an
atrocious attack on the defenseless, holy city of the Basques."
It aroused such a wave of indignation abroad that not even the joint
statement of disinterested correspondents, testifying that the principal
damage had been caused by Anarchist
incendiaries and Asturian dynamiters before they evacuated Guernica,
carried much weight.
(12)
Statement issued by the Nationalist government on 3rd May 1937.
With the unanimity which might appear to suggest obedience
to orders many English and French newspapers are using a comparatively
minor event such as the hypothetical bombardment of a small town as
the basis of a campaign designed to present 'Nationalist' Spain as
anti-humanitarian and opposed to the principles of the laws of nations,
thus serving the ends of the Soviet faction which dominates the Spanish
'Red' zone. These newspapers clamour against the bombardment of open
towns, attempting to lay the blame for such outrages upon the 'Nationalists'.
'National' Spain energetically rejects so injurious a campaign and
denounces these manoeuvres before the world.
The newspapers now crying
aloud remained silent when in Madrid, under the presidency of the
'Red' Government, thousands of innocent beings were murdered. Over
60,000 died at the hands of the 'Red' hordes without any motive other
than the whims of a militiaman or a servant's dislike, in this way
perished old people, women, and children, all of them innocent. In
the Madrid prisons murders were committed without check under the
supervision of the 'Red' Government agents. There fell intellectuals,
politicians, many Republicans, Liberals, Democrats, and members of
the Right.
At Barcelona also 50,000
or 60,000 horrible murders have been committed, and there have been
many thousands more
killed in Malaga, Valencia, and other large towns after barbarous
tortures. This was not war. It was crime and vengeance. But then the
newspapers which are today defending so-called humanitarian principles
were silent or spoke timidly or even attempted to justify such barbarous
crimes. They were silent too when bishops and thousands of priests,
monks, and nuns were cruelly done to death and beautiful artistic
treasures were burned in the churches of Spain.
The hospitals at Melilla,
Cordova, Burgos, Saragossa, and recently the schools at Vallodolid
and towns miles from the
front have been bombarded by the 'Red' aeroplanes. There were numerous
victims among the women and children without any word of protest being
heard from the self-appointed champions of humanity. The city of Oviedo
has been literally destroyed by the 'Red Huns' and aeroplanes in the
same silence.
And now the Basque Soviet
allies have blown up Eibar, a hard-working industrial city before
the entry of our troops.
They used dynamite and liberally sprayed petrol until most of the
buildings were destroyed. But those who today weep
for Guernica remained unmoved and suffered no scandal. Irun suffered
a similar fate under the eyes of European journalists and witnesses
from Hendaye in the same negligent or culpable silence.
Guernica, less than four
miles from the fighting line, was an important crossroads filled with
troops retiring towards
other defences. At Guernica an important factory has been manufacturing
arms and munitions for nine months. It would
not have been surprising if the 'National' 'planes had marked Guernica
as an objective. The laws of war allowed it, the rights of the people
notwithstanding. It was a classical military objective with an importance
thoroughly justifying a bombardment. Yet it was not bombarded.
It is possible that a
few bombs fell upon Guernica during days when our aeroplanes were
operating against objectives
of military importance. But the destruction of Guernica, the great
fire at Guernica, the explosions which during the whole
day occurred at Guernica - these were the work of the same men who
at Eibar, Irun, Malaga, and countless towns of
Northern and Southern Spain demonstrated their ability as incendiarists.
The Spanish and part of
the foreign press duly reported the 'Red' Militia's threats to destroy
Madrid before the 'National'
troops entered it. The blowing up of great buildings which are today
still mined has been systematically prepared by
the 'Red' Government, which is indirectly served by those now clamouring
about Guernica. Let this manoeuvre at the service of 'Red' Spain cease
and let the world know that Guernica's case, though clumsily exploited,
turns against this Government of incendiarists and assassins, who
at Russia's orders pursue the systematic destruction of the national
wealth of Spain.
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