The small Spanish town that foretold Ukraine

Guernica is a warning to the world

Parents watch their children practice soccer on the leafy town square, ringed by red-roofed buildings and the hills of the Basque country. Nearby is the assembly house, next to the oak tree around which regional leaders have taken their oaths of office for more than six hundred years.

The small town is placid, even sleepy on a summer afternoon. Aside from the historical Museum of Peace, there’s little sign of Guernica’s traumatic history: It was the place where the terror bombing of an entire town was demonstrated for the first time.

For three and a half hours late in the afternoon of April 26, 1937, German and Italian pilots dropped bombs, including incendiary devices, that destroyed 85% of the town’s buildings and severely damaged nearly all of the rest. They strafed terrified civilians on a market day when thousands of residents from other communities had gathered there. At least 1,600 people were killed, according to the most reliable estimates.

The destruction of Guernica became a template for military campaigns that target civilians until this day. In Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, the Russian armed forces routinely aim missiles and drones at civilian targets.

“Will you commit to not killing any more civilians,” a reporter asked the Russian president at his summit meeting with U.S. President Donald Trump in Alaska on Friday. Putin didn’t answer the question.

At least 13,883 civilians, including 726 children, have been killed in Ukraine since the February, 2022 invasion. Last month’s civilian casualty toll was the highest since May, 2022, according to the United Nations.

If the world is going to stop the bloodshed there, it should pay attention to what happened to Guernica.

Defenseless

It was in northern Spain nearly 90 years ago that a foreign air force sought to demonstrate the military effectiveness of turning its weapons on defenseless people. The operation was ultimately directed by German Air Marshall Hermann Göring, historian Xabier Irujo documents in his cogent book, Gernika, 1937: The Market Day Massacre. (Note: I’ve used the English spelling for Guernica, except in book titles and quotations.)

The bombing was an “experiment” — a way to demonstrate to dictator Adolf Hitler that the Nazi air force had capabilities that should be supreme over the army and navy in war planning. Göring used it as the route to become the leader of all of Germany’s military and much of its economy, ousting three ministers who didn’t share his views. The attack on Guernica was originally timed for the day before Hitler’s birthday, though it had to be postponed for a week.

Hitler and Göring, 1940.

On Göring’s terms, the decimation of Guernica was a success. Hitler named Göring as his second-in-command of the Third Reich. In that role, he was free to invest vast resources into the Luftwaffe, which sought to demoralize the U.K. from the air during the Blitz.

After Germany’s defeat, when Göring was questioned by war crimes investigators, he called the bombing of Guernica “a lamentable event. But we could not do otherwise. At that time, such experiments could not be carried out elsewhere.”

Guernica became forever famous through Pablo Picasso’s searing canvas depicting the carnage wrought by the bombers and fighters that swooped over the town. The artist was roused by reports from George Steer, a correspondent for the Times of London who arrived hours after the bombing and documented the horror.

“As the terrified population streamed out of the town they [the planes] dived low to drill them with their guns,” Steer reported. “Women were killed here whose bodies I afterwards saw….people lay down in ditches, pressed their backs against tree trunks, coiled themselves in holes, shut their eyes and ran across sweet green open meadow.”

How it started

The atrocities of the Spanish Civil War began before Guernica’s agony.

In July, 1936, a group of right-wing Spanish army officers led a rebellion against the leftist government of the nation’s republic, with General Francisco Franco emerging as the military strongman. The rebels employed savage tactics. “On August 13th, about four thousand people, both civilians and soldiers, were machine-gunned inside the bullring of the city” of Badajoz, Irujo wrote. The rebel commander justified it as eliminating 4,000 “Reds.”

“Along the same lines, during his first interview with the international press on July 29th 1936, Generalissimo Franco told journalist Jay Allen of the Chicago Tribune that he would continue the war, even if he had to kill 50% of the Spanish people,” Irujo noted.

Gen. Emilio Mola, who ordered the bombing of the Basque town of Otzandio, “stated that ‘we must spread terror…It is imperative to show that we are the ones in control by eliminating unscrupulously and without hesitation all those who do not think like us.’” If his own father sided with the enemy, Mola would later say, “he would shoot him.”

But the rebel forces didn’t have the planes that would be needed to gain air superiority over the Republic’s military. Franco’s team set about soliciting arms and troops from authoritarian regimes such as the Nazis in Germany and the Fascists in Italy.

Franco was able to secure hundreds of aircraft and thousands of troops from Italy and Germany which were eager to pressure test their forces in what was for them a lower- stakes contest in Spain. Hitler and Mussolini saw it as an opportunity to gauge the preparedness of their troops for the world war they believed would inevitably come.

They couldn’t have gotten away scot-free with their audacious backing of the Spanish rebels if France, Britain and other European nations had stood up. But nearly every nation in Europe, even including Germany and Italy, endorsed a vague policy of non-intervention in Spain. In practice, it meant that the nations that might have supported Spain’s legitimate government, refused to do so, ceding the field to the German and Italian dictators.

As a result, the Spanish Republic’s forces lacked the planes and antiaircraft defenses they would have needed to fend off the German and Italian air forces.

As Irujo noted, “The German ambassador to Great Britain, Joachim von Ribbentrop, was delighted with the accord, which eliminated the Spanish Republic's right to receive international assistance while allowing the rebels to obtain ample weaponry (including airplanes) and regular troops from Germany and Italy — that is, the Non-Intervention Agreement denied the Spanish Republican government arms and ammunition while turning a blind eye on glaring violations by Germany and Italy.” (The Soviet Union also agreed to the non-intervention policy and violated it by providing aid to the Spanish Republic.)

By October, 1936, the non-intervention pact had “become a mockery,” wrote Irujo. It was an open secret that arms were flowing into Spain and that Germany and Italy were supplying many planes. The British, French and American governments were well aware of the aid Franco was getting, but feared that disclosing it publicly would trigger an international crisis and a possible world war.

The seeds of the terror bombing campaign had been planted years before, noted Irujo. “As outlined in 1933 by Alsatian nobleman Carl Ludwig von Oertzen in his essay Principles of Military Policy, ‘if the cities are destroyed by flames, if women and children are victims of poison gases, if the population of open cities, located far from the front, falls victim to bombs and torpedoes dropped by airplanes, an immediate end of hostilities is then possible and even a government whose nerves resist all will not be able to resist this for a long time.’”

In fact, such bombing has often been shown to strengthen the cause of the victims. A 2011 study found that the more bombs dropped by American forces on South Vietnamese targets in 1969, the more likely it was that Viet Cong insurgents would control the territory later. “Killing civilians is unjust,” Thomas Pepinsky of Cornell University noted, “but our research shows that it is also bad strategy.”

Motives

In the case of Guernica, there were more particular reasons for the savage attack. “Göring needed to demonstrate the deadly capability of the German air force, an idea first posited by Andre ‘Pertinax’ Géraud, foreign editor of L’Echo de Paris.”

Irujo added,

On April 30, he published an article later reproduced by the American press, stating that the orders for the massacre at Guernica came directly from Göring, who was ‘anxious to show the unconvinced German general staff what his Air Force could do.’ Germany was using the war as a training school for military airmen, and, according to Pertinax, Göring took the initiative in ordering that a town be destroyed in order to give a practical demonstration of what air warfare could achieve and to vindicate some of his strategic and tactical theories, which had been challenged by the army's general staff.

Irujo cites evidence that Göring favored vastly beefing up the contingent of German aircraft committed to the war against the Basques despite the objections of members of the German army.

The Germans and the Spanish rebels saw the attack on Guernica, which had no air defenses, as a way to demoralize the Basque troops and speed their campaign to take the much larger city of Bilbao, the industrial heart of the region.

Irujo estimates that at least 59 German and Italian aircraft attacked Guernica. They could fly at an altitude of only a few hundred feet, well below the cloud cover, since there were no anti-aircraft guns to threaten them. The first bombs were dropped at about 4:20 p.m. on April 26, and the bombers and fighters attacked in waves — with some breaks that fooled residents into coming out from under cover.

As Steer wrote, “the raid on Guernica is unparalleled in military history. Guernica was not a military objective. A factory producing war material that lay outside the town was untouched. So were two barracks some distance from the town. The town lay far behind the lines. The object of the bombardment seemingly was demoralization of the civil population and destruction of the cradle of the Basque race.”

Steer noted the horrific logic of the attack: “first, hand grenades and heavy bombs to stampede the population, then machine-gunning to drive them below, next heavy and incendiary bombs to wreck the houses and burn them on top of their victims.”

A young boy who survived the attack, Imanol Agirre, recalled the church bells ringing to alert residents to the enemy planes.

The bells always rang ... when planes passed over on their way to bomb Bilbao. We got used to it. That day, too, when the town was full of peasants and cattle for the market the bells rang, but nobody took much notice. Suddenly there were crashes. I saw spurts of flame and smoke coming from the far side of the town. To the shelters! To the shelters! People began to run in all directions in a wild panic ... We saw terrible things. One man near us had been hunting. He ran across to take shelter in a hut and we saw the planes kill both him and his dog. We saw a family of people we knew from our street run into a wood. There was the mother with two children and the old grandmother. The plane circled about the wood for a long time and at last frightened them out of it. They took shelter in a ditch. We saw the old granny cover up the little boy with her apron. The planes came low and killed them all in the ditch except the little boy. He soon got up and began to wander across a field, crying. They got him too.

Wolfram Richthoven, chief of staff of the German Condor Legion in the Basque country, was jubilant at the outcome. “Guernica, a city of 5000 inhabitants, literally leveled, he wrote in his diary. “Bomb craters are still to be seen. Absolutely Fabulous!”

In public, though, the attackers of Guernica denied bombing the town and accused the Republican forces of setting it ablaze. They later came up with the even more far-fetched explanation that the bombardment was very limited and aimed solely at destroying a bridge, which actually survived the attack.

Guernica in ruins, 1937.

In more than 40 years of ruling Spain, Franco never admitted that his rebel forces bombed Guernica. Aiding his cover-up was the fact that the rebel army took over the town three days after the bombing and destroyed the records of the Basque government. Bodies were buried in mass graves or allowed to remain underground as Franco’s forces began building a new town “on top of the ruins of the previous one,” Irujo wrote. “As a consequence, the corpses of people buried under the debris were never recovered and registered.”

Despite the cover-up, the Guernica bombing provoked outrage around the world. The Basque president, Jose Antonio Agirre, indignantly denied in a broadcast on April 29 that his side had set fire to the town:

Before God and history which will judge us all, I affirm that for three hours and a half German airplanes bombed with inconceivable cruelty the defenseless civilian population of the historic town of Gernika, now reduced to ashes, machine- gunning women and children, many of whom perished while the rest escaped and fled in terror.

I ask the civilized world if it is possible to allow the extermination of a people that has always had as its most valued goal the defence of its liberties and the protection of the secular democracy of Gernika, symbol of which is its millenarian tree.

The oak tree of Guernica, which stands next to the Assembly House. Here is where leaders have had to take an oath to recognize the people’s rights, freedom and the laws of the region for more than 600 years. (The oak tree is the latest incarnation of many individual trees that have occupied this space over the centuries.)

Amid the outrage, though, diplomats like Britain’s Anthony Eden and the United States’ Cordell Hull, shamefully failed to blame the culprits for the crime of destroying Guernica. Irujo wrote that Eden “lied to the House of Commons when he said that he did not have evidence that Gernika had been bombed.” Never mind that a fragment of a German bomb, “with German inscriptions indicating the year and location it was made” was sent by the British consul in Bilbao to the British embassy, and it was eventually sent to London.

Britons themselves would be on the receiving end of German bombing raids after the start of World War II. Irujo noted that the Germans used techniques similar to those used at Guernica to attack Warsaw and Rotterdam.

The U.S. and UK firebombed the German city of Dresden in 1945, dropping more than 3,400 tons of explosives and killing an estimated 22,700-25,000 people. More than 200,000 people were killed when the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the closing days of the war with Japan. Waging war against civilian targets had become well and truly established by then.

Picasso’s Guernica

The Spanish artist Pablo Picasso, who was living in Paris, had been commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to paint a mural for the 1937 Paris International Exposition. When he read about the Guernica bombing, he discarded a plan for the mural and instead chose the town’s destruction as his subject.

The enormous painting — 25.6 feet wide by 11 feet tall — depicts in stark black, white and gray an agonizing scene of suffering by the town’s people and animals. Picasso refused to let the painting be shown in Spain as long as Franco’s regime lasted, and it was displayed for many years at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In 1981, after both Franco and Picasso had died, the painting was taken to Spain, where it is shown at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid.

Some stories are too good to be true, and this is no doubt one of them:

“While Picasso was living in Nazi-occupied Paris during World War II, one German officer allegedly asked him, upon seeing a photo of Guernica in his apartment, ‘Did you do that?’

Picasso responded, ‘No, you did.’"