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Bombing of Guernica

The bombing of Guernica was an aerial attack on April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War by the German squadron known as the Condor Legion against the Basque city of Guernica. It was the first aerial bombardment in history in which a civilian population was attacked with the apparent intent of producing total destruction.

Guernica

Even before the bombardment, Guernica was a place of great significance to the Basque people. The Viscayan 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 population of about 5,000. There were probably a considerably larger number of people in the town on the day of the attack: the town was about 15 kilometers from behind Republican lines and, up until the attack, had been spared the ravages of the war. There were certainly numerous war refugees present in the town, and the day of the attack was a market day, so there were also many people from the surrounding territories.

Also, at the time of the attack the town had no air defenses, because of the recent losses to the Republican air forces.

The first five waves of bombardment

The bombing was actually a sequence of attacks by German and Italian forces, the first joint military operation between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. They came with such rapidity 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 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 Dornier 17 passed an Italian patrol of three Savoia 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, "the Italians had been trying for some time to obtain... a separate peace agreement with the Basque nationalists," and were not inclined to jeapordize 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-storey a 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 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

Around noon that day, the triple-engined Junker 52s of the Condor Legion had carried out a devastating mission against the smaller town of Guerricaiz. They returned to their base to reload armaments and to eat their lunch, then headed to attack Guernica. The 3^rd Squadron set out with a cargo of heavy 250- and 50-kilogram bombs and 1-kilogram incendiaries, the latter forming a third of the payload. It can reasonably be 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 Rivers Mundaca and Burgos a few minutes later. They were escorted from Vitoria by a Fiat squadron and by the Messerschmitt Heinkel 51s strafed defenseless 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 Casa de Juntas and the Oak. The bridge, the overt target of early Italian attack, survived.

There are no official figures as to the number of victims. Estimates range from as few as 120 dead to as many as 10,000, with the consensus standing at about 1,500, mostly old people, women, and children.

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 Blitzkriegs 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 blatantly claimed that Guernica had been burned by the fleeing Republicans themselves; however, various foreign correspondents happened to be present during the attack and to witness the devastation. They also attested that the firemen of Bilbao were late in arriving and did little once they arrived, aggravating the damages, although César Vidal presents evidence to contradict the latter report and provides an apparently detailed account of the fire-fighting efforts.

In his book La Destrucción de Guernica (The Destruction of Guernica) César Vidal makes the following arguments about the motives of the Condor Legion and their commander Wolfram von Richthofen:

• The lack of a reconnaissance pass before the bombing shows that Condor Legion were intending 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 omitted incendiaries.
• Twenty-two tons of bombs was an enormous quantity to attack a town the size of Guernica. Vidal gives multiple sources to the effect that "On the first day of the offensive against Bilbao all 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" falsely stated only 7.956 tons of bombs were dropped on Guernica.

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

Symbolic importance

The bombardment of Guernica 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.