Two sounds made Teresa Ortuz pause in her task. The first was dull, like a hammer blow on an anvil bedded in earth. It was artillery fire, coming closer to Guernica.
The second sound was nearer. Something alive was with her in the mortuary.
Teresa lifted her lantern. Its light barely carried to the open door at the opposite end of the morgue. Beyond, dim illumination from the main hospital building cast shadows on the flagstone courtyard outside this long, low, windowless room.
Teresa heard the footsteps of the patrolling sentry. Around her were the sheeted forms, each a dead soldier. She replaced the lantern on the floor. Then, kneeling beside a naked body still warm after its journey from the operating room, she wiped away the blood and dirt of the battlefield, closed the eyes and mouth, and folded the arms.
The only signs of violence on the body were the surgical sutures that ran from gullet to abdomen. Behind the stitches were the man’s intestines, bundled back into his abdominal cavity following his death.
Teresa heard the sound again, a crunching noise.
She rose to her feet and moved toward the door, holding the lantern higher for more light. Ahead of her, something was tugging at a corpse. As she watched in horror, a huge, lean dog backed away, dragging the body outside.
Teresa screamed. The animal growled and tugged more fiercely. Hearing its teeth grind against bone, Teresa screamed again.
The sentry appeared in the doorway, raised his rifle, and shot the animal. Then he dragged it outside by its tail.
He returned and stood in the doorway. “They are getting a taste for human flesh. It is bad….”
Teresa thanked him, assured him she was no longer frightened, and went back to her work. She could sense he was still standing there, puzzled at the sight of a dark-haired nurse laying out corpses at this witching hour. She explained this was the only free time she had, and added, “It has to be done.”
Teresa Ortuz was nineteen years old. This Sunday was the two hundred seventieth day of the war she had spent in the convent of the Religiosas Carmelitas de la Caridad, one of the oldest religious orders in Europe. On July 27, 1936, the barracklike convent on the northern outskirts of Guernica had been requisitioned as a military hospital.
In the convent nearly five hundred wounded were now cramped together, many close to death. To tend them were twenty nuns and as many lay nurses. Five surgeons, led by Captain Juan Cortés, the chief medical officer, operated in shifts for eighteen hours a day.
Teresa divided her time between wards and operating room, where she had been assigned to work with Captain Cortés. Theirs was not a comfortable partnership. She recognized his surgical skill but deplored his personal habits. He drank, reeked of garlic, and swore volubly. He refused to change his surgeon’s apron, while insisting she be spotlessly garbed for every operation.
Twice in the past Teresa had asked Mother Augusta, the Superior in charge of the nursing staff, to switch her to another surgical team. Mother Augusta believed Teresa was one of the few nurses strong enough to manage Cortés. She explained there was no one else available to work with him and coaxed Teresa to stay with a promise to have yet another talk with the irascible surgeon.
Teresa doubted whether another of Mother Augusta’s appeals would have any effect. Previous ones had produced no change in Cortés. He still worked prodigious hours, performed great surgical feats, and drove his staff mercilessly.
Most of all, Teresa was upset that Cortés was irreligious. She marveled that Mother Augusta continued to believe he would change. The Mother Superior’s faith somehow strengthened Teresa’s resolve eventually to become a nun.
She knew her decision to take holy vows disappointed her father. He wanted her to be, like him, a doctor. When she had told him of her ambition, he had asked her to wait a further year before embarking on the life of self-sacrifice. Secure in her belief, she had agreed to wait.
Soon afterward, the war had started and Teresa had enrolled on the hospital staff. In the nine months that followed, she had devised several self-imposed “tests,” as she put it, to “prove I still had the willpower necessary to become a nun.”
One of her “tests” was to give up her midnight coffee break to go to the mortuary and lay out the dead.
Teresa completed her task and returned to the main building. Its ground and two upper floors were filled with beds. The normal living space of the convent was limited to the chapel and a small wing where the nuns slept; lay staff were never allowed into this private world.
Mother Augusta once said it was “God’s will” the convent had been occupied. Captain Cortés was quick to offer a more practical explanation: The building’s yard-thick walls could withstand all but the most sustained ground attack. From the air, only a direct hit by a large bomb would do any real damage. But, the surgeon had warned, the red cross painted on the convent roof was no guarantee of safety. On the contrary, he pointed out, in other theaters of the war the emblem had acted as a magnet, drawing both aircraft and artillery fire.
Bolts of black cloth, originally intended for nuns’ habits, were used by Mother Augusta to black out windows; only a few on the ground floor facing into the courtyard remained exposed when the cloth ran out. Screened spaces were prepared to hide ambulances discharging wounded. An overhead covering of grass laid on wire netting was rigged to camouflage surgical linen being laundered.
Each nun gave up a portion of her free time during the day to sit on the roof of the convent and scan the sky for aircraft. Others patrolled the road, ready to stop transport from approaching the building if an air raid occurred. Several ambulance drivers had been gently admonished for driving too quickly near the hospital; dust clouds from their vehicles could provoke the interest of aircraft.
Teresa had also acted as an aircraft lookout. A few days ago, she had seen tiny specks crawling over the mountains in the south, heading in the direction of Bilbao. That night she heard the port had been bombed.
Next day, following air attacks on the Basque front line, the hospital had received its first victims of incendiary bombs. All but one of the soldiers had soon died from the terrible phosphorus burns.
The sole survivor lay in a cubicle on the ground floor. His scalp was singed, his lips were seared, and a wide bandage covered his sightless eyes. His arms and chest were yellow with blisters and weals. He had been kept alive by blood and saline transfusions.
Passing the cubicle, Teresa saw that the drips had been removed. She hurried in search of Captain Cortés. He was about to begin a ward round; he preferred the nocturnal hours to pad from one bed to another, inspecting his patients. In response to her demand for an explanation, the surgeon told Teresa he had stopped the transfusions because the man was going to die anyway, and he would not waste blood on a doomed case.
Teresa was horrified. “Only God knows for sure when a person will die,” she protested.
Cortés blinked and replied, “The dead do not interest me. It is then, if at all, that they become a matter for God.”
Teresa returned to the cubicle. The man had died.
At that moment she despised Captain Cortés almost as much as she hated the enemy pilots who had dropped the incendiary bombs.
Thirty-five flying miles south of Guernica, across the mountains at Vitoria, Lieutenant Colonel Wolfram, Freiherr von Richthofen, was taking his usual pre-bedtime tour around the airfield. As he did so, he detected the first signs of a “bomber’s sky.” The air was getting drier, the breeze was just strong enough to clear smoke from a target, cloud was breaking up to provide the right mixture of cover and visibility for his pilots. Like him, the air crews had been frustrated by long periods of bad weather that kept them grounded. Some passed the time in the Vitoria brothels. Others simply drank the strong local wines and brandies.
Von Richthofen was proud of his self-control. Partly through training and partly because of his nature, he refrained from showing emotion of any kind in public. Although he had once felt physically ill when a Spanish general greeted him with a kiss on the cheek, he had successfully concealed his feeling.
The chief of staff of the Condor Legion was forty-one, almost twice the average age of his pilots. Nevertheless, in stamina and flying ability he could match the best of them. He was impressive without being tall: firm-muscled, lithe, with a hunter’s swift reaction. He reminded many people of his cousin Manfred, the German flying ace killed in World War I.
Von Richthofen’s blue eyes and pursed mouth came from his father; his aristocratic snub nose had been a family characteristic for four hundred years. His strong legs were developed in boyhood through constant physical exercise over the family estate in Silesia. Even in the heat of Spain he never missed his morning pushups, running in place, bending-and-stretching exercises. And at the end of each day he walked among the airplanes he cherished almost as much as he did his wife and young son back in Germany.
Not all the aircraft were at Vitoria. Seventy miles southwest, at Burgos, were three squadrons of Junkers bombers, the new Heinkel-111s, and the workhorses of the task force, the Dornier-17s. Here, at Vitoria, were the fighters: the HE-51s, the still secret ME (BF)-109s, and four HE-23 Stuka dive bombers whose distinctive whine produced a special terror in its victims on the ground. Also dispersed around the airfield were the reconnaisance HE-70s and HE-45s. Finally, there were the Legion’s two W-34s, which rose awkwardly into the air at dawn and dusk each day so that their crews could study cloud density and windspeed. The weather forecasts were based on their flights.
Recently the forecasts had turned out to be more unreliable than usual, due to the rapid weather changes over mountainous northern Spain. The pilots blamed the luckless weather crew not only for being wrong, but for actually causing the bad weather; it was a sign of the frustration everyone felt.
Now, to the north, over the mountains, the sky was light enough to silhouette the trees and the aircraft parked under and around them. Von Richthofen paused by each aircraft, listening as the breeze rustled through the wire stays. There was no doubt in his mind: The wind was from the south, a sure sign of fine weather on the way.
Well clear of the aircraft, surrounded by a high fence, was a large compound guarded by Spanish soldiers. Inside, canvas-covered irregular mounds concealed bombs and ammunition cases.
Continuing his walk, Von Richthofen strode past the tents where the fitters stored their tools. He had once surprised a group of mechanics by reciting the exact sequence they must follow in stripping down an engine. It earned him further respect—but he had never gained the affection of his officers and men. Von Richthofen was too preoccupied with results to ever achieve more than a casual relationship with those he commanded.
As a child he had amused himself by dismantling old farm machinery. While a cadet in the Prussian Army, he spent much of his time alone, digesting technical magazines. After flying with his cousin Manfred’s squadron, he ended World War I with seven “kills.” Some said he had shot down more enemy aircraft than he was officially credited with; that the cousin of the Red Baron allowed them to go to others to avoid any charge of nepotism.
After Berlin University, where he earned an engineering doctorate in 1929, he went into the diplomatic service. For three years he served as air attaché at the German embassy in Rome. Late in 1932 he returned home. Within months Hitler was in power.
Initially, Von Richthofen had had doubts about Hitler. Von Richthofen was, after all, an aristocrat with a title going back to the sixteenth century; he felt nothing in common with the Nazis and their beerhall manners. Finally, however, Von Richthofen came to believe Hitler would regain for Germany “her rightful place at Europe’s table after the shameful diktat of Versailles.”
Among those who came to power in the Nazi takeover was Hermann Göring, who had also flown in the Red Baron’s squadron. The intervening years had done nothing to soften Von Richthofen’s dislike of Göring, with his gaudy uniforms, his childish vanity and greed. Von Richthofen despised Göring’s undisciplined drinking habits and suspected him of being a drug addict.
When they met in 1934, Göring was building the Luftwaffe in secret. Von Richthofen, motivated by patriotism, and fearing Göring “would bungle things,” saw an opportunity “to be in on the ground floor of Germany’s military rebirth.” He accepted Göring’s offer of a planning job in the new Air Ministry. He rejected Göring’s suggestion he join the Nazi party. That matter was never raised again.
Von Richthofen’s work behind the impressive columns of the main Defense Ministry building in Berlin involved devising secret war games to play in Bavaria. But he yearned to see whether his theories really worked.
The Spanish Civil War was to provide that opportunity.
Within days after the war began, General Franco sent a personal message to Hitler. The Führer was on his annual pilgrimage to Bayreuth for the Wagner festival. On the night of July 25, 1936, after the curtain rang down on Siegfried at 9:50 P.M., Hitler met with colleagues to consider “the Spanish question,” and decided “immediately to fulfill this appeal for help.” Göring was delighted: Here was the perfect opportunity to test the Luftwaffe’s men and machines in action.
Lieutenant Colonel von Richthofen arrived in Spain with the Condor Legion in November and was made its chief of staff at the beginning of 1937. The early months were difficult for him. There were the Spanish to contend with; their belief in mañana made him impatient. But he was also learning how to control his bombers and fighters in a way that would serve him well—not just in Spain, but later, in World War II.
In the years ahead, Von Richthofen’s reputation would outstrip that of his famous cousin, the Red Baron, and bring additional glory to a family already prominent in German military history. For he would be credited with perfecting the aerial blitzkrieg—a sudden, unexpected, devastating attack delivered with precision at thunderbolt speed. It was a tactic he would use with ruthless efficiency in France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Crete. Later he would lead an armada of over seven hundred fighting planes to Russia, creating terror at Sevastopol, Leningrad, and Stalingrad. He would rise to the rank of field marshal, eventually joining Adolf Hitler’s personal staff.
But as Von Richthofen completed his midnight inspection of Vitoria airfield, all that lay ahead. Soon he would apply his unique qualities of ambition and invention to take a major step toward his future successes: deciding the fate of the most revered town in northern Spain.
At 1:30 A.M. an ambulance arrived at Guernica’s Carmelite Convent. It carried corpses. Teresa Ortuz overheard Captain Cortés tell the driver he should be shot for wasting fuel to transport the dead. The surgeon glanced at the bodies and walked past Teresa into the hospital.
An orderly emerged and helped the ambulance driver unload the bodies. Teresa concluded that they had been dead for some time: Rigor mortis had passed and the muscles were again relaxed. She hoped death had been instantaneous.
Teresa returned inside to the sterilization room, where Cortés was checking the record book she was detailed to keep. The last entry, for Saturday, April 24, showed that twenty-two major operations had been performed and six patients had died. Cortés remarked it was “about average.”
Icily, Teresa asked if he were referring to the number of operations or the dead. Cortés laughed, then closed the book and left the room.
Teresa realized she had touched a weak spot—Cortés did not like to be reminded that any of his patients died.
Since childhood she had witnessed how patients respected her father. He was a venerated figure, accorded the same status as a priest. In turn, her father had lived up to his image. Cortés, however, seemed to her to relish his own intemperate behavior: “He enjoyed shocking people,” she later said.
Teresa had come to the conclusion that the only way for her to survive professionally in Cortés’s company was to stand up to him. His response had shown her it was the right policy, for she had also recognized something else: “Captain Cortés could show a perverse delight in being challenged.”
Now Teresa made her nightly check of the sterilization room, ensuring everything was ready for another eighteen hours of surgery, due to begin at 6:00 A.M. The poupinelle, a copper sterilizer the French had sent, was loaded with surgical instruments. She moved around the room, reflecting that its contents showed the international involvement in the war—despite the Nonintervention Pact.
In the deep cupboards along one wall were instrument boxes from Russia, linen drums and barrels of compresses from Belgium. The instrument and swab tables were from Holland. The anesthetist’s trolley had been manufactured in England; its metal flasks of ether and rows of phials came from Poland and the United States.
The previous day’s surgery had made further inroads on their supplies. Boxes and bottles stood empty on the shelves, the prospects of refills diminishing each day that the Nationalist blockade of Bilbao continued.
By the time she finished her checks, Teresa knew that the hospital was facing a crisis. By the end of the coming week there would not be enough ether to anesthetize a single patient.
The thought kindled anew an emotion that she had struggled to subdue for weeks: hatred of the enemy. She knew that if an enemy soldier appeared this moment in the room, she would try to kill him with her bare hands. The thought made her tremble; stifling that hatred was another of the “tests” she had set herself to prove she was worthy of taking holy vows.
When she had regained her composure, she took a compress, dampened it with water, and left the room to walk through the wards guided by her lantern. In rooms to one side of the central passageway on the ground floor were patients who had recently undergone surgery. On the other side were those waiting, each classified by a colored gummed sticker on his sleeve: red for acute, blue for less acute, yellow for nonurgent cases. She could not remember when she last saw a yellow label, but in the last week there had been an alarming proliferation of red ones.
Teresa went from ward to ward, from cot to cot, offering soothing words and a cool compress. She took care to appear oblivious to the smell of sweat, urine, and feces.
One room housed the preoperative thorax cases, with great bandages around their stomachs, chests, rising and falling in painful breathing. Most slept, sedated by morphine.
One man lay awake, watching Teresa as she approached for any hint that might relieve or confirm his fears. She smiled at him, holding up her lamp so that he could see her face.
The man was scheduled for a splenectomy in the morning. But Teresa knew that wounds of the spleen seldom occurred alone; his liver and large and small intestine were probably damaged. His eyes opened wider as he pleaded for water.
Teresa was about to explain he could not have any, then changed her mind. The man’s face was ashen, his lips like clay. Death, she guessed, was close. In the morning, if he was still alive, he would be moved to a ward where the prolapsed cases, those beyond aid, waited to die.
She let the man drink.
During the early days of the war, some of the doctors had performed “compassionate surgery,” operating on patients who were without hope, and afterward prescribing massive doses of morphine until death. In this way a man died without pain, and in hope.
Captain Cortés had ordered a halt to such surgery soon after Mola’s northern offensive began. Much later, Teresa would recall his sardonic comment: “Even if we are in a convent, we are not going to waste time working on terminal cases and trying for a miracle.”
It was the only time Teresa had seen Mother Augusta angry. She had turned on the surgeon and reminded him that miracles were not expected of him; they were the province of God. Cortés had not been moved.
Only afterward, when the hospital’s surgical case load had grown overwhelming, did Teresa wonder what her father would have done in the situation. She could not ask him. Three weeks earlier he had volunteered for medical service in the Republican Army.
Several times during her ward rounds, she paused at the sound of distant shellfire. Some of the patients were frightened by it; she guessed they were the ones who had heard the rumor that the enemy slaughtered wounded soldiers in their beds. Teresa calmed their fears by saying it was Basque artillery laying down a barrage. The gunfire did not disturb Teresa; she knew there were still twenty thousand troops between the town and the enemy.
Nevertheless, to satisfy one patient, she went outside to see if she could spot any artillery flashes. The mountains were now silent. As she turned to go back inside, she noticed a group of people on the road approaching the convent. It was too dark for her to identify them; she assumed they were refugees.
Some of the troops Teresa Ortuz and the other people of Guernica believed were defending them had slipped out of their excellent positions and retreated across the mountains to the town, leaving a fifteen-mile hole in the front.
Behind this collapse was a sorry story of poor leadership in the field and political chicanery at the rear. The Republican Army in the north, at best tenuously commanded, had by this Sunday morning become disorganized and dispirited. Two battalions manned by passionate trade unionists were withdrawn from the battlefield by their political paymasters in a crude attempt to persuade the Basque government to give them representation. A general retreat had begun because units feared being cut off.
The group Teresa mistook for refugees comprised more than one hundred soldiers who had entered the town from the east, over the Rentería Bridge. Foot-weary and dejected, they shuffled into Guernica seeking shelter. Instinctively, they avoided the open squares around the marketplace, public school, and railway station that lay to their left. The soldiers knew from experience that such places were ideal targets for fighter planes to strafe.
They also avoided the churches of San Juan and Santa María, knowing enemy bombers regarded churches as suitable targets; the Nationalists claimed the Republicans often stored ammunition in crypts.
Finally, the troops passed the Carmelite Convent; a hospital was no place for soldiers who weren’t wounded. They chose instead to spend the rest of the night in the gardens of the monastery of the Augustine Fathers, just beyond the convent, on the main road to Bermeo. The ancient monastery marked the northern boundary of the town.
The soldiers fell asleep almost immediately upon lying down, their rifles at their sides. Beside one group of three men was the company’s prize possession: a modern machine gun. It had been dismantled for easier carrying, and now its crew used the ammunition belts as pillows.
The soldiers’ arrival did not go unnoticed. Refugees saw them and passed the news along to the railway station plaza where hundreds more refugees waited, their eyes intent on the freight train being loaded from one of the town’s armament factories, the Talleres de Guernica.
Stevedores, moving carefully, grunting under the loads they carried, were emptying the factory. Once a man stumbled and his companions froze as he struggled to hold onto a box of hand grenades and mortar shells, the factory’s main products. One of the sentries guarding the train ran and hoisted the box back on the man’s shoulder.
After the explosives were loaded, the plant’s tools and machinery were placed in the freight cars. The Talleres de Guernica was being gutted of everything movable and would be reassembled behind Bilbao’s “ring of iron,” the defensive shield of antiaircraft guns, field artillery, rifle trenches, and barbed wire the Basques had built around their industrial capital. When the loading was completed, the soldiers closed the boxcar doors.
In the station plaza, men holding an assortment of clublike weapons edged toward the train.
“It’s moving!” The shout, from one of the refugees, was nearly lost in the hiss from the engine’s valves. In a concerted rush, the refugees ran toward the train.
Startled, the soldiers swung around, uncertain of what to do. An NCO bellowed at them.
“Aim!”
The soldiers moved their rifles to their shoulders. “Warning volley. Fire!”
The bullets whistled over the heads of the mob.
“Reload!”
The click of the rifle bolts being opened and closed was heard.
“Aim! Shoot to kill on command!”
The soldiers swung their rifles directly on the refugees.
“Stop!”
From the Talleres de Guernica a young officer ran to place himself between the soldiers and the mob.
Lieutenant Ramón Gandaría deliberately turned his back on the refugees and ordered the soldiers to lower their weapons. When they had done so, he complimented the NCO for his swift action, then turned to walk toward the mob. He stopped in front of the biggest man he could see, reached forward and took the man’s club, then contemptuously flung it aside.
“All of you,” said Gandaría sharply, “throw down your sticks.”
They did as he ordered.
A voice at the back of the mob shouted they should still storm the train to get to Bilbao.
Gandaría swiftly elbowed his way through the group and yanked the speaker to the front. Holding the man by the scruff of his neck, Gandaría again addressed the crowd.
“Even if you somehow managed to take this train to Bilbao, your fate there would be a certain one. You would be shot. This train is vital to the war effort. You are not.”
He shook the man by the neck.
“Do you wish to die?”
The man stirred uneasily.
“Then get out of here. And take this rabble with you!”
Gandaría thrust the man from him. The mob melted away.
Adjusting his cap, with its red, five-pointed star of the Republic, Gandaría watched the freight train begin its forty-five-minute journey to Bilbao. Then he turned to the NCO and said how much he sympathized with the refugees’ desire to leave. Ignoring the man’s confusion, Gandaría walked away.
Ramón Gandaría had been born twenty years earlier in the squalor of Barcelona’s dockland. He was the youngest of fourteen children; his mother died bearing him. He learned later it had been a struggle to raise money for her burial. His father was a political militant who weaned his children on slogans. A passionate, inarticulate man, he died when Ramón was eleven. The child was brought up by an elder sister. Educated by nuns, he had by his teens renounced orthodox Catholicism. He flirted briefly with communism, found it wanting, but became a fervent supporter of Spain’s Popular Front, the alliance of left-wing parties that won the last election before the country was plunged into civil war.
Gandaría had taken to the streets of Barcelona at the familiar cry of “Barricades!” Troops loyal to Franco in the city fired on the demonstrating workers, killing a woman beside him. The mob hurled itself upon the troops, driving them to their barracks, where they could later be killed at the workers’ leisure.
Sickened by the violence, Gandaría had trekked over the Pyrenees to visit a sister living in San Sebastián. He arrived on that August day in 1936 when the Nationalist Navy was shelling the port. His sister was killed by a salvo.
Her death, more than anything else, turned Gandaría into a tough fighter. He joined the Basque militia and fought in a dozen bloody battles. In January 1937, he was promoted to lieutenant. Two months later, at the start of the Nationalists’ northern campaign, he was sent to the headquarters staff of the Loyola Battalion in Guernica. This lean, war-scarred veteran, just twenty years old, had been entrusted with the task of instilling battle readiness in the HQ staff.
A few days earlier he had received new instructions—to turn Guernica into a defensive fortress and to supervise the evacuation to Bilbao of the town’s two armaments factories.
He had dispatched the Talleres de Guernica on that freight train. Apart from the incident with the refugees, there had been no difficulties. Gandaría doubted it would be so simple with the Astra-Unceta complex, which he planned to move this coming Tuesday. He was sure that its owner, Rufino Unceta, would put up a determined fight. Gandaría relished the thought of outwitting the most powerful citizen in a town which he had disliked from the moment of his arrival.
He had been in Guernica nearly a month. Each day his resentment toward the townspeople had increased: “They were complacent. They seemed to think a divine right would ensure the war passed their town by. They thought themselves superior.”
And in no one had he found that superiority more marked than in Rufino Unceta. Gandaría, with his Barcelona accent and harsh upbringing, looked on people like Unceta as one of the “fundamental reasons why there had to be a war.” In Gandaría’s eyes, the arms merchant, with his mansion and personal fortune, belonged to “that class of rich who grow richer by owning the poor.”
On impulse, Gandaría walked back to his battalion headquarters along a route that took him past Unceta’s home at the southern end of the town. The mansion was in darkness. Gandaría studied the yellow-stone building carefully. When the time came he would commandeer it as part of his fortification plan for Guernica.
At 3:00 A.M. a soldier patrolling near the Rentería Bridge saw flames coming from a lodging house near the River Mundaca. It took him three minutes to run to the fire station beside the Bank of Vizcaya on Artecalle, one of the main streets in the center of the town. He roused the stable lad, who ran to the homes of the ten volunteer firemen and woke them. By 3:30 A.M. the town’s only fire cart, pulled by two dray horses, was outside the rooming house and the 600 gallons of water it carried were hissing onto the flames. With additional water drawn from the river, the fire was soon extinguished.
Fireman Juan Silliaco had never known a better turnout; the years of practice had paid off. A dark-eyed man of forty-five with powerful biceps, a bushy moustache, and a hard, lean body, Silliaco knew more about firefighting than did any of his colleagues. Even the fire chief—an elderly man who nowadays rarely attended a fire—knew that Silliaco was effectively the group’s leader.
At the outbreak of the war Silliaco had been asked to join the Bilbao fire brigade to gain further experience. After a week in Bilbao, he had been offered a permanent post. He declined, preferring to return to his job as a bartender in the Bar Catalán on Calle Don Tello, one of Guernica’s longest and drabbest streets, and to his respected position among Guernica’s volunteer firemen.
Tonight’s call had been their first in six months, and the volunteers had reacted well. But Silliaco wondered how they would cope with a serious blaze. Much of their equipment was outmoded. Hose pipes had been carefully patched, yet still leaked; the water pump was unreliable; some of the couplings to the main supply were misshapen. Two weeks ago he had written to fire headquarters in Bilbao cataloging the faults. He was awaiting a reply.
On the way back to the fire station the horses shied at gunfire coming from the mountains east of Guernica. It confirmed what Silliaco had suspected for days: The fighting was creeping closer.
The time had come for him to make a painful personal decision.
The distant, intermittent shelling and the volley of rifle shots from the railroad station ensured that baker Antonio Arazamagni would go short of sleep. He lay in bed listening to the ticking of his alarm clock, waiting for its bell to ring at 4:30 A.M., his normal hour for rising. He lived over the bakery, at No. 11 Goyencalle, a narrow, cobbled street on the western slopes of the town.
As the twenty-one-year-old baker turned restlessly in bed, he heard low voices from below his window. For such a well-built man, Antonio moved surprisingly quietly and quickly down the stairs and into the bakehouse. Pausing only to pick up a wooden rolling pin, he slipped open the front door.
Farther up the alley two men were stalking a cat, trying to entice it with scraps of meat. The cat was suspicious, but eventually its natural caution was overcome by hunger. As the animal darted for the meat, one of the men grabbed it by the neck; the other prepared to slit its throat.
Antonio hurled the rolling pin, hitting the second man in the back, forcing him to drop his knife. Clawing and spitting at its captors, the cat wriggled free and raced down the alley.
The two men turned, saw Antonio’s strong figure, clad only in underwear, bearing down on them, and they, too, fled.
Picking up his rolling pin, Antonio knew that one cat had been at least temporarily spared from the clutches of the gangs who nightly hunted the animals, killed and skinned them on the spot, and sold the carcasses as rabbits.
A passionate animal lover, Antonio waged constant war against the gangs; as a consequence Goyencalle was one of the few streets in Guernica where cats were safe. Several of them lived in his bakery.
Just as Antonio was debating whether to go back to bed, the alarm clock rang. He got dressed.
The trade in cat meat was another sign that the Nationalist blockade had proved effective. Public transport had almost ceased to exist. Domestic coal was hard to obtain. Antonio managed to heat the bakery ovens with strips of old newspapers wadded into balls and sprinkled with water. But in one way he was better off than most people. In a hungry town he could always eat bread—or use it to barter.
Later today, the baker intended to reap the benefits of a month’s delicate negotiations. The talks had centered on his 1929 Ford, now parked outside his bakery, which he polished until it gleamed like the limousines whose pictures he culled from magazines and posted on the bakehouse walls.
For months he had been able to afford only enough fuel for his bread rounds. Then the owner of his garage had indicated there might be a way he could purchase more gasoline. Day after day the pair haggled before reaching an agreement: Antonio would provide at reduced price an extra loaf and an apple pastry every day for a month; the garage man would provide a full tank of gas at the prewar price.
Antonio planned to collect the gas when the garage opened later this Sunday morning. Then, free for the rest of the day, with his week’s wages—the equivalent then of 75 U.S. cents—jangling in his pocket, he would set out to visit cousins in Marquina, some fifteen miles across the mountains to the east. In particular he hoped to further his friendship with a pretty eighteen year-old friend of the family. On his last visit to Marquina she had teased him about his ability as a baker; now, proof of his skill, an appetizing fruit pie, stood on a table in the bakery.
Excited at the prospect of the day ahead, Antonio loaded up his car and set out on his rounds. Even at this hour, 5:00 A.M., many of his 650 regular customers waited for him on their doorsteps. The sight of Antonio at the wheel of the old Ford, its seats stacked high with still-warm loaves, was reassurance that life, after all, had not changed that much.
Antonio pressed the car’s klaxon and greeted his customers with cheery banter. He had known many of them all his life. His family had been the town’s main bakers for centuries, making bread long before the present tree of Guernica, the sacred oak symbolizing Basque independence, had been planted in 1860. Antonio even claimed a forefather had baked bread for the great festival of 1766 that marked the town’s four-hundredth birthday.
This morning several customers mentioned they had heard gunfire during the night. Antonio assured them there was no cause for concern. On his journey through the town he had seen no roadblocks, few soldiers patrolling, nothing to suggest the authorities feared an attack.
Every morning his route took him across the broad plaza before the railway station in the center of the town. It was the only part of his journey he disliked; the plaza was a meeting point for refugees. Hundreds now stood in line waiting for the booking office to open at 6:00 A.M. so that they could buy a ticket for the next passenger train to Bilbao.
Uprooted, salvaging what they could carry or load on a donkey cart, sometimes driving a cow before them, the refugees had begun entering Guernica soon after Mola’s offensive started. Nobody knew exactly how many there were. Some put the figure as high as four thousand.
They were a drain on the town’s depleting larder and a strain on the nerves of the local people. Refugees told how the Moors, the Moroccan shock troops now in the service of Mola, murdered, looted, and raped as they advanced. It was said nuns had been ravished and then made to walk naked through the streets, priests had been castrated and disemboweled; in Zaragoza the Moors were said to have nailed the tongues of some women to a table.
Antonio wished the refugees would leave Guernica. He did not believe all they said, and he disliked their Gypsylike behavior. He watched with satisfaction a group making its way down the road to Bilbao.
Whistling cheerfully, the baker continued on his rounds, delivering the last loaf to a family who lived on the northeast edge of the town, beside the Rentería Bridge.
At 5:00 A.M. Von Richthofen jumped out of bed and performed his morning exercises. Then he scrubbed under a cold shower, dried himself briskly, and dressed in the khaki uniform that two months earlier had been issued to each member of the Condor Legion. His was identical in every way to those worn by the five thousand men he commanded, apart from the colonel’s pips on his epaulettes.
He briefly checked his appearance in a mirror and took his usual quick look around the bedroom: Everything was in place.
Von Richthofen occupied a suite on the top floor of the Frontón Hotel in Vitoria. At his bedside was a framed portrait of his wife. On a shelf was his flute. At the foot of his bed was a trunk filled with books. His reading included belles lettres and volumes on the lives of the fox and eagle. In a smaller chest was his “war library”: a study of Bismarck, two slim manuals on air tactics in World War I, and a well-thumbed edition of Command of the Air. Its author, an Italian strategist named Giulio Douhet, argued that the best way to break an enemy’s resistance was to launch air strikes against targets well behind the front line, and even against the civilian population itself. It was a theory already interesting many of the more forward-thinking officers of the major air forces in the world.
But so far, Von Richthofen’s experience in Spain had led him to reject this theory. The chief of staff favored using the Legion’s air power in direct support of the ground troops, attacking the enemy’s supply routes and soldiers near the front line.
The question of how best to use the Legion had led to further tension between Von Richthofen and his immediate superior, General Hugo Sperrle.
Discord had been there since those days back in Berlin when both men had formed part of Germany’s new military elite. Sperrle disliked Von Richthofen’s naked ambition, relentless drive, and seeming disregard for anything, or anybody, who barred his path. Further, Sperrle looked on Von Richthofen as a Hochwollgeboren, a snobbish Prussian. Von Richthofen, in turn, resented Sperrle’s coarse witticisms and rough table manners. He believed Sperrle was given command of the Legion largely because he was an officer from the old Reichswehr, the small military force Germany had been allowed to keep after World War I.
Publicly, the two men maintained a civil front. Privately, they avoided each other. Sperrle, talking to colleagues, would often prelude a waspish comment with “What would the fancy Freiherr say to this?” Von Richthofen rarely wasted time on such personal remarks, though once he referred to “our coffeehouse commander.”
Although commander of the Condor Legion, Sperrle was not its driving force. While the more energetic Von Richthofen made the day-to-day decisions about the Legion’s operations, Sperrle spent most of his time with General Franco. The Generalissimo liked him, and respected the German’s advice.
Now, as Von Richthofen left the Frontón Hotel, he was relieved to see that Sperrle’s coupe was in the parking lot, its Spanish driver asleep at the wheel. Von Richthofen hated those mornings when the monacled Sperrle accompanied him to the airfield. Climbing into his Mercedes, Von Richthofen wondered if the latest Spanish intelligence report that would await him at Vitoria airfield would be accurate.
On March 31, the first day of the northern offensive, Spanish intelligence had led the Legion to launch a massive air attack on the town of Durango, a road and rail center with an important arms factory, situated behind the Republican line. Durango was to be the key that opened the northern front.
It was General Sperrle who had ordered the raid, after discussions with General Mola. Spanish intelligence had reported troops in the town, and the German, without checking, had accepted the information. The decision was communicated to Von Richthofen, who implemented Sperrle’s order with vigor.
But his enthusiasm for the assault turned sour when he learned, some hours after the bombers had returned to base, that the enemy soldiers had fled the town well before the Legion struck. Bombs killed fourteen nuns in their chapel and the Jesuit church received a direct hit at the moment when the priest was communicating the Body of Christ. In the town’s parish church, a priest died while elevating the Host. By the end of the attack, 127 civilians were dead; 121 others died later from their injuries. Another 525 were wounded. No soldiers were reported among the casualties.
Even so, Durango continued to be a military objective; the town’s armaments factory was still intact. The Legion carried out a second air strike. Again their victims were civilians, again they missed the arms factory. Another attack was carried out on April 2. Two nuns were machine-gunned to death; not a bomb fell near the arms factory. On April 4 the Legion tried again. More houses were destroyed; more civilians died. But they still failed to destroy the factory or make the roads in the town impassable.
Von Richthofen, though incensed that the Legion had failed to kill enemy troops, nevertheless regarded the Durango attack as successful. His bombers had forced the troops to retreat farther and had demoralized the civilian population by its indiscriminate bombing. The Legion had cut its teeth in the “Durango affair” and had drawn blood—even if it had been only the blood of priests, nuns, women, and children.
Von Richthofen drove as fast as he dared over the poor roads in the Mercedes that had been shipped to him from Germany at the express orders of Hitler. In ten minutes he parked outside the white stucco building that housed his office at the airfield. For a moment he paused to look at the sky. The wind was still blowing from the south, gusting at times. The cold, rainy front was passing. He hurried into his office and checked the barometer: It was rising. Everything pointed to a few days of fine weather for his fliers to again pound the enemy.
He turned to his desk: One of his aides had prepared maps, situation and intelligence reports. Now, at nearly six o’clock on this Sunday morning, he began to read the Daily Intelligence Summary signed by Colonel Juan Vigón.
Vigón was chief of staff to General Mola, and as such, was Von Richthofen’s opposite number on the Spanish side. Whereas Mola was something of a dilettante, Von Richthofen saw in Vigón someone much like himself: dynamic, decisive, enthusiastic for battle. It was Colonel Vigón, not General Mola, who had first encouraged Franco to agree to the campaign in the north.
Even so, since the “Durango affair” Von Richthofen had mistrusted the Spanish intelligence reports. Vigón, he knew, could only rubber-stamp information from agents in the field.
The latest summary—ASSESSMENT AND INTENTIONS OF ENEMY PROJECTED TO MIDNIGHT SUNDAY, APRIL 25—claimed that although the fall of Durango was “imminent,” the Republican line was still intact and held by some “26,000 troops, armed with machine guns and mortars of 81 mm. They also have about 35 guns of calibers varying from 7.35 to 15.5 cm. Their intention must be to continue to hold their defensive line running due south from just east of Bermeo. Little enemy air force activity need be expected.”
The summary was just six hours old, but in part was already outdated. Many hundreds, if not thousands, of Republican troops were now in general retreat, falling back toward Bilbao.
Von Richthofen suspected as much. He consulted his map of the territory north of Durango. He noticed that three main roads leading toward Bilbao from eastern Vizcaya converged at one point: the Rentería Bridge at Guernica.
On one corner of his desk was the polished butt of a shell case, a souvenir from World War I. It would have made a fine ashtray for anyone who dared smoke in his office. Instead, it was filled with colored pencils. Von Richthofen selected a yellow one and drew a circle. Yellow was the color for “possible target.”
Von Richthofen had encircled the Rentería Bridge in Guernica.
Then he turned to matters requiring his more immediate attention.