Von Richthofen completed the seventy-five-mile drive from Vitoria to Burgos airfield in the same number of minutes.
The Condor Legion’s main bomber base was a camouflaged, orderly world of almost two thousand ground and air crew who serviced and flew the three squadrons of Junkers-52 bombers, the experimental squadron of new Heinkel-111s, and a miscellany of other aircraft.
From behind the main office block came the sound of airplane engines. The chief of staff had timed his arrival perfectly. The first Heinkel, its bombs slung under the wings, was just taking off for the attack on Bilbao. Even though he could not recognize the pilot, Von Richthofen knew who it was. Only First Lieutenant Rudolf von Moreau had the skill and the daring to take a fully laden twin-engine bomber into the air as if it were a single-engine fighter.
By the time the other pilots were in the air, Von Moreau had disappeared into cloud. Von Richthofen guessed the young Bavarian was circling impatiently, waiting for them to join him. Then, in a series of “chains”—three aircraft to a chain, each chain separated by half a mile of airspace—the squadron would head for Bilbao.
After the last Heinkel was gone from sight, Von Richthofen drove back to the office. Major Fuchs, the wing commander, was waiting for him at the main door, map case clutched under his arm, forage cap set squarely on his shock of black hair. Fuchs saluted, climbed into the front passenger seat, and the two men headed for the center of Burgos.
As they drove, Fuchs briefed Von Richthofen on the meeting ahead. Fuchs was directly responsible for ordering the Legion’s aircraft into the air and giving the squadron leaders their instructions. He was barely thirty; yet with his studied speech and careful mannerisms he contrived to look far older.
The meeting was to be a full gathering of senior Nationalist commanders in the north. Von Richthofen disliked these occasions with their undertones of jealousy, opportunism, and back-stabbing. At the last meeting, the Italian air commander, General Velani, had made ridiculous claims about the bombing skills of his pilots. In fact, the Italians were so inaccurate they had even bombed their own lines.
Von Richthofen had kept silent as Velani spoke, because he was anxious not to disrupt the already strained relationships among the various Nationalist commanders. The slow progress of the northern campaign had exacerbated that strain. But the chief of staff knew he could not remain quiet this evening if Velani indulged in more boasting.
Nor would Von Richthofen mince words about the way the Spanish were conducting the ground campaign. Three weeks earlier, there had been a “fearful row” when Commander in Chief Sperrle had castigated General Mola for the tardiness with which his Spanish troops followed up attacks by the Legion. Mola had replied that the German fliers were “not exactly suited for this sort of action.”
Sperrle had erupted. He was a huge man—he stood six feet six in his boots and weighed over 250 pounds—and his angry voice had reverberated around Mola’s headquarters. Unless things improved, he had said, he would take the Legion elsewhere in Spain. In a towering rage he had gone to Salamanca and told Commander in Chief Franco how little he thought of the Nationalist troops in the north and their leadership. Franco, used to dealing with temperamental Spanish subordinates, had successfully calmed Sperrle.
That had been early in April. Now, three weeks later, Von Richthofen did not believe matters had improved much. There was still “too little follow-up by the Spanish to the opportunities the Legion creates,” he later wrote.
The narrow roads around Burgos Cathedral were jam-packed with hundreds of people enjoying an evening stroll. It took Von Richthofen far longer than he had intended to reach the three-storied Town Hall. The clock on the tower guarding the entrance showed almost six-thirty. Moments later, Von Richthofen and Fuchs were climbing the stairs to the second-floor conference room.
Waiting at the top of the stairs was Colonel Juan Vigón, a small, wizened man well into middle age. On his head he wore a black Basque beret with three burnished stars, his only badge of rank on a drab khaki uniform. Vigón took off his beret and smiled to reveal decaying, uneven teeth. With his scrawny neck, hands pocked with liver spots, and eyes magnified by powerful steel-rimmed spectacles, Vigón looked what he had once been: a private tutor to some of the children of Europe’s lesser nobility.
Vigón was now chief of staff to General Mola, the Spanish commander in the north. He was one of the very few Spaniards whom Von Richthofen liked, trusted, and even admired. In one of his confidential reports to Berlin, Von Richthofen had described Vigón as “streets above the mass of his countrymen as regards sense of duty, willpower, decisiveness, and dedication.”
As they greeted each other, Vigón and Von Richthofen solemnly shook hands—a custom the German insisted on, even though they now met several times a week. Then the Spaniard solicitously inquired about Von Richthofen’s health and his drive from Vitoria. He virtually ignored Fuchs. The wing commander, trailing behind with the Spanish aides and escorting officers, regarded Vigón as an affected snob.
Some Spanish officers saw Vigón as a harsh disciplinarian who publicly rebuked senior commanders in that reedy voice they had come to hate. Periodically, he took personal command in battle—and the enlisted men responded immediately to the sight of this wrinkled gnome galloping along the front, urging them on. The Moors idolized Vigón. He was reported to have told them that as long as they fought well, they were entitled to the spoils of war.
Von Richthofen was the better military tactician, Vigón the superior political thinker. Together, they formed a formidable team. But the bond that linked them was their common belief that the enemy should be pursued without letup, shown neither mercy nor remorse.
Midway along the blue-carpeted corridor, the officers turned in to the conference room. It was dominated by a long, highly polished oak table surrounded by carved, high-backed chairs; the furniture had been specially brought from one of King Alfonso’s palaces. Heavy chandeliers lit the table even though the evening sun still shone into the room.
Von Richthofen took his usual place to the right of Vigón, who sat at the head of the table. Across from him, General Velani, the Italian air force commander, sat bolt upright in his chair, dressed in the most splendid uniform in the room. Rumor had it that Velani’s servant spent an hour a day polishing his master’s boots. Around the rest of the table were the officers who guided the Nationalist war machine in the north. With relief, Von Richthofen saw that General Mola’s customary seat was vacant. Theirs was another of the personality conflicts that beset the Nationalist command.
Vigón explained to the meeting that Mola was in Salamanca to discuss the war situation with Franco. Then smoothly, like a teacher questioning pupils, he asked the Spanish field commanders to report on conditions on their fronts. Each officer gave a lengthy dissertation. When Von Richthofen’s turn came, he said with emphasis, “The Reds have broken. There is a twenty-five-kilometer gap in their lines. I suggest we consider how best to exploit that situation.”
Vigón called for maps. The gap Von Richthofen had referred to was just east of Marquina, the area the Legion had bombed earlier that day.
General Velani was the first to break the silence. He would like it written into the minutes of the meeting that “this very afternoon Italian aircraft attacked the region with great success.”
Von Richthofen demanded to know whether the Italians were claiming total responsibility for the enemy rout.
Vigón interceded. He told the minute writer to note that “today our German allies launched a concentrated air attack in the Marquina area, which our Italian allies followed up to good effect.”
Then, having shown his skill in diplomacy, Vigón, once more coldly professional, put questions to the Spanish officers about Nationalist and Republican troop movements.
Von Richthofen tried again. In fluent Spanish, a language he knew Velani still had difficulty with, he asked the commander of the Navarre Division exactly what was being done to exploit the air success around Marquina.
Flushing, the Spanish general began to recite arguments familiar to Von Richthofen: The terrain was difficult; there was no need for a “frenetic pursuit of the enemy when slow and gradual pressure would produce successful results”; in any case, it was “unreasonable” to expect “too much of attacking troops.”
Von Richthofen pounced. “Nothing is unreasonable that can further destroy enemy morale, and quickly. It is already crumbling because of the air attack. It is essential that every effort be made on the ground to complete the collapse.”
Looking directly at the Spanish brigade commanders, he continued, “The infantry must not rely on the air force and artillery to create favorable situations. They must pursue their own attacks with all energy and toughness, forcing their own openings. The infantry must have the intention to harass the enemy and to pursue him, making his life absolute hell.”
An uncomfortable silence settled over the room. Vigón let it stretch, as if to emphasize the importance of what had been said. Then, blinking owlishly, Vigón looked at the Navarre brigade commanders. One after the other they agreed to pursue the enemy through the Marquina gap.
Satisfied, Vigón invited them all to study their maps once more. Then he said simply, “Gentlemen, I think it clear enough what next has to be discussed.” Later, Von Richthofen would say that the situation “was so obvious that even a first-year student at a war academy would have spotted what had to be done.”
Nevertheless, General Velani had a question: Were Guernica and its environs defended?
Vigón looked expectantly around the table. Nobody could provide the answer.
Von Richthofen said it did not matter what defenses there were. The Condor Legion would still attack. It was, he added, essential that the retreat of the Republican troops be delayed, if not halted, at the funnel leading into Guernica.
Another silence ensued as all of them examined their maps again, studying where the roads from the east joined at the junction by the bridge.
“The question is, When to attack?” said Vigón.
One of the Spanish generals argued that the attack should begin immediately.
Von Richthofen disagreed. That would mean a night attack over hazardous and unfamiliar territory against a target difficult to identify in the darkness.
“My fliers would be willing to undertake such an operation,” said Velani.
Von Richthofen argued fluently, listing other tactical objections against a night attack. “For all we know, the enemy could have crossed into Guernica already. In that case we need the roads leading into the town intact, so that our troops can puruse them on the ground. Equally, if the enemy has not yet entered Guernica, and we now destroy or obstruct their means of entry, they would have time to regroup and find some other way of falling back to Bilbao before our troops can catch them. I believe we should postpone any decision to attack until the morning. Then we will have the benefit of the latest air reconnaissance.”
Vigón agreed.
Velani had one further question: Who would actually make the attack?
Vigón saw the pitfall. Although the Italian air force had not enhanced its reputation during the northern campaign, to deny them an active role in the war would lead to serious problems with Mussolini. Choosing his words carefully, Vigón said that the Germans would attack first, and “if necessary, the Italian air force can also join in.”
Von Richthofen knew that would not be necessary. By the time his bombers had finished, the escape route for the Basques would be pounded to rubble.
Finally Vigón closed the gathering. Not once had he, or anybody else in the room, referred to the fact that the road intersection and bridge they planned to attack were close to one of the most historic towns in all Spain.
As the men left the conference, Fuchs said to Von Richthofen, “Such a target is never easy.”
Von Richthofen nodded, remembering that on previous occasions the Legion had failed in its attempts to knock out bridges. Then he brightened. With quiet confidence he told Fuchs, “Use Von Moreau to lead the attack.”
Seventy miles to the north and nearly 9,000 feet above Bilbao, First Lieutenant Rudolf von Moreau gazed in fascination at the spectacle below him. Industrial areas on either side of the River Nervión were covered with a steadily spreading screen of smoke. At irregular intervals, reddish patches glowed and flared, marking the spots where 550-pound bombs had fallen.
Flying across the city on his second run, Von Moreau banked his new Heinkel-111 bomber, No. 25-3, high over the great park of Doña Casilda de Iturriza. Behind him, to the east, the last Heinkel was coming in on its bombing run. Its bombardier was Von Moreau’s closest colleague, Count Max Hoyos. Following the course of the Nervión, the Heinkel made its final approach to the docks.
The squadron leader lost sight of the plane as he took his own Heinkel at 180 mph across Bilbao. Over the railway station at Amezola, Von Moreau banked to the east, heading back for the narrower upper reaches of the Nervión. In another minute he had completed a full circle over the city.
Von Moreau’s eyes scanned the skies for enemy fighters. Just a week earlier one of his Dornier-17 bombers had been shot down by the most famous Republican pilot on the northern front, twenty-one-year-old Felipe del Río. The loss had severely damaged the Legion’s reputation and had even caused questions to be asked in Berlin.
Von Moreau could not know that Del Río himself had been shot down two days later over Bilbao by his own antiaircraft defenses. Now, without Del Río, the Republican fliers, vastly outnumbered by the Condor Legion, their few planes inferior to the recently arrived Heinkels, refused to fly.
Von Moreau always flew on the basis that “any second we might be jumped.” He craned his neck to look back through the cockpit window but saw no enemy aircraft. To the west he could see Hoyos’s Heinkel climbing away from the docks to the safety of stratocumulus.
Satisfied that all his aircraft were now safely behind the shelter of cloud, Von Moreau pushed the steering column forward and his plane swooped down toward the river. At the end of every raid he carried out his “farewell look-see” of a target; it had become almost a trademark, a sign to those on the ground that it was the legendary Von Moreau who had bombed them.
He could just make out tiny figures on the decks of ships; some of the old coal-burners were sending up shafts of smoke that almost reached the low-flying Heinkel.
From Iturriza Park, reddish-yellow, winking lights also climbed to meet the aircraft. Von Moreau felt the controls shudder as the ack-ack shells began to explode around him. A near miss tilted his starboard wing downward. Instinctively he allowed the bomber to slip sideways through the sky, across the city, and out of range of the antiaircraft battery.
Over Bilbao’s main plaza he banked, then, using the Gran Vía as a rough-and-ready navigation aid, he climbed swiftly toward the marshaling yards of the Estación del Norte. There he again reached cloud cover—wet, cold, and comforting to Von Moreau and his crew of three. They could see nothing. Nobody could see them.
A mile or so south of the city, the Heinkel emerged into the evening sun. Over several square miles of sky, Von Moreau could see his squadron orbiting around the map reference point he had earlier given each pilot.
Far below, out of range, he could distinguish Bilbao’s “ring of iron.” From 12,000 feet it looked like no more than a jagged scar curving across valleys and hillsides. Von Moreau knew that on some of the peaks were antiaircraft guns. But his bombers were too high for them.
Inside the “ring” was the industrial center of Galdacano, which was also the Basque military GHQ. The night before, a Junkers-52 squadron had attacked the dynamite factory there. The object of the raid was psychological. It was hoped that the noise of the exploding dynamite would terrify the people of Bilbao—which it did.
The raid was also in keeping with Mola’s curious belief that Spain was overindustrialized; he had asked Von Richthofen to use the Legion to destroy “at least half of Bilbao’s factories for the future good health of the Spanish nation.”
Von Moreau had welcomed this opportunity for bombing practice.
Now, another mission almost over, he relaxed, studying the country below: high mountains and short valleys intersected by rivers; inaccessible, primitive, but rich in wild vegetation. It reminded him of home, the Black Forest of Bavaria.
Almost a year had passed since he had last seen the Schwarzwald. During that time Von Moreau had become even more famous on the Nationalist side than Del Río on the Republican.
Von Moreau had arrived in Spain by ship from Germany on August 7, 1936, only three weeks after the war began. It was he who had first commanded the Junkers-52 squadron that had ferried Franco’s Moroccan troops to Spain. Although he was known in Germany for his record-breaking flights from Berlin to Tokyo and New York, his reputation in Spain was mainly founded in the dawn of August 21, 1936, when he had flown a Junkers-52 over enemy lines at Toledo to reach the besieged Alcázar fortress, where Franco’s troops were on the point of being starved into surrender.
He had brought the bomber down to parapet level over the Alcázar. Fifty feet below, he could see the Republicans camped at the foot of the fortress, too stunned to shoot at him. Flying between the four towers of the Alcázar, he had dropped food containers into the inner courtyard, merely sixty yards square. It was a feat, said one of his colleagues, “the equivalent of sprinting a hundred meters and dropping a pebble onto a postage stamp somewhere along the track.” And it was a feat that Von Moreau repeated.
Within weeks he had carved himself a permanent niche in the air annals of Spain. If any target required daring combined with precision bombing, he was chosen for the job. Legend had it that no objective, however small or well defended, was safe when Von Moreau was in the pilot’s seat.
He did not deny the stories; he enjoyed the fame. By the end of 1936, at age twenty-four, Von Moreau was the most experienced bomber pilot in Spain. Early in 1937 Von Richthofen appointed him commander of the experimental bomber squadron, made up of Heinkel-111s, Dornier-17s, and four Junker-86s, which had just arrived from Germany.
Von Moreau’s task as leader of this special squadron was “to perform test and trial operations of various kinds against various objectives.” This meant he could attack a target in any manner he chose—he could bomb from high altitudes, dive-bomb, launch a low-level attack. In the air he was answerable to no one; on the ground only Von Richthofen could challenge his decision.
For the moment there was no more action. Von Moreau told his radio operator to transmit orders to the other aircraft to form up for the return flight.
At 7:50 P.M., the telephone linking Vitoria with the bomber base at Burgos rang in the operations room in the Frontón Hotel. Captain Gautlitz took the call, listened, and replaced the receiver. “They’re on the way home,” he said.
The news was greeted with broad smiles by many of the operations room staff. Now they were free to patronize the Legion’s brothel, drink in one of Vitoria’s dozens of bars, visit one of the town’s cinemas, or simply sit around and gossip in the hotel.
Lieutenant Hans Asmus intended to do none of these things. In the past week he had been improving his Spanish with the help of a delectable local girl. They would sit together in a coffeehouse, and he would repeat after her, sentence by sentence, “the words of the most beautiful language I had ever heard.”
Asmus was one of the few Germans still trying to learn Spanish. Most of the Legionnaires had come north expecting to be welcomed as liberators, as they were in southern Spain. Instead, here at Vitoria they frequently found themselves looked on as conquerors. The cause, Asmus believed, was the attitude of the local priests: “Many of them were militants. They painted totally wrong pictures of us.”
Now, as he tidied up the files and maps, Asmus wondered how long it would be before some priest warned his girl she should not be seen with him in public. Her friendship had made his off-duty hours bearable, helping him to forget that the mail service to and from Germany was poor, that censorship was strictly enforced, that the food was often inedible, that lice thrived in his tick mattress even though he sprayed it daily.
As long as he could go on seeing his Spanish friend, Asmus was not unduly worried about going home. He was earning more in Spain than he could have hoped to earn had he stayed in Germany, and he was banking most of his salary. He was popular with his colleagues. There was only one thing he wanted: to return to flying duties. At the first opportune moment he intended to ask Von Richthofen to transfer him back to a squadron.
In Guernica the clock of Santa María struck 8:00 P.M. Father Iturran lowered his Bible and looked toward the presbytery window. From the direction of the main square he could hear the low notes of the txistu, a Basque flute, playing a melancholy melody.
The memories of the past few hours filled his mind. Leaving his assistant priest to attend to the church, Father Iturran had pondered all afternoon whether he was right to preach as he had. He remembered the shock and fear his words had produced. At first he had been satisfied with this reaction. Later, he wondered. Should he have ascertained conditions in Bilbao before urging a mass exodus there? Should he have checked with the bishop of Bilbao before he had spoken?
In the early evening there had been a knock on his door by the mayor, José Labauría. Father Iturran had invited him in. Labauría would come no farther than the whitewashed entrance hall. In his black suit, the mayor had delivered a protest. The sermon, he said, had done a disservice to the community.
Father Iturran had warmly told Labauría to “remember you are talking to your parish priest. Only my bishop can challenge my word. And I do not believe you are yet bishop of Bilbao.” He had thrown open the presbytery door and motioned the mayor to leave.
Labauría’s attitude convinced the priest he had, after all, been right to speak out that morning. He regarded the mayor as “a weak man, ready to do nothing at every opportunity.”
After Labauría’s departure, Father Iturran prayed and read his Bible. The scriptural certainty of the Old Testament gave him comfort until the clock, striking eight, broke his concentration.
Now Father Iturran recognized the distinctive way the txistu was being played. Only one person could play so well—Javier Gardoqui, a fourteen-year-old altar boy at Santa María Church.
Then, as he listened, came the sound of a second txistu, and a third, each flautist providing his own improvisation, yet uniting with the others to build up the theme. The flutes were joined by a txalaparta, a tomtom. Next came the crash of tambourines. Finally, loud and harsh, came the brass section, dominated by the deep lowing of a euphonium.
Guernica’s town band was warming up for the regular Sunday night dance in the main plaza.
Putting aside the Bible, Father Iturran walked to the window. Across in the Plaza Las Escuelas he could see hundreds of people congregating under strings of colored electric bulbs festooned through trees.
He had failed. His sermon had gone unheeded.
He was about to turn away when a new sight stopped him. From his window he had an excellent view down the Calle Santa María. Coming toward him, just passing the refugio in the middle of the road, was a throng of soldiers.
The old priest watched them trudging up the hill. When they reached the presbytery he opened a window and called out to ask who they were and where they had come from.
One of the soldiers looked up at him and said, “We’re from the front. Can we sleep in your church?”
Father Iturran was too astonished by the question to answer immediately. By the time he had replied that they could “rest and pray” in Santa María, the small group had disappeared from his view.
From the square the sound of music grew louder and gayer. It was, the priest would later write, “like being in Sodom. The war was on our very doorstep and people were still dancing.”
For a moment longer he stood at the window, looking out. Then he made his decision: If he could not save the people, he could at least salvage the holy relics in his church. But he would need help to move them to safety.
Father Iturran left the presbytery. Outside, he unhitched his donkey. Hoisting up his cassock, he climbed on to the barebacked animal and spurred it forward with his heels. At a steady clip he jogged down Calle Santa María, squeezing past the air-raid shelter, and crossed the Rentería Bridge.
He took the track that led to the Convent of La Merced.
Although farm boy Juan Plaza had yawned at the beginning of Father Iturran’s sermon, this evening he was convinced that, if anything, the priest had understated the danger. For the past two hours, sixteen-year-old Juan had been shuffling back and forth across the dusty square in front of the Convent of La Merced, eavesdropping on the hundreds of soldiers milling around. The snatches of conversation he had heard made Juan “tingle and tremble with fear.” Nearly forty years later, he would remember the soldiers’ words with anger: villages wiped out, women and children murdered; mass graves, pits, and trenches; the lines of bodies nobody bothered to bury; the chilling testimony to the systematic extermination of “political prisoners.”
The Plaza family farmed a small holding two miles outside Guernica. Theirs was a hard, unremitting existence with little to break the monotony of tilling and sowing and reaping from one year to the next. On Sundays, the family walked to Mass at Santa María Church. On Mondays, Juan rode with his father to market to sell their produce. Nowadays, the income barely provided the basics of life.
That afternoon Juan had sat on his farmhouse gate and watched the ambulances careening down the road from Marquina. The diversion was so welcome it hardly occurred to him they carried wounded men. He had been surprised to see Antonio Arazamagni’s car among the ambulances, the baker seated importantly behind the wheel. Juan had waved. Antonio had not returned the greeting.
Shortly after 5:00 P.M., a line of soldiers had crossed his father’s fields, disturbing the farm’s herd of four cows. By the chicken run, the soldiers had halted. One of them asked Juan whether he had seen any airplanes. Puzzled, the boy said he hadn’t. The soldiers had moved onto the road and formed up in marching order. One of them had produced a bugle and begun to play the “Hymn of the Republic.” As they trudged down the road, the soldiers had sung along with such sincerity that the anthem took on a meaning Juan had never before felt.
Impulsively, Juan had tagged along behind them. At six o’clock they had reached the square in front of the convent. As more soldiers arrived, many slightly wounded, some on makeshift crutches, all unshaven and dirty, a feeling of doom had gradually settled over the square.
Even to Juan Plaza, untutored in the ways of the military, “these soldiers smelled of defeat. I was ashamed of them.”
Now, shortly after eight o’clock, the boy was edging out of the square. Suddenly a few yards from him, the main convent door was thrown open. Standing in the doorway was a young lieutenant, pistol on hip, cap at a rakish angle.
“Silencio!”
Twice more Juan heard the officer shout before an uneasy silence came over the troops.
Speaking slowly, emphasizing every word the officer began. “I am Lieutenant Gandaría. This is Loyola Battalion headquarters. And you are supposed to be in the Army.”
The contempt in his voice carried to all corners of the square.
“Smarten yourselves up. Stand to attention when an officer speaks to you.”
Juan could see that many of the men around him were uneasily straightening.
Gandaría continued, “The retreat stops here! You are paid to fight. Every one of you. No more running. No more hiding. By God, each one of you is going to fight!”
Juan heard muttering from some of the soldiers.
He watched as the lieutenant removed his pistol from its holster. Tapping the butt against the palm of his hand, the officer warned he would shoot any man who gave the first hint of insubordination—or cowardice.
The murmuring stopped.
Gandaría ordered the soldiers to form into platoons. All those without rifles were to fall out before him, and they had “better have good reasons for not having guns,” he added grimly.
With much shuffling, the troops sorted themselves out into units. Juan found himself standing alone.
Gandaría looked down at him. “You, boy. Do you know the field beside the cemetery?”
Juan nodded.
“Then take these platoons there.” Gandaría indicated two squads of men.
Juan didn’t hesitate. His sense of shame was replaced by a new pride. He would always remember his feeling that “with men like Lieutenant Gandaría we could still win.”
Chanting the words of the “Hymn of the Republic,” he led the soldiers out of the square. Behind him, in growing strength, men took up the refrain.
Father Iturran spurred his donkey toward the convent door, where Lieutenant Gandaría still shouted orders.
“My son,” the priest said, “I wish to speak to you.”
Gandaría gave no sign of having heard. He continued to issue orders. Raising his voice, Father Iturran added, “It is a matter of some urgency and importance that we must speak about.”
The lieutenant paused and looked quickly at the old priest. Then he motioned for Father Iturran to follow him into the convent. In silence the two men walked down the central passageway to a small office, bare except for a desk and two chairs.
As soon as they were seated, Father Iturran spoke. “I need your help. I want soldiers and a truck or two.”
Gandaría smiled. “Father,” he asked, “are you intending to start your own war?”
The priest shook his head. In a quiet, matter-of-fact voice he explained his request. He concluded, “I cannot move the church to safety. But I can save its contents. Some of the relics are priceless.”
Gandaría rose to his feet. “How thick are the walls of the church?” he asked.
Puzzled, Father Iturran replied he thought they were at least three feet thick.
Gandaría nodded. Then he spoke flatly. “Father, my only concern with your church is this: If we are attacked, I will have to use it as a defensive position. Those walls could withstand even heavy shells.”
Father Iturran shot to his feet. Attempting to control his rage, the priest cried out, “It is my church you are talking about, my church—“
Gandaría continued from where he had been interrupted. If the town were attacked, the church, “by its very position,” would be doomed. The Nationalists would undoubtedly shell it, as they had shelled other churches. Far more important than safeguarding religious relics was the necessity of preparing the Church of Santa María as a defensive post. As such, it was without equal in Guernica. Apart from the church’s thick walls, its windows would command a field of fire that could halt an enemy advance for many hours, perhaps even days. In the interests of Guernica and of Basque freedom, the church should be readied now.
“Father,” the young officer urged, “the Fascists are coming. Be sure of that. We must do everything to stop them.”
Trembling, Father Iturran pointed out there were other strongly built buildings in the town.
Gandaría promised they would also be used. “I will take any building, big or small, that can be adapted to delay the enemy.”
The priest stared unbelievingly at the officer. “My son, you are a Catholic, of course.”
Gandaría shrugged. “In name only.”
“But even so, you wish to destroy my church?”
“No, Father. To make good use of it to protect other churches in Bilbao and elsewhere from being destroyed.” Gandaría leaned across the desk. “The enemy, Father, is now only a few miles from here. Your church has only a matter of days. It is better it is prepared—”
“Never!”
Gandaría and Father Iturran stared at each other. Then both looked toward the open door. From beyond, in the convent chapel, came the sound of singing. Las Mercedarias were ending their day with Matins.
“My son, you will be damned forever if you touch the church,” said Father Iturran.
Slowly, the old priest walked from the office. In the corridor he paused, listening to the singing. He had far from given up his fight to save the Church of Santa María.
Every night at eight-thirty, one of the nuns in the Convent of Santa Clara unlocked the outside door of an antechapel so that it could be entered from the alley beyond the door. Then the nun lit a votive candle and retired back into the main cloisters.
Inside the chapel, close to the statue of Our Lady of Peace, she had left a silver tray. Down the years on that tray had been placed hundreds of messages asking for the special prayers of the Sisters of Penance.
Many of the requests were written on cheap lined paper; a few were penned on expensive embossed cards. Prayers were asked for the sick, the dying, for sinners and penitents, for men and women burdened with anxiety and sorrow. Spinsters asked for prayers to find a husband. Children prayed for an ailing mother. Recently, there had been many prayers to bring husbands, fathers, and brothers safely back from the war.
Every night, for an hour, the chapel was open to receive these messages. Later they would be divided among the nuns, who would read the requests and, in answer to them, pray during the coming days.
Tonight, minutes after the street door was unlocked, Carmen Batzar lifted the outside latch and stepped into the tiny chapel. From beyond, somewhere in the cloisters, she could hear Matins being sung. With a deep genuflexion, Carmen paused before Our Lady of Peace. Then she placed a folded note on the tray. Inside she had written: “Your prayers are asked for Juan, gravely wounded in the cause of God.”
Carmen hurried from the chapel, anxious to return to her fiancé’s bedside. She was too preoccupied to give more than a glance to the soldiers she passed, standing around the entrance to the convent. She was some way down the street before an instinct made her stop and turn around. The soldiers were no longer to be seen.
Briefly she wondered where they had gone. Then she walked on—never guessing that the troops had done something no man had dared for more than three hundred years.
They had gone into the nuns’ cloisters.
In quickstep, Juan Plaza led his column of soldiers over the Rentería Bridge, across the railway line, and then wheeled left into the long, cobbled Calle Don Tello.
Seeing the many bars and cafés in the street, some of the soldiers broke ranks. There were angry complaints from those who continued to march. Refugees thronging the sidewalk joined in jeering at the men who left the column. Fists flew, but trouble was averted by the NCOs in the group. They rounded up as many of the defectors as they could and forced them back into line.
Even so, the column lost almost a third of its original complement.
Peering down from his apartment window on Calle de la Estación, José Rodríguez thought they looked like “a column of lunatics chanting like dervishes.”
Rodríguez turned in disgust from the window. The soldiers were a reminder that time was running out, the war now “only a bullet shot away.”
It was not bullets but the prospect of bombs that most disturbed Rodríguez. Since Rufino Unceta had first raised the possibility that the Germans might be unaware of the factory’s loyalty and importance to the Nationalist cause, Rodríguez had spent many hours pondering how to protect it from an air attack. Each scheme he thought of had to be rejected because there was neither time nor equipment to implement it. He had been forced to return to his original plan of removing vital machine parts “and trusting in God that in the event of an air attack the factory would be missed.”
Rodríguez peered down into the street. The marching column had now almost crossed the railway plaza; the tail enders were still “cavorting about.” If only, thought Rodríguez, he could make the troops guarding the armaments complex show such a lack of discipline. It was going to be very difficult for him to smuggle the machine parts out of the factory under the watchful eyes of Lieutenant Gandaría.
The soldiers were dancing to the music they could hear coming from the Plaza Las Escuelas, some two hundred yards away. Encouraged by Juan, the soldiers filled the night with raucous singing.
As they passed the Unceta complex, Juan proudly explained, “This is where we make guns to kill Franco’s Fascists.” As the word was passed down the column, the singing died away and the men became uneasy.
Juan could not understand what made them so nervous.
The bells of Santa María were tolling nine o’clock when Rufino Unceta completed his customary evening stroll. He, too, had been preoccupied with thoughts of how to save his factory. The sight of the column of troops led by a boy puzzled him. The road they were taking led to the cemetery, on the southern outskirts of the town.
He hurried to catch up with them. In response to his question, one of the soldiers told him they were going to form a new front line.
“Where?”
The soldier nodded toward the hills west of the town, in the direction of Bilbao.
Rufino Unceta turned away. If the soldier was right, then the new Republican line would be somewhere behind Guernica. In that case, the Basque forces were probably going to abandon the town. With growing excitement Unceta realized the Nationalists might occupy the town without firing a shot.
Unceta decided to prolong his walk to see what further signs of activity he could find. Briskly, he strode up the hill toward the Parliament Building. Another group of soldiers was marching toward him. He watched as they, too, took the narrow road toward Guernica’s cemetery.
The Parliament Building was in darkness; the tall iron gates in the high, railed fence surrounding the building and its gardens were locked.
Behind the gardens, at the rear of the Parliament Building, rose the Convent of Santa Clara. Ordinarily, at this time of night, its windows would also be in darkness. Tonight, lights burned in the upper rooms of the convent. And in those rooms Rufino Unceta saw something that sent his hopes crashing.
Framed in the windows were soldiers.
A few of them, acting as lookouts, had rifles; two were stationed in the belfry. No matter how far back the front line would extend behind the town, Rufino Unceta now knew one thing: The Convent of Santa Clara had become part of the latest Republican defenses.
Stunned, Unceta turned and walked back down the hill.
On her way to the dance in the main square, María Ortuza would never have looked up if one of the soldiers had not softly called down to her. The vision of a bearded man hanging out of a window of the Convent of Santa Clara was too much for María. With a shriek she ran down the road. She was still running when she reached the Plaza Las Escuelas, where the dance was in full swing. Calming herself, she looked for somebody in whom she could confide what she had just seen.
Isidro Arrién was taking his usual Sunday night stroll in the town, keeping an eye on the fare Guernica’s other restaurants were offering.
Tonight, as usual, he had no need to fear the competition. The menu of the Julián Hotel was reduced to one course—a stew. The Taberna Vasca, the Arrién’s main competitor, was also offering modest food and a dubious ersatz beer sent up from Bilbao.
Near the Taberna, new slogans had been pasted up on the walls:
DO NOT WASTE BREAD. IT HELPS THE ENEMY.
OUR CHILDREN NEED BREAD. DO NOT WASTE IT.
There were other indications of austerity. Few of the bars offered the Basques’ traditional open sandwiches of sardines and pimientos. Coffee brewed from burned barley cost 50 céntimos a cup—almost a day’s salary for some workmen. Wine, anisette, and vermouth were all watered. Tobacco was scarce; those who smoked the weekly ration of twenty cigarettes complained the butts tasted of cow dung. For Isidro, the most telling sign of all was the increasing number of homeless dogs, cast out by their owners to roam the streets, their ribs stark against the skin. He knew that some of the town’s butchers passed off small dogs as rabbits and larger ones as lambs.
Tonight, as he headed back to his restaurant, Isidro estimated he would be able to continue only one more week before the deficiencies of his larder became obvious. Although he could prolong the situation by introducing cuts now, that would not be in keeping with his policy of offering the most varied menu in Vizcaya. It was better to go out in style, he had told his wife, than to “linger on, counting every chick-pea in every bowl of soup.”
Isidro paused to listen to the band. It was playing, loudly but not very well, a medley of tunes that the bandleader had introduced as “a tribute to the foreign soldiers who have come to Spain to support the struggle.” The titles sounded strange to Isidro: “Popeye the Sailor Man” and “The Music Goes Round and Round.”
He turned away and found himself face-to-face with María Ortuza. He knew her slightly; they often nodded at each other in the early hours of market days when both were after bargains.
Now, she was flushed and breathless. He assumed she had been dancing. She spoke to him. But with the music and the noise of the large crowd, he could not quite understand what she was saying.
In such a situation, Isidro fell back on a trick he had learned early in the restaurant business. He nodded sympathetically and said he entirely agreed. Then he excused himself and walked away. But the more he thought about it, the surer he was that he had misunderstood María. He knew her as a sensible young woman, not at all the sort to tell wild tales about soldiers and nuns.
Juan Plaza led the soldiers into the field. Waiting there were some officers who had arrived by truck. They stood by its tailboard, watching the enlisted men doling out bundles of brushwood. A score of campfires were soon burning; water was boiled, coffee brewed, and hunks of bread dunked in the liquid.
Watching the men sprawled on the grass, with their stubbled faces and filthy clothes, Juan sensed they were close to total demoralization. Away from the bright lights of the town, they no longer sang or showed the bravado they had displayed on the march. The officers did nothing to restore morale; they huddled by the truck as if they, too, seemed to be waiting for leadership. Moving from one group to another, sixteen-year-old Juan thought, “If they had tails, they would be between their legs.”
From time to time, men rose and disappeared in the direction of the cemetery. Juan followed one of them and saw him scramble over the cemetery wall and drop down onto a grave. A low cursing came from behind a headstone. Juan could make out the shapes of men lying among the tombs and mausoleums. When he called out to ask what they were doing there, a voice replied there was no better place to be in the event of an air raid.
Besides those in the cemetery, some two thousand soldiers would be billeted in and around the town by nine-thirty that Sunday night.
Three hundred of them were in the gardens and monastery of the Augustine Fathers. Close to a hundred occupied the dormitory of the Convent of Santa Clara, forcing the Sisters of Penance to camp out in their refectory. In addition to the two hundred troops in the Convent of La Merced, Gandaría squeezed in nearly six hundred more. Most of the remaining men camped out by the cemetery and on the slopes west of Guernica.
Gandaría’s phone rang. It was Captain Cortés, from the hospital in the Carmelite Convent, requesting transport to move convalescing patients to the Residencia Calzada. Cortés wanted to transfer thirty cases and use their beds for the injured from Marquina.
“Why don’t you use your ambulances?” Gandaría asked.
“Because I don’t have any,” Cortés replied. “Two have broken down and the third was sent to Bilbao half an hour ago at their request.”
Gandaría told Cortés he would send a truck to ferry the patients across town.
Hardly had he replaced the telephone than there was a knock on his office door. An orderly said a young baker was seeking an appointment on an urgent matter. Wearily, Gandaría ordered that Antonio Arazamagni be shown in.
Antonio described his day, beginning with the cat episode, then his service as an ambulance driver, culminating in the struggle to get more gas to clean the blood off his car seats. That was why, he continued, he had come to see the lieutenant. He had used his small quota of fuel as part of the war effort. He hoped the lieutenant would agree he was entitled to full recompense for the money he had spent.
Rising, Gandaría gripped Antonio by the arm and silently led him from the office. Outside was the 1929 Ford. Gandaría took the baker over to the car, opened the door, and motioned Antonio to get in. “If you ever come here again looking for anything, I will have you locked up.”
Then, for the second time this Sunday, Antonio was pressed into military service. Gandaría ordered him to drive to the Carmelite Convent and help move the convalescent patients to the Residencia Calzada.
By 10:00 P.M., the flow of patients into the operating room had eased. Teresa Ortuz walked to the poupinelle to collect a set of instruments for the next operation. She handed them to the relief nurse, then went off duty after working eighteen hours in the past twenty-four.
Tonight she would not be going home. Mother Augusta had arranged for a number of nurses to sleep in the nuns’ wing, where extra beds had been prepared. For the first time Teresa was going to have a glimpse of what her life could be like as a nun.
Mother Augusta was waiting for her at the door leading to the wing. She explained that Teresa’s rest would not be interrupted unless there was a crisis during the night. The Superior then led the way to a narrow, cell-like room, barren except for a bed, a cupboard, and a crucifix on the whitewashed wall. There was one small window.
For a moment Mother Augusta hovered in the doorway. Then she told Teresa that the Second Basque Surgical Unit had been diverted to Bilbao to deal with those injured in recent air raids. That meant Teresa’s father would not be coming home. But, added Mother Augusta, he had telephoned earlier that evening to say he was well.
“He also told me, my child,” continued the Superior, “that you wish to join an order.”
“Yes, Reverend Mother.”
“Then, when the time is right, we shall talk.”
Left alone, Teresa sat on the bed, too tired to fully appreciate what the Superior had said. Soon she was asleep.
In the Bar Catalán, Juan Silliaco was experiencing his busiest night in weeks. He knew it would be several hours before he could close up and go to bed. Several dozen soldiers filled the bar, elbowing aside refugees and regulars alike. Their behavior and unkempt appearance made Silliaco angry.
He had heard rumors about men like these—the “weak elements,” soldiers who had broken in the face of the enemy. It was because of them that he would have to send his son to safety in Bilbao the next morning.
“God help us,” he suddenly shouted, “if this is what our army has come to.”
Silliaco hammered on the bar counter and announced he would serve no more drinks to “comrades who should be in the field defending us.”
One of the soldiers looked at the barman. “If you want to fight so badly, then you go.”
“Not while you remain here,” retorted Silliaco.
The soldier glared, then muttering, left, followed by his companions.
In other parts of the town, other soldiers were also receiving a cool welcome. Mayor Labauría found some of them loitering around the entrance to the Town Hall and told them to move on. The police stopped troops going into the public school and the Church of Santa María. A police patrol watched over the Parliament Building. By then, the Convent of Santa Clara was once more in darkness; there was nothing to show that troops were inside the building.
Soldiers soon gobbled up the Hotel Julián’s stew at 50 céntimos a plate; they asked for more and eventually had to be ejected by the police. Along with other small groups of tired soldiers, they drifted toward the one place in town where they appeared to be welcome—the open-air dance.
Usually, the dancing ended around 10:00 P.M. Tonight, on instructions from the town’s police chief, the band kept playing. The chief hoped the soldiers, many of them now fortified with wine, would wear themselves out, dancing the endless reels and polkas. In the meantime he made his way to discuss the troops’ conduct with Lieutenant Gandaría. When he reached La Merced Convent he found Gandaría had gone to bed, leaving strict instructions he was not to be disturbed, “unless the commander in chief wants me.”
In the presbytery of the Church of San Juan, Father Eusebio Arronategui realized that Father Iturran was repeating himself. The old priest was obviously lonely and eager to pour out his fears for the safety of the valuable objects in Santa María. He made it clear that he expected Father Eusebio not only to devise, but to supervise, a rescue operation.
The young priest remained noncommittal. But now Father Iturran was insisting that he join in a further attempt to persuade Lieutenant Gandaría to provide transport to remove the statues, paintings, ornaments, and holy relics to Bilbao.
Father Eusebio hesitated. He did not wish to hurt the old man, but he knew enough about Gandaría to guess that the lieutenant would feel he had more important uses for his trucks than moving the contents of a church. Yet he knew what an effort it was for Father Iturran to come to him for help after all the weeks of tension between them.
Father Eusebio let Father Iturran talk, while expressing no opinions himself. Encouraged, the older man spoke with passion about the attitude of the Vatican toward the war; the pope was being deliberately misled, he said.
The young priest remained noncommittal. But now Father Iturcovertly endorsed the Franco cause, just as he had more openly supported Mussolini from the first year of his pontificate in 1922. He knew, too, that the pope had a deep-seated dread of communism, and that this had undoubtedly influenced his position on the Spanish war.
Father Iturran reminded him that only a month before, in March, Pope Pius XI’s latest encyclical, “With Burning Anxiety,” had denounced Nazism.
Father Eusebio said that the pope should have extended his attack to cover the behavior of the Germans fighting for Franco.
“It is not only the Fascists who behave badly,” Father Iturran replied. “Look what they want to do to my church. A machine-gun post…” The old priest’s voice trailed away.
Father Eusebio explained that all they could do was search for some means of transport, though he had no idea where he could find a suitable vehicle; the look of hope on Father Iturran’s face made him determined to try. As Father Eusebio poured him another cup of coffee, he promised the old man that tomorrow he would make some inquiries.
In the excitement of dancing, María Ortuza’s fears diminished. The memory of the soldiers in the Convent of Santa Clara no longer troubled her.
Moving from one partner to another, the dark-haired young woman waltzed and reeled over the smooth concrete slabs of the plaza, drawing spontaneous applause from groups of admiring soldiers.
As the band struck up another waltz, she found herself in the arms of a handsome, solemn-eyed trooper. He was a poor dancer, and María found herself having to lead him. In the end she abandoned the struggle. Staring down at her, the soldier growled, “You’ll have to do better for the Moors.” The soldier pointed toward the eastern hills. “They’re out there. So are the Germans and Italians. Thousands of them. You’ll soon have a choice of dancing partners.” He thrust María aside and walked away.
Looking for a friendly face, María saw Antonio Arazamagni in the crowd and told him what the soldier had said.
Antonio was tired, but when he saw that María was frightened he tried to soothe her.
She told him about the troops in the Convent of Santa Clara. Antonio shook his head in disbelief. María took his hand and offered to show him. Together they walked along the curved narrow lane behind the Parliament Building. When they reached the convent, it was in total darkness.
“You see,” chided Antonio, “nothing.”
“Listen,” María whispered.
Through one of the open windows above, Antonio heard a man’s voice asking for a cigarette. Stunned, he led María away from the convent. When they reached the broad Calle Allende Salazar he told her, “You should go to bed and forget what you have seen.”
He escorted her to the door of the Arriendiara house, then, shaking his head, turned homeward.
Juan Plaza arrived home shortly before eleven o’clock. The farmhouse was in darkness; his parents and younger brothers were asleep.
Moving carefully about the darkened kitchen, Juan located his father’s prized possession—a wireless set. For weeks now, the dial had been set to receive Radio Bilbao’s news bulletins. Mealtimes had been regulated so that the family could listen to the newscasts.
Tonight Juan was eager to know if the radio would mention the new troop deployments around Guernica. He switched on the set, lowered the volume, and strained to hear as the announcer reported heavy air attacks on Bilbao.
Suddenly, through the static, came a new voice, speaking in a dialect Juan could not easily understand. Raising the volume slightly, Juan could make out the words. It was Radio Salamanca, the Nationalist station, warning that Franco was about to deliver “a mighty blow against which resistance is useless.” The voice urged, “Basques! Surrender now, and your lives will be spared. Resist, and you will surely die.”
From upstairs, Juan’s father called down in a sleepy voice to switch off the radio.
Isidro Arrien, hearing the broadcast, told his wife the threat was meant for Bilbao. The Nationalists would not “waste their ammunition attacking Guernica,” he said. “They’ll just walk in and take us when the time comes.”
Perhaps, he mused, Nationalist occupation would be good for his business. Free from the uncertainty of recent weeks, with supply lines stabilized, life might return to normal; the restaurant could maintain its reputation for fine dishes.
Father Eusebio, politely gesturing Father Iturran to be silent, caught only the end of Radio Salamanca’s threat. The old priest stared transfixed at the radio until Father Eusebio switched it off and tried to cheer up his companion by dismissing the broadcast as “mere propaganda.”
Father Iturran shook his head.
“We’ll move everything we can from your church in the next few days,” Father Eusebio promised.
The old priest pulled himself to his feet, and with a downcast “Good night,” left the presbytery.
Father Eusebio was tempted to “go after him, to comfort and reassure him. But I did not, for sometimes a man and his thoughts must be left alone.”
In the Carmelite Convent, those of the hospital’s night staff who were standing by the radio during a coffee break exchanged looks. For them the radio’s warning could mean more casualties.
Seated alone in a corner of the common room that nurses, doctors, and nuns shared, Carmen Batzar heard them talk of shortages of equipment and lack of bed space. She knew the men and women around her were right to maintain a professional distance from their patients; she could not. Putting down her coffee cup, she hurried back to her bedside vigil. Her fiancé was still unconscious. But now, as she gently massaged his hand, she felt his fingers tighten on hers.
Shortly after 11:00 P.M., Von Richthofen arrived from Burgos at Vitoria airfield. Overhead, the wind was chasing banks of clouds across the moon. To the north stretched a solid mass of cloud that was advancing on the clear patches of starred sky.
Von Richthofen hoped the front would drift clear of northern Spain by morning and spill its rain over France. If the wind dropped, the rain clouds might hang over the Vizcayan mountains, grounding the Legion once again.
When he reached his suite in the Frontón Hotel, he sat at his desk and wrote in his war diary: “Only the weather can actually defeat the Legion.”
Every night before retiring, Von Richthofen spent a few minutes with his journal. In a bold scrawl, on cheap, lined notepaper, he recorded his orders, vented his anger, expressed his hopes, described his future plans, and brutally criticized the Spanish commanders and Sperrle.
In his writings he complained that Nationalist generals “do not get up until eight o’clock, so the war cannot start properly until then, at least if they are to be consulted.” Von Richthofen had protested to Vigón about their tardiness, and eventually Franco would order that his commanders “be fully awake, briefed, and ready for action at the same time as the Germans.”
Von Richthofen’s diary and his official reports give a clear picture of the contempt he had for almost all the Spanish leaders, apart from Vigón. Nor was he better disposed toward their troops, who “are slow and tardy in pursuit, enabling the enemy to regroup constantly and to overcome its panic.”
Von Richthofen often wrote of the need to destroy enemy morale: “Fear, which cannot be stimulated in peaceful training of troops, is very important, because it affects morale. Morale is more important in winning battles than weapons. Continuously repeated, concentrated air attacks have the most effect on the morale of the enemy.”
Von Richthofen carefully folded the pages of his diary and placed them in an envelope addressed to his wife. That envelope was then placed in another, addressed to Max Winkler, Berlin W8, Post Schliessfach 81—the special mail drop through which all correspondence to and from the Legion was processed. In Berlin, the chief of staff’s words would be read by a censor and then forwarded to Baroness von Richthofen. She would carefully smooth the pages and insert them in yellow cloth-bound files already bulging with the day-to-day thoughts of her husband.
Two floors below in the hotel lounge, Captain Franz von Lutzow, the fair-haired commander of the HE-51 fighter squadron, expertly clasping an accordion, sang in a rich Rhineland accent to the group of pilots swaying around him:
“Along the Hamburg-Bremen line
A lovesick maiden crept.
And when the train from Flensburg came
She laid her down and wept.
The driver saw her lying there
And braked with trembling hand.
The loco failed to stop in time—
Her head rolled in the sand.”
The others roared out the chorus:
“Who begrudges the miser his money
Or the sultan of Zanzibar his crown?
There isn’t a finer sensation
Than mounting the best tart in town!”
A heartfelt cheer rang out. Then the young officers and technicians in the lounge belted out another song. Although their jollity was almost a nightly ritual, the excuse for this Sunday night was twofold: They were continuing their celebration of Hitler’s forty-eighth birthday, which had occurred five days before on April 20, and they were welcoming a new fighter pilot.
The song-filled evening was one of the first entries in the diary twenty-three-year-old Hans Joachim Wandel planned to keep of his time in Spain. For a young man who had left Germany only two days earlier, the Condor Legion’s camaraderie must have been exciting.
Around him on a dozen lips was the refrain “Trink aus! Trink aus!”
The hotel lounge was newly redecorated in a style somewhere between fin de siècle and a German travel bureau. Posters showing Berlin, Munich, and the Black Forest were tacked to the walls. The ceiling was festooned with Spanish bric-a-brac: castanets, a bullfighter’s sword, and several pairs of garters filched from tarts in the Legion’s brothel. The floor was covered with fringed rugs and the wall lights dimmed with red shades. Heavy curtains covered the windows. Stuffed armchairs stood in groups around the room. In the corner was a bar, tended by a Spaniard.
There were no women in the room—the local girls had resisted all the efforts of the Legionnaires to entice them into the hotel. The patrons of the lounge fell back on shoptalk and colorful descriptions of visits to the approved brothel.
At a dozen tables the conversation concerned the technicalities of flying and bombing. The conversation drifted to the subject of damage during low-level attacks. Many knew what it was like to return with bullet-riddled wings, an aileron shot away, a tail plane jammed; it was amazing that some of the planes had stayed airborne. Most of the pilots could look back on many months of sorties that had subjected them to extreme nervous tension and emotional strain, situations where they had been saved only by the merest quirk.
But the pilots made light of the dangers. Sangfroid was part of their carefully cultivated code, and Von Richthofen made it clear that any flier who showed signs of distress would be sent home.
Tonight, as usual, a number of them masked their feelings by swigging local brandy or the weak Spanish beer, and joined in one bawdy chorus after another.
“A thousand miles from Hamburg
A lonely flying lad
Lies dreaming of the Reeperbahn
And all the girls he’s had….”
Across the room Operations Officer Gautlitz was surrounded by a knot of fliers anxious to pump him about the following day’s targets. He responded in his usual laconic way—troops, roads, a bridge; to the fliers it sounded like more of the same. A discussion started on the best way to strafe troops. Wandel listened, wide-eyed, as the men around him talked of hedgehopping over the fields to machine-gun the enemy. Somebody asked where tomorrow’s attacks would be concentrated.
Gautlitz replied, “Probably near a place called Guernica.”
“Never heard of it,” shouted a pilot.
“Just another Spanish dump,” said another.
Half a mile from the hotel, twenty tired Spanish girls could be had for a price. They were the medically inspected and approved whores of the official Legion brothel.
The Legion’s administrative officer had commandeered a villa on the road to Vitoria airfield and turned it into the most elegant brothel in the town, so that “the lads can copulate in comfort.”
Lieutenant Hans Asmus found such reasoning “typical of the way things were done.” He himself had no desire to visit the brothel with its blue bedrooms for officers and lilac-green cubicles for the other ranks. He preferred to keep company with his nice Spanish girl. Tonight, while he was brushing up on his Spanish, a number of his fellow officers were lining up to pay 100 pesetas for fifteen minutes on a bed with a girl. To meet demand, the whores refused to spend longer with any man.
The price, a Legionnaire later recalled, was “all inclusive, two big towels, soap, and an aluminum box containing two contraceptives.”
The girls worked a twelve-hour day, with an hour’s rest after six hours’ duty. They spent one shift in the officers’ bedrooms, the next in the cubicles. Ten percent of their earnings went to the “house.” It was said that in a month here a girl could earn more than she would make in a year in a brothel catering to Spaniards.
Tonight, the line for their services was unusually long. It always was after a day of combat.
Inside the villa was a waiting room where all ranks sat, eyeing each other and the doors leading off on either side: officers to the left, NCOs to the right. While the men waited they could buy Spanish champagne, and if they wanted, look at erotic photographs.
When a man’s turn came he paid his money to the old galleon who functioned as madam. Arabic by birth, she affected what she believed was the classical Spanish look: lank kiss curls gummed to her temples and an outsize comb nested in her hair. She wore bedroom slippers and a dress that encased rolls of fat. From time to time she coughed, emitting a sound similar to an aircraft with an engine fault. Her knowledge of German was limited to a choice range of expletives. It was widely believed that she reserved her own special services for the German corporal who was in charge of the bordello. Tonight, as always, this short, potbellied soldier stood beside her, watching the steady procession of customers to and from the rooms. With midnight approaching, there was no letup in the line of men.
The Legion’s brothel in Burgos was also experiencing a steady demand. Some men, frustrated by the long line at the approved whorehouse, broke the strict Legion rule and patronized Spanish brothels where a girl was available for the equivalent then of five U.S. cents. The chance of contracting venereal disease was high; discovery of infection meant being drummed out of the Legion and sent home. A number of airmen had experienced this fate. But others continued to visit the off-limits bordellos.
For Squadron Leader Hans Henning, Freiherr von Beust, the idea of visiting any brothel was quite unthinkable. The twenty-four-year-old scion of one of Germany’s oldest families had made a firm vow since coming to Spain “not to tangle with the local girls.”
Tonight, as usual, Von Beust was passing the evening in his hotel sipping wine with Wing Commander Fuchs and First Lieutenant von Moreau. Their conversation turned to the recent loss of three Legion fliers. The trio had gone out for an afternoon drive on April 5. Near Durango their car had wandered across the Basque lines. One of the pilots had resisted capture and was shot. The other two were now prisoners in Bilbao. The incident had caused Von Richthofen to ban all Legion personnel from driving in the countryside.
Von Moreau believed the captured men would be exchanged for Russian pilots held by the Nationalists; such exchanges had occurred before. Even so, he thought the whole incident stupid. “We take enough risks in the air without sticking out our necks on the ground.”
Then talk turned to the enemy defenses. All agreed it was “foolish talk” for anyone to claim Bilbao’s defenses were easy to pierce. Only last Sunday there had been the loss of the Dornier-17 shot down over the city.
“We’ve got to stop them from strengthening their ‘ring of iron,’ “ said Von Moreau.
Then Von Beust brought up the problem of accurate bombing in the JU-52. The problem was not new, but it was peculiar to the model of JU-52 used in Spain. When that bomber approached a target, the navigator, who flew in the right-hand cockpit seat, had to climb back through the fuselage to a point in the floor where “the pot” was, a metal-plated cupola containing a machine gun and the bombsight. Before bombing, the pot had to be lowered by a hand winch, so that it was suspended beneath the fuselage like a huge egg between the wheels. After locking the pot in position, the navigator climbed down a short iron ladder and became the bombardier. He had to squat, facing forward on the cupola’s thin metal floor, and his head was above the level of the metal sides, protected only by a glass windbreak.
On the bombing run, the bombardier peered through the primitive bombsight to line up a target. Gripping the ladder with his knees for support, he guided the pilot toward the bombing point by pushing buttons that flashed red, green, or white lights in the cockpit; red was for left rudder, green indicated a need to veer right, “hold steady” was signaled by the white light.
“It’s a wonder we hit anything at all,” complained Von Beust.
Nevertheless he, like the other bomber pilots, had shown considerable accuracy during bombing missions.
Once, after dropping his bombs, Von Beust was told the pot had jammed and could not be retracted. His navigator was seriously wounded and trapped inside it. With the bomber badly damaged by Republican fighter planes, Von Beust had nursed his JU-52 homeward, the pot reducing his airspeed and dragging him toward the mountain peaks. Finally, he knew he would have to land on the nearest available flat ground.
Ahead, he saw a suitable strip. What followed would be etched into his memory. “I decided to try to land very, very slowly in the hope the pot, with my navigator inside, would be pushed up into the plane by the ground. I had no idea whether I was landing in Nationalist or Republican territory. As it turned out, I hit the deck just five hundred meters inside our lines and the pot was pushed up successfully. Unfortunately, the navigator died soon afterward from his wounds.”
The feat made Von Beust a hero to his fellow fliers; it was another escapade in what Von Moreau described as “our great Spanish adventure.”
A few blocks from where the Germans sat and gossiped, Colonel Juan Vigón was in his office signing copies of the latest Daily Intelligence Summary—an assessment of enemy intentions in the coming twenty-four hours. This one, the Spanish chief of staff believed, should give little cause for complaint. While the prose might be purple in places, the facts were accurate enough. A great hole had been punched in the enemy line and its troops were now in “a state of rout toward Guernica.”
“Reliable sources” established that the enemy had lost a great deal of equipment, was short of food and low in morale. The summary spoke of “impending catastrophe” for the Republicans.
Vigón initialed the summary and handed it to an aide for distribution. One copy would be delivered to Vitoria for Von Richthofen to peruse in the morning.
Now Vigón could no longer delay dealing with the problems of the Moroccan troops commanded by General Juan Yagüe. The Moors had been brought north, and their very presence helped create panic among the enemy. But during a recent lull in the fighting they had been taken out of the line. Reduced to mere guard duties, the Moors had grown restive. There had been reports of thefts and assaults, and a story that some Moorish soldiers had carried off a number of women to their camp, who had not been seen again.
Lieutenant Colonel Wolfram, Freiherr von Richthofen, chief of staff of the Condor Legion, who gave orders to bomb “without regard for the civilian population.” In World War II he would rise to the rank of field marshal, join Hitler’s personal staff, and receive credit for perfecting the aerial blitzkrieg technique he practiced in Spain. (Photo: Jutta, Baroness von Richthofen)
Von Richthofen, a soldier’s view. This photograph was taken on Monte Oiz the afternoon Guernica was attacked. (Photo: Hans Asmus)
Colonel Juan Vigón, commander of the Nationalist Army of the North. A former schoolteacher, he was the only Spanish officer to win respect from the exacting Von Richthofen. (Photo: Hans Asmus)
General Alfredo Kindélan, commander in chief of the Nationalist air force. (Photo: Hans Asmus)
Captain E. von Krafft, leader of the No. 3 Squadron of JU-52 bombers in the Guernica attack, during off-duty hours in Burgos. (Photo: E. von Krafft)
JU-52 BOMBER
The underside with its pot lowered. From this exposed position the bombardier guided the pilot to the target. (Photo: E. von Krafft)
A section of the control panel of a bomber used in the attack on Guernica. (Photo: Hans Asmus)
A close-up of the nose, showing No. 3 Squadron’s emblem: a red bomb with white wings in a black circle. (Photo: E. von Krafft)
Captain Klaus Gautlitz, chief operations officer, the man who ringed the target. (Photo: Hans Asmus)
Lieutenant Hans Asmus, assistant operations officer. (Photo: Hans Asmus)
First Lieutenant Hans Henning, Freiherr von Beust, leader of No. 2 Squadron. (Photo: Freiherr von Beust)
Lieutenant Hans Wandel, fighter pilot. (Photo: Authors’ Collection)
A Heinkel-111 of von Moreau’s experimental squadron receives its bomb load at Burgos. (Photo: Hans Asmus)
First Lieutenant Rudolf von Moreau (with map) briefs his squadron for the raid on Guernica. (Photo: Hans Asmus)
The Heinkel-111. (Photo: E. von Krafft)
This photograph was taken as JU-52 bombers of No.3 Squadron returned from bombing Guernica. (Photo: E. von Krafft)
In May 1939, members of the Condor Legion assembled in Berlin for a victory parade. Bedecked with flowers and their Spanish medals, they passed in review before Hitler, Sperrle, and Von Richthofen. Field Marshal Göring commended the men for their achievements in Spain. (Photo: Gerhard Berger)
A smiling Francisco Franco visits the Condor Legion headquarters in Vitoria after the attack on Guernica. (Photo: Hans Asmus)
Ordinarily such incidents would not have troubled Vigón unduly; he had authorized the Moors “to live off the land” as part payment for their services. But in the last few days there had been clashes between off-duty Nationalist troops and the mercenaries from Morocco. Serious trouble had been averted by confining the Moors to their camps. But again Spanish commanders had complained, and Vigón knew he must act swiftly.
Unlike the Spanish troops, the Germans were friendly toward the Moors. The Condor Legion admired their fighting ability, sometimes sought their company, and at times insisted on taking them into smart restaurants, forcing other patrons to leave. Von Richthofen had once affectionately referred to “our dusky friends,” as feared on the ground “as we are in the air.”
Vigón knew he had to be careful. If the Moroccan commander, General Yagüe, felt his men were being slighted, he would likely enlist German support—and cause yet another rumpus at High Command level. Vigón was under orders to maintain a policy of “peaceful coexistence” among the various Nationalist factions; at this critical stage of the war Franco did not want to alienate his allies.
It was close to midnight before Vigón hit upon the solution to his problem, one that would undoubtedly satisfy Von Richthofen’s continued demand that ground troops be used immediately to follow up air attacks. It would also give the Moroccans a further chance to vent their blood lust.
Vigón would send the Moors back into the front line—to the sector in front of Guernica.