Shortly after noon, Von Richthofen arrived in the Frontón Hotel, Vitoria.
From the moment Von Richthofen returned to the operations room, and for the next six hours, he was always within the earshot or eyesight of Hans Asmus. Today, Asmus, an acknowledged admirer of Von Richthofen, clearly recalls what the chief of staff said and did during those hours.
Von Richthofen marched into the operations room and announced, “The attack is on.”
Asmus remembers “the feeling of excitement that radiated from Von Richthofen. He tried hard to conceal it, because he was not the sort to show any emotion. But he had been given a real opportunity to deal the enemy a telling blow. And it was natural that he should show some reaction.”
The response among the Legion personnel was, in Asmus’s word, “electric.” Von Richthofen moved to the plotting table, accompanied by Gautlitz, Raunce, and Asmus. The others in the room watched as Von Richthofen double-checked the weather reports, reconnaissance photographs, and intelligence summary.
Finally, he turned to the Aircraft Availability Logbook and issued orders.
Asmus recalls, “Von Richthofen jabbed at a large-scale Target Selection Indicator map and said, ‘The bridge and roads leading to it must be closed.’ On the map, Guernica was about three hundred meters west of the bridge. But this was war, and nobody stopped to say, ‘Wait a minute, there is a town near that bridge.’ Quite simply, the question of the proximity of Guernica did not come into our calculations.”
The Rentería Bridge, Asmus would later claim, was chosen “as the prime interdictory target, and the roads leading to the bridge as subsidiary targets.”
He would remember Von Richthofen saying, “Anything that moves on those roads or that bridge can be assumed to be unfriendly and should be attacked.”
The chief of staff reinforced this order by pointing to the aerial photographs: They clearly showed troops moving down the roads from Marquina.
Nobody asked what should be done if troops had already crossed the bridge into Guernica. “The matter did not arise because we had no idea then that there were troops in the town,” said Asmus. “However, it was standard practice that wherever troops were seen they were attacked. That is what war is about.”
Von Richthofen now began to discuss the type and number of aircraft to be used on the raid.
He ordered all three Junkers-52 squadrons to attack “in a concerted, one-run stagger”: twenty-three heavy bombers to hit the target in wave after wave.
In addition, the four Heinkels of Von Moreau’s experimental bomber squadron were to act as “pathfinders”; Von Moreau himself was first to fly a solo sortie over the target area, testing out local antiaircraft defenses.
Six Messerschmitt BF-109s were to provide fighter protection for Von Moreau’s bombing force; later they would strafe the target themselves. A squadron of ten HE-51s were to fly low-level attacks over the target area, bombing and machine-gunning.
Asmus would recall that Von Richthofen said the bombs were to be “the usual mix, including incendiaries—ideal for creating panic among a retreating enemy. One incendiary could set a truck on fire, the best way to block a road.”
Von Richthofen wanted the second fighter squadron, using six HE-51s, to fly a diversionary sortie ahead of the main task force, attacking the area immediately to the north of Monte Oiz, which had just fallen into Nationalist hands.
When the operational orders were written by Raunce in the DOR, Von Richthofen announced he was “going up to the front to try to see the attack going in.”
He detailed Asmus to accompany him. Although the twenty-three-year-old was surprised to find himself “pulled out of ops for the afternoon,” he relished the prospect of “seeing some real action again.”
Von Richthofen decided that Gautlitz could conduct the briefing of the fighter pilots at Vitoria airfield. He was also to relay the attack orders to Major Fuchs at Burgos, so that the wing commander could brief the bomber squadron leaders.
The chief of staff looked steadily at Gautlitz. In a measured voice, he posed the question he always asked at the end of a discussion: “Is everything absolutely clear?”
Gautlitz said it was. He would, Asmus knew, “faithfully deliver the orders, not changing them by a single word.”
Asmus and Von Richthofen drove to the front amid the fluffy clouds, warm breeze, blossoming trees, and birdsong of a mellow Vizcayan afternoon. Asmus would recollect Von Richthofen’s saying, “We could not have hoped for better weather for this operation.”
Soon after Von Richthofen’s departure, Captain Gautlitz relayed his orders to Major Fuchs in Burgos. The two men then held a highly technical discussion concerning assembly areas for bombers and fighters, turning points, friendly ground-troop markings, bombing heights, time over target, bomb loads, predicted windspeed over target, final approach direction, return routes to base.
When all these points had been agreed upon, Gautlitz assembled his own briefing team: the navigating officer, the intelligence officer, and the met officer. They arrived at the airfield about 1:30 P.M., and made their way to the briefing room, a stark hut furnished only with chairs and wall maps.
The room was already filled with fighter pilots dressed in flying jackets, breeches, and calf boots. Clutching his new flying helmet, Lieutenant Wandel felt slightly self-conscious. He had been one of the first into the briefing hut and was seated near the front.
Using a large-scale Target Selection Indicator map, Gautlitz identified the two main target areas: the “primary” one at Guernica; the “diversionary” target around Múnditibar, north of Monte Oiz.
Gautlitz dealt first with the diversionary attack at Múnditibar. He ordered six HE-51s from Fighter Squadron No. 2 to attack the area, adding, “Almost certainly there will be many retreating troops there.” These fighters were to take off at 3:45 P.M., and would play no direct part in the attack on Guernica.
The pilots jotted down their instructions.
He moved on to the “primary target” and repeated the attack instructions he had been given by Von Richthofen.
First Lieutenant Herwig Knuppel’s Messerschmitt squadron of six fighters was to provide a protective umbrella for Von Moreau’s Heinkels. They would fly above the bombers, escort them to the target and back to Nationalist-held territory. Afterward, the Messerschmitts would return and attack the primary target area.
Captain Franz von Lutzow’s ten HE-51s of No. 1 Squadron were to carry out a series of low-level attacks over the primary target area, machine-gunning and dropping light bombs.
The navigating officer took over. Using a map on which he had already traced the route to and from the target, he took the pilots stage by stage along the outward run. He indicated the assembly area over Villarreal and said he expected all aircraft to reach the area at the right height and on time—a reference to the recent poor timekeeping of some pilots.
He pointed to the first turning point, the village of Garay. It was here that Knuppel’s Messerschmitts would rendezvous with Von Moreau’s Heinkels.
He addressed himself to Von Lutzow’s pilots. By the time they reached Garay, they must be flying in pairs close together, ready to go into the attack.
From Garay all aircraft heading for the primary target would bear slightly to the northwest. The next landmark, he indicated, would be the peak of Monte San Miguel; the mountain was one of the dominant features in the area around Guernica. Their course would take them just east of the mountain. After they had passed it, the River Mundaca would be on their port wing. They were to continue northward toward the Bay of Biscay, circle over the fishing port of Elanchove, near Bermeo, and then return southward, following the Mundaca estuary toward Guernica. “Follow the river, and you can’t go wrong,” concluded the navigating officer.
The intelligence officer spoke next. Little, if any, enemy fighter opposition was likely, and there had been no time for the enemy to prepare antiaircraft defenses. “In any event,” he continued, “by the time you attack, the whole area will have been hit by the bombers.”
The met officer was brief. The pilots should expect scattered clouds, a light wind, some ground haze. The initial attack would be downwind. “After that, it is up to you, but the weather this afternoon should cause no difficulties.”
Captain Gautlitz had the last word: “Time is all-important. You must get to the rendezvous area on time, make your turning points on time, and get to the target on time, so that there is no danger of your being there when the bombers are overhead. I don’t want a repetition of Durango.”
At Durango, some of the HE-51s had been low over the town when the Junkers had begun their run—and the fighters had nearly been hit by their bombs.
“And stick to your route. It has been designed to achieve maximum surprise,” continued Gautlitz. “Over the target there will be plenty of room to maneuver. The valley is about five kilometers wide. Use it sensibly. And watch your fuel. With full tanks you should have up to forty minutes over the target. Use that time to full effect. Get in close and low. Pick your objective and stick to it. You just waste ammunition if you chop and change all the time.”
Along with some of the other newly arrived pilots, Wandel took notes rapidly.
“But don’t take unnecessary risks. If you’re downed, there is nothing we can do for you. So stay up.”
For the first time, Wandel felt a bit nervous.
The experienced bomber squadron leaders seated in Major Fuchs’s office at Burgos airfield took few notes. Von Moreau was ordered to take off at 3:45 P.M. and lead his squadron to the assembly area five miles north of Burgos. He would then leave on his own for Guernica; his squadron would proceed without him to Garay, where Knuppel’s fighter escort would rendezvous with them. Von Moreau would complete his inspection of the target area, bomb it, and return to Garay to collect his squadron with their escort. The Messerschmitts would fly some 2,000 feet above the Heinkels, ready to pounce on any enemy aircraft, and after the bombing, would accompany them back over the Nationalist lines.
The main Junkers bomber force would take off at one-minute intervals after 5:15 P.M. and circle the rendezvous area. On the run northward each squadron would maintain a one-mile gap, so that by the time the last of Von Knauer’s bombers were clearing the target, First Lieutenant von Beust’s leading No. 2 Squadron would be lining up for their bombing run. Following a mile behind the last plane would be the third squadron, led by Captain von Krafft.
The squadrons would, as usual, bomb in “chains” of three aircraft flying in V formations from a height of some 6,000 feet. They would approach the bridge sideways. The standard method of attack would have been to bomb the bridge along its length in single file. But the desire for surprise, and the hills in the Guernica area, precluded such an approach.
Apparently none of the squadron leaders queried the bombing height. From 6,000 feet, on past experience, the Junkers bombardiers would be likely to have a high percentage of misses against such a small target. Despite the facts that no enemy aircraft were expected in the area and that antiaircraft fire would probably be nonexistent, no one suggested it would almost certainly be safe to reduce height to give the bombardiers a more reasonable chance of hitting the target.
And nobody voiced any concern over the danger to civilians that must have been apparent, even at this stage, to the airmen.
But years later, Captain von Krafft would recall that he had objected “with utter determination to the use of incendiary bombs.” He argued that from such a height the lightweight canisters would “fall like autumn leaves, out of control.” Although he was the ranking squadron leader, his objection, he said, was brushed aside. “Fuchs would not allow any argument on the matter—it was an order. He was under considerable pressure from Von Richthofen, who wanted the mission to go ahead, and quickly.”
Von Krafft testily concluded, “So we are to assume there are wooden bridges at Guernica.” Fuchs ignored his comment and reminded crews about the correct procedures for jettisoning bombs.
The wing commander hoped the matter would not arise. But if bad weather suddenly developed, or enemy fighter planes did disrupt the attack, then all bombs must be dropped “in the general target area.”
Von Beust would remember Fuchs’s ending the meeting with the words “This mission is very important.”
The squadron leaders left Fuchs’s office to brief their crews.
Scores of Spanish workmen at Burgos airfield hauled the sledgelike bomb trains out of the dumps to the waiting aircraft. Under the supervision of German ground staff, they winched the bombs into their racks. As usual, Von Moreau’s squadron was the first to be loaded.
Next, the bomb trains moved to Von Knauer’s squadron of JU-52s. Each plane received a mixture of high-explosive and antipersonnel bombs—and at least 110 incendiary bombs. All told, the three Junkers squadrons alone would carry well over 2,500 incendiaries.
Von Knauer had never before carried incendiary bombs against such a target. It hardly seemed possible to him that the slim metal cases filled with thermite, a mixture of aluminum and iron oxide, would, when ignited, reach 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit.
Von Beust’s No. 2 Squadron was similarly loaded. The incendiaries were together in one suspension frame in the forward bay of each bomber’s hold; the big bombs were placed behind them in four separate racks. Over the target, the bombardier would release the incendiaries first; the other bombs would drop in sequence.
As usual, the German ground crews made sure the Spanish laborers removed any mud from the bomb casings and fins. A lump of mud could affect a bomb’s balance as it plunged to the ground.
Finally the loading teams reached No. 3 Squadron, seven JU-52s dispersed in a rough arc. The Spaniards worked carefully. Still fresh in their minds was the recent incident when a badly fitted 550-pounder had fallen and crushed a loader.
Today there were no mishaps. The last bomb was in place, the last aircraft fuel tank filled.
At Burgos and Vitoria airfields, a combined force of forty-three bombers and fighters was ready. Among them they would carry 100,000 pounds of high-explosive, shrapnel, and incendiary bombs—in order, it would later be claimed, only to knock out a stone bridge just 75 feet long and 30 feet wide.
Such a heavy expenditure of explosives was a departure from the usual careful husbandry of Von Richthofen. In effect, he was prepared to use about 400 pounds of explosives for every square yard of bridge he wanted to destroy. And he was about to send the largest force until then ever assembled for an air attack in Spain to destroy a bridge so small it was supported only by two slim pillars.
Certainly, the bridge was near an important road junction. But destroying it would not trap the enemy to be rounded up by the Nationalist ground forces. A little upstream, the Mundaca was easy to ford; even if the Republican forces had to leave behind their trucks and ammunition carts, they could wade across the river, which in places was no more than ankle-deep. Von Richthofen, of course, may not have known that or even considered it.
But given that he was intent on hitting only the bridge, he had at his disposal a weapon far more suited to the task than the cumbersome Junkers. Each of his Stuka dive bombers was capable of carrying a single bomb weighing 1,000 pounds. Equipped with the latest bombsight, able to nose-dive onto a target, any of the four Stukas available that day would have had a high chance of taking out the bridge with one direct hit. Even a near miss with such a bomb would have set up a powerful Shockwave that, if it did not cause the bridge to collapse, would doubtless have made it unsafe for traffic.
According to Lieutenant Hans Asmus, Von Richthofen never considered using the Stukas. He chose instead to rely mainly on the Junkers-52 bombers, with their antiquated bombsights and—because of the drag caused when their pots were lowered—notorious instability during the final run in to a target.
Wind has always been the nemesis of bombardiers; a sudden freak wind can upset even the most sophisticated calculations. However, those winds generally occur well above 6,000 feet.
The bombardiers soon to be over Guernica were certainly not justified, at least as far as their heavy bombs were concerned, in saying later, “The wind blew our bombs off target.”
And the “mix” of bombs they were to drop was, to say the least, unusual for an attack intended primarily against stonework. The antipersonnel bombs would have little effect, and the one thing incendiaries could not do was burn down an all-stone bridge.
But “splinter” and “fire” bombs could be expected to create havoc in a town that Von Richthofen knew was no more than 300 meters away.
The question remains: Did Von Richthofen really intend his flying armada to rain most of their 100,000 pounds of bombs only on the bridge, or was it no concern of his whether they were scattered over a large area and killed defenseless civilians, so long as the retreating troops were delayed and disrupted?
If that question troubled Von Richthofen as he now drove north toward the front line “to see the action,” he did not share it with Lieutenant Asmus.
And all Asmus would remember of that journey was “sitting tight in my seat as Von Richthofen drove his Mercedes as if it were a fighter plane.”
At 2:00 P.M., Teresa Ortuz scrubbed up with Captain Cortés and the anesthetist for a midthigh operation on a soldier whose leg had gone gangrenous. This was the first amputation she had assisted with, and she was astonished what a simple job it was.
Antonio Arazamagni would remember the weather that afternoon as “created especially to make you forget everything except the joy of being alive.” But the beguiling sun and breezes did not distract him from his task.
“I was still hoping to find my relatives and friends from Marquina,” he later recalled. “The bottom of Calle Santa María was the poorer end of the street, and I thought that maybe without much money they had gone there to find a room. There weren’t many people around when I got there, and I was about to give up looking when I heard this noise—it sounded like dozens of cats—coming from one of the lodging houses. I looked through the window. Inside, the room was filled with caged cats.
“I knew what this place was—a cat-processing factory. The poor cats were being kept alive to be killed when the market price went even higher for meat.”
At first Antonio was tempted to go to the police. But remembering his unsatisfactory visit to report the theft of a sack of flour, he doubted that the police would bother to try to save a roomful of cats.
He went back to the bakehouse, selected a heavy pastry knife and a wrench from the toolbox in his car, and returned to the lodging house. Making sure he was seen by no one, he opened the door and slipped inside.
Antonio moved down a dark hallway. The stench was almost overpowering. At the end of the corridor a door was ajar. Moving on tiptoe, he peered into the room beyond. A man was asleep on a bed. Antonio carefully closed the door, retraced his steps up the corridor to another door, opened it, and found himself among the imprisoned cats.
One by one he opened the cages. Hissing and spitting, the animals fled out of the house and into the street. In minutes, Antonio later calculated, he must have freed fifty cats.
Francisco Lazcano was enmeshed in his first meeting with Captain Juan de Beiztegi and Lieutenant Gandaría. Militarily, the situation was even worse than Lazcano had expected. Beiztegi said that the town’s defenses were “short of everything except courage.”
Lazcano promised to intervene personally with President Aguirre to see if some arms could be prized away from the redoubt around Bilbao.
Gandaría said bluntly, “To fortify Bilbao at the expense of all else is militarily and politically bad tactics.”
Lazcano asked Gandaría what, in his view, would be good tactics.
Gandaría told him, “Guernica must become a new fortress, barring the way to Bilbao.”
Lazcano was impressed. He felt that a mind like Gandaría’s would be useful at GHQ.
Juan Silliaco noticed that some new slogans, typical Basque barroom humor, were going the rounds: “If wine interferes with your job, quit your job,” and, “A night of good drinking is worth a year’s thinking.” The one he liked was, “If you are drinking to forget, please pay before you begin.”
Too few people were drinking today. Bored with manning a virtually empty bar, Silliaco left an assistant in charge and went to the fire station. He was surprised to find its doors open and the horses in their traces. The stable boy explained the orders had come from Town Hall.
“Close the doors,” growled Silliaco. “And unharness the horses. This isn’t a circus.”
From his office in the Town Hall, Mayor Labauría could see boys scampering around the marketplace. He probably envied their freedom; increasingly, his life was no longer his own. The smiling, polite Francisco Lazcano had gradually encroached on every aspect of his work. Now, at an hour when Labauría usually catnapped after a leisurely lunch, Lazcano was in his office, insisting they must finalize the evacuation plans.
Resignedly, Labauría turned his attention to the problem.
In the Unceta arms factory, José Rodríguez took his first step to stop Lieutenant Gandaría’s plan to move the works to Bilbao.
Quietly and unobtrusively, he ordered trusted foremen to slow down production. First one machine, and then others, developed mysterious faults. The armed soldiers patrolling the factory floor watched uneasily as the diminutive Rodríguez displayed convincing rage about the breakdowns he had engineered.
Around midafternoon, Carmen Batzar returned to the Carmelite Convent with her newly updated diaries. She wanted Juan to read them.
When she reached his bedside he was asleep. After sitting with him for a time, she placed the diaries beside the bed and left.
For the banker Julio Bareno, business was slow all morning. He heard some of the new rumors as he stood in the bank doorway, thumbs in jacket lapels, looking into the sunlit street.
The goings-on at the fire station next door had bothered him: Harnessing up the horses and opening the doors could mean only that “fire was expected, and the only fire that could be anticipated was from enemy attack.”
The gunfire in the hills seemed closer, more intense. A customer added to his fears by saying “it was a positive fact that Nationalist troops had entered Marquina.”
They had not, but Bareno had no way of knowing this. His apprehension increased when he tried to telephone the bank’s headquarters in Bilbao. The line was dead. He assumed it had been cut by enemy action; in fact, a fault in the bank’s switchboard had made it inoperative. Engineers repaired the fault by 2:00 P.M., but by then Bareno had given up trying to reach Bilbao.
He decided to act on his own.
After the staff had gone home for their early-afternoon break, he locked the bank’s door and began to bag up all the silver and notes, which he then placed in a massive steel safe at the rear of the building.
Among the written guarantees the safe carried was one stating it could resist heat up to 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. Its manufacturers had not anticipated man’s ability to produce slim canisters capable of causing temperatures well above that.
When the staff returned for the afternoon’s work, he told them to “go home, collect your families, and leave town. This is no longer a safe place to be.” Alarmed, the staff did as they were told.
Alone once more, Bareno gathered together the bank’s ledgers and stuffed them into an old-fashioned mail pouch. Then, for the last time, he locked the bank doors behind him. He collected his wife from their apartment above the bank and walked out into the street. Sharing the weight of the heavy mail pouch between them, they headed out of town.
In his presbytery, Father Eusebio continued his careful inspection of the borrowed plate camera. Like most amateurs, he was not sure of angles and perspectives. Periodically he thrust his head under the tentlike black canopy to peer through the viewfinder.
María Ortuza was also preoccupied with photographs that afternoon—those in a woman’s magazine she had saved for just such spare moments. Señora Arriendiara was visiting the Count of Arana, and she had told María she would not be home for dinner.
María knew she could safely steal an hour or two to lose herself in the glossy world of fashionable ladies posing in expensive surroundings. She had often entertained a secret dream—to recline in a splendid bed, sipping champagne like the most elegant models in the magazine.
Von Moreau strapped himself in and watched his navigator settle in the adjoining seat. Behind them, the radioman began to warm up his Morse code set. The fourth member of the crew was strapped in the open machine-gun turret above. For the rest of the raid he would be out of contact with the three men bunched up in the front of Heinkel bomber 25-3.
As regulations prescribed, Von Moreau asked the radio operator if his set was functioning properly. The radioman said it was. Von Moreau then checked his code list containing the Morse signals that could be transmitted to other aircraft or back to base: KA meant “proceed with mission as planned,” KB meant “mission completed.”
Von Moreau waited patiently for the signal to press the starter button.
Sometime after 3:00 P.M., Von Richthofen and Asmus reached the foot of Monte Oiz, just captured by Mola’s troops. Its wooded slopes rose nearly 4,000 feet above sea level, and a Spanish officer said that from the summit the two men might be able to see the target area.
Von Richthofen led Asmus at a brisk pace up the mountainside.
At three-forty, one of the ground crew standing by Von Moreau’s Heinkel removed the rudder lock on the rail and made a final inspection of the control surfaces. He then moved to the front of the aircraft, and positioning himself some distance before the Perspex nose, moved his hands up and down rapidly.
Von Moreau nodded and pressed the starter button. The port engine whined and its propeller spun into life; moments later, the starboard motor was also running. Watching the fuel and oil pressure, he tightened his hold on the control column as 22,046 pounds of aircraft, fuel, and bombs shuddered from the vibration of the engines. He pushed the throttles wider, watching the rev counters climb. Then, when he felt the tail wheel starting to rise, he throttled back.
He glanced at the navigator beside him, monitoring the instrument panel; the man affirmed, “Alles in Ordnung.”
He looked in his rearview mirror; the radio operator nodded.
Von Moreau checked the time on the instrument panel clock and looked out over the nose of the aircraft. Two ground crewmen were waving him forward. He glanced again at the clock. Then he eased open the throttles and 25-3 began to move over the grass.
It was exactly 3:45 P.M.
The Heinkel taxied slowly away from the dispersal area to the southern end of the airfield.
By the time Von Moreau’s aircraft had reached the runway, the rest of his squadron was beginning to follow. He pushed open the throttles, and 25-3 accelerated. Correcting for the incessant cross-winds at Burgos airfield, he gently juggled the port and starboard engine throttles and felt the exhilarating pressure of almost 2,000 horsepower hurtling the aircraft at over 100 miles an hour into the air.
Beside him the navigator called out each stage as it was completed. There was a thumping beneath their feet as the undercarriage retracted into its nacelle.
“Wheels up,” said the navigator.
“Wheels up,” acknowledged Von Moreau.
There was another, less noticeable, bump as the wing flaps slipped back into position.
Von Moreau altered the position of the throttles, reducing the aircraft’s angle and rate of climb, and at the same time eased the control column forward.
Cruising at some 180 miles an hour, the Heinkel bomber continued toward the rendezvous point, gaining altitude all the time.
Guernica and vicinity
The attackers’ route: from Condor Legion airbases at Burgos and Vitoria to Guernica and back
For every 500 feet it climbed, the temperature dropped one and a half degrees.
At 5,000 feet Von Moreau leveled out and circled the rendezvous point five miles to the north of the airfield. His gunner had an unsurpassed view of the other Heinkels coming up to meet them. He could also feel every course change Von Moreau executed. The gunner braced himself as he saw the wing flaps suddenly appear; moments later he experienced a bone-jarring jolt as the aircraft bounced upward.
Von Moreau used this technique to gain height rapidly. By lowering flaps 15 degrees, he caused the Heinkel to hit a wall of air that sent it shooting upward in 100-foot “bounces.” Von Moreau called this “my aerial ladder.”
At 6,000 feet he completed one circle over the aircraft beginning to orbit below. Then he trimmed the controls, corrected course for the changed wind direction, and headed northward. Behind him, the rest of the experimental squadron would form up, and in exactly thirty minutes’ time, rendezvous with the Messerschmitts over Garay.
As Von Moreau’s flight north began, the navigator made some calculations on his plotting pad. He checked his map. Then he confirmed they were on schedule, thirty-five minutes from TOT—their planned time over target.
In the operations room at the Frontón Hotel, Captain Gautlitz chaired the daily meeting of the Target Selection Committee, advising on the Legion’s objectives for tomorrow.
In the absence of Von Richthofen, Gautlitz played it safe. He earmarked Bilbao for a series of raids next day.
There was only one drawback. The met officer announced another spell of unsettled weather for the next twenty-four hours.
Over the village of Garay, Von Moreau throttled back, banking the aircraft in a wide quarter-circle.
The navigator, now lying full-length in the bombardier’s position in the Heinkel’s nose, could see people looking up from the village. Consulting his watch to check whether they had arrived early or late over Garay, he was able to calculate whether the windspeed had varied from that predicted by the met officer.
Von Moreau’s navigator was one of the most experienced bombardiers in the Condor Legion. He had an enviable record of bull’s-eyes, and his coolness in action made him an ideal flying partner for the squadron leader. Together the two men had a well-deserved reputation for hitting targets accurately and consistently—a rare achievement in a war where bombing inaccuracy was standard.
In the exposed upper turret, the machine-gunner’s main role was to defend the Heinkel against enemy aircraft attacking from above and behind. No attacks had occurred for weeks. Flying, for Von Moreau’s gunner, had become extremely boring.
In the cockpit the sun was pleasantly warm. Behind Von Moreau, the radioman left his seat and crowded forward to look at the landscape ahead. Until they reached the target area, or unexpectedly encountered opposition, there was not much for him to do.
Von Moreau brought the Heinkel lower to get a better view of the broad, gently sloping valleys. There were forests of pine trees and white streams of water tumbling down sharp rock faces. Occasionally he saw farmers plowing with teams of oxen or tending pocket-size meadows.
Ahead rose the bulk of Monte San Miguel; on the summit was a small church, the cross on its roof glinting in the sun. The Heinkel passed to the right of the mountain and continued northward toward the sea. Away on the port side was the meandering River Mundaca; in front were the village of Elanchove and the Bay of Biscay.
Over Elanchove, Von Moreau banked in a steep turn, then leveled out, heading south toward Guernica.
Not long after, the bombardier twisted his head and shouted, “One minute to TOT.” Then he turned back to his bombsight. They were above Arteaga.
Von Moreau throttled back. His airspeed dropped to 160 mph. This would be a “dummy run,” an opportunity for his bombardier to practice lining up the target and for the rest of the crew to scan the area for antiaircraft emplacements.
Von Moreau dipped his starboard wing to get a better look at the Mundaca; here it was quite narrow.
In the upper turret, the gunner could see a castle close to the river. Once it had belonged to Isabel II. Today it was deserted, its huge gardens overrun with oaks and cypress trees, its four towers covered with creepers.
Now a small range of foothills lay below. There was a village in one of them. Von Moreau glanced at his map and identified Corte-zubi. The Heinkel sped over the hamlet.
“Target in sight,” shouted the bombardier.
Von Moreau and his crew sat silently at their stations. Immediately ahead lay Guernica. Only the machine-gunner in the upper turret, facing backward, could not yet see the town.
The two lookouts on the roof of the Carmelite Convent spotted Von Moreau’s Heinkel approaching up the valley. They rang their hand bell and shouted, “Avión! Avión!” Mother Augusta telephoned La Merced Convent, but before anyone answered, she heard the bells of Santa María Church ringing their warning. She replaced the receiver and hurried to the operating room.
Captain Cortés told her he would continue performing surgery. Teresa laid out instruments for the next case.
In other parts of the hospital the ringing of the lookouts’ bell initiated automatic emergency actions. Two nuns went out to the Bermeo road, ready to turn away all traffic in order to avoid drawing attention to the building. Inside the convent, nurses and nuns went to the upper-floor wards and began to take all the patients to the ground floor. Other nurses gathered together emergency medical supplies.
In the center of Guernica, most people were momentarily puzzled by the sound of the church bells. By the time they realized the pealing signaled an air-raid warning, 25-3 was almost overhead. A few ran to their nearest refugios, or to Santa María Church.
Outside La Merced, Lieutenant Gandaría trained his glasses on the Heinkel. He turned and shouted to Captain de Beiztegi, “It’s a Fascist!”
The two officers ran into the convent, seeking, Gandaría later said, “any suitable gun to shoot at the plane.”
Across town, in the Astra-Unceta complex, Luis Unceta rang the factory fire-alarm bell—the prearranged signal for the 120 workers to hurry to the bunker at the rear of the plant. The soldiers guarding the equipment did nothing to stop them.
Augusto, Luis’s youngest brother, ran out of the factory gate to collect his mother, brother, and two younger sisters. Alerted by the bells of Santa María, they had already left their mansion for the bunker, as had the domestic staff. Augusto urged them along more quickly. The fourteen-year-old thought he was acting “quite calm and grown-up in the circumstances”— until his mother reminded him that an Unceta did not shout in public like some street urchin.
In Rodríguez’s office, Rufino Unceta stood still as he watched the Heinkel approaching. Only his eyes followed the aircraft’s course as it passed overhead, climbing steeply.
Unceta turned to Luis and quietly asked him to switch off the factory alarm bell, “because everyone must know by now that there are aircraft about.”
Then, Rodríguez would recall, “with great dignity, Señor Unceta walked through his factory to ensure all the workers had gone to the bunker. He ignored the soldiers patrolling the factory floor. His only concern was for the safety of his workers.”
Unceta’s coolness helped dispel the general manager’s “sickening feeling that my premonition was coming true.” Even so, Rodríguez refused to leave until he saw his wife coming through the factory gate.
Behind her, he saw other people running into the railway station plaza. Rodríguez thought “how ill-advised they were to congregate there, when they should have been seeking shelter.”
He and his wife hurried to the bunker.
By the time 25-3 passed over the southernmost part of Guernica, it had gained considerable height. While Von Moreau’s eyes and hands were occupied with flying the bomber, part of his mind was weighing whether the troops he had glimpsed on the western slopes of the town indicated the area was, after all, fortified. Anxious not to be an easy target for any antiaircraft fire, he climbed steeply. But there was no flak.
Von Moreau’s bombardier, spread-eagled in the nose, had little difficulty looking down on the River Mundaca and spotting the Rentería Bridge.
From near the bridge Juan Plaza saw the plane “climbing like a rocket. Then it leveled out and headed for Múgica [a small village two miles southwest of Guernica]. It did a sudden turn and disappeared behind the hills to the west of the town.”
Juan, on his way from the farm to deliver homebaked bread to his grandmother, who lived near the Rentería Bridge, presumed the pilot was lost.
Faustino Pastor, crouching in his machine-gun pit on the slope behind the monastery of the Augustine Fathers, identified the aircraft as a Heinkel. His machine gun could not be inclined upward at a steep enough angle. It was impossible for him to fire at the bomber.
When the plane turned toward Múgica, other soldiers rose to their feet with relieved cheers. But Pastor was not so sure the danger was over. He dismantled the gun from its tripod so that, if necessary, next time he would have a freer arc of fire.
The ringing of the bells failed to disturb María Ortuza’s reading. Curled upon her mistress’s sofa, she was so enthralled by the love story in her magazine that she failed to hear the renewed shouts from the street outside: “Avión! Avión!”
Von Moreau returned for his second flight over the town, this time a textbook bombing run at about 4,000 feet. He was lower than the planned bombing height, but quite safe now that he had confirmed the absence of flak guns. The troops did not bother him; the danger of being brought down by rifle or machine-gun fire was minimal.
“Bombs ready,” reported the bombardier.
As they approached the bridge and the town, he called out fractional course changes, which Von Moreau executed. Slowed to about 150 mph, the Heinkel bomber approached Guernica. Nothing disturbed the crew’s concentration.
“Bombs gone.”
As the bombs dropped away, the Heinkel, freed of their weight, rose. Von Moreau opened the throttle and banked away to port, above the Unceta factory and bunker and across the broad floor of the valley.
Von Moreau and his bombardier, despite their proved reputation for accuracy, had dropped their bombs hundreds of yards from the Rentería Bridge, in fact near the railway station plaza in the center of Guernica.
Juan Plaza guessed the Heinkel was directly above the Rentería Bridge when it dropped the bombs. They curved down, falling faster each second of their descent.
Half a mile separated Juan from the point of impact, “but the noise made my hair stand on end.”
He watched as a curtain of dust swirled upward. Then came a sound that made Juan tremble. “It was a wild shrieking of terrified people.”
He ran toward the town.
One 550-pound high-explosive bomb sliced away the front of the Julián Hotel across from the railway station, leaving four floors suddenly exposed after the rubble settled.
Another bomb fell behind the railway station, collapsing part of the rear of the building.
Other bombs fell in the station plaza itself, among people waiting for the next train to Bilbao, and those who had rushed to the square, believing it to be the nearest safe open space, following Von Moreau’s first flight over the town.
Nobody would ever know how many were in the plaza when the bombs fell; probably between three and four hundred persons. Those on the edge of the crowd, having spotted Von Moreau’s second run, had just enough time to run into adjoining streets before his bombs hit. Those in the center of the plaza had no chance.
Juan Silliaco was walking up Calle de la Estación, about a hundred yards from the square, on his way to the fire station because “that plane was up to no good,” when the blast from the bombs knocked him off his feet.
From where he lay, he saw the first people die in Guernica: “A group of women and children. They were lifted high into the air, maybe twenty feet or so, and they started to break up. Legs, arms, heads, and bits and pieces flying everywhere.”
Unaware of his own injuries—Silliaco’s arms and legs were cut by splinters—he staggered into the dust to try to help.
He stumbled over something. It was the lower half of a woman. By the time he had passed a dozen corpses he no longer gave them a second glance, concentrating his efforts only on dragging the wounded clear of the debris.
Around him others, among them the volunteer firemen, began rescue work.
The injured screamed. The shocked, the bereaved, and the terrified screamed. The loudest sounds came from a group of women tearing at the pile of rubble in front of the Julián Hotel. When the hotel’s facade fell in, a group of small children had been playing nearby.
Silliaco called the firemen. At the mound, he shouted for silence. Then he lay down on the rubble and listened. He rose to his feet and shook his head. Nobody, he believed, could be alive under the impacted rubble.
Antonio Arazamagni did not remember how he arrived in the plaza. He found himself kneeling beside the body of Javier Gardoqui, the altar boy at Santa María who had played truant to go fishing. The boy had been partly undressed by a freak side effect of the blast. But a puzzled Antonio could find no serious external injuries. The baker knew nothing of how the human lung can be ruptured by a pressure of 100 pounds a square inch, and how Javier’s had collapsed under a force at least ten times greater.
Antonio recognized all three of the small corpses he helped drag from a crater near the railway station. He identified twelve-year-old Florence Madariaga by the pigtail attached to what remained of her scalp. Juliana Oleaga he recognized by her dress; it was the same one she had been wearing when he had met her earlier that morning. She had been decapitated. Fourteen-year-old Clara Almedia had suffered the same fate.
“Leave them,” said Silliaco. “There’s someone alive in the station.”
Antonio joined the firemen picking their way inside.
Near the booking office they found the clerk, half buried beneath wooden beams and plasterwork. Antonio would never forget how, when they freed him, he gave a sudden convulsive shudder—and died.
They carried him outside and laid him at one end of a growing line of bodies.
Faustino Pastor was with the first group of soldiers to reach the plaza. By the time they arrived there, about fifteen minutes after Von Moreau had dropped his bombs, the immediate emergency was over. Miraculously, fire had not broken out, and the pall of dust was settling. Most of the dead had been located. The wounded were being tended on the spot by some of the town’s doctors; those more seriously injured were taken to the Carmelite Convent.
The general feeling, Pastor would recall, was that “terrible though the aftermath was, no further attack need be expected.”
The young soldier had seen enough of war to know that such optimism was ill-founded. He hurried back to his machine-gun post.
Isidro Arrién did not stop to wonder whether more bombs might be coming. Those that had already fallen rattled the pots and pans in his kitchen. He ordered his wife and daughters to the Unceta bunker, his sons to the air-raid shelter in the basement of the public school.
When the bombs fell, his few late-lunch customers scattered. Isidro saw one man leave clutching his plate of food and wineglass. He polished off the meal in the open air—and disappeared without paying. Isidro never saw him again, and never forgave him.
The restaurateur told his sons he would join them in the public-school shelter after he had damped down the kitchen’s coal ranges; he was worried about the possibility of fire. But he also knew that if he doused the fires, the flans, pastries, and stews cooking for the evening menu would be ruined.
Uncertain what to do, he walked to the door of his restaurant. Shouts were still coming from the direction of the railway plaza. At first he thought to help, then decided, realistically, that an overweight man of sixty years could render little assistance in a situation that would require physical fitness.
Isidro went back to his kitchen, stoked up the stoves, and poured himself a large glass of wine.
María Ortuza’s peaceful afternoon was shattered by the blast from the station plaza. Her first reaction, she would recall, was that “old Unceta’s factory has blown up at last.”
Only when she became aware of the clanging of Santa María’s bells did she realize the town had been attacked. Still not worried, she went out into the street. While some people were hurrying to the church, many more seemed uncertain what to do.
María would later recall, “We had become used to hearing gunfire and explosions, even if only from a distance. And we didn’t want to appear to be panicking. There had only been one plane, and now there were no more in the sky. Apart from the dust down by the plaza, there was nothing to be seen from where I stood. Before long the church bells stopped ringing.”
She considered walking down to the town center to see what had happened. But in the end the pull of her magazine proved stronger. She went back inside the house.
Francisco Lazcano, in the mayor’s office, tried to establish the damage, contact the president’s office in Bilbao, reach Captain de Beiztegi in the Convent of La Merced, and at the same time issue instructions to various civic officials.
He turned again to the telephone, his anger mounting. There was no response to his shouted “Por favor, por favor …”
Unknown to Lazcano, one of the bombs had severed the town’s main telephone link with Bilbao, which ran underneath the railway plaza. He was also unaware that the bombs had severely damaged the lines carrying the town’s internal telephone system. The line out of the Town Hall was among those now inoperative.
Lazcano left the mayor’s office to call upon Captain de Beiztegi, garrison commander in La Merced.
Free of its bomb load of over 3,000 pounds, and helped by a tailwind, Von Moreau’s aircraft made good time back to its rendezvous point with the other Heinkels and their escort of six Messerschmitt BF-109s.
He reached Garay, some ten miles to the south of Guernica, at about 4:40 P.M. People in the small town would remember airplanes “going around and around and doing nothing.”
Von Moreau ordered his radio operator to transmit the coded signal that the mission was to proceed as planned.
Squadron Leader Knuppel’s Messerschmitts spread themselves in protective pairs some 2,000 feet above Von Moreau’s Heinkels.
Sergeant Henne formed up on one side of Von Moreau, Sergeant Zober on the other. Sergeant Meier brought up the rear of the formation.
At about four-forty-five, they headed north, reaching the mouth of the Mundaca estuary without incident.
As they encircled Elanchove, Von Moreau led the other Heinkels down to around 3,000 feet. The maneuver took three miles of airspace. The planes set off on the route Von Moreau had covered only twenty minutes earlier.
Ahead, the thin pall of dust hanging over the railway plaza was visible to the crews.
Above Arteaga, Von Moreau turned to his radioman and pointed upward. The operator transmitted in Morse: “Breaking away.” Simultaneously Von Moreau began to climb to port, up toward the watchful pair of Messerschmitts guarding that flank.
Meier’s Heinkel moved forward to take over the squadron leader’s position, a few yards ahead of Henne and Zober. The bombardiers were in position in the nose of each aircraft. All was in readiness for the run in.
The scene in the Taberna Vasca was chaotic. When the first explosions had occurred, the sheep drovers eating there had raced to the door, tripping over tables and chairs. The floor was splattered with bowls of stew.
The only person now left in the restaurant was the owner’s eldest son, Juan Guezureya. His parents had rushed the rest of their children to the nearest sanctuary, the Church of Santa María, just a few yards across Goyencalle.
Juan stayed behind to damp down the kitchen fires. He was about to leave the restaurant when his mother returned, shouting, “Where’s Cipriano? We’ve lost him.”
Juan sent his mother back to the church with the promise he would search for his younger brother. He began on Calle Allende Salazar, knowing the wide, tree-lined street was a favorite playground of the town’s children.
As he ran into the street the bells of Santa María clanged again. From the upper windows of the Convent of Santa Clara, soldiers were aiming rifles. They were shooting at the three bombers that, Juan guessed, were still almost two miles away. As he watched, the aircraft swooped lower. He did not wait to see any more. He jumped over the nearest garden wall.
Juan did not know that only a few yards away, Cipriano and fourteen other boys had crawled into the entrance to one of the huge concrete viaduct pipes placed at various points along Calle Allende Salazar to carry away the seasonal floodwaters. The pipe the boys hid in was dry. To the youngsters its outer circumference of six-inch-thick concrete must have appeared a strong protective shield. They did not know that bombs are at their most destructive when exploded in, or near, an enclosed space.
Juan Silliaco knew that the three bombers coming down the River Mundaca toward the town were low enough “to be able to drop their bombs accurately wherever they liked.” The fireman also felt they were flying too wide apart to be concentrating on one individual target.
“They’re going to smash the whole town!” he shouted. Turning to the other fire brigade volunteers, he ordered them to follow him to the fire station.
The men ran from the plaza.
Faustino Pastor had barely propped up his machine gun on the firing parapet when the bombers appeared. They were low enough for him to see the silhouettes of the pilots. He fired at the planes but missed. The Heinkels passed above him at about 170 mph.
Pastor grabbed his camera and focused on the town. To him would fall the sad distinction of being the first to photograph the bombing of Guernica. During the coming hours he would go on to produce a rare record of a town under air attack—in between firing his machine gun.
“Bombs gone,” reported the navigator in the nose of Heinkel 25-4. Sergeant Meier pulled on the control column and the aircraft climbed away over the town, banking to port. The other two bombers followed suit.
Eleven seconds after releasing the bombs from a height of about 2,000 feet—a time lapse that carried each aircraft 1,000 yards beyond the bomb-dropping point—their combined load of high-explosive, antipersonnel, and incendiary bombs fell on an area from the candy factory near the Rentería Bridge to the vicinity of the Arrién Restaurant.
A cluster of incendiaries landed among the fifty girls tending vats and molds in the candy factory. The bombs exploded with white flashes, then flared and burned fiercely, scattering red-and-white fragments of Thermit.
Factory manager Rafael Herrán emerged from his office in time to see a cascade of sparks envelop one of the girls, setting her overalls and hair alight. She collapsed in a fiery ball. Other women were screaming and running for the doors. A sheet of flame came from the far end of the building where the incendiaries had ignited caldrons of sugar solution.
Coughing and spluttering through the smoke, Herrán joined the stampede from the factory.
At the door he remembered the fish he had bought for tomorrow’s meeting of his cooking club. He ran back to his office and picked it up. He risked his life, he would say afterward, “because I continued to believe everything would go on as normal. I couldn’t accept what was happening.”
Antonio Arazamagni, at the junction of the railway station plaza and Calle Don Tello when two bombs fell in the street, saw an old woman, seated outside her front door, calmly peel her potatoes until she had finished, then rise to her feet and walk back inside the house as if nothing had happened.
Fifty yards away, at No. 29, a bomb fell through the roof and tumbled three floors of plaster and lathe into the street. Among the eight people killed were the widow Lucita Bilbao and her daughter Victoria, who was celebrating her fifteenth birthday. In one of those freak happenings that people would remember long after, the cake Antonio had baked for Victoria ended up intact on top of the pile of rubble under which Victoria and her mother were buried.
The second bomb fell on No. 62 Calle Don Tello, a grocer’s shop. The staff and customers, seven persons, were killed outright.
A policeman directed Antonio to the Plazuela del Mercado, at the foot of Calle Santa María. Several bombs, including a 550-pounder and some incendiaries, had fallen there. The incendiaries failed to detonate; the shiny canisters, bearing the name of their German manufacturer, were recovered and would later be one of the exhibits the Basque government would offer as “proof to the world of the German involvement in the terror attack.” Not everyone would believe the story.
The 550-pounder had plowed through an office block, bringing down the roof and part of the building’s facade, spewing desks and filing cabinets into the square. The worst damage occurred in a cake shop at street level. Among the debris, spattered with cream and pastry, were the bodies of the two young shop assistants.
They were the only immediately identifiable dead Antonio saw. He estimated there were up to forty people injured. It seemed to him a miracle the death toll was not higher.
In the marketplace, stalls were set on fire; people and animals were killed and injured. An incendiary landed in a bull pen, spraying two bullocks with burning Thermit. Maddened with pain, they broke out of the stall and charged through the market before falling into a bomb crater.
Smoke killed caged birds, blackened produce and household goods. In minutes the most famous market in Vizcaya was destroyed as flames spread through the canvas-roofed stalls.
Juan Silliaco and his volunteers were about fifty yards from the fire station when, before Silliaco’s eyes, “it disappeared in smoke.”
A bomb had curved over the adjoining roof of the Bank of Vizcaya to bring down the building. So complete was the destruction that it would be three days before the stable boy’s body was recovered, intermingled with the remains of the two dray horses. Under the falling concrete Guernica’s fire truck was flattened to a third of its original height.
Juan Silliaco picked himself up off the ground for the second time in thirty minutes and realized that Guernica now had no proper means with which to fight fires.
He ordered his firemen to pair off “and lend what assistance you can.”
The bombers go in. This remarkable photograph was taken by Father Eusebio Arronategui just as the first wave of Junkers-52s approached Guernica. If the Germans’ target was the narrow Rentería Bridge, as they claimed, why were the planes flying three abreast? (Photo: Authors’ Collection)
The German planes attacked from the north, flying through the gap in the hills at the top of this picture and down the valley to Guernica. The main road leading south to Bilbao can be seen at center; parallel to it on the right is the railroad track. (Photo: Authors’ Collection)
The first bombs fall. (Photo: Authors’ Collection)
Faustino Pastor mans his machine gun in Guernica. Soon he would remove its legs in order to fire straight up at the attacking planes. (Photo: Faustino Pastor)
Interior of the Church of San Juan in flames. (Photo: Authors’ Collection)
The gutted interior of the Church of San Juan after the attack. (Photo: Informe Herrán)
Another view of the devastation of the Church of San Juan. (Photo: Studio Pepe)
The Church of Santa María surrounded by flames. Just left of center is the Carmelite Convent, where Dr. Cortés and Teresa Ortuz were working in the operating room. (Photo: Faustino Pastor)
The road from Guernica up to Luno. On this bend, many people were machine-gunned. (Photo: A taxi)
The remains of downtown Guernica, with the shell of the Bank of Vizcaya at center right. Nearly three-quarters of the town’s buildings were reduced to rubble. (Photo: Authors’ Collection)
The Taberna Vasca, and a view of what was once Guernica’s marketplace. (Photo: Authors’ Collection)
Guernica’s wrecked frontón, or pelota stadium. (Photo: Authors’ Collection)
Basque troops search for survivors among the ruins. (Photo: Faustino Pastor)
Some thirty feet from the kitchen where he sat holding his wineglass, Isidro Arrién saw the front of his restaurant split open, as if in slow motion. Then the ceiling emitted a groaning noise. Dropping his glass, he ran from the kitchen.
Behind him the ceiling fell in with a crash as tons of masonry buried forever his prized cooking pots and the flans and cookies baking in the oven.
The next thing Isidro would recall was finding himself running through the marketplace. To reach there he must have completed a circle from the rear of his restaurant, a distance of some one hundred yards that he would never recollect covering.
Almost blinded now by sweat and close to exhaustion, the big man continued to run. He was one of the hundreds of men, women, and children now running in all directions through the town, aimlessly.
As Von Moreau’s experimental squadron flew back to Burgos, at Vitoria airfield the ten HE-51s commanded by Captain Franz von Lutzow were about to start their engines.
Lieutenant Wandel was aware that he was being observed from the aircraft on either side of his. He hoped he had not given the wrong impression by the eager way he had checked his flaps and elevators and pulled himself into the cockpit.
Wandel was eager for combat; he wanted to show how sharp his reflexes and eyesight were, and that he had not “come all this way for nothing.” But he did not want to be like some of the other new members of the squadron. On the way out to their planes they had spoken loudly about the feats they were going to perform. The more experienced pilots had been quiet and reflective in the presence of these brash newcomers.
Waiting for takeoff, Wandel again went over the route. From the moment he was airborne, he calculated, it would take sixteen minutes’ flying before he would for the first time shoot to kill.
At Burgos airfield, the Junkers-52 coughed into life.
First Lieutenant von Knauer of No. 1 Squadron was the first to start his three engines. Then Lieutenant Hermann started his, and Sergeant Wienzek. Finally the sound of twenty-seven air-cooled BMW radial engines, each generating 725 horsepower, echoed around the base.
First Lieutenant von Beust’s squadron of seven Junkers bombers carried out its engine tests. No. 3 Squadron started their preflight checks. Soon twenty-three Junkers-52s would be ready for action.
About 5:10 P.M., the aircraft dispatcher at Vitoria airfield raised and lowered his hand. One Heinkel aircraft engine after another sprang into life, and the fighter biplanes jockeyed into takeoff position.
Wandel followed Von Lutzow into the air, climbing to 5,000 feet, and then to the rendezvous point. The young flier found he had little time for sightseeing; he was busy keeping his position among the other HE-51s. He was relieved when Von Lutzow raised his hand and pointed northward.
At Burgos airfield, Wing Commander Fuchs watched as the remainder of No. 1 Squadron prepared to follow Von Knauer into the air.
Each bomber waddled into position, paused, spouted puffs of blue-gray smoke from the engine exhausts as its motors were boosted, and then commenced its takeoff run. As it gained speed, its tail lifted so that the aircraft was almost level with the ground, traveling on its two fixed wheels. Then, with a roar, it was airborne.
Fuchs could tell who was flying each plane by the way it took off. Sergeant Dous in 22-84 needed a lot of runway. Hampe, the NCO pilot of 22-91, flew like a carbon copy of Von Knauer. Chilla, the sergeant-pilot of 22-90, on the other hand, was better suited to flying a Heinkel. He took his bomber into the air with the daring of Von Moreau.
Sergeant Rasche, who flew 22-95, was the last of No. 1 Squadron to line up. Behind him came the fourteen planes of the other two squadrons.
At Vitoria airfield, an officer in flying control logged each fighter taking off. After the last one was airborne, he telephoned the news to the operations room in the Frontón Hotel.
As the Junkers bomber group assembled near Burgos, each of the HE-51s, having crossed the enemy line, fired a test burst of its twin machine guns. The ten planes flew on toward Guernica at 150 mph.
In Guernica, Lieutenant Gandaría succeeded in reaching GHQ in Galdacano by telephone. The military line from La Merced did not go through the town’s telephone exchange. He reported the damage and asked for fighter plane and artillery protection “because there may be another attack.” He was told the request would be considered.
“That means,” said Captain de Beiztegi, “that nothing will be done.”
The communications room in La Merced was now a makeshift damage-control center. Ever since Von Moreau’s first bombs had fallen on the town, reports had been coming in from patrols sent to investigate the damage. By five-thirty, casualty figures were forty-two dead or missing, sixty-four injured. Serious cases had been admitted to the Carmelite Convent after Captain de Beiztegi had personally telephoned Captain Cortés and told him, “With the red cross on the roof anyone can tell you’re a hospital. If you are going to be bombed, better to go down doing your job.” There is no record of Cortés’s reply.
The candy factory had been gutted. But surprisingly, there were no other reports of serious fires. Small ones were put out by bucket brigades.
To the men in the communications room, Guernica seemed to have survived its baptism of fire remarkably well. They turned their attention to the reports coming in from observation posts along the front: All afternoon, Italian and German aircraft had been attacking Basque positions between Marquina and Monte Oiz. Only six miles southeast, Múnditibar had been bombed and machine-gunned.
Captain de Beiztegi ordered the two thousand troops in and around Guernica to remain under cover, so as not to draw further attention to the town.
At the time that order was issued, the first soldiers were already fleeing. In ones and twos at first, then in small groups, and finally in large numbers, they stole away from the cemetery, from their positions on the west slopes of Guernica, and from La Merced. Those from the convent headed back down the Marquina road. Some of them told Juan Plaza they were looking for a place to ford the Mundaca south of the town.
“You’re running away,” Juan told them tearfully.
A soldier explained, “It’s better to stay alive to fight another day with proper weapons.”
As Juan approached the Rentería Bridge, “a mass of mad people came running from the town, over the bridge, and down the road toward me. One woman, her feet slashed by broken glass, was laughing insanely all the time. A man was carrying a caged bird and screeching for his wife to follow him. He didn’t wait for anyone, just kept screeching.”
Then, over the village of Arteaga, some miles from where he stood, Juan saw a sight that made him turn and join the fleeing mob.
Captain von Lutzow’s HE-51s were coming in to attack.
Standing in the doorway of Unceta’s bunker, José Rodríguez counted five pairs of fighters coming toward Guernica. He estimated they were flying at around 200 feet.
Near the Rentería Bridge they broke formation. Four pairs peeled off across the town; the fifth continued down the railway line, machine guns firing, toward the arms factory.
As the fighters reached the railway station plaza, some 400 yards from Rodríguez, they banked and released incendiaries.
Some of them started fires on Calle Fernando el Católico, a street leading to the arms plant. One struck a corner of the factory, bounced off the concrete onto the ground, and began to burn.
José Rodríguez and Luis Unceta rushed from the bunker to fight the fire. Water had no effect. Rodríguez grabbed a spade and shoveled sand over the flames, smothering them.
He and Luis ran back to the shelter. Choking from the acrid smoke of the incendiary, Rodríguez told Rufino Unceta, “It must have been a mistake. The bomb should have fallen elsewhere.”
Augusto Unceta would recall how “Father just stood there, saying nothing, but radiating strength to everybody around him.” The fourteen-year-old boy felt intense pride when he heard a workman say that Rufino Unceta’s foresight in building the bunker had saved them all.
In addition to the 120 men in the huge cavern were their families, Victoria Arrién, and her daughters—all told, some 350 persons. It was uncomfortable for those at the back of the shelter, where the air was already stale. But for those grouped around Unceta and his family at the bunker entrance, there was a safe, well-ventilated view of the destruction of their town.
Antonio Arazamagni carried a young office girl, injured and suffering from shock, out of the Plazuela del Mercado. Antonio was taking her to the home of Jacinta Gómez on Barrencalle; he knew that the mother of three would look after the girl.
Jacinta saw Antonio coming down the narrow street and ran to meet him. Antonio could see her children standing in the doorway of their house.
At that moment, a Heinkel-51 began to machine-gun the street.
Antonio lurched into a doorway with the injured girl. He saw Jacinta knocked backward several feet by the force of the bullets.
Her three children ran screaming from their home toward their dead mother. A second Heinkel killed them all in one sustained burst.
Peering over the garden wall on Calle Allende Salazar, where he had remained since leaving the Taberna Vasca to look for his young brother, Juan Guezureya saw two HE-51s swoop on the marketplace. To Juan it seemed as if their guns “systematically raked the whole area. The two planes just flew back and forth at about one hundred feet, like flying sheep dogs rounding up people for the slaughter.”
When the planes finally climbed away, the dead included several members of the town band. Nobody had time to identify or to count the total number of bodies. Later, it was estimated that close to fifty people received injuries during this particular strafing.
María Ortuza waited for the Heinkels to fly away from the marketplace. Then she ran down Calle Adolfo Urioste past the Taberna Vasca and into the air-raid shelter under the Town Hall. The dash left her breathless, but mindful of her position as housekeeper to Señora Arriendiara, María did not lift her skirts above her ankles as she stepped down into the bunker.
About three hundred people were wedged inside. María found herself unable to move more than a few feet beyond the door. A man moved aside to give her a little more room. She smiled her gratitude to Mayor José Labauría.
About a quarter of a mile away, huddled between the pillars supporting the still-intact Rentería Bridge, a handful of people sheltered from the air attacks.
Francisco Lazcano could be forgiven for thinking that open though it was, the underside of the bridge was a safe place to be. So far not one plane had fired a single burst nor dropped a single bomb on the bridge.
Father Alberto de Onaindía—a canon of Valladolid Cathedral and close confidant of President Aguirre—was also under the bridge. The priest had been passing through Guernica from Bilbao en route to his family and birthplace at Marquina when the attack began. Sheltering by the water’s edge, he took careful note of all he could see. Later he would offer the pope, and the world, his eyewitness account—and cause an international storm with his testimony.
Over five hundred people, mostly women and children, believed they were safe inside the Church of Santa María. Father Iturran was close to tears as many of them knelt and prayed before the high altar. Carmen Batzar, among them, prayed for Juan Dominguiz. Others crowded into the side chapels, counting their rosaries and asking for God’s protection. Few noticed the neat pile of artifacts near the entrance.
Father Iturran abandoned the idea of leaving the church. Nor, he believed, would Lieutenant Gandaría now want to fortify the building. “The planes will avoid us,” he kept repeating. “The pilots can tell this is God’s house.”
Pedro Guezureya, owner of the Taberna Vasca, would remember, “People were afraid to leave because of the unknown conditions outside. All we could hear were screams and shouts and bombs and guns. A mother placed her baby in the font. Another woman went into a confession stall with her child. People were kneeling in front of the holy statues, asking God to spare them.”
For some reason, probably to go to her fiancé, Carmen Batzar left the church. She walked alone along Goyencalle, and must have just turned onto Calle San Juan when she was spotted by a fighter pilot. Like her fiancé, she was machine-gunned. But Carmen Batzar died where she fell.
José Rodríguez saw the fighters climb away from the town. He estimated later that thirty minutes had passed since their arrival.
Some 2,000 feet above Guernica, Captain von Lutzow waited until the last of his squadron had joined the circle. East of the town, two of the roads were empty. Along the third, the road to Marquina, figures were moving. Von Lutzow dived. The other planes followed.
Sheltering behind some rocks, Juan Plaza kept his eyes fixed on the aircraft. The first fighter passed overhead, and he realized their guns were silent. He lay on his back and started to “laugh like a madman, I was so relieved.”
The fighters were probably not only out of ammunition, but also low on fuel. Von Lutzow had apparently led them in a valedictory swoop on the way back to Vitoria. As they climbed away out of the valley, smoke rose over Guernica.
Juan Guezureya waited until the smoke eddying from the lower part of the town had drifted to where he lay behind the garden wall. Then he vaulted it and sprinted northward along Calle Allende Salazar.
He did not see the viaduct in which his young brother, Cipriano, and fourteen other boys had taken refuge. In one of those bizarre flukes of the bombing, four incendiary bombs fell near the viaduct, creating a wall of flame across its mouth, cracking the cement rim of the pipe, and finally collapsing tons of earth on the boys. Two weeks would pass before a flash flood revealed their bodies.
In the packed air-raid shelter beneath the Town Hall, María Ortuza felt entombed. Mayor Labauría had ordered the shelter door shut after four persons standing by the doorway had been killed. Their bodies had been pushed aside so the door could be closed.
Even so, smoke was drifting in. María heard the “moans from the back of the shelter where people were half-choking. Some soldiers offered water bottles. The gesture was poorly received. People thought the soldiers should be outside, fighting back.”
María heard a gasp, and a body slumped to the ground. A woman shouted hysterically, “My boy needs air! Give him air!”
It was almost 6:00 P.M. in Guernica, one and a half hours since Von Moreau had first flown over the town.