When Von Richthofen and Lieutenant Asmus reached the top of Monte Oiz, intervening mountains blocked their view of the target area. Disappointed, the two men descended.
No written record was made of their conversation on the way down; it is probably safe to assume, as Hans Asmus does, “that if we talked, it was undoubtedly about work. Von Richthofen didn’t like social contact. You could not talk to him about the weather or a landscape unless it was directly linked with some strategic move.”
By 6:00 P.M., the Condor Legion’s main bomber force—twenty-three Junkers-52s—was streaming northward, spread over several miles of airspace north of Garay. Between them they carried the balance of 100,000 pounds of explosives with which to hit the still-intact Rentería Bridge.
In Guernica’s Carmelite Convent, injured people filled the reception area and overflowed into ground-floor corridors already crowded with wounded soldiers brought from the upper floors.
Cortés and Teresa had moved out of the operating room to work in the casualty area. Teresa would remember Cortés “was like a demon, doing the work of five people.”
Watching him work and make his decisions, she realized that “his hardness was no more than a shell. For months he had kept from us part of his character which now came out. It was easy for him to be brisk and tough with soldiers. But with civilians he was very gentle and patient. At times I thought he was close to tears at some of the injuries, especially among the children. He ordered that, whenever possible, they should be treated first.”
Teresa followed the surgeon and tied a card to each victim; on it she wrote Cortés’s diagnosis, the immediate treatment he had given, and his decision whether to operate or not. On some cards Captain Cortés drew a small circle. It meant they should not be resuscitated if they became unconscious.
Drums of compresses and instrument trays were everywhere. Doctors, nurses, and nuns had to step over the injured lying on the floor.
A man with legs smashed to pulp; a woman whose thorax was torn open; a youth with machine-gun bullets in the leg; a child with a mangled arm. Each victim had to be diagnosed, assessed, given immediate palliative treatment, and if possible, comforted.
The air, Teresa remembered, was “filled with cries of ‘Get a priest. I am dying.’ We didn’t have a priest.”
Mother Augusta and her nuns did their best to ease the suffering of those beyond help.
The dead were carried out to the mortuary.
Between operations Cortés would inspect new cases, deciding who should be saved first. Catching Teresa’s eyes on him, he once growled, “I’m not playing God. I’m just trying to do what Solomon did—please everybody.”
Sometime after 6:00 P.M., Mother Augusta reported that blood supplies were almost exhausted. She tried to contact Bilbao; the telephone was dead.
Cortés passed word to the other surgeons that they must exercise even more stringent control when contemplating transfusion.
Once, stepping away from the operating table, Teresa saw Captain Cortés stare at the sight of Mother Augusta bending over a wounded man and giving him sips from a brandy bottle. “Have a drink yourself,” the surgeon urged her. Mother Augusta offered him the bottle. Cortés laughed and walked away.
Teresa later heard Cortés tell a doctor, “The old Superior had the nerve to get that bottle from my office!”
She was sure there was a note of admiration in the surgeon’s voice.
Juan Plaza made another attempt to reach his grandmother’s home by the Rentería Bridge. He spotted her walking down the road toward him, clutching a basket of eggs. It was, she said calmly, all she had been able to take before the flames from the candy factory had spread to her house.
She looked reprovingly at the loaf of bread Juan still clutched. In the course of the afternoon, it had become crushed and dirty.
“Have you been playing football with it?” she asked. Juan thought she was the most composed person he had seen since the air attack started.
During his training period with the Bilbao Fire Brigade, Juan Silliaco had learned that buildings destroyed by bombs present special problems. The instructing officer had used a number of photographs from World War I to illustrate his lectures. Silliaco also recalled a striking photograph taken after the San Francisco earthquake; it showed some of the city’s firemen burrowing into a building.
This afternoon Silliaco saw numerous examples of the sort of bomb damage he had been taught to expect—and beware.
There were many buildings like the fire station, which as a result of a direct hit had totally collapsed in a heap of rubble. There was no point in searching them, for no one could survive under such wreckage. In other buildings only one wall had collapsed; they could safely be searched by somebody who knew what he was doing. Then there was the worst kind of all, the sort of building Silliaco now contemplated on Calle San Juan.
It had once been a rooming house, four floors high, filled with refugees. A bomb had penetrated the roof and plunged through to the ground floor. It had failed to explode, but the sheer force of its passage through the poorly built building had collapsed the inner supports. The upper floors had caved in, sending ceilings down on floors, floors down on ceilings. The building had been reduced to half its normal height. To an expert like Silliaco it was “a classic situation—terribly dangerous.”
From inside came cries for help.
People were rushing forward to tear at the rubble when Silliaco ordered them to stand back.
“You’ll kill them,” he said, walking around the building, trying to establish where the people were buried. He called for silence. The voices seemed to be coming from a corner of the building, under the rubble. He guessed they were in an air pocket, a cavity created by a quirk in the way the building had fallen. He told the onlookers to fetch shovels, wood supports, and ropes.
As they rushed to do so, Silliaco picked at the rubble, determining where to start tunneling. A wrong decision would result in the collapse of the air pocket.
By the time the equipment had been produced, he had selected his approach route. He began to dig.
The fighter pilots landed at Vitoria about 6:10 P.M. While ground crews were busy refueling and rearming the HE-51s, the pilots gathered together to compare impressions of the action.
All agreed the dust and smoke were nuisances and that the roads east of the town had been surprisingly empty.
From this moment on, they would nevertheless insist that they had attacked genuine military objectives. The plausibility of this claim would be severely damaged thirty-seven years later, when former officers of the Condor Legion would say they did not know there were troops in Guernica. They still blamed “unexpectedly high winds” for carrying the bombs into the town.
Only a near-hurricane could have carried the HE-51s over the streets of Guernica.
And many in Guernica would later recall the absence of any appreciable wind; it gave the bucket brigades a chance to contain some of the fires in the town.
Antonio Arazamagni headed a bucket brigade on Calle San Juan. A line of men stretched fifty feet from a hydrant, passing along pails of water to throw on flames licking at a burning building.
Antonio, after witnessing the killing of Jacinta Gómez and her children on Barrencalle, had kept moving. At some point he handed over the office girl he was carrying to someone; he would never remember to whom or where.
He next found himself working on the bucket brigade. People would later say the young baker displayed great courage in helping fight the fire.
Checking through the Convent of La Merced, Lieutenant Gandaría estimated there were less than two hundred troops left in the building. Hundreds had gone. He threatened to shoot the next man he saw leaving. When an officer said it was now more sensible to evacuate the convent, he turned on him. “What’s wrong with our army is that it’s filled with deserters.”
Captain Juan de Beiztegi threatened to court-martial any officer who willingly let his troops go.
The garrison commander soon made other unpleasant discoveries. When Gandaría telephoned observation posts around Guernica, Arteaga did not answer. An officer in the monastery of the Augustine Fathers said some of his troops had “fallen back” farther westward; another officer near the town’s cemetery reported his men had “extended” their positions “back into the hills.” Ganda-ría angrily told him to bring them back to their original positions.
By the end of his telephoning, Gandaría was clear on one thing: Most of the troops he had counted on to turn the town into a Basque Alcázar had broken and fled. Virtually the only ones who remained were the headquarters staff of the Eighteenth Loyola Battalion, those whom he had successfully imbued with his own fierce desire to resist, and remnants of the Saseta Battalion out by the monastery. Even if he brought together all the troops, there would still be insufficient force for the last-ditch stand he had intended.
Bitterly, he told Captain de Beiztegi they had no alternative but to pull out from the town.
In La Merced Convent, Mother María told her nuns they must leave at once. First they would take the Marquina road, then walk south along the river until they found a place shallow enough to cross. From there they would go to Múgica and on to Bilbao.
Unwittingly, she had chosen the same route as many of the soldiers who were hastening out of the town.
During this break in the bombing, José Rodríguez made some calculations about the timing of the attacks. So far they had occurred at intervals of about twenty minutes.
On that reckoning, his watch told him if another attack was coming, it should begin in nine minutes.
Burrowing into the rubble, Juan Silliaco was trying to figure out the line of least resistance through the debris.
So far, he had excavated several feet of narrow tunnel. Using his shovel to dislodge the powdered plaster and brick, he passed handfuls of dirt to a man behind him, who in turn passed the debris back into the street. Then the process was reversed to bring to the tunnel head the wooden props needed to support Juan Silliaco’s slow advance.
Juan knew that the greatest danger was in going too fast; every inch he dug had to be pretested or the burrow would collapse.
The trapped people cried out again. Silliaco was able to distinguish several voices, among them a child’s. He shouted for them to be silent; he was concerned they might use up their air supply. From then on, there was no sound but the scraping of his shovel.
When he reached what he judged was ground-floor level, a door barred his way. It was still within its frame, but it leaned at a strange angle. Silliaco thought it might have fallen from an upper floor. Gently he pushed against it. It swung open. Below him in a cavern were a man, two women, and a girl about four.
A torch was passed down the tunnel. Silliaco inspected the hole and saw that the group had been saved by the way the beams had crisscrossed to create a roof holding back tons of rubble.
“Stay where you are,” commanded Silliaco. “You’ll disturb the roof.”
They stood still.
“The child,” continued the fireman. “Pass her to me.” The man lifted up the little girl. Silliaco reached down and pulled her into the tunnel.
“Don’t worry. I’ll get your mother and father soon,” Silliaco promised her. He edged his way back down the tunnel, taking the girl with him.
Juan Silliaco emerged into open air and handed the girl to one of the small crowd of watching people.
He was about to crawl back into the tunnel when the people around him shouted and ran away. When he saw what had frightened them, the fireman followed their lead.
Similar panic gripped the bucket brigade feeding water to Antonio Arazamagni. They dropped their pails and ran.
Earlier, as people had run for shelter from the air attacks, some of them had noticed an incongruous sight outside the Church of San Juan: a plate camera standing on a tripod before the church.
Father Eusebio had intended to photograph the church that afternoon, but when the first bombs fell, he had gone to the railway station plaza to give the last rites to the dying and spiritual comfort to the wounded. He took refuge when the machine-gunning started. After the fighters left, he heard that his own church had been hit. He ran all the way to San Juan and found it undamaged.
He was about to return to his ministering when he saw something that made him rush to his camera. At that moment, he would later say, his only thought was “to acquire positive proof of this terrible act of desecration of our holy town.”
Father Eusebio tilted up the camera. In the viewfinder he could clearly see coming toward the town the first chain of three Junkers-52s.
Behind them, “as far as the eye could see,” the evening sky was filled with bombers.
He took a picture, whipped out the plate, turned, and fled.
Some seven miles from Guernica, the planes in Von Knauer’s No. 1 Squadron lowered their pots. The nine bombardiers climbed down into the cupolas to line up their bombsights. At two miles a minute the bombers flew toward the town.
Behind No. 1 Squadron, Von Beust’s Staffel was circling the final turning point, Elanchove. Captain von Krafft’s No. 3 Squadron was still flying north past Monte San Miguel.
The bomber crews had received no reports of Faustino Pastor’s machine gun or of the riflemen in the Convent of Santa Clara. Both groups began firing when the first chain was about two miles away.
Julio Bareno lurched to his feet when he heard the gunfire. Exhausted from carrying the heavy mail pouch, he and his wife were resting by the Residencia Calzada. It took him a few moments to realize what the shooting was about. He turned and shouted to his wife, “Look at those planes!”
Over two hours had passed since the couple had reached the wall. Señora Bareno could not bring herself to leave her home and friends; she refused to go farther. Her husband had pleaded with her, but she had told him it was “madness to walk to Bilbao, and why should we do all this for the bank?” He could not explain “the special obligation” he felt as a branch manager.
When the air attacks had come, the couple had cowered against the wall, flinching as plane after plane flew overhead. In the intervals between raids, Bareno had tried to persuade his wife to move. Now, his patience exhausted, he screamed at her, “Can’t you see what’s coming?”
His wife opened her eyes and peered northward. Crying out in horror, she got to her feet and ran down the road to Bilbao, leaving her husband to stagger after her with the mail pouch.
The Junkers flew higher than the Heinkel bombers, so this time Juan Plaza did not actually see the bombs being loosed from the planes. But a good mile down the Marquina road, he and his grandmother could hear the explosions reverberate through the valley. They saw huge columns of flame and smoke rise into the air above Guernica.
The lead bombers turned away. Juan later estimated that between 500 and 1,000 meters separated each chain of three Junkers.
The first salvo of bombs set fire to the huge, empty pelota frontón behind the Arrién Restaurant. It also smashed Julio Bareno’s Bank of Vizcaya.
Juan Silliaco was near the bank just before it was hit. “The air was alive with the cries of the wounded. I saw a man crawling down the street, dragging his broken legs. He was saying, ‘Help me, please help me.’ Then he just disappeared along with some cows who had broken free from their pens at the market. They were literally blown to pieces.
“Pieces of people and animals were lying everywhere. The bombs were falling all around and the ground was rocking beneath my feet.”
Silliaco would not remember where, or how far, he ran. Then: “There was a terrific crash. I was thrown on my face. From a great distance I heard a voice screaming. Or maybe it was many voices united in one common scream. From where I lay, it seemed far away. It took me some time to discover I was trapped under a fallen building. I was saved because before the building collapsed into the street, the ground had cracked open, breaking one of the viaducts carrying the town’s main water supply. I had fallen into the viaduct and was quite safe, but above me was a mass of timber and brickwork. I could see daylight, and then I wished I couldn’t see anything. Close by, in the wreckage, was a young woman. I could not take my eyes off her. Bones stuck through her dress. Her head had been twisted right around her neck. She lay, mouth open, her tongue hanging out. I vomited and lost consciousness.”
Julio Bareno and his wife were no more than a hundred yards beyond the Residencia Calzada when it received a direct hit.
They stood appalled as the home, filled with the elderly and orphaned, exploded before their eyes. Chunks of stone were hurled across the road and into the houses opposite. The shock waves blew the Barenos off their feet.
Very few inside the Residencia were to survive. It was estimated that forty-five old women and men, children, wounded soldiers, and the nuns caring for them died from the one bomb that hit the home. Neither the huge red cross on the roof nor the Residencia’s reinforced refugio saved them.
Julio Bareno helped his wife to her feet, picked up the mail pouch, and they continued out of town.
It took each chain of bombers just thirty seconds to pass over Guernica and execute a standard 150-degree turn away from the target. By then a further 9,900 pounds of explosives, the collective load of each chain, were whistling over the town.
Antonio Arazamagni, his mind and body battered, swayed at the junction of Calle Santa María and Azoquecalle. He had no clear idea of how he had arrived there, or why.
Three hundred feet away—he would later measure out the distance—was the ugly air-raid shelter in the middle of Calle Santa María, filled with about 150 people. “A row of bombs fell along the street. One after another, in a line, like a pack of cards, the houses began to collapse. I saw them sway and fall with a roar that I could hear even above the sound of the planes. The shelter went, too. All the explosions fused together. The force of the blast threw three people out of the shelter.”
Antonio turned and ran toward the Church of Santa María.
In the next street to the north, Father Eusebio was about 100 yards up the sloping Calle San Juan when he recognized a family that had recently arrived in his parish. Señora Urnganguru and her five daughters had returned from Shoshone in Idaho, following the death of Señor Urnganguru in the United States.
The priest had come to know the eldest daughter, twelve-year-old María, best; he had listened attentively to her stories of the United States. Now he watched the girl guiding her mother and younger sisters around the corner of Barrencalle and down Calle San Juan. He hastened to meet them.
María was relieved to find the priest beside her. She would remember, “He said our only chance was to get out of town. He began to lead us down the street. We had only gone a few yards when a bomb fell on the exact spot we had just passed. Farther down, another bomb hit a house and several bodies just flew through the air.”
Led by the priest, the family ran down Calle San Juan. “Parts of houses were falling all around us. But we somehow managed to keep our feet. My mother kept shouting, ‘Stay together, whatever we do, stay together.’ I think she thought if we had to die, it was better we all died together. Once a wall fell, blocking the street. Father Eusebio did not hesitate. He pushed us up over the rubble and climbed over after us.”
They were less than fifty yards from the Church of San Juan when it was hit by a cascade of incendiaries and burst into flames. The plate camera on its tripod was incinerated.
The bombs that destroyed San Juan had probably been dropped by the last chain of Von Knauer’s No. 1 Squadron. A mile behind that chain, thirty seconds away, Von Beust’s No. 2 Squadron now prepared to begin bombing.
In the gap between the departure of one squadron and the arrival of another, Father Eusebio managed to get the Urnganguru family past his burning church and onto the Puntería Bridge, which was still untouched.
He watched them turn onto the road to Arteaga, heading for the safest place he knew in all Spain—the Santimamiñe caves, four miles away.
Then the young priest sprinted back up Calle San Juan. He passed his blazing church without pausing. He was now concerned only with getting to Santa María, a tempting target for any bomber pilot.
Squadron Leader von Beust, in 22-70, found it impossible to identify any target. He would remember, “I saw the bombs from the first squadron dropping. By the time we were over the target, the town seemed to be obscured by rising dust resulting from the first bombs. The air was very dry, and I suppose the roads were not paved. So we had to drop our bombs as best we could. There was no question that we wouldn’t drop them—it would have been dangerous for us to land with a bomb load—but the navigator in the pot couldn’t tell what he was hitting.”
A Von Beust bomb may have been the one that reduced Antonio Arazamagni’s prized Ford to a tangled scrap. A second one might have scored the direct hit on Antonio’s bakery. Antonio arrived on Goyencalle in time to see the building bulge outward “and then fell right on top of my car.”
Brokenhearted, Antonio headed out of Guernica, up the steep mountain road leading to the village of Luno.
The villagers of Luno had a panoramic view of the attack taking place several hundred feet below them in the valley. But gradually a blanket of smoke spread over Guernica, wiping out the view. By then, the first survivors of the raid had reached Luno, and the people of that hamlet were too busy aiding them to watch the hell that was happening almost at their feet.
Nobody would ever know how many victims were claimed by the smoke alone. In four days’ time, a refugio would be opened in the basement of a house at the bottom of Calle Allende Salazar, and twenty corpses would be revealed, totally unmarked. A pathologist would establish that their deaths had been caused by suffocation.
In the Town Hall bunker, María Ortuza thought some of the people near her were about to choke to death. The heat in the shelter rose steadily as the air became more fetid. A group of women had cleared a little space for some children to squat, knee to shoulder blade, but everybody else had to stand.
Some sick, some hysterical, many near suffocation, all gasping for breath, the people in the bunker heard the raid outside increase in intensity. Then, immediately above, there was a sudden, terrifying explosion. A 550-pounder had hit the Town Hall.
María believed “we were being buried alive. The roof came down on us, and then the Town Hall was hit twice more. Three floors fell on our shelter. The air was filled with the smells of scorched plaster, wood, and flesh.”
María dropped to her knees and crawled toward the shelter door. Her head stung from a glancing blow she had received. Ahead there was a sharp, splintering sound, and then daylight. Labauría had smashed open the door.
She closed her eyes tightly against the pain and scrabbled forward. Once she pushed aside a hand, but to her horror, she found it had caught in her belt and she was dragging a severed arm along with her. She thrust it away and continued to claw her way over the rubble.
Once in the open, she dragged herself to a corner of the Town Hall plaza. There, behind a pile of debris, María sheltered, biting her knuckles until they bled.
Others clambered out of the shelter and ran blindly. Then, with a crash, the Town Hall caved in, again sealing the shelter’s entrance.
Rufino, Luis, and Augusto Unceta, José Rodríguez, and a score of workmen had formed themselves into a makeshift firefighting squad. Armed with shovels, buckets of water, and sand, they huddled between the bunker and the main factory building, ready to risk their lives to save the plant.
As the air attacks continued, Rufino Unceta carefully watched the path of the aircraft. All flew on a course that took them clear of the factory.
It was obvious that Unceta, with his calm demeanor, believed his loyalty to the Nationalists had been remembered; that the pilots had been ordered to avoid hitting his factory.
They had not.
The Condor Legion was unaware there was an arms factory in the town—let alone that its management was pro-Franco. The Unceta complex was saved because the bombers had orders to approach Guernica at an angle that carried them southwest over the town. The factory was due east of the railway line and some 400 yards south of the station. To have hit the Unceta works, the bombers would have had to follow a course farther east.
That the factory had not been machine-gunned was also explicable. There were better targets available for fighter pilots than a solid concrete building. Whether he knew it or not, Rufino Unceta had only to fear the odd stray spark crossing over the railway line and setting fire to his plant.
Out in the open, he and the other firefighters had an excellent view of the Unceta mansion, some 100 yards away to the west. Suddenly, explosions shook the house and sheets of flame gushed through the roof and windows.
The Uncetas watched in silence as their mansion collapsed, almost certainly hit by the last chain of No. 2 Squadron. They had lost all their private possessions. Rufino Unceta’s only comment on the destruction of his home was “I will build again.”
At that very moment, unknown to the Uncetas, Julio Bareno was hefting down the Bilbao road ledgers containing details of their deposits.
Lieutenant Gandaría waited until the last of Von Beust’s squadron had cleared the town, and then shouted, “Go!”
At the command to go, Mother María and the nuns hurried past him, out of the Convent of La Merced, and down the Marquina road.
“Adiós,” shouted Gandaría. The nuns made no reply. He looked at the soldiers crowding the central passageway of the convent. When Captain de Beiztegi nodded, Gandaría waved the first soldier forward.
The troops ran past him after the nuns. The two officers followed them, leaving La Merced empty for the first time in centuries.
Behind Von Beust, Squadron Leader von Krafft led his bombers farther out to sea than the others had done; after he turned south again, the gap between him and the last of No. 2 Squadron was some five miles. Now, as he came in to attack, Von Krafft “could see nothing of the town, only smoke drifting southwest over it.” But Von Krafft did spot the Rentería Bridge, standing well clear of the smoke.
“So the attack went ahead,” Von Krafft would recall. “I felt my plane lift as the bombs were released, and I turned at once to look back at the target. The big bombs fell by the bridge. The incendiary bombs made a silver shower over the smoke above Guernica and dropped into the town.”
Nine of the heavy bombs from Von Krafft’s squadron fell in and around La Merced, just by the Rentería Bridge. They damaged a kitchen, part of the chapel, and uprooted the convent’s orchard. But not one bomb hit the bridge itself.
Faustino Pastor and his team continued to fire at the bombers, too preoccupied to notice how many of their colleagues had left their positions.
The monastery of the Augustine Fathers was now empty. The monks had joined the soldiers fleeing the building; they eventually went to Bilbao and on to France, never to return to Guernica.
At the southern end of the town, most of the soldiers around the cemetery had also decamped. Those who remained were squeezed into the mausoleums, standing between the coffins.
Isidro Arrién felt he, too, was in a tomb, with thousands of men beating on its roof. He never knew when or how he had reached the shelter in the basement of the public school. His first clear memory was of his sons guiding him to a seat.
The Arriéns, with five hundred other children and parents, listened to the sounds outside. “The bombardment had gone on so long we grew accustomed to it, and terror in many cases simply gave way to total exhaustion,” one of Isidro’s children would remember.
Isidro found himself dozing, oblivious to the sound of hundreds of windows in the classrooms above being shattered.
A combination of rage and fascination had so far kept Juan Guezureya from breaking down.
He had reached the slopes to the west of the town, and was sheltering in a small cave about 400 feet directly above the now-deserted monastery of the Augustine Fathers. His vantage point afforded him a view of the family restaurant; on more peaceful afternoons he had come to the cave and dreamed of how, when the business was his, he would expand it “and give the Arrien Restaurant something to think about.”
Now the Arrien Restaurant was gone. Juan could glimpse its shell through the smoke. But the Taberna Vasca, he could see, was still intact. Then came a series of crumping sounds and the Taberna Vasca went up in flames.
He wept. He did not raise his head from his hands until he heard the monastery of the Augustine Fathers explode, “blown to smithereens.”
An overshoot, a sudden gust of wind, simple bad luck—nobody will ever be able to say with certainty what caused an incendiary to penetrate the roof of the Church of Santa María.
Father Iturran was in the pulpit, leading the packed congregation in prayer, when the bomb crashed into the side chapel of Our Lady of Begonia. Father Eusebio, standing at the rear of the church, grabbed a flower vase and rushed to dump the water over the smoking canister.
The incendiary was giving off clouds of smoke but no flames. It had left a gaping hole in the roof, knocked Our Lady’s statue to the ground, and now rested on the chapel floor.
“Water! We need water,” shouted Father Eusebio. “There is no danger if we get water.”
From the pulpit, Father Iturran’s voice came loud and clear. He commanded some of the men in the congregation to go to the sacristy and bring out the bottles of communion wine: “If our Lord could work a miracle by turning water into wine, then perhaps he will allow us to use wine as water.”
Many people would later testify that only the old priest’s words stemmed general panic. Water and wine were poured onto the incendiary, and it fizzled out without catching fire.
Some of the congregation later swore they had witnessed a miracle.
Soon after 6:30 P.M., the last three Junkers climbed away from the town, having rained down 9,900 pounds of mixed explosives.
About fifteen minutes had passed since Father Eusebio had taken his dramatic photograph of Von Knauer’s JU-52 and the two others approaching Guernica. The priest still had the plate tucked into his cassock pocket. Later he would take it to Bilbao, where it would be developed and used for propaganda purposes.
During those fifteen minutes, over two hundred people had been killed and twice as many injured. Seven of every ten houses in Guernica—almost three-quarters of the town’s buildings—had been destroyed, or soon would be, by the flames.
The Rentería Bridge, target of all this destruction, was still intact.
In the Church of Santa María, Father Eusebio counted silently. After sixty seconds he went outside. The sky to the north was empty.
He turned back into the church and told the people inside, “They have gone. But they may come back. We have little time.” He issued orders: the infirm and elderly should make their way toward Luno; the remainder should run for the caves of Santimamiñe.
The people hesitated. Then from another part of the church came the commanding voice of Father Iturran: “Go, it is your only chance.”
The people hurried from Santa María, some beginning the climb to Luno, others streaming down Calle San Juan, across the Rentería Bridge, and up the Arteaga road. Nearly five hundred people eventually reached the caves.
Around 6:40 P.M., Knuppel’s squadron of six Messerschmitts took off from Vitoria. The fastest fighters in the Spanish Civil War needed barely ten minutes to reach the town.
By then Santa María Church was empty; Mother María and her nuns were well south of Guernica. The soldiers from La Merced had overtaken them, but the nuns had caught up again because the soldiers had deliberately slowed their pace to that of the refugees. From the air it would have been impossible to tell the troops from the civilians.
Lieutenant Gandaría guessed there must be hundreds of people heading for the river crossing and on to Múgica. Years afterward he would recall their faces: “dark with smoke, coated with dust, and totally blank. They were alive, but all life had gone out of them.”
He and Captain de Beiztegi trudged on, saying nothing “because there was nothing to say. The war was lost.”
On the opposite side of the River Mundaca, Julio Bareno and his wife were about halfway between Guernica and Mugica when the Messerschmitts appeared. Bareno pushed his wife into a ditch, then jumped in beside her. Other people stood paralyzed, numbed by the noise of the planes racing toward them at almost ground level. The fighters banked toward Luno.
Antonio Arazamagni saw them coming, and he, too, rolled into a convenient ditch. “A group of men and women, and some soldiers, were coming up the road. They had no chance. They were all killed.”
Later there would be some doubt as to how many swoops the Messerschmitts made over Guernica. Juan Guezureya saw them make one run, “low and steady, firing all the time, flying north to south over the town.”
Eyewitness María Ortuza in 1975. (Photo: Sigbert Butz)
Eyewitness Juan Guezureya in 1975. (Photo: Sigbert Butz)
The target that was missed: the Rentería Bridge. (Photo: Sigbert Butz)
The new home of the Uncetas in downtown Guernica. (Photo: Sergio Ferraris)
The summer home of the count of Montefuerte in Guernica. It was not damaged in the 1937 raid. (Photo: Sergio Ferraris)
Slightly battered but still standing, the Church of Santa María. (Photo: Sigbert Butz)
The Convent and Church of Santa Clara. (Photo Sigbert Butz)
The Carmelite Convent. (Photo: Sigbert Butz)
Close-up of the monument honoring those who died “under the banner of Francisco Franco.” (Photo: Sergio Ferraris)
Evidence of the 1937 attack can still be seen in Guernica. (Photo: Sigbert Butz)
The cemetery at the outskirts of town. In the center is Guernica’s sole memorial to those who died in the Civil War—but those of one side only. (Photo: Sigbert Butz)
Guernica, as seen from one of the stations of the cross on the road to Luno. (Photo: Sigbert Butz)
The Church of San Pedro at Luno, where many fled from the bombs in 1937. (Photo: Sigbert Butz)
The rebuilt Town Hall and its Plaza de los Fueros. (Photo: Sigbert Butz)
Because of the 1937 devastation, Guernica today is a remarkably new town in an ancient land. (Photo: Sigbert Butz)
Juan Plaza, almost two miles outside Guernica, believed he saw the ME-109s make two attacks before they flew off.
He may have confused them with Von Lutzow’s HE-51s, which returned at about 7:00 p.m.
To José Rodríguez, still standing beside his fire bucket near the Unceta plant, it was “impossible to understand why they had come. The town was virtually flattened. Nothing stood between the market and the railway station.”
Juan Silliaco, trapped in the viaduct, recovered consciousness at about the time the fighters began to strafe the ruins. Machine-gun bullets thwacked into the debris around him.
He knew his position was relatively safe, if unpleasant: The young woman’s body a few feet away had begun to smell.
Machine gunner Faustino Pastor would also recall how low the planes flew. He could no longer fire at them—he was out of ammunition. But the fighter planes did not seem interested in attacking the machine-gun team. They concentrated on the town.
Juan Guezureya watched them “just going back and forth, back and forth, machine-gunning. Sometimes they flew in pairs, sometimes in a long line, sometimes in close formation. It was as if they were practicing new moves. They must have fired thousands of bullets in the process.”
María Ortuza heard some of those bullets thudding into the dead donkey she hid behind. She closed her eyes, “so they would also think I was dead.”
At seven-thirty, the HE-51s executed a final run over the town and headed back for base. The air attack on Guernica was over.
It was almost three hours since Von Moreau’s pathfinding flight over the town. Those still alive were left with the fires to fight.
To Juan Guezureya, looking down from his cave on the stricken town, it was like “having a preview of the end of the world.” From the heights of Luno, Antonio Arazamagni felt he was “witnessing Armageddon.” Many others would express the sentiment that this had been their Day of Judgment, and that, in the words of Augusto Unceta, “God had chosen to spare some of us from this manmade hell.”
In that hell, Juan Silliaco realized that if he were not rescued soon, he would be roasted alive. He was thankful his son was safe in Bilbao. He hoped the boy would never learn how his father had faced death without having made a proper confession and with sudden doubts about everlasting life.
Not far away, María Ortuza mustered enough courage to move from behind the dead donkey and make her way to the Church of Santa María. It was empty, its nave reeking of smoke. She turned back into the town, seeking “a sign of life to show I was not alone.” She saw none as she passed the burning Taberna Vasca, the blazing marketplace, a dozen other burning buildings. The flames singed her hair; the smoke made her eyes smart.
At the corner of Artecalle, her path was blocked by the Bank of Vizcaya, its front collapsed across the street. She could see the bank’s safe standing upright in the rubble. María could not know that the heat had incinerated all the paper money inside, but that the silver coins Julio Bareno had placed there would survive—and within a week would be used by the Nationalists.
She retraced her steps along the eastern edge of the marketplace. As she saw a horse move and then sag back into the flames, María shrieked. The beast had undoubtedly died some time before; and the intensity of the heat had caused its muscles to contract.
As she moved around another pile of rubble, a voice from inside called for help.
It was Juan Silliaco.
María saw some soldiers come out of the Convent of Santa Clara, the only troops to have remained in Guernica’s center during the attack. She persuaded them to rescue Silliaco; they freed him in a short time and went on their way.
Silliaco himself began to search for other members of the town’s volunteer fire brigade. He eventually located two sheltering by the River Mundaca. There were a number of bodies in the water.
“Don’t bother with them,” said Silliaco. “Concentrate on the living.”
Those three men formed the nucleus of a rescue operation that in the hours to come would incorporate many other squads, some as large as forty men. They would fight the fires with any means available, free the trapped, and ultimately dig out the dead.
But now, Juan Silliaco was intent on completing a rescue he had begun almost two hours before. He and his two companions went back to Calle San Juan, to that pile of debris Silliaco had had to abandon when Von Knauer’s bombers had arrived. He found the tunnel intact. When he shouted into it, a faint response came back. Silliaco crawled into the mound and brought out the two women and man who had remained unharmed during the world’s biggest air raid to date on an undefended town. A few days later, they were reunited with the small girl Silliaco had saved earlier.
When darkness came, shortly before 8:00 P.M., Rufino Unceta decided that no further air attacks need be expected. He sent his sons and José Rodríguez into the town to assess the damage, and told his workers and their families they could leave the bunker. Then he entered his factory.
The soldiers had long since fled. “My only concern was what damage there was to the machines.”
There had been none. The plant was ready to resume production. It would not, after all, be removed to Bilbao.
Luis and Augusto Unceta separated from Rodríguez outside the factory; the boys went to examine the damage to their home, the general manager to his.
No. 3 Calle de la Estación, Rodríguez’s home, was “a smoking pile of stones.” He counted a dozen blackened bodies nearby, another score in the railway station plaza.
By the time Rodríguez had walked the length of Calle Don Tello, he had counted a further forty corpses. He encountered another thirty-seven in his walk up Calle San Juan to the corner of Calle Ocho de Enero. The fiercely burning Church of San Juan made further progress dangerous.
He was undecided which way to go. “The difficulty was that apart from the church, there were no familiar landmarks. I was surrounded by ruins and death.”
Profoundly shocked, he continued counting the dead. He had reached a figure of over two hundred “when the futility of counting dawned on me. Two, two hundred, two thousand—counting would not bring any of them back.”
The Unceta boys, like many other people that night, were also busy with body counts. “Somehow,” Augusto would remember, “the sheer number of corpses made it possible to look dispassionately at sights that on a smaller scale would have been overwhelming. One burned body is shocking; a hundred charred corpses lose their impact. I saw hundreds that night.”
He and his brother Luis counted some 250 bodies in their walk up Calle de la Estación to Azoquecalle and back down part of Calle Santa María. They were stopped from going farther by the flames from the air-raid shelter, now surrounded by rescue workers trying to fight the fire with buckets of sand and water. Days would pass before the street was cleared, and Augusto would recall, “the biggest problem was matching up the bits and pieces of bodies. They did the best they could, and some people said that one hundred fifty died on that one street alone. But it was only a guess.”
The Unceta boys would have another abiding memory of their walk through the town: “Some bodies lay in a pattern as if they were running away when hit. They were facedown and had been shot from behind.”
When Juan Guezureya reentered the town from the northwest, he, too, noticed that corpses were facedown; they must have been machine-gunned as they fled out the Bermeo road. Juan forced himself to turn over some of the bodies, dreading he might identify any of his family. He did not. All had escaped to the Santimamiñe caves except fourteen-year-old Cipriano, buried in the viaduct with the other boys.
Juan reached Santa María Church, found it deserted, and went on to the Taberna Vasca. As he stood before it, openly weeping, he heard “a sound I never thought possible.”
The bells of Santa María were tolling eight o’clock.
Fathers Iturran and Eusebio hoped, they told Juan, that those who heard the sound would take it as a signal that “from this moment, Guernica will begin its rebirth.”
The two priests went into the nave and looked at the pile of relics Father Iturran had intended to move to Bilbao.
“There is nothing more to fear,” said Father Eusebio. “Your church is safe.”
He produced the camera film plate and explained about the picture.
“They will deny what they have done,” he said. “The world must have proof. I must take this to Bilbao.”
“I will stay here,” said Father Iturran.
The two priests set to work, replacing Santa María’s holy relics in their original places.
Around 8:30 P.M., Juan Plaza once more approached the town along the Marquina road. The smell of burning flesh carried strongly to the boy.
He reached the Rentería Bridge. Beyond, from Guernica, the heat rolled toward him in great waves. He scrambled down to the river bank and walked along it until he was across from the railway station. There he forded the river and entered the town.
“Everywhere people were carrying bodies to the Plaza Las Escuelas. The school had not been hit. When I reached it, there were already several rows of bodies, maybe a hundred laid out in the square. Dead animals were everywhere, terrible sights. The heat was unbearable.”
He went up to Calle Allende Salazar, where he made a surprising discovery. All the large houses lining the road on either side of the Parliament Building were intact, apart from a few broken windows. Parliament itself was untouched, as was the sacred oak tree on its grounds. The Convent of Santa Clara, near the oak, had also escaped damage.
Juan heard two men state as fact a rumor that became commonplace in the days to come. “These were said to be the homes of Franco sympathizers which had been intentionally spared in the bombing.”
No such orders had been given to the pilots. It was pure chance that their northeast-to-southwest bombing run across the town had taken them on a course that precluded their hitting the homes of the wealthy on Guernica’s western slopes.
But the rumor grew. Further “proof” was provided by the “fact” that “everybody in those houses, fearing the people’s revenge, ran away to await the arrival of the Nationalists.”
Groups of townspeople searched those houses, looking for the “traitors.” María Ortuza watched a group of vigilantes force open the door of the count of Montefuerte’s residence. The young housekeeper was close to collapse from her experiences; that, she later admitted, could be her only excuse for what followed.
“I went after them into the house. I couldn’t believe my eyes. A hundred feet away, on the other side of Calle Allende Salazar, everything was gone. My friends, my town, everything. But here in this house, the pictures on the wall were straight. The silver on the sidetables gleamed. The flowers in their vases were freshly watered. But there were signs of a quick departure. Clothes were scattered around. The dining table had not been cleared. One of the men who had broken in said the Montefuertes fled after the raid ended and that the house was now a refugio for refugees. I went upstairs, going from one room to another. Finally I found myself in a big bedroom with a four-poster bed. I flopped on it and fell asleep.”
María would sleep in the count of Montefuerte’s bed for fifteen hours.
By 9:00 P.M., a record number of operations had been performed by the surgical teams in the Carmelite Convent. The doctors and nurses had time only to sip scalding coffee prepared by Mother Augusta before they plunged back into work that, thirty-seven years later, Teresa Ortuz could recall only as “an endless routine of cutting and sawing and slicing.”
After the air raid ended, Cortés had reoccupied the upper floors of the convent.
Lieutenant Juan Dominguiz was one of those carried back upstairs. Under his pillow were the diaries Carmen had left with him. Lying in the darkened ward lit only by the glare from the town, he waited patiently for Carmen to appear. He still believed she was working somewhere in the hospital.
Dominguiz would learn of her death in Bilbao, where he was taken in an ambulance late that night. He would eventually recover from that shock; his physical recovery would be completed in the Basque country in France. There he would stay, with his memories of Carmen and her diaries.
At nine-thirty, Captain Cortés, at the urging of Mother Augusta, went to inspect the morgue. In it were crowded some fifty corpses, flies and insects crawling over the bodies.
“They should be buried at once,” said Cortés.
“Not without a Christian service,” insisted Mother Augusta.
The surgeon said he did not see what difference a “proper funeral” would make. “They’re dead, and no amount of praying will change that.” He returned to his work. When Teresa saw the surgeon’s face, “I realized that I must have looked dead myself. All that sustained any of us was the knowledge that if we stopped, more would die.”
They continued with short breaks for the next twenty-four hours. By then, the military patients had been evacuated to Bilbao. Cortés, his surgeons, and the orderlies of the field unit went with them, while Mother Augusta and her nuns remained to nurse the civilian casualties. Teresa, torn between the desire to find her own family and her professional responsibilities, in the end was persuaded by Mother Augusta to search for her loved ones. Eventually she found them, safe in Bilbao. Later, she insisted on returning to the convent.
Faustino Pastor was “too emotionally upset by all the destruction, too tired after all the shooting,” to join the troops arriving in the town to help with the rescue work.
By 10:00 P.M., it was estimated that about four hundred soldiers were engaged in the task. And about that time, Juan Plaza would later claim, he heard “people say that the number of bodies recovered was over three hundred.” Soon that figure would be doubled, trebled, even quadrupled by some of the journalists then heading for the town.
The spectacle of the burning town brought in civilian help from the surrounding countryside. But it was not until eleven o’clock, when the Bilbao Fire Brigade trucks arrived, that a determined attack could be made on the flames.
Juan Silliaco and his men teamed up with the Bilbao firemen, but there was little they could do. The water soon ran out. Sixteen hours would pass before the last flame died, leaving the town smoldering.
On Calle Allende Salazar, close to where Cipriano Guezureya and fourteen other boys lay buried, Antonio Arazamagni discovered a cat inside a water pipe. Sometime earlier, possibly during the raid, she had given birth to kittens. He scooped up the mother and her litter, placed them inside his jacket, and went in search of food for them. In Luno, Antonio persuaded a farmer’s wife to give him some milk. The kittens all survived and eventually became inseparable from the baker.
In Guernica, the arrival of the press was viewed with disfavor by some people. Juan Guezureya would recall a mood of “not wanting reporters, but rescue workers. If only they had sent planes to defend us, everything would have been different.”
The Condor Legion bomber and fighter pilots were debriefed at Burgos and Vitoria. Both Asmus and Von Beust would remember the sessions as “routine.”
By midnight a party was going on in the lounge of the Frontón Hotel. Fighter pilots sang bawdy songs. The brothels were open; while the Legionnaires waited their turn, most agreed it had been one of the busiest afternoons since their arrival in Spain.
Shortly before midnight, Von Richthofen completed his customary stroll among the aircraft at Vitoria airfield. He could see that the piles of bombs in their guarded dump had been depleted. There were plenty more available.
He returned to his room and his diary.
Much later, after he had learned in detail what had happened, Freiherr von Richthofen stated in a secret report to Berlin that “the concentrated attack” on Guernica “was the greatest success.”