On March 28, 1975, four bombs rocked the ancient town of Guernica in northern Spain. It was not the first time, nor the last, that such incidents had occurred, and it provoked a not untypical reaction by the Franco regime. Next day, thousands of Spanish Civil Guards armed with machine guns virtually sealed off Guernica from the rest of the country.
Basque Nationalists had set off the bombs to commemorate an event that had occurred thirty-eight years earlier. This is the story of that event—and hopefully an explanation of why, even now, efforts are being made to distort what happened in Guernica on April 26, 1937, that has made it symbolize the horrors of war to millions of people, inspired Pablo Picasso to immortalize it in his most famous painting, and placed it apart in the annals of warfare.
For eight months after the Spanish Civil War began, the people of Guernica were hardly affected by the conflict. The fighting raged far to the south of them, leaving the spiritual home of the Basque people isolated behind the mountains of northern Spain.
When the fighting started on July 17, 1936, the seven thousand citizens of Guernica remained loyal to the government in Madrid, a hodgepodge of political parties ruling under the emblem of Republicanism. Although the townspeople had little in common with Spain’s elected leaders, they had even less sympathy for the men who had plunged the country into civil war: the Nationalists, led by General Francisco Franco.
The origins of the conflict that split Spain were complex; it was not in the beginning a case of “the military” against “the peasants,”or of fascism versus communism, as observers would later describe it.
In the five years of Republican government before 1936, the country had become increasingly unstable politically. During that time, Spain had had eleven prime ministers, and eighty other ministers had held office. As a result of the general election of February 1936, thirty-two disparate political parties were represented in the Cortes, the Spanish parliament.
Spain’s Republican constitution collapsed because the peaceful coexistence of Right and Left on which it depended, alternating as government and opposition, proved unworkable. Right and Left agreed on only one thing: They could not work together. Gradually each became bent on the elimination of the other.
When the war began, Basque opinion was divided. In theory, as the region’s politics leaned to the Right, it should have favored Franco. But Franco’s Nationalists were for a unified Spain; Basque Nationalists were for an independent Basque nation. Soon after hostilities started, the government in Madrid granted the Basques “home rule,” thereby guaranteeing their loyalty to the Republican cause. From then on, most Basques believed that if ever the conflict came to them, they would be fighting for their own country against an enemy that was the equivalent of a foreign aggressor.
Autonomy seemed only right to most Basques. Since records began, their three mountainous provinces of northern Spain had been the home of a distinct, recognizable culture, and their language, its origins unknown, was understood by few outsiders.
The Basques were among the most religious people in Spain, and the most strongly attached to Roman Catholicism. They practiced a form of democracy based on a stubborn tradition of strong local rights. For centuries, this combination of almost fanatical religious belief and strong political awareness had secured for the Basques a large measure of autonomy within the Spanish nation. Guernica was their sentimental capital, symbol of their independence, source of their inspiration.
Soon after the region became independent, Guernica’s mayor declared himself a Franco supporter. He was promptly imprisoned, an example to other Nationalist sympathizers in the area.
The people of Guernica felt well protected by the three battalions of Basque troops based in the town. A few were worried by Guernica’s booming armaments industry, but most agreed it was a small price to pay for what the war had given them—independence.
Until the end of March 1937, the struggle for Spain centered mainly around Madrid. Guernicans heard the radio bulletins, read the newspapers, and were relieved the war was being fought far away. They knew little of how the world had been caught up in the war; how twenty-seven countries had agreed to a Nonintervention Pact banning foreign help so that the conflict would not spread; how, even so, idealists—most totally untrained—from the United States, Great Britain, France, and many other countries had traveled to Spain without their governments’ sanctions to fight against the Nationalists; how Hitler and Mussolini—also signatories to the pact—had sided with the Nationalists and officially, but secretly, seized upon the conflict to provide their armed forces with experience for a bigger war to come.
By March 1937, Germany had sent to Spain—while repeatedly denying it had done so—over five thousand troops, whose influence was out of all proportion to their numbers. They were the elite Condor Legion, handpicked to maintain and defend the largest and most powerful air armada until then ever assembled for any war. In firepower alone, the Condor Legion exceeded the combined air forces of World War I.
Although Germany had also provided a few tank units and naval specialists, it was the Legion that had secretly ferried Franco’s feared Moroccan troops to Spain. It was the Legion that had air-dropped life-sustaining supplies into Franco’s besieged fortress, the Alcázar. It was the Legion that had bombed Madrid.
And it was the Condor Legion that now looked northward to targets in the isolated Basque provinces. The mountains separating the Basques from the rest of Spain were a formidable natural barrier. But the Legion could fly over the jagged peaks and act as airborne artillery for the Nationalist ground troops.
The Legion’s commander in Spain persuaded Franco to send his men north in support of a new offensive to be led by the Nationalist commander, General Emilio Mola. On March 30, 1937, Mola broadcast an ultimatum:
“I have decided to terminate rapidly the war in the north. Those not guilty of assassinations and who surrender their arms will have their lives and property spared. But if submission is not immediate, I will raze all Vizcaya to the ground, beginning with the industries of war.”
Vizcaya was the most densely populated of the three Basque provinces. Because of its mineral wealth, it was the industrial fief of Spain. Iron ore, coal, and coke were mined around Bilbao, the region’s seaport capital. Guernica, twenty miles east of Bilbao, was the province’s spiritual center, with its historic Parliament Building and the oak tree, symbol of Basque culture and independence, growing on the Parliament grounds.
On March 31, Mola launched his offensive. Fifty thousand heavily armed troops, including the feared troops from Morocco, advanced on the Basque country. Air support was provided by the Condor Legion.
Opposing them was the Republican Army of the North. Poorly equipped with a few obsolete aircraft and fieldpieces, prevented by the Nonintervention Pact from procuring more modern weapons from Great Britain, France, or the United States, this army of forty-five thousand was further weakened by disagreements over strategy among its commanders.
Although the Republican troops put up a stiff resistance, gradually they were forced back. Guernica became a focal point for thousands of refugees fleeing from aerial bombing on a scale the world had never before experienced. They knew that after the planes dropped their death loads, ground troops would not be far behind. And they heard tales of a vengeful conqueror—that men were often shot after surrendering, and that women were sometimes forced at gunpoint to strip and submit to rape.
In spite of what the refugees told them, the people of Guernica felt little alarm. They believed Guernica to be inviolate; the town was, after all, world renowned as the capital of a region that had practiced a form of democracy, under which all men were accorded respect and dignity, long before the other countries of Western Europe. Even as the war came closer, and shortages of food, coal, and other supplies made the influx of refugees a serious problem, Guernicans told themselves that the enemy would surely respect their historic town. Even if Guernica were taken by the enemy, they thought, little violence would occur.
By April 25, 1937, the front line was twenty miles from Guernica. Between its inhabitants and the enemy was a rugged terrain; thousands of Basque troops provided protection.
Or so the people of Guernica thought.