On 20 April, after a fortnight’s lull due to bad weather, the Franco offensive resumed. At the same time, the nationalists hoped to starve Bilbao into submission by imposing a blockade which the British Admiralty readily accepted as effective until disproved by a British merchant ship, the Seven Seas Spray, which sailed in with 3,500 tons of food. By 24 April, the enemy had made an important breakthrough in the hills of Inxorta; and in the ensuing panic it seemed as though little would stop the Franco forces advancing to Bilbao. Two days later Guernica was blitzed by the Condor Legion.
*
‘Amatxu, the church bells are ringing,’ Ignacia OZAMIZ’S three-year-old son kept saying as, from early morning, the bells tolled out warnings of enemy planes in the vicinity. The front was barely 20 km to the east at Marquina as the crow flies. Four months pregnant, she had put her child – the youngest of four – to bed after lunch when her husband, a local blacksmith, sent her a message to go down to the shelter. People had seen a big plane – the abuelo – over the mountains.
Until the past week, she thought, with the exception of food shortages and the dead being brought from the front for burial, the war had hardly affected Guernica. Six months before, José Antonio Aguirre, newly elected head of Euzkadi’s autonomous government, had knelt under its famous oak tree, where in the past Spanish monarchs or their representatives had sworn to respect the Basque fueros. Guernica, a town of 6,000 inhabitants lying between hills 30 km to the north-east of Bilbao, was a symbol of liberty and tradition for the Basques. In a few hours it became the universal symbol of fascist terror.
Monday, 26 April was market day. The livestock market had been suspended for the duration of the war, but the ordinary market, Ignacia OZAMIZ recalled, continued as usual. Father Dionisio AJANGUIZ was on his way to his home town from his parish of Aulestia, halfway to Marquina, to spend the afternoon chatting and playing cards with fellow priests. One of them, whose mother that very morning had offered them a glass of cognac each not to go to Guernica, was accompanying him. They had drunk the cognac and set out. He had taken no heed even of his own brother’s admonitions; Father José AXUNGUIZ had been warning his parishioners at Marquina not to continue the traditional practice of going to Guernica on market day.
—It was an outing for the youth; buses brought people from as far away as Lequeitio on the coast. The people lacked war training. I blame the Basque authorities. They shouldn’t have allowed the practice to continue, they were responsible for a great number of deaths. Those of us who lived virtually on the front, as in Marquina, had learnt the importance of building good shelters. But in Guernica they hadn’t taken adequate precautions; the shelters were rudimentary. I kept telling my mother: ‘Build a good one.’ ‘Poor child, poor child,’ was all she could say …
As Father Dionisio AJANGUIZ walked into Guernica, a solitary Heinkel III flew over and dropped half a dozen bombs. ‘It was the people’s salvation; they ran from their houses to the shelters.’ He was still half a kilometre from the centre when he saw nine planes appear, flying low, from the direction of the sea. He threw himself on the ground as the first bombs fell.
Hearing the explosions, Ignacia OZAMIZ, who had taken her husband’s advice and gone to the shelter next to her house, thought the end had come. So did others.
—‘Ignacia, where have we come to die?’ the church organist from my home village said. ‘Here – ’ I replied. The shelter was packed: 150 people at least between neighbours and people who had come for the market. The bombs crashed on the near-by hospital, killing twenty-five children and two nuns. Debris fell on the shelter, and we thought it had been hit. It was little more than a roof of sandbags, narrow and short, in the patio next to our house. Soon it filled with smoke and dust. ‘Amatxu, take me out,’ my son began to cry in Basque. ‘I can’t breathe … ’
Her eldest daughter, Manolita AGUIRRE, had gone with girlfriends to the plain that began at the edge of the town. There had been no school that day. As they were playing, they saw the planes coming. Workers shouted at them to get into the shelter close by the small-arms factory. As they ran in they heard the tat-tat-tat of the fighters’ machine-guns. An old man pulled out a religious medallion and gave it to her to kiss. ‘Pray, child, pray, the planes are bombing us –’
—The fighters dived down and machine-gunned people trying to flee across the plain. The bombers were flying so low you could see the crewmen, recalled Father Dionisio AJANGUIZ. It was a magnificent clear April evening after a showery morning …
Between the waves of bombers, the priest scrambled to look for a safer place than the side of the road. Amidst the crash of bombs, Juana SANGRONIZ hoped she could die without seeing the cause of death. When she ran into the shelter people had shouted, ‘Don’t let her in – ’. She was a Carlist, had been arrested with a number of others and kept in gaol for three weeks in Bilbao. She hadn’t been out of her home, not even to go to mass, since her release, unable to face the indignity of being seen under guard like the other women. But her novio had dragged her into a house near the church of Santa María where people were sheltering. She was sure she was going to die. She heard the bombs whistle, the frightening explosions. People cried that it was dangerous to keep the mouth shut.
—One had to put a stick or something between one’s teeth. My novio tried, but I kept telling him, ‘Leave me in peace.’ He was a strong man, but he was trembling with fear …
The house on one side of the shelter, and then Ignacia OZAMIZ’S house on the other, began to burn. The smoke poured into the shelter. Someone drove a cow in. It started to shriek.
—All the smoke came in with it. We had to keep our mouths shut, we could hardly see each other, and the smell was awful, remembered her seven-year-old daughter, KONI. I didn’t think of dying, I was too young perhaps. But I thought we were going to suffocate …
—People started to panic, recalled Ignacia OZAMIZ. ‘The house is on fire, we’re going to be burnt alive,’ they screamed. Gudaris guarding the shelter let no one leave. One man tried to force his way out with his young child. ‘I don’t care if they kill me, I can’t stand it here.’ He was pushed back. ‘Keep calm,’ the soldiers shouted …
The town was beginning to burn, the wooden rafters catching alight. After the high explosive bombs, successive waves of planes dropped incendiaries.
From the shelter of an iron-ore bore hole about a kilometre from the town, Father Dionisio AJANGUIZ saw the roofs catching alight. Even at that distance he found breathing difficult because of the smoke. He feared that at least half the town’s population must have been killed. ‘And that’s what would have happened if they had dropped the incendiaries earlier instead of towards the end’ …
A pall of smoke rose into the sky. Between waves of bombers, Juan Manuel EPALZA, now serving in the war industries’ chemical section, who by chance was lunching at a factory on the outskirts of the town, came out of an air raid shelter to look. Thoughts of Nero crossed his mind. The bombing was of a different intensity to any that he had suffered.
After some three hours it ended. As Ignacia OZAMIZ and her two children emerged from the shelter, she saw the town was alight. ‘Don’t cry,’ her husband consoled her. ‘We’ve got our hands, we’re unharmed, alive.’ But she could think only of her eldest daughter and her mother, neither of whom had been in the shelter with her. Her house in Asilo Calzado was burning from the roof. Her husband rushed in to rescue papers and money.
—‘Oh, if only you’d managed to save my sewing machine,’ I said. He went back in. As he came down with the machine, he found the staircase alight. He threw the machine out of the window, only just managing to jump out himself. ‘Woman, I got your machine but it nearly cost me my life.’ ‘Why did you go up?’ ‘To do you a pleasure.’ The machine broke in its fall on the air raid shelter we’d just left, but I picked up the head, and I’ve got it still …
As her eldest daughter, Manolita, came out of the shelter on the edge of the town – where none of the industr
ial plants, including the small-arms factory, had been hit – a wave of heat struck her face. She told a man that she had to join her parents who were in the blazing ruins she could see beyond the railway station. Together, they skirted the town along the railway track to reach the main road. A gudari carried her on his shoulders to reach her burning house, one of the first on the street into the centre.
Everywhere people were fleeing. The water main had been broken in the raid, and there was little to be done to put out the fire. Juana SANGRONIZ was led out of the blaze by her novio. Crying uncontrolledly, she refused to look back at the burning town. Ignacia OZAMIZ’S husband ran to rescue his crippled mother; he arrived too late. She and three other old women had been burnt alive. Leaving their house burning, the family made their way out of the town by a path known as El Agua Corriente; the main street through the centre was impassable. As they reached the higher part, they saw that the area around the oak tree had not been hit. That night, given shelter outside town at the home of the Count of Arana, one of whose sons her husband had managed earlier to get released from gaol, she had a miscarriage. Her husband took her to a relative’s farm. She left her four children with her mother. Little did she think it would be three years before she saw them again.
—‘And to think that we shall be blamed for this,’ I said to Dr Junod, the Swiss Red Cross representative, as we walked through the still burning ruins a few hours later. Juan Manuel EPALZA had just returned to Guernica from Bilbao. ‘No,’ replied Dr Junod, ‘that’s impossible.’ ‘You don’t know the enemy we have in front of us,’ I replied … 6
Demoralization of the rearguard was an important element of war, thought Father José Maria BASABILOTRA, chaplain in a Basque nationalist unit, who had been in Durango after the air raid nearly a month before. It became more important as married men were called up: concerned about their families in the rear, they were more easily demoralized and in turn demoralized the youth who were the best combatants.
—The effect of Guernica on the soldiers of my JSU battalion was much worse than if they had been in combat and suffered casualties, reflected a seventeen-year-old communist miner, Saturnino CALVO, who was stationed barely 10 km away. To know that women and children were being killed in the rearguard – we saw the ambulances on the road below our positions – demoralized them. I won’t say it lowered their combat-spirit – the battalion was almost entirely Basque-speaking – but it affected them deeply …
*
For seven more weeks, the Basque army – its previously politically affiliated battalions formed at last into five regular divisions – defended every metre of the 30 km of hilly terrain before Bilbao. Col. Montaud was replaced as chief-of-staff and President Aguirre became commander-in-chief. It was the communists, particularly the Soviet advisers, stressed Gonzalo NARDIZ, ANV minister in the government, who suggested the latter appointment. ‘They understood the great importance of nationalism in the Basque army; without it, I doubt if there would have been such resistance.’
In Bilbao, which in the Carlist wars of the previous century had three times withstood siege, and was now defended by a ‘ring of iron’, fear that the Guernica blitz might be repeated was widespread. Every time the frequent sirens sounded, industry, business and offices came to a complete halt.7 People saw the few remaining Basque fighters take off.
—‘They’re only five,’ the right-wingers said, rubbing their hands. Then one day there were no longer five but four; then three. Ana María ADARRAGA, fifteen-year-old daughter of a merchant navy purser, was one of hundreds who spent all day by the railway tunnel close to her home in Luchana on the estuary’s right bank. I remember the enemy planes bombing frequently – but never the Altos Hornos steel works and the shipbuilding yards right across from us on the opposite bank. They must have thought they were going to be using them pretty soon …
Her four brothers and sisters had been evacuated to England. Since Guernica, over 13,000 children had been sent to France, Belgium, Switzerland, England and Russia. Food had been a problem since the winter. ‘Chick-peas, rice, black rye bread, fish. We were going hungry. The blockade was ferocious.’
Rations in January were down to 50 grams of rice, chick-peas and vegetables, and 250 grams of oil per person per day. The difficulty of feeding the population – Vizcaya, like Catalonia, was not self-sufficient in food – was increased by the 100,000 refugees from Guipúzcoa. The fortuitous arrival of a large consignment of chick-peas from Mexico just before the start of the war had to some extent saved the situation.
Ignacia OZAMIZ’S four children from Guernica had arrived in Bilbao, unknown to their mother who was expecting them at the relative’s farm where her husband had taken her after her miscarriage on the night of the blitz. A friend of her husband’s had picked up the children in his lorry. Three days later, when the nationalists occupied Guernica, the family was stranded on different sides of the lines, neither knowing if the other were alive.
After the blitz of their home town, the children now experienced the bombing of Bilbao. Living with an aunt in a house in the city’s centre, they went from the third to the first floor, where mattresses had been piled against the windows, when they heard the sirens; it was the only shelter they had.
Confused and sad, they heard children saying wherever they went: ‘Have you seen my parents?’ and parents asking after their children. They went hungry, eating orange peel, if they were lucky to find some lying in the street, and raw carob beans. At last, with the enemy at the gate of the city, their uncle managed to get them on the last ship to leave Bilbao. They drove through a heavy air raid to the port. Their uncle went aboard, gave the captain a package containing pistols from the small-arms factory he owned; the ship was already full. The children went up the gangplank. Shouts rose from the people thronging the quay and who were still trying to get their children aboard. ‘It shouldn’t be allowed, they’re rich people’s children.’ Alone again, not knowing where they were making for, they set sail; after three days at sea they heard that Bilbao had fallen.
*
The ‘ring of iron’ had been pierced a week before, after a heavy pounding by artillery and bombers at a point near Larrebezúa where it had not been finished. The Franco forces knew where to attack;8 at the start of the campaign, the engineer Goicoechea, who had been working on the fortifications, defected to the enemy.
—We had trusted him, considered him one of ours at heart because he came from a PNV family, Juan AJURIAGUERRA, president of the Vizcaya PNV, recalled. It may seem as though I’m trying to excuse him; on the contrary, I consider it an additional charge against him …
In fact, it was the second betrayal; the first engineer who initiated and planned the defensive line had been executed for trying to pass information to the enemy. Goicoechea, his assistant, continued to work on the line. His defection was common knowledge among the troops – so much so that an enemy reconnaissance plane was nicknamed after him. But in Ramón RUBIAL’S opinion, the iron ring was virtually useless anyway. The socialist turner, who was now in command of the 5th socialist battalion, found that the concrete pill-boxes were not camouflaged, and the trenches were wide and straight. ‘We had no confidence in it. Bilbao had to be defended in positions outside it … ’
—If it could be, reflected Pedro BASABILOTRA, secretary to the head of the PNV forces. The enemy bombed and bombed. We were without air cover. Every day the central government promised us war material – and every day it failed to arrive …
Air superiority was decisive. The Condor Legion did not repeat the Guernica blitz; it experimented, instead, with incendiaries on the pine-clad slopes of the hills, setting fire to them. After abortive attempts, the central government managed to get seven fighters to Bilbao in a direct flight from Madrid. There was a generalized resentment among Basque nationalists at its failure to send more effective aid. There was talk again that all Spaniards were the same, that the central government was as hostile to the Basques as was the insurgent military
.9
But, as Ramón RUBIAL perceived, Vizcaya lacked a sufficient hinterland to be able to keep war matériel, even planes, safe from enemy air attack. As it was, even the little Basque artillery could hardly be used in daylight because it was spotted and bombed.
—All our fighting had to be done at night; under cover of darkness we recaptured positions lost by day …
In Saturnino CALVO’S JSU battalion, enemy artillery, especially the German 88 cannon, was more feared than the bombing to which, after initial panic, they had grown used. The seventeen-year-old communist miner believed that by fighting in the mountains with a proper network of defensive positions they could have held the enemy off.
—But it required a war policy of the sort that the Basque government was unwilling to carry out. A scorched earth policy, a revolutionary type of war like in Madrid. We enjoyed a great advantage – the rugged terrain – which the defenders of Madrid lacked …
With the ‘ring of iron’ pierced, the centre of Bilbao lay only 10 km away within heavy artillery range. In the city, observed Dr Carlos MARTINEZ, the former parliamentary deputy just arrived from Paris on his way home to Asturias, there was calm. Artillery fire was plainly audible. The city’s fall was patently imminent. He walked along the Gran Vía. Under President Aguirre, order had reigned in Vizcaya throughout the war: priests and property had been respected, he saw. He went into a shop and bought two jackets of English material without any formalities – no ration cards, no vouchers. He wouldn’t have been able to do the same in Asturias. Perhaps many were waiting for the Franquista victory, he thought.
The communists called for all-out resistance, maintained that spades, properly used, were as effective as fighters against enemy raids. The disadvantages of a war of position, a last line of defence, became clear: once pierced, what other positions were there to fall back on?10
The Basque government decided to defend the city and at the same time to evacuate the population. A city without its population would not be another Madrid, however heroic its soldier-defenders might be.
Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War Page 61
