Spearheading the air campaign for the Nationalists was the Condor Legion. Hitler had already rescued Franco at the start of the conflict when he had sent planes to Morocco to help airlift the Army of Africa to the Spanish mainland. German advisers had been with the Generalísimo ever since. But when the Madrid front ground to a halt, Hitler decided to send more German troops in an attempt to speed up the war. The Condor Legion was formed towards the end of 1936. Initially it comprised some five thousand men, but this would later increase to over twelve thousand. At its head, reporting directly to Franco alone, was General Hugo von Sperrle, and below him Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, cousin of Manfred, the Red Baron. Sperrle had demanded high-performance aircraft from the Luftwaffe and was supplied with Heinkel He111s, Junkers Ju87s (Stukas) and Messerschmitt Bf109s. In contrast to the slow-paced, old-fashioned Spanish style of campaigning, Sperrle preferred swift, concentrated attacks with high firepower. Later he was to play an important role in German Blitzkrieg tactics on the Western front in the Second World War.
The Condor Legion took part in many of the important battles of the Spanish Civil War, during which it lost more planes in accidents (160) than to enemy action (72). Spain was a testing ground for new military ideas: it was here that the Germans invented ‘carpet bombing’. The unit had some colourful people flying for it – one pilot, recovered from the wreckage of a shot-down Dornier 17 near Bilbao, was found to have plucked eyebrows and was wearing lipstick and ladies’ pink underwear. He was lucky to die in the crash – many who survived were lynched by angry mobs. The Condor Legion’s most infamous act, however, occurred at Guernica.
General Mola had begun the Basque campaign on 31 March 1937 with a statement promising to raze the province of Vizcaya to the ground if the enemy did not surrender. ‘I have the means to do so,’ he said, and to demonstrate this he destroyed part of the town of Durango in an aerial and artillery bombardment, resulting in the deaths of some three hundred civilians, including fourteen nuns and several priests who were celebrating mass at the time. Although the Condor Legion was answerable only to Franco, liaising through his office in Salamanca was slow, and so Franco had given Sperrle the go-ahead for direct communications with Mola. Almost a month on, though, Nationalist troops were not advancing as quickly as hoped.
On 20 April they started the second phase of their campaign with heavy bombardment of the Republican lines, which now broke. Basque fighters fell back in disarray, many ending up in Guernica. With refugees also flooding in from the surrounding areas, the town’s population had risen from seven thousand to almost ten thousand people. But despite the Nationalist advance, and the attack on Durango just a few weeks before, the people of Guernica had little notion of how much danger they were in.
Aerial bombardment, although used as a military strategy before this point, even within the context of the Spanish war – Durango was a case in point, as were earlier Republican bombings of Córdoba and Saragossa – had failed to register in popular consciousness. So much so that when Picasso was told about the method of destruction of the emblematic Basque town, he asked, ‘What’s an aerial bombardment?’ Previously, Western powers had experimented with the technique to control their distant colonies. The Italians had first dreamed up bombing from the air in the autumn of 1911 when Lieutenant Giulio Cavotti, flying a Taube monoplane, had dropped four 4.5lb bombs from a height of some six hundred feet on rebel positions in Libya. No one was injured and little damage was done, but a precedent was set. Since then the British had carried out systematic aerial bombardment in Somaliland in 1920, but Guernica was the first bombing of civilians to enter the world’s collective imagination, and the first town to be systematically razed to the ground in such an attack. The line from Guernica to Hiroshima passes through Coventry, London and Dresden, and while the Basque and Japanese experiences barely compare in scale, the underlying concept is still the same.
Perhaps the only part of the Guernica story that has never been contested is the fact that the town suffered great damage from explosions. Everything else, from how it happened to who was responsible, why it was done and how many people were killed, has been the subject of intense argument at some point or another. And the debate still goes on.
One version of events goes something like this:23
At around half past four on 26 April 1937, a German Dornier 17 – later dubbed a ‘flying pencil’ during the Battle of Britain – flew over Guernica and dropped a handful of bombs around the bridge crossing the River Oca, failing to hit the target and destroying a number of nearby houses. Although perhaps strategically unimportant for the Nationalist advance, the town was home to a couple of small-arms factories, and soldiers from some four Republican battalions were stationed there. It was also the spiritual home of the Basque people, being the site where traditionally the Spanish king, or his representative, swore to uphold the Basques’ traditional rights and culture. An old oak tree marked the spot where the ancient ceremony took place, next to the Casa de Juntas.
A few moments after the Dornier’s bombs were dropped, three Italian planes – Savoia-Marchetti SM.79s – passed over, dropping thirty-six 50-kilo bombs. These, too, fell on houses around the bridge and in an empty plot near the train station. A little while later more German planes arrived, Junkers Ju52s carrying 50-kilo and 250-kilo bombs, as well as 1-kilo incendiary bombs with aluminium tips. These caused considerable damage – with their delayed explosion they penetrated the old wooden houses and quickly set them on fire. The blaze spread easily to neighbouring areas.
At around six o’clock that afternoon a Republican plane flew over the town on the orders of the Basque president, José Antonio Aguirre. The pilot did not report any significant damage. But the bombardment was far from over. Half an hour later, nineteen Junkers Ju52 bombers accompanied by four Messerschmitt Bf109s returned to Guernica for the final assault. While the bombers concentrated on the centre, the fighters strafed the roads leading away from the town, which were now crammed with men, women and children trying to escape. In one pass alone twenty tonnes of bombs were dropped. By seven o’clock they had finished. Guernica was ablaze. Over 70 per cent of the town was destroyed. The bridge, the arms factories and the train station, however, were all still standing.
Foreign journalists on the Republican side were sitting down to dinner in Bilbao thirty kilometres away when the news came through that Guernica had been bombed. They rushed off and arrived to find the place in the grip of a firestorm. ‘We tried to enter, but the streets were a royal carpet of live coals; blocks of wreckage slithered and crashed from the houses, and from their sides that were still erect the polished heat struck at our cheeks and eyes.’ Reuters were the first to tell of what had happened, but George Steer, writing for The Times, captured the world’s imagination with his account, later retold in his book The Tree of Gernika. ‘Some of the witnesses were quite dumb. They were digging them out of the ruined houses – families at a time, dead and blue-black with bruising. Others were brought in from just outside Gernika with machine-gun bullets in their bodies: one, a lovely girl. The militia cried as they laid her out on the ground in the broken hospital: they could give no reason for their tears – they just cried.’
The scene was apocalyptic. Many people had been crushed as they sought shelter in cellars too weak to withstand the intensity of the bombardment, while witnesses described cattle and sheep running around the town on fire, set alight by thermite and white phosphorus from the incendiary bombs.
The flames had not been extinguished before the claims and counter-claims began as to what had actually happened. For the Republicans, outrage was mixed with a desire to elicit the sympathy of democratic countries and perhaps push them into assisting in the battle against Franco. Accounts were soon circulating that many thousands of people had been killed in the bombing. The Nationalists realized the event could potentially be very damaging, and Franco’s propaganda teams, after briefly denying that Guernica had been attacked, quickly shifted to insi
sting that the ‘Reds’ had blown the town up themselves as they were retreating. Anxious to minimize the bad publicity, they peddled their account to journalists accredited to their side, who reported it back to London, Paris and Washington. Catholic supporters of Franco around the world dutifully clung on to this version of events.
But the raid was a disaster for Franco’s image abroad, and there are reports that he was furious with the Germans when he learned of the consequences of the bombing. Guernica lost the Nationalists a lot of support, and Time magazine, Life and later Newsweek took the side of the Republic. Franco continued to insist that the enemy had destroyed the town until the 1940s. Only then did he concede bombers from the Nationalist side had been responsible. But according to this new official version, the Germans had been acting without his knowledge, so he still managed to avoid blame or responsibility.
The question of whether Franco did know that the attack was planned is still unclear. There is nothing to show he gave the definite go-ahead for it, yet he had made no complaint following the Durango bombing a few weeks earlier. If anything, the bombing of civilians fitted in with his ideas about ‘redeeming’ Spain through bloodshed. What he didn’t want was a swift victory which would leave him with problems on the home front. The enemy had to be beaten down and subjugated.
The reasons why Guernica was targeted are, likewise, unclear. Strategically, the destruction of the town in this fashion was far from necessary. Goering, at his trial at Nuremberg, said the attack had been an experiment by the Luftwaffe.
‘It’s a shame, but we couldn’t act in any other way,’ he said when the prosecutor pointed out that women and children had been present. ‘At that time these experiences couldn’t be had anywhere else.’
Like a test tube, Guernica was a way of examining the effect on the enemy’s morale of aerial bombardment.
Goering committed suicide in his cell, but the man more directly responsible for what happened, General – later Marshal – Sperrle, head of the Condor Legion in Spain and one of the men subsequently behind the bombing of Coventry, died a free man in Munich in 1953.
Another theory regarding the bombing is that the Germans carried it out in order to show General Mola how to conduct a rapid campaign. The Spanish Civil War was costly for Berlin, and German commanders tried on numerous occasions to speed things up or persuade their Nationalist allies to go faster. Franco, however, preferred a slow, steady conquest that caused as little damage as possible to infrastructure. Guernica was one way of showing him how the campaign might otherwise be conducted.
More recently, though, historians have found evidence that the destruction of Guernica was an act of revenge by the Luftwaffe for the lynching of one of its pilots shot down over Republican territory earlier that year. Many who escaped their planes by parachute met the wrath of local people before the authorities could get to them.
Whatever the cause, the Germans and Italians – and the world in general – learned much about the effect of mass bombardment of civilians through the attack on Guernica, and the clock was set ticking for the future air raids that would so mark the Second World War. As one British Foreign Office official scribbled in a note at the time, Guernica ‘told us what to expect from the Germans’.
The question of how many people died on that day in 1937 still seems to depend, as does so much about the Civil War, on your political persuasion. No one now talks of three or five thousand casualties, a figure claimed by some soon after the attack. The Basque government eventually gave the official figure as 1,654 killed and 889 wounded. Most now regard this as too high. Nonetheless, many historians today insist around one thousand people died. For right-wingers, though, the figure is as low as 120, or even less. Although a tragic and bloody event, now this is perhaps the least important part of the story: Guernica exists beyond the events of 26 April. In his despatch, Steer wrote: ‘In the form of its execution and the scale of the destruction it wrought, no less than in the selection of its objective, the raid on Guernica is unparalleled in military history.’
Even today it is a symbol of our power to destroy.
17
Valley of the Dead
I had slept deeply the night before, and when I woke it took some minutes for the memory of where I was and what I was doing to seep back into my mind. Kiki’s flat, the smooth wooden floor, hot summer light streaming through the upper window. I had sweated profusely again, skin clammy and thin. Staggering to the kitchen for a glass of water I almost fell over, my legs like rubber, head spinning. It seemed the virus had still not left me entirely.
Kiki was almost annoyingly jolly.
‘We’re going for a drive into the mountains. You need some mountain air.’
A couple of hours later, after I’d slowly showered, eaten and put on some of my new clothes, I was slumped in the passenger seat of an orange 2CV, wearily watching the miles of towering chocolate-brown suburbs shift gradually into dry countryside. I tried to rise above the din of the tiny engine to connect once again with where I was. Some part of my brain was aware that today Kiki was dressed most definitely as a man. Perhaps it was a disguise in order to step out of the protection the city gave him.
We stopped to pick up some newspapers and magazines, and I glanced at a photo report on Picasso’s famous painting Guernica. Commissioned by the Republican government for its pavilion at the World Fair in Paris in the middle of the Civil War, this huge black and white depiction of the bombing has become one of Picasso’s most celebrated works, a violent, chaotic scene of destruction that fits well with the painter’s fragmenting, distorting style. Inspiration for the work had come after a million people took to the streets in Paris, where Picasso was living, to protest at the news of the Basque massacre. Photos of the bombed city were soon circulating. The work got mixed reviews when it went on display – the Germans and the Soviets in particular found it displeasing – but went on to become perhaps the most famous painting of the twentieth century, touring the world from its eventual home in New York. Although he had bestowed it on the ‘Spanish people’, Picasso had insisted it could never be shown in Spain until democracy was restored. It finally reached the country in 1981. Today it hangs in the Reina Sofía museum in the centre of Madrid.
‘Picasso makes the same mistake as everyone about the Civil War,’ Kiki said.
‘What’s that?’
‘He can only see it in black and white.’
My concentration locked on to the screaming horse with its arrow-tongue, and the light-bulb eye in the sky, like a mechanical, soulless god. Try as I might to absorb other aspects of the picture, I couldn’t move my gaze from these two central motifs, my eyes moving in and out of focus in a fog-like drift. A voice somewhere inside me was speaking with solid assurance, saying how natural it was that there should be no colour in such a scene. Such wilful destruction and wrongdoing could only be depicted in shades of grey. Colour would be inappropriate here. I found myself nodding silently, taken in by the strength of the argument. But from the other side of the car came a different voice.
‘It’s simplistic,’ Kiki said. ‘If life is as complicated as it is, imagine what war must be like.’ His voice hadn’t noticeably changed, but it seemed subtly different from before in a way I couldn’t quite pin down – more suited to one wearing ‘male’ dress. Perhaps it was the style of speaking more than a blunt shift in register.
‘Do you think it’s possible there were good guys and bad guys?’ he said.
I remembered coming across a comment by Stephen Spender, who’d served on the Republican side with the International Brigades. He’d said that according to his tutor at Oxford, the Spanish Civil War was the only conflict in his lifetime where there was an absolute and clear choice between good (the Republic) and evil (Franco). Perhaps in the Europe of the 1930s it was easier to make such bold statements than it is now. Certainly I couldn’t come down on one side like that myself.
There seemed to be very few people who could treat the Civil War simp
ly as history. As with so much in Spain, emotion and passion played a large role in the matter, so much so that the echoes of the conflict still resounded today. Would they ever fall silent, I wondered?
‘What happened to your family in the war?’ I asked. I could hear the words coming out of my mouth in a tired slur.
‘They were up in Galicia,’ Kiki said. ‘Not much. That whole area was under the Nationalists from the start. My grandfather had a shop and was too old to fight; my father was still a boy. An uncle on my mother’s side was enlisted into Franco’s army and got a bullet through the stomach at Brunete. But no one talked about the war too much. It was always there, like a headache that just won’t go away, but you try to get on with things. When I was sixteen I asked my uncle about what happened, but he broke down. I didn’t bother after that.’
The Battle of Brunete, in July 1937, had been one of the biggest battles of the war, an ultimately unsuccessful attempt by the Republicans to break out of the circle the Nationalists were slowly trying to draw around Madrid. Casualties were high on both sides, with around 42,000 men lost in total.
I sat back and closed my eyes, happy for a short while to be driven around, sickness inducing a childish desire to withdraw into a secure space where responsibility rested on another’s shoulders. The temptation to be led, to hand yourself over to one who seemed or claimed to have all the answers, was a constant threat. Wasn’t that, after all, how people had been lulled into the sleep of political extremes of the thirties? As I drifted into a dream-like state, I had visions of the Civil War turning into a battle between religious sects, Franco morphing into a tambourine-wielding Hare Krishna while his opponents lined up in the lotus position, levitating their way to the front lines and attacking their enemies with nut roasts.
I felt a hand on my arm.
Guerra Page 20
