Guernica - Birth of the blitzkrieg that rained death on a quiet town

It was late afternoon on April 26, 1937, when the bombers came.

They littered the sky above the sleepy Basque market town of Guernica, unleashing their deadly cargo on the unsuspecting civilians below.

At the time Spain was embroiled in a bitter civil war that had begun the previous year when the right-wing Nationalists led by General Franco set about overthrowing the country’s left-wing Republican government.

Hitler’s Germany supported Franco while the Soviet Union backed the Republicans and 80 years ago the Nazis raised the ante by sending in bombers to attack Guernica which happened to be close to the frontline.

The town was reduced to rubble, with perhaps more than a thousand people killed, and from that fateful day Guernica became a byword for a new kind of terror.

Dr Peter Anderson, Associate Professor in Twentieth Century European History at the University of Leeds, says it was a significant moment.

“The attack on Guernica was the first time an undefended European town had suffered mass destruction from a bombing raid.”

There has been previous air raids dating back to the First World War when Zeppelins attacked places like Sheffield and London, but nothing on this scale.

In the past, conflicts had been fought on battlefields whereas the Nazi bombings raised the spectre of a war where defenceless civilians could be attacked in their own homes and towns and cities razed to the ground.

“It had an enormous effect on British public opinion.

“It was the first large scale destruction of an undefended town from the air and fed into this fear of mass bombing.”

The Guernica raid was also seen as a rehearsal for war and the blitzkrieg tactics which the Luftwaffe used to devastating effect in Poland just over two years later.

It was the Times journalist George Steer who broke the story to the outside world. “He was nearby and when he reached the town it was still in flames. He investigated and found bomb casings with German names,” says Dr Anderson.

General Franco’s supporters had initially tried to suppress the story, denying their had been an air raid, claiming the attack had been the work of communist forces.

“It’s often said that truth is the first victim of war and this was an important moment in war reporting. Steer had to demonstrate that the bombing had taken place and he used photographs and people’s personal testimonies to show that it had.”

The Yorkshire Post covered the story, reporting on April 28 that General Franco’s forces had advanced towards Bilbao, adding: “German airmen are accused by the Basques of having carried out a terror air raid which destroyed the town of Guernica.”

The attack made headlines around the world including in France where it was read by a certain Pablo Picasso. “He was having a crisis about what to paint for an international exhibition and when he read about what happened 
it prompted him to paint Guernica,” says Dr Anderson.

The atrocity inspired one of the greatest artworks of the 20th Century and is arguably the biggest reason why the town’s name remains famous around the world.

However, Picasso’s masterpiece is not the only legacy of that infamous attack. It prompted an outpouring of solidarity from the British public and under mounting pressure the government agreed to take in 4,000 Basque child refugees, many of whom were housed in Yorkshire.

Eighty years on and Guernica is once again a quiet, unremarkable town albeit one with a painful past.