OF THE TWENTY-ONE major-generals on active service in the Spanish military, Franco was one of only four who were not loyal to the Republic. A squeaky-voiced, insecure little man, forty-four years old, Franco had an ability to lead and inspire that is hard to explain. Perhaps it was his confidence, his almost naive belief in his ability to prevail. Among his few admirable qualities, he had demonstrated great physical courage as a young officer in the endless Moroccan war. With a keen sense of the power of terror and little knowledge of modern warfare, he loved bayonet charges, because they were frightening. He was both ruthless and heartless, using fear as his favorite weapon. As a field officer, leading charges, mounted on a white horse, he was known for brutality both in Morocco and, in 1917, when he was in command of one of the units putting down a miners’ strike in Asturias.
Franco had cunning rather than analytic intelligence, and an instinct for self-preservation rather than an ideology. He was capable of the most dramatic reversals, if they served his needs, fawning over Hitler when he thought Germany would win and then becoming pro-American to save himself. Acutely sensitive to symbolism, he wore clothes that reflected complex alliances and fantasies. When in the north, he often wore the red beret of Carlism, with the black shirt of fascism, and sometimes added a white admiral’s jacket.
He had never been in the navy but had always wanted to be. Born in a military town in Galicia, he had been prevented by navy cutbacks caused by the “Disaster of 1898” from pursuing a naval career. His obsession with 1898 was typical of his generation of military. He talked about El Desastre regularly throughout his long life. It was for him a source of deep anti-American sentiments, as well as hatred for Basque and Catalan nationalists. In his 1960s school primer, the loss of Cuba and the Philippines is presented as an American plot. In the question section that follows this discussion, the student is asked: “What country caused the defeat in Cuba?” The United States, the student was supposed to answer.
In the winter of 1937, the campaign was going badly for the rebels, and the Vatican urged Franco to seek a negotiated peace. It was suggested that at the least, he might be able to make peace with the Basques, since they were such devout Catholics. Given the Basque history of negotiating, this might have worked. Many Basque nationalists saw the Republic as simply another government in Madrid. Luis Arana, Sabino’s now aging brother, saw the conflict as the problem of foreigners, of Spaniards. Still sounding like the Carlist general Muñagorri, he asked, “What do we owe to this fight which is not ours, that is not about our race, that is not about our ideology?”
But Franco told the Vatican that he would not negotiate, since such an agreement would simply defer the problem. The only possible solution to the Basque problem, according to Franco, was the complete annihilation of Basque nationalists. Mola, commanding a northern army from Navarra, and German general Hugo Sperrle urged an assault on Bilbao.
Franco had courted the Germans, and they had sent troops, planes, and weapons. But German officers, including Sperrle, were not pleased with the way these resources were being used. Investigating Franco’s failure to take Madrid in the fall of 1936, they found that he had little understanding of how to deploy ground forces in coordination with the air force that, thanks to the Germans and the Italians, he had at his disposal. Franco was a tactician for the nineteenth century, but there were to be no more calvary charges or officers on white horses.
As a condition for continued support, the Germans insisted on a consolidation of all German forces, known as the Condor Legion, under Sperrle’s command. Once Franco agreed to this, a war machine of which he had little understanding arrived in Spain. It included the newest German bombers and fighter planes, tanks and motorized artillery, and an additional 12,000 troops, including armored, artillery, and air force upits. A twentieth-century force arrived to fight a nineteenth-century civil war.
On March 24-26, 1937, the campaign was plotted by Francoist air force and ground troop commanders, Mola’s chief of staff, and the Condor Legion’s chief of staff, Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, cousin of the World War I ace known as “the Red Baron.” Richthofen explained to the Spanish how aircraft could be used to destroy the morale of the enemy before a ground assault. The commanders arranged for close coordination between ground and air forces and agreed that no attempt was to be made to spare civilians. Italian troops as well as Requetés, Navarrese units, were included in the battle plan. Once again, Basques would fight Basques.
How were the Basques preparing for the first full-scale assault by a mechanized, ground and air, twentieth-century army?
In Guipúzcoa the militia that was formed clearly confused warfare with Hollywood romanticism. They armed themselves with revolvers—an almost useless weapon in combat—holstered to their hips, and many sported checked wool shirts and red bandanas. They were Basque cowboys going to war. When the rebels showed off the fire-power of their Italian airplanes and the heavy artillery from ships at sea and threatened to destroy the beautiful resort of San Sebastián unless the population surrendered immediately, the loyal locals raided the better hotels and took vacationing fascist sympathizers hostage, creating a standoff that saved the city. As warfare spread along the Bidasoa in view of the French side, the French Basques along the border rented telescopes, binoculars, and rooms on upper floors with a view.
But warfare does not stay picturesque for long and within weeks these same towns were crammed with refugees. In Hendaye, anxious parents went from hotel to crowded hotel looking for scraps of news from the besieged towns where their sons were fighting.
As the twentieth century came to a close, Juan José Rementeria, a tall, fit-looking Basque who wore a dark blue beret, was living in Guernica. Though he appeared to be no more than sixty-five years old, he was born in 1910, in the nearby town of Muxica. Coming from a Basque Nationalist Party family, he was one of the many who heard Aguirre’s call to defend Vizcaya. He was given a single-shot, bolt-action rifle and five cartridges for ammunition. He never did learn the make of the weapon. He had no military training. “We should have had some training,” he said, “but there was no time.”
The Basque arms industry made small arms, grenades, and munitions, but no bombs. The Basques avenged one of the first air attacks by dropping rocks on enemy troops.
“IF SUBMISSION IS NOT immediate, I will raze Vizcaya to the ground, beginning with the industries of war. I have the means to do so,” declared Mola in a March 31 broadcast, the text of which was dropped in leaflets from airplanes. But he did not begin with industry. He began using artillery and aerial bombardment to destroy Durango, a rural town by the jagged, rocky gray crests of southern Vizcaya. And so began this new kind of warfare, a war waged against civilians. Durango was a town of ancient churches, rambling cobblestone streets with a river running through it lined by buildings with flower boxes. Once during the Carlist wars, it had served as Don Carlos’ headquarters. This traditional town was attacked at 7:20 A.M. while the churches were filled for mass. The air raid lasted thirty minutes. Two hundred and fifty-eight civilians were killed. Franco’s headquarters in Salamanca denied that the attack had taken place. But Durango was undeniably leveled. The Basques must have done it to themselves, headquarters explained to the international press. Communists must have attacked the churches and killed worshippers, they claimed.
The Germans were still displeased with their ally. After three days of attack, little ground had been taken. Mola proposed destroying the factories in Bilbao. The Germans asked him why he would do this, when he needed the industry and would soon capture it. Mola’s reply to this pragmatic German question was redolent with all the festering hatreds of nineteenth-century Spain. First was the military resentment of Basques and Catalans: “Spain is totally dominated by the industrial centers of Bilbao and Barcelona. Under such domination, Spain can never be set right.” Then came the Carlist hatred of urban industry: “Spain has got too many industries which only produce discontent.”
It seems never to
have occurred to Mola how a war machine such as the one placed in his hands was built and maintained. Sperrle replied that he would only bomb industries under direct and specific orders from Franco. But Franco wanted to preserve the industry for his future use. While the commanders argued over targets, an air and artillery campaign of terror was moving across Vizcaya. Franco and Mola had expected a three-week campaign. But they had not understood the determination of Basque resistance nor the long Basque history as outnumbered guerrilla fighters. All the Basques could do was retreat, but they did so slowly and made every foot of territory cost rebel lives.
Franco was perplexed at why this dazzling new force, more power than he had ever imagined commanding, made such slow progress. The Germans too were perplexed. After Durango, Ochandiano was bombed. As the ground forces advanced, town after village was destroyed. The Germans were trying a new tactic of warfare that could later be used elsewhere in Europe. But it wasn’t working. Basque history and character had not been factored into the German equation. To the Basques, the bombardment was new and it was terrifying, but it was not breaking their morale. To the Basques, this was a new variation on an old story—the invader, more numerous and better armed, trying to take their land.
Frustrated by the slowness of their advance, Mola and Franco’s headquarters started talking about razing Bilbao. The army was bogged down, but the air force could chose its targets with impunity because the Basques had little defense against airplanes. At command centers, angry Spanish and German officers looked at maps to pick the town to destroy next.
The Basques, with their bolt-action rifles, having been pounded daily by artillery and aircraft, were in an increasingly disorganized retreat in the Guernica area. Franco, Mola, and the Germans agreed on the need to cut off the Basque retreat. But they wanted more than that tactical victory. They wanted to carry out Mola’s threat, to symbolically “raze Vizcaya.” Later, all parties tried to distance themselves from the decision, but given the scale of the operation, it is all but certain that the attack on Guernica, like all other attacks in the Basque campaign, was a joint decision of Franco, Mola, the Germans, and the Italians.
GUERNICA WAS, AND still is, a market town where the farmers of the region sell their produce on Mondays along the riverfront in the center of the medieval town of stone buildings. The Basque government had suspended the market because of the war, but the peasants had to sell their products. Not only did the attackers choose a market day, Monday, April 26, 1937, but they began their attack at 4:40 P.M. when the center of town was bursting with peasants displaying the first crops of spring carried in ox-drawn carts, with livestock, with shoppers from throughout the area, and with war refugees whose homes in other Basque towns had been bombed.
A church bell warned of approaching planes. There had been such warnings before, but Guernica had never been hit. One Heinkel 111, a new bomber just developed by the Germans for speed and payload, flew in low from the mountains. Since Guernica had no air defenses, low-altitude daylight bombing, the ideal situation for accuracy, posed no danger to attacking aircraft. The plane dropped its bombs and flew away and returned with three more of the new Heinkels. Then came a sort of deadly air show, displaying all that was new in German and Italian attack aircraft: twenty-three Junkers, Ju 52s, the old bombers that the Heinkels were to replace, appeared along with the four Heinkel 111s, three Savoia-Marchetti S81s, one of the new, fast Dornier Do 17s, a bomber so sleek the Germans called it “the flying pencil,” twelve Fiat CR32s, and, according to some reports, the first Messerschmitt BF 109s ever used. This new fighter was a marvel of modern warfare, flying up to 350 miles an hour with bulletproof fuel tanks and a 400-mile range.
In the preceding months, only three of the old Ju 52 bombers, flying tight, low formation in the Vizcayan sky, their triple engines thundering, had terrified civilians below.
The Germans and Italians had unveiled their new modern air force with the market in Guernica as its only target. The bombers dropped an unusual payload, splinter and incendiary bombs, a cocktail of shrapnel and flame personally selected by Richthofen for maximum destruction to buildings. As people fled, the fighters came in low and chased them down with heavy-caliber machine guns.
At 7:45 the planes disappeared, leaving the blackened forms of the few remaining walls silhouetted against the bursting flames, which glowed into the night sky.
The cratered streets were cluttered with the entrails of bombed out buildings—blackened bricks and twisted wires and pipes. In the rubble were the charred corpses of people, sheep, and oxen. The Basque government estimated that 1,645 people were killed in the three-hour attack. Guernica’s population was only 7,000, though between refugees and the market, there may have been another 3,000 people in town that afternoon. The only ones who had a chance to accurately count casualties were Franco’s troops, who occupied the town three days later. Records of what they found have never been released. At first they said it never happened. Later, they admitted to possibly two hundred casualties. But given the intensity of the attack and the population of the town, the number of dead must have been far higher than the 258 deaths in the much briefer bombing of Durango.
Fortunately, four foreign journalists—three British and one Belgian—were in the area. George Steer, correspondent for the Times of London, filed a story that ran two days later in both his paper and the New York Times. The world was horrified—outraged at the ruthless massacre of unarmed civilians but also terrified at its first glimpse of the warfare of the future.
Pablo Picasso, commissioned to paint a mural for the Spanish pavillion of the 1937 Paris World’s Fair, chose as his subject the horror of the Guernica bombing. Europeans began to realize that the Germans could attack their cities in the same way they did Guernica. George Steer pointed out that a similar raid could level the North Sea port of Hull or Portsmouth. Too late, the British government started to understand that the fate of the Basques was directly relevant to its own security. The Germans were only practicing in Spain. Even the Catholic Church in Spain showed signs of being less comfortable with their Fascist defenders after Guernica, and there was evidence of declining morale in Franco’s troops.
From Franco’s office a statement came explaining that due to bad weather, the planes under his command had been unable to fly on April 26, and therefore the attack could not have been theirs. As for the Germans and Italians, Franco’s headquarters explained that no foreign aircraft were in the territory they held. He presented as proof a flight log, but it was for the wrong day.
It didn’t work. There were thousands of witnesses. Franco arrived at an explanation. The Basques had dynamited and set fire to their own city, just as, according to him, they had done in Durango.
Franco’s staff tried to give controlled press tours of the destroyed and occupied town. James Holburn, Steer’s colleague who covered the Francoist side for the London Times, reported that the craters he inspected were caused by “exploding mines.” But Franco’s troops could not stop the weary survivors from talking. A London Sunday Times correspondent, in the presence of a Francoist press official, went up to an elderly man who was slowly removing bricks from the interior of his ruined home. He asked him who had done this and the man replied, “Italians and Germans.” The press officer explained that the man was “a Red.” Others told the same story, that the town was bombed for hours by Germans and Italians. “Guernica is full of Reds,” was the only official explanation for this testimony. But one frustrated officer finally said, “Of course it was bombed. We bombed it, and bombed it, and bombed it and, bueno, why not.”
George Steer was informed that if he were captured by Franco’s troops, they intended to shoot him for the stories he had been writing. Steer started carrying a machine pistol with him though he later admitted that he never fired it and, like many of the Basque troops, no one had ever explained to him how to operate his weapon.
Even today there are people who remember what happened at Guernica. Anton Aurre says he reme
mbers very well, though he was only four years old. He remembers it as a beautiful, clear April day.
I remember you could see the heads of the flyers. You could see they were German planes, see the numbers, the pilots, everything.
Then there was a huge explosion. It was the beginning of the bombing. We could see the fire in Guernica. You could hear them machine gunning. They came in groups of three. I don’t know how many or if the same ones kept coming back, but always three at a time.
We could see the fires all night. The next day we went in to town. There were holes in the street. I could stand in them and they were higher than my head. The town was still burning in some places and there were corpses in the street.
It was a warm spring, and Aurre’s father was among the volunteers It was a warm spring, and Aurre’s father was among the volunteers who buried hundreds of mangled and decomposing who buried hundreds of mangled and decomposing corpses. Anton remembers his father acting strangely and being told that his father was ill. All Anton remembers of this illness was that his father was very quiet and did not eat for a week.
Others remember that the incendiary bombs gave off a sapphire blue light when they exploded, that people were running through the streets screaming, fleeing the town and getting machine-gunned on the mountain slopes as the planes circled back, over and over again.
Juan José Rementeria was fighting in the defenses outside Bilbao when he heard that Guernica was bombed. “We came back during the night. There was almost nothing left of Guernica and we took trucks and loaded survivors and their furniture and moved them to Asturias.”
Guernica, after the attack, the night of April 26, 1937, photographed by the Basque Government (Sabino Arana Foundation, Bilbao)
Basque History of the World Page 18