The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945

Among those who brought news of Italian gas bombing to Britain was the South African journalist, George Steer. By coincidence he was also the journalist who alerted the British public to what came to be regarded as the worst pre-war bombing atrocity, the German-Italian bombing of the ancient Basque town of Guernica (Gernika) on 26 April 1937. No single event played as large a part in confirming for the European public that the bombing of cities and civilians was now to be an established part of modern warfare. The raid took place as Spanish nationalist armies commanded by General Francisco Franco advanced into north-east Spain during the civil war campaign against the Spanish Second Republic, the consequence of a failed military coup in July 1936. Guernica was certainly not the first Spanish city to be bombed during the Civil War – much international attention was also paid to the bombing of Barcelona and Madrid – and the nationalists, supported by German and Italian air contingents sent to Spain, were not the only side to carry out bombing. Nor were the circumstances of the raid clear. Orders to the German air units, commanded by Wolfram von Richthofen, stated that the raid was supposed to target communications and enemy forces. Franco’s propaganda asserted that Communists had burned down the town to discredit the enemy.⁵⁴ Nevertheless the destruction of Guernica, in Europe rather than the colonies or distant China, served as a lightning conductor for the accumulated anxieties of European populations.

The bombing was announced the following day in Paris and Manchester, thanks to a Reuters reporter who was with Steer in nearby Bilbao when the attack occurred; it was this initial report that prompted Pablo Picasso to paint his homage to Guernica as his contribution to the Spanish pavilion in the 1937 Paris World’s Fair. But it was Steer’s sombre and detailed dispatch, published with some hesitancy by The Times on 28 April (and with less hesitancy by The New York Times), that attracted most attention.⁵⁵ Steer emphasized the innocence of Guernica and of its victims, and much of the subsequent propaganda generated by the anti-Franco (and anti-fascist) lobbies in the democracies played on the ordinariness of the damaged town. A British cinema newsreel broadcast the voiceover, ‘these were homes like yours’; a pamphlet on an earlier bombing by nationalist aircraft had carried the headlines ‘Children Like Ours! Mothers Like Ours! Wives Like Ours!’⁵⁶ Steer had already witnessed the bombing of the Basque town of Durango some weeks before (and had regarded this as ‘the most terrible bombardment of a population in the history of the world’), but he chose to highlight Guernica because it was the old Basque capital, with a famous oak tree in its main square around which the Basque people traditionally expressed their democratic consent to their governors. Some 1,400 of the population of 6,000 were reported to be dead, though the true figure is now thought to be around 240.⁵⁷ Widespread protests against the bombing led the League of Nations on 29 May 1937 to condemn the practice in the Spanish Civil War and to demand the withdrawal of non-Spanish forces from the conflict. Eventually, at the end of March 1938 Chamberlain was persuaded to make a House of Commons statement deploring ‘the direct and deliberate bombing of non-combatants’ in Spain as an illegal act.⁵⁸