The Bombing of Guernica

On 26 April 1937 two dozen German and Italian bombers bombed the community of Guernica in the Basque region of northern Spain.  At the time Guernica was a small town on the northern edge of Spain in the Basque province of Vizcaya, known as the center of Basque liberty in the larger Spanish nation.  After the bombing Guernica became a symbol of the horrors of modern aerial warfare, as directed against civilians.

This bombing raid was part of an offensive during the spring of that year conducted by the Nationalists to secure control of northern Spain as part of the Spanish Civil War.  The year before, 1936, the Spanish Civil War had begun as a military struggle for control of the country between Republicans and Nationalists.  Republicans had controlled the national government since 1931 by creating the Second Spanish Republic that year.  They were on the left ideologically and included communists and socialists.  Nationalists were on the right ideologically and included fascists.  The conflict between Nationalists and Republicans in the Spanish Civil War reflected the larger division between Fascists and their political opponents across Europe.  Fascists had already taken control of Italy and Germany.

A New Generation of Bombers

The German and Italian aircraft that bombed Guernica were part of the Condor Legion sent by Hitler’s Nazi government and the Casa Legionara dispatched by Mussolini’s fascist government.  Hitler and Mussolini assisted Franco’s forces toward the ends of extending fascist control over another nation in Europe and testing new weapons and tactics.  These bombers were part of a new generation of aircraft each of which could carry hundreds of pounds over distances of hundreds of miles at speeds up to two hundred miles per hour.  The bombs that these aircraft dropped on Guernica included 250-kg and 50-kg explosive bombs and 1-kg incendiaries.  These bombers epitomized the next step in military technology that evolved over the course of the twentieth century.

Considered the first case of saturation bombing of a civilian population, the two dozen German and Italian bombers that carried out this raid dropped about 100,000 pounds on Guernica.  Twenty German and Italian fighters followed up the bombing by strafing survivors.  This bombing brought about the destruction of Guernica’s town centre.  Casualty figures vary from 126 to 1654 killed.

Art in the Aftermath

The bombing of Guernica is most famously commemorated in the painting “Guernica” by Pablo Picasso.  Asked to paint a painting for the Spanish exhibition at the arts exhibition in the 1937 World’s Fair in Paris, Picasso determined to depict not a battle, but the destruction in this new era of total warfare.  Picasso completed this mural painting, which measures 3.49 m/11’5” by 7.76 m/25’6”, just two months after the bombing, in June 1937.  Picasso painted Guernica in the Cubist style, a school of painting that emerged in the aftermath of the First World War.

A New Era of Warfare

Both the bombing of Guernica and Picasso’s painting symbolize this new era in modern warfare in which large portions of cities could be destroyed and hundreds or thousands of people could be killed by aerial bombardment.  The destruction done to Guernica foreshadowed larger and more destructive bombing raids later in the Second World War.