Bombing of Guernica (1937): The Air Raid That Inspired Picasso

The bombing of Guernica took place on 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, when aircraft of Nazi Germany’s Condor Legion and Fascist Italy’s air force attacked the Basque town of Guernica (Gernika in Basque). The raid destroyed most of the town centre and killed an estimated 150 to 300 people. Reported around the world within days and immortalised by Pablo Picasso’s painting, it became one of the most famous symbols of the horror of bombing civilians.

Background

The Spanish Civil War began in July 1936 with a military coup against the Republican government. The Basque provinces of Biscay and Gipuzkoa remained loyal to the Republic, which granted the Basque Country autonomy in October 1936 under a government led by José Antonio Aguirre. Gipuzkoa was largely taken by the Nationalists in 1936, leaving Biscay and its capital Bilbao as a Republican enclave in the north.

On 31 March 1937 General Emilio Mola launched an offensive to conquer Biscay. The same day aircraft bombed the town of Durango, killing more than 250 people. Mola publicly threatened to destroy Biscay if it did not surrender. Air support for the offensive came mainly from the Condor Legion, whose chief of staff, Lieutenant Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, was closely involved in planning operations.

The Condor Legion had been formed in November 1936 from German volunteers, in practice regular Luftwaffe personnel sent in secret. It included bomber, fighter and reconnaissance squadrons as well as anti-aircraft and signals units, and it gave the young German air force practical experience of modern warfare. Fascist Italy supported Franco with its own air units, the Aviazione Legionaria, based in Majorca and on the mainland. The Basque defenders had very few aircraft and almost no anti-aircraft guns.

Guernica was a small market town of perhaps 5,000 to 7,000 people, swollen in April 1937 by refugees and retreating soldiers. It lay about 30 kilometres from Bilbao and some 10 to 15 kilometres behind the shifting front. For centuries it had been the meeting place of the assembly of Biscay, held beneath an oak tree, the Tree of Gernika, that symbolised Basque rights and freedoms.

What happened

Monday 26 April 1937 was market day, and the town was busy. At around 4.30 in the afternoon church bells warned of approaching aircraft. Over roughly the next three hours, waves of bombers attacked the town. The main force consisted of German Junkers Ju 52 bombers, supported by Heinkel He 111 and Dornier Do 17 aircraft, a few Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.79 bombers and escorting fighters.

The bombers dropped high-explosive bombs and large numbers of small incendiary bombs, and fighters machine-gunned the roads and fields around the town as people fled. Fires spread through the closely packed centre and burned for hours. By evening most of Guernica’s buildings were destroyed or gutted; estimates of the proportion range up to about three-quarters.

Survivors later described sheltering in cellars and makeshift refuges while buildings collapsed around them, and fleeing across open fields under fire. The town had few proper air-raid shelters, and efforts to fight the fires were quickly overwhelmed. Many of the dead were never formally identified, and some bodies were buried in the rubble.

The Rentería bridge over the river, the most obvious military target, survived, as did the Astra-Unceta arms factories on the edge of town. The Basque assembly house and the oak tree beside it were also left standing. Nationalist troops entered the ruined town on 29 April 1937.

Why the town was targeted

Historians still debate the aims of the raid. German records indicate that the Condor Legion intended to block the roads and bridge through Guernica in order to cut off retreating Basque units. Richthofen’s diary records his satisfaction with the results.

Yet the choice of weapons and timing, with incendiaries on a crowded market day and long after the bridge could have been hit, meant that the main effect fell on civilians. Many historians argue that the raid was also intended to break Basque morale and hasten the surrender of Bilbao, and that the Condor Legion was testing the effect of combined bombing on a town. There is no consensus on whether Franco or Mola specifically ordered the destruction of the town, though the attack served their campaign.

The death toll

The number of victims has long been disputed. Shortly after the raid, the Basque government reported 1,654 dead and 889 wounded, a figure widely repeated for decades. Nationalist sources minimised the casualties or denied that bombing had taken place.

Modern research, including work by local historians in Gernika based on cemetery records, death registers and witness accounts, has identified far fewer named victims. Most historians now cite a death toll of about 150 to 300, while stressing that records are incomplete because of the chaos of war and the destruction of the town.

The propaganda battle

Four foreign journalists reached the burning town that night. One of them, George Steer of The Times, wrote a detailed report published in The Times and The New York Times on 28 April 1937. He described the raid as a deliberate attack on a civilian town and noted German bomb casings he had seen. His report caused a sensation.

The Nationalist authorities responded by claiming that the town had been set alight by retreating Basque “Reds” and anarchist arsonists to create propaganda. This version remained official in Franco’s Spain for decades and was supported by some foreign writers. Germany denied involvement at the time. Over the following decades, journalists and historians, including Herbert Southworth in his 1977 study, demonstrated that the town had been destroyed from the air.

Picasso’s Guernica

The Spanish Republican government had already commissioned Pablo Picasso to create a large work for its pavilion at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1937. After reading the reports of the raid, he chose Guernica as his subject. He painted the huge canvas, about 3.5 metres high and 7.8 metres wide, in black, white and grey between May and early June 1937.

The painting shows no aircraft or specific place. Instead it presents a screaming mother with a dead child, a fallen soldier, a wounded horse, a bull and figures crying out amid flames. Picasso’s photographer and companion Dora Maar documented the painting’s progress in a series of photographs, which show how the composition changed as he worked. Picasso rarely explained the symbols, and critics have debated for decades what the bull and the horse were meant to represent. At the Paris exhibition the work received a mixed response, and some visitors found it too abstract for a political message.

After the exhibition it toured Europe and the Americas to raise support for the Republic. Picasso placed it in the care of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and stipulated that it should go to Spain only when democracy was restored. It arrived in Madrid in September 1981 and has hung in the Museo Reina Sofía since 1992.

Myths and facts

Myth: Guernica was the first city ever bombed from the air. Towns had been bombed in the First World War and in colonial wars, and Durango had been bombed weeks earlier. Guernica became famous because of the scale of destruction, the immediate press coverage and Picasso’s painting.

Myth: more than 1,600 people died. That figure, reported by the Basque government in 1937, is now considered far too high by most historians. Modern estimates of 150 to 300 deaths do not diminish the crime, but they reflect the best available evidence.

Myth: the Basques burned their own town. This was Nationalist propaganda. Evidence from witnesses, journalists, German records and Richthofen’s own diary shows that the town was destroyed by German and Italian aircraft.

Legacy

Guernica became a byword for the bombing of civilians. In the Second World War far larger raids followed, from Rotterdam and the Blitz on Britain, including the Coventry raid, to the Allied bombing of German and Japanese cities. The memory of Guernica shaped public fears of air war in the late 1930s and influenced debates about appeasement.

Reconciliation came slowly. In 1997, on the 60th anniversary, German President Roman Herzog wrote to survivors acknowledging German responsibility. The town, rebuilt under Franco, now houses the Gernika Peace Museum, and a tapestry version of Picasso’s painting hangs at the United Nations headquarters in New York.

Timeline

• 1937, 31 March: Mola’s offensive against Biscay begins; Durango is bombed.
• 1937, 26 April, about 4.30 pm: The air raid on Guernica begins on market day.
• 1937, 26 April, evening: The attack ends after around three hours; fires burn through the night.
• 1937, 28 April: George Steer’s report appears in The Times and The New York Times.
• 1937, 29 April: Nationalist troops occupy Guernica.
• 1937, May – June: Picasso paints Guernica in Paris.
• 1937, 19 June: Bilbao falls to the Nationalists.
• 1981, September: Picasso’s Guernica arrives in Spain.
• 1997, April: German President Roman Herzog’s letter to survivors.

Why it matters

The bombing of Guernica showed the world what modern air power could do to an undefended town and foreshadowed the bombing campaigns of the Second World War. The long fight over its truth, from denial to careful research, also shows how propaganda shapes memory. Through Picasso’s painting, Guernica remains one of the most powerful images of war’s cost to civilians.