Basque History of the World (27 page)

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 remembers 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)

In 1970, Franco’s government admitted for the first time that Guernica was bombed from the air. In 1998, the German government finally apologized to the Basque people, but the Spanish government never has, and it continues to deny Basques access to military records of the incident. In 1999, the Spanish legislature passed a resolution admitting that Franco had lied about Guernica.

T
HE
BASQUES WERE
still fighting. Rementeria went back to defend Bilbao. “Everybody thinks it was over with Guernica but it wasn’t There were a lot of fronts, we went to them and fought on.”

In the rubble that was Guernica at the end of April 1937, the ancient stone bridge over the river remained intact, as did a few archways in the center of town. The rest was blackened heaps and collapsing walls. But at the edge of town where the mountains begin, a pillared nineteenth-century building still stood, with a straight oak tree in front. In the days after the bombing hundreds of homeless survivors, mostly women, gathered in front of the oak, sleeping on mattresses soaked from the effort to put out the fires. George Steer and other correspondents listened to their stories. “They conversed in tired gestures and words unnaturally short for Spain,” Steer later reported. “And they made the funny noises of bombers poising, fighters machine-gunning, bombs bursting, houses falling, the tubes of fire spurting and spilling over the town. Such was the weary, sore-eyed testimony of the people of Guernica, and it was only later that people who were never in Guernica thought of other stories to tell.”

The pillared building with the oak tree in front of it are both still standing. Farther up the mountain, Juan José Rementeria can see the top of the tree from his apartment window.

Among the mysteries surrounding the attack is the question: Why Guernica? Many believe it was because of its symbolic importance. Yet the oak was not touched. Some theorize that the Requetés, the Navarrese troops, had asked the command not to damage that place. Or maybe it was just missed because it was at the edge of town. Maybe the Germans, not knowing Basque history, thought it was just a tree.

10: The Potato Time

Silent and antisocial, if the Basques want to communicate with others, they sing.

—Pío Baroja
, F
ANTASÍAS
V
ASCAS

THE BASQUES HUNG ON, dug in around Bilbao, fiercely and futilely defending every foot of ground. Unlike the Carlist sieges of the last century, little olive oil was left, nor was milk or meat. The only plentiful food was Mexican chick peas. In the old Basque tradition, Bilbao controlled the import of Mexican chick peas for all of Spain and when war broke out the warehouses were packed with the nation’s supply.

A British destroyer flotilla based in St. Jean-de-Luz, careful not to compromise neutrality by carrying any implements of war, tried to bring food into the city. The Basque government procured a supply of grain and started making state bread, a heavy, bitter, dark bread which offered a maximum of nutrition by including all parts of the grain. The Basques were not accustomed to this type of dark whole wheat bread and it was popularly believed to be toxic. Among the alleged side effects, it was said to cause miscarriages in pregnant women and madness in men. But the tenday food ration was a pound of rice, a pound of chick peas, a pound of vegetables, and a half pound of cooking oil per person. Bilbao was crowded with refugees from the cities and towns already destroyed. Not only Guernica and Durango but Eibar, Munguia, Muxica, Elgeta, Markina, Bolibar, Arbacegui, Yurre, Castillo y Eleijabeitia, Amorebieta, Lemona, Fika, Rigoitia, and Galdakano had all been destroyed or seriously damaged from bombing. Many of the survivors had fled to Bilbao.

According to George Steer, domestic cats became a source of meat. It had long been rumored that cat was a peacetime delicacy in the poorest neighborhoods of Bilbao. Steer even supplied the following recipe:

First, the cat was caught, then laid in salt for twenty-four hours, then basted. A magnificent sauce of sherry and mushrooms and various spices was then prepared to drown the last carnivorous flavors of pussy, and the whole was said to resemble jugged hare, and even in the case of plump lady cats to give jugged hare points and a beating.

—George Steer
, THE TREE OF GUERNICA,
1938

But the correspondent, who termed chick peas “the yellow menace” complained that by January 1937 cat Bilbaíno was not the same anymore. There was no longer any salt or sherry and anyone who could find mushrooms ate them immediately.

People looked to the sky, not only fearing attacks but hoping that the long awaited planes of the Republican air force would come to save them. Steer was convinced that those planes would have saved Bilbao. But they had come from Barcelona and bad weather had forced them to land in French territory. The French, respecting the neutrality agreement, would not allow them to continue. But the enemy planes came and dropped bombs regularly.

Only the Soviet Union and Mexico were willing to supply weapons and they could no longer reach Bilbao. The British and French were not going to enter this civil war but after Guernica their sympathies, and especially public opinion, were clearly with the Basques. Aguirre appealed through the Catholic Church for other countries to shelter Basque children. Britain agreed to take 4,000 children. France placed no limits at all on Basque refugees. These two countries, together with Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, Mexico, and the Soviet Union, took in a combined total of more than 20,000 Basque children. The British Royal Navy assisted with the evacuation. The children were all vaccinated before they left, and each child was served coffee, milk, and a fried egg as they made their way to sea, saluted by the mournful honks of fishing boat horns. In England the children were installed near an airfield and needed to be constantly reassured that the incoming aircraft were friendly. At the sound of an airplane engine they would begin shouting “
bombas!
”