FOR MOST, THE bombing of Guernica and the photograph of the so-called Falling Soldier epitomized the horrors of the Spanish Civil War (1936–9). But did the reports of that bombing accurately reflect what really happened and was that photograph all it seemed?
That Guernica was the target of aerial bombardment on 26 April 1937 is beyond dispute, but the severity, duration and objective of the perpetrators are the subject of claim and counterclaim. The Communist-backed Republicans claim the town was obliterated after being bombed on a busy market day, resulting in thousands of deaths, while the Nationalists, led by the ultimately victorious General Franco, who was supported by Nazi Germany, asserted that the town was a legitimate target and the bombardment had been strategic and of limited severity. Again, according to the Republicans, the raid on the town, which the locals prefer to call Gernika, was carried out by the German Condor Legion – which never denied its involvement – with the allegedly dark objective of testing out the effectiveness of the pattern bombing of civilians in preparation for the forthcoming Second World War. In keeping with this hidden agendum, the Condor Legion, under the command of Wolfram von Richthofen, cousin of the more notorious Red Baron, selected the ‘innocent’ town of Guernica at random and cynically planned to bomb it to give their chap with the abacus the best chance of coming up with some impressive figures. Yet there is nothing to support this suggestion and much to contradict it.
The Republican forces in that area were in full retreat and, given the direction in which they were heading, it was obvious to everyone in the area that they would bottleneck at Guernica in the Basque province of Vizcaya, better known as Biscay to outsiders. The town also had a serviceable rail-head and was home to the Astra small-arms factory so it would have been something of a miracle had the place not been selected as a target. The day in question was a Monday which, under normal circumstances for Guernica, would have been a market day and thus a day resulting in an increased civilian presence, but markets had already been banned for their propensity to block up the roads. Even had this not been so, the rural population surrounding the town, noting the ever-increasing Republican presence, had already figured out for itself what was on the cards for Guernica and had resolved to give the place a very wide berth. The German objective, according to von Richthofen, was to take out the bridges and destroy the road infrastructure to restrict movement out of Guernica, as Nationalist forces on the ground were fast approaching the town.
The attack force comprised two Heinkel 111s, one Dornier 17, eighteen Junkers 52s and three Italian Savoia-Marchetti 79s, which between them carried 22 tons of 250 kg or 50 kg bombs and 1 kg incendiaries. The first of the five waves of attack came at 4.30 p.m. and was carried out by the DO 17, which approached the town from the south to drop twelve 50 kg bombs. Next came the Italian SM 79s with explicit orders to bomb the bridge and roads to the east of the town but not to bomb the town itself – a strange overrider to their orders had the obliteration of Guernica been the prime objective. There were three more waves involving the Heinkels and the Junkers with the last of these ceasing at about 6 p.m. when, according to some accounts, about a quarter of the town had either been flattened or was on fire. Smaller then than it is now, Guernica has never been a big place and most expert opinion agrees that this is about what one could have expected the German Army to achieve from the payload their planes were known to have been carrying. It should also be remembered that the bomb weights mentioned above reflect the overall weight of the ordnance dropped; on average the explosive payload of a 1930s bomb stood at something less than 50 per cent of the overall bomb weight, so the combined weight dropped was about 10 tons of explosives. Not pleasant if you are underneath it when it falls but this hardly constitutes a heavy bombardment in the context of war.
Naturally, the Republicans of the time maintained that over half the town had been destroyed but, if that was true and the total obliteration of Guernica had been the objective, why didn’t the Germans simply mount another air raid of similar strength to achieve that alleged objective? And if over half the town was in ruins, as the Republicans maintained, why is much of Guernica’s early architecture still standing today? The nineteenth-century parliament buildings are still there, as is the Tribunales, the fifteenth-century Church of Santa Maria and the thirteenth-century Church of St Thomas. And what of the death toll? Again, and as one would expect, the Republicans trumpeted that over 2,000 innocent civilians had been killed, but that is quite impossible. The average kill rate inflicted by 1930s aerial bombardment on free-running ground personnel in an urban location was about seven deaths per ton of ordnance dropped. Seven times 22 (tons) is 154, which fits neatly with the more accurate body count of 153 established by the Gernikazarra Historia Taldea (Gernikazarra History Group) soon after the event. Yet this quiet voice of sanity has failed to stifle claims still coming from both sides of the argument. As late as 30 January 1970, the pro-Franco Madrid-based newspaper, Arriba, stated that there were only twelve deaths in Guernica that day, a claim as ridiculous as those from the pro-Republican camp maintaining a death toll running into the thousands.
Cold War spy Kim Philby, whose left-wing sympathies for the Russian-backed Republicans can hardly be questioned in the light of later revelations, is known to have been in Guernica on 28 April. Already in Moscow’s pocket, he had been ordered by Stalin to organize the assassination of Franco. Some of his clandestine activities aroused the suspicions of Reuters correspondent Ernest Sheepshanks, a threat Philby allegedly removed by tossing a grenade into his car. Be that as it may, his copy filed to The Times that day read:
ENFANTS PERDUS
The Spanish Civil War began on 18 July 1936 when the Hitler–Mussolini-backed General Franco mounted a coup against the Communist-backed Republican government. Only from a distance did the Republican cause look like the romantic adventure it was depicted to be by the likes of Ernest Hemingway who, for all his later tales of derring-do, spent most of his time in Madrid’s Hotel Florida, drinking and filing copy based on second-hand information.
Most of the idealistic foreigners who flooded to the Republican banner soon saw the harsh realities of the war. Nearly 3,000 Americans joined the Lincoln Battalion but, under Republican commanders, they were simply used as ‘enfants perdus’ to attack enemy positions too well entrenched to risk fully trained Spanish troops. By the time the battalion decided to go home in 1938, over a third were either dead or seriously injured. It was much the same for other International Brigades which, collectively numbering 60,000, were likewise depleted by over a third through the same cynical misuse.
It is feared that the conflagration destroyed much of the evidence of its origin, but it is felt here that enough remains to support the Nationalist contention that incendiaries on the Basque side had more to do with the razing of Guernica than did General Franco’s aircraft. Few fragments of bombs have been recovered, the facades of buildings still standing are unmarked and the few craters I inspected were larger than anything hitherto made by any bomb in Spain. From their positions (most corresponded to the known location of manholes in the roads) it is a fair inference that these craters were caused by exploding mines which were unscientifically laid to cut roads. In view of these circumstances it is difficult to believe that Guernica was the target of bombardment of exceptional intensity by the Nationalists or an experiment with incendiary bombs, as is alleged by the Basques.
Others took pictures of buildings that had quite obviously been torched from the inside with the abandoned petrol containers still scattered about in evidence. True, the Condor Legion dropped a limited number of lightweight incendiaries, each with a payload of about 450 g but, by the very nature of their delivery, these tend to burn multistorey buildings from the top down and most of the burnt-out shells of buildings inspected shortly after the raid had burned from the bottom up. Many of the foreign journalists who visited the town after the raid seem to have been of the opinion that it would have taken many hundreds of bombs to achieve the level of destruction that confronted them. Most suspicious of all was the fact that, with Guernica once the capital of the Basque lands, the quarter of the town where still stands the old Meeting House and the sacred oak, Gernikako Arbola (The Tree of Guernica), under which the Council of Vizcaya first received its Royal Charters of Privilege in the Middle Ages, was completely unscathed. The spiritual and historic importance of this unscathed part of the town to Basques does raise a rather large question mark over who did what to Guernica.
But no matter, the Republicans won the propaganda war by commissioning Picasso to run up his still-famous Guernica which, measuring about 12 feet by 25 feet, presents the viewer with nightmare images and made its debut in the Spanish Pavilion at the 1937 World’s Fair. A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words and Picasso’s painting spoke volumes on the very real horrors of the Spanish Civil War to other countries – especially the USA, which somehow managed to utter eloquent condemnation of the war in general and the bombing of Guernica in particular while remaining tight-lipped about the American pilots involved in the first-ever concentrated bombing of civilians in a wholly innocent town. Helping the Spanish put down the Berber uprising in Morocco in 1925, an American-staffed squadron bombed the insignificant town of Chefchaouen to inflict staggering casualties. Of no military significance whatsoever and a town of about the same size as Guernica – with a population of perhaps 7,000 – the town was hit for no other reason than to break the will of the insurgents. As they say in that Moroccan town, ‘everyone in Chefchaouen has heard of Guernica but no one in Guernica has heard of Chefchaouen’.
It is probably fair to say that few books or films fail to depict members of the Franco–German forces as cardboard cut-out fascist baddies and the Republicans as noble idealists struggling against a determined and sadistic opposition. Rarely is there any mention of the 50,000 civilian murders committed by those noble idealists who were every bit as enthusiastic in their atrocities as the Nationalists. As good communists, the Republicans harboured a particular hatred for the Church, resulting in some 7,000 clerics and nuns being variously raped, crucified, thrown to the bulls in the arenas, burned alive or castrated and thrown down wells in the hope of poisoning the local water supply. One of the most ardent cleric killers was a woman known only as La Pecosa, or the Freckled One, who seems to have taken particular delight in organizing the gang rape of nuns prior to their execution. On the night of 19 July 1936, Republican militia went on the rampage in Barcelona to torch fifty of the city’s churches, leaving only eight others and the cathedral standing. In the Aragon city of Barbastro over 90 per cent of the clergy were murdered and about 62 per cent in the city of Lérida; Tortosa in Catalonia, Segorbe in Valencia, Málaga, Minorca and Toledo escaped with a mere 50 per cent cull of their clerics. As is ever the case in such internecine conflict, no one emerged with clean hands.
On 5 September 1936, the man born Endre Friedmann, who was destined to achieve international fame as a war correspondent and photographer under the pseudonym of Robert Capa, claimed to have been outside the village of Cerro Muriano in the province of Córdoba when he fortuitously snapped a Republican militiaman in the instant he was shot in the head by a distant sniper. The image became an overnight icon with the young man falling back, arms spread and his rifle falling from his dead, right hand. Still a popular wall-poster, Capra’s snap went unchallenged until 1975 when Spanish geographers and historians took a closer look at both the central figure and the configuration of the landfall in the background. The so-called Falling Soldier was allegedly Federico Borrell García, an anarchist volunteer, but suspicions were first aroused by the fact that, although he was indeed killed outside Cerro Muriano on 5 September 1936, all his comrades were united in their reports that he had been shot while taking cover behind a tree. Not only are trees conspicuously absent from the peripheral terrain in Capa’s photograph but Capa himself was not recorded as having been in the area at the time.
On the geographical front, the configuration of the hinterlands in the distant background bears no relationship to any eyeline taken from anywhere around Cerro Muriano. According to José Manuel Susperregui Etxebeste, Professor of Audiovisual Communications at the University of the Basque Country, who has written much on the photographic legacy of the conflict, the photograph matches identically the geographical skyline at Espejo, some 30 miles to the south-east of Cerro Muriano. In 1936, the only fighting around that town took place on the 22 and 25 September, by which time García was some three weeks dead and Capa, again, was not in the area. It seems that the photograph cannot have been of García and cannot have been taken in Cerro Muriano. Etxebeste further states that the photograph must have been taken several weeks before Capa’s claimed date and not with his famed Leica, but with the Rolleiflex of his then lover and business partner, Gerda Taro, and that said camera must have been mounted on a tripod at the time. In other words, the whole thing had been staged.
No matter where it was staged or whether it was Capa or Taro who clicked the shutter, that photograph will doubtless retain its iconic status. The Italians have a saying, ‘Se non e vero, e ben trovato’, or ‘If it isn’t true it is well invented’ – and the Capa snap is nothing if not ‘ben trovato’.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
With special thanks to Dr Karl Kruszelnicki of the Physics Department of the University of Sydney, who was kind enough to take the time to explain to me in person just why any celestial or solar alignments that may occur today at Stonehenge would not have done so 5,000 years ago.