ABSTRACT
Monday, 26 April 1937 was a beautiful, clear day in the ancient Basque (Euskadi) town of Guernica (Gernika). It was a market day and the town was filled with people from around the area. But at this time the Basque campaign of the Spanish Civil War was raging and the rebel forces of General Francisco Franco, along with their fascist German and Italian allies, were engaged in a ‘new kind of warfare, a war waged against civilians’ (Kurlansky 1999: 197). At 4.40 p.m., when the center of Guernica was most crowded, a deadly air display began when new modern attack aircraft from the German Condor Legion and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria bombed and strafed the town. Up to a thousand people were killed in the vicious attack, and much of Guernica, the symbolic capital of the Basques, was destroyed by the ‘thermite rain’ of the incendiary devices dropped by Nazi bombers (Patterson 2007). Guernica was not the first time that civilians had been bombed from the air, but as Patterson notes: ‘It was the first time that a completely unmilitarised, undefended, ordinary civilian town in Europe had been subjected to this sort of devastating attack from the air’ (2007: 17). The purpose of the bombing was to break the will of the Basque people and eliminate their ‘appetite for resistance’ to Franco's Nationalist insurgents (Graham 2005: 71).
