The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [81]
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