The Basque History of the World - Mark Kurlansky [82]
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