Homage to Guernica

...We will never forget what happened...

...It circled the town three times, dropping 13 bombs and machine-gunning the streets...

...Most of those killed were refugees or others who had come to town for market day...

...There were no anti-aircraft missiles implanted around Guernica ????no organized defenses whatsoever ????and the target which the German pilots chose was the inhabited part of the town and not its military installations...

...In his testimony at Nuremberg in March 1946, Herman Goering boasted of the opportunities which the Spanish Civil War offered to train his airmen and called Guernica a test "for my young Lutfwaffe...

...Today Guernica, with its whitewashed, red-roofed houses and neatly manicured parks and plazas, seems like any other small Basque township tucked away in the hilly countryside of Spain's industrialized and thriving northern Vizcaya province...

...At least 3,000-4,000 were killed in all, and many more were wounded...

...They didn't know where to hide...

...While memories of the Civil War are still vivid in Spain????perhaps, in fact, because they are so vivid ????few if any Spaniards want now to relive the terrible ordeal that ravaged their country in the late 1930s...

...In his official capacity (and reportedly under pressure from the capital), he dutifully presented Generalissimo Francisco Franco, whose German allies had reduced the town to rubble, with a diamond-studded medal commemorating the anniversary...

...If I remember correctly," he says, "there were 86 dead...

...She saw a German plane coming in very low over the roofs...

...According to these sources, 1,654 people were killed and 889 wounded...

...This is the view of Guernica's present mayor, of former Mayor Unceta and of Francisco Bilbao, the vice-secretary of the provincial Vizcayan government who recently studied the question...

...Nationalist troops occupied the town on April 29...

...For 30 years," one Spaniard casually encountered in Madrid complains, "we have had no equality, no fraternity and, above all, no liberty...

...This, Bilbao explains, is because 90-95 per cent of the bombs dropped by the Germans were incendiaries which succeeded in gutting the town but gave civilians a chance to escape...

...When the plane left we ran to the shelter, which was crowded with people from the streets...

...Unceta subsequently refused reappointment to another term as mayor, some say because of trouble over the award and the pressure brought against him and his family by the local people...

...There were some militiamen in our shelter, and they said it was worse than the bombings at the front lines...

...We are ashamed that other Basques could take part in such a ceremony...

...Thirty years after the American Civil War the United States had bound up its wounds, the nation was more united than ever and, indeed, with the growing power of Southerners in Congress and the relegation of the Negro to a position of renewed subservience, it almost looked as if the side that lost had actually won...

...Only last month a 33-year-old Roman Catholic priest, the Reverend Victor Manuel Arbeloa, went on trial in Madrid for having "insulted" Franco's National Movement in a comment on Guernica...

...There were not even plans to defend it from the advancing Nationalist troops...

...But the regime in its "crusade" against what Franco calls "anti-Spain," persists in dredging up bitter memories????arresting young priests for recalling Guernica's destruction and manhandling Basques for insisting that their ancient rights be respected...

...According to Bilbao, the Condor Legion never really operated under Franco's thumb during the Civil War...

...For sheer brutishness and stupidity, the deed smacks far more of German than Spanish practice...

...One shelter that was badly made collapsed...

...Most people who lived through that bombing left Guernica????they lost their homes????and not many of them have returned...

...on May 1 foreign correspondents were invited in to see for themselves the evidence of this arson...

...More than anything else, perhaps, Picasso's work crystallized the symbolic meaning of Guernica in the minds of men everywhere...

...The Basques of northern Spain revere Guernica, the ancient seat of their culture, where for centuries Spanish monarchs took a vow to respect Basque rights beneath the sacred oak that still stands on a rise above the town...

...It is really much better now...

...But more planes came with more bombs, incendiaries as well as high explosives, and they too machine-gunned those attempting to escape...

...Today it employs 440 workers and exports more than 100,000 pistols and shotguns of various caliber to foreign markets each year...

...People tried to flee into the surrounding fields...

...To the outside world Guernica may be a fading symbol, for the horror unleashed there by German airmen 30 years ago was soon outdone by the spectacles of Warsaw and Rotterdam and eventually brought home to the Germans themselves in Hamburg and Dresden...

...Franco's boast that his form of government is "more advanced" than Western democracy notwithstanding, the material prosperity that has come to much of Spain in recent years has not been accompanied by comparable political progress...

...In Congress Senator William Borah of Idaho rose to level a stinging rebuke at Fascism: "So long as men and women may be interested in searching out from the pages of history outstanding acts of cruelty and instances of needless destruction of human life they will linger longest and with the greatest horror over the savage story of the Fascist war in Spain...

...Also, it was market day...

...There were many militiamen in town, because the front had broken, and many refugees...

...Maria H. was 17 years old when Guernica was destroyed...

...They destroyed the water reservoir to prevent the fires from being put out...

...Generally speaking, the Vizcaya Province is the richest in Spain, with an average per capita income of about $650 a year, and Guernica seems to be sharing in this prosperity...

...Spaniards quip that the dictadura (hard dictatorship) has become a dictablanda (soft dictatorship), but there have been signs in recent weeks that the regime's cautious experiments in liberalization are being called to a halt...

...If they say that less than 100 were killed," says one Basque nationalist who spent four years in prison after the Civil War, "they are lying...

...This version of what happened was solemnly attested to by various eyewitnesses, by the mayor of the town and the President of the Basque Republic, by correspondents for the Times, Daily Telegraph, Daily Express and Star of London, by Reuters news service, and by 20 Basque priests????nine of them eyewitnesses????who described the event in a letter to the Pope...

...Some things, however, are beyond dispute, and those "doves" in the United States who have raised Guernica's memory in connection with the American bombing of North Vietnam might bear them in mind...

...As for the actual number who were killed in the bombing, the precise figure seems by now beyond detemiining, though it is reasonable to assume that the original reports of more than 1,600 were probably exaggerated, and perhaps greatly so...

...What hurts me most is that Guernica was defenseless, and that they attacked nothing of military value...

...All this is new," he said, making a sweeping gesture with his hand...

...The report also contended that the explosions in the streets had been caused by dynamite hidden in the sewers, and that numerous witnesses had testified to the deliberate burning of the town by "Red Separationists" acting under the supervision of the Basque government...

...My sister and I were in the drawing room, and mother was on the balcony...

...Many old people died there...

...Despite its fate in the Civil War, Guernica is a bigger town today, with 8,500 inhabitants, than it was 30 years ago...

...Caudillo of Spain by the Grace of God," according to every coin minted in the country????finds himself on the horns of a political dilemma: If he permits the liberalizing process to go forward, he risks increased expressions of public discontent...

...But for most Spaniards old enough to remember, strange though it may seem, the destruction of Guernica seems to suggest that it is sometimes better to live with evil than to suffer havoc in trying to bring evil down...

...The day was a Monday????market day in Guernica????and the town's normal population of approximately 5,000 was swelled by farmers from the surrounding countryside and refugees from the war...

...There was a Communist battalion barracked in the church school, and they opened fire on the plane," he recalls, "but it left...

...Father Arbeloa's lawyer argued that for the regime to feel itself insulted by such remarks it would first have to prove that Franco's forces had in fact ordered Guernica's destruction...

...The visitor to Guernica now soon realizes that the fears and passions which made the Spanish Civil War one of the most dreadful internecine conflicts of this century are far from exhausted...

...The former mayor, a bald, strongly-built, energetic man named Augusto Unceta, was there when it happened...

...Adolf Galland, the Nazi air ace who joined the Condor Legion shortly after Guernica's destruction, says in his memoirs that the attack was a mistake, caused by bad bomb-sights and lack of experience, and that it "caused great depression among the members of the Legion...

...William P. Lineberry is currently making an extended European tour...

...On the other hand, in this age of doctored documents, the figure of 98 based on burial records is equally suspect, particularly since many of those who may have died were presumably refugees and other non-residents consumed by the flames or ultimately buried elsewhere...

...if he stops it, he risks bringing existing discontent to a boil...

...The prosecution declined this challenge, and in the end Father Arbeloa was acquitted...

...THIRTY YEARS LATER THE EMOTIONAL SCARS REMAIN Homage to Guernica By William P. Lineberry Guernica The former Mayor of Guernica pointed down the street to the place where the Church of San Juan once stood...

...And the generation of young Spaniards that has since come of age seems far more interested in directing Spain's energies toward a common fellowship with Western Europe than in reliving old animosities...

...Evidence does seem to indicate, however, that the attack was a Nazi experiment, carried out without Franco's consent...

...No language can describe the scene at Guernica...

...A long list of distinguished public figures in the United States, including seven Senators, two Governors, a former Secretary of State and the 1936 Republican Presidential candidate, Alfred M. Landon, issued a public protest denouncing "the monstrous crime of Guernica in the name of justice and humanity...

...The Basques have not forgotten all that happened...

...German tourists are an insult to Guernica's memory for us...

...Many Basques do not welcome these visitors...

...The Basque clergy, too, has been outspoken in its criticism of the regime...

...For many years it was a jailable offense in Spain to allege that anyone other than "Red Separationists" was responsible for the town's destruction...

...That was the first deliberate saturation bombing of a civilian population from the air in history, and though only a modest preview of far greater horrors to come, it stirred outcries of shocked indignation in many parts of the world and touched off a controversy that has not yet been settled...

...Even so, these men decry what they call "the myth of Guernica...

...At 74, the Generalissimo...

...Of course," he replies...

...Very soon more planes came, and they bombed the place for almost four hours...

...Outside the Basque country, most young Spaniards who have heard of Guernica at all know it for its ancient oak and its excellent Basque cuisine...

...It is interesting to note, in this connection, that when Guernica celebrated its sixth centennial the West German representative was conspicuously absent from the consular delegation from nearby Bilbao...

...They didn't bomb the industrial places, so they could be used later on...

...In fact, 80 per cent of Guernica is new, rebuilt since that day 30 years ago when the German planes came, and came, and came?dropping high-explosive and incendiary bombs and then machine-gunning those trying to flee the stricken town...

...If any German flyer came, I would put him on trial for war crimes...

...Miraculously," as the deeply religious Basques put it, the oak too was spared in the bombing...

...It was 30 years ago this week, late on the afternoon of April 26, 1937, that Guernica was transformed into a universal symbol of war's cruelty by the planes of Adolf Hitler's Condor Legion, flying in the service of Franco's Nationalist forces...

...Ironically, the factory went undamaged in the bombing, which razed almost the whole of the inhabited part of the city...

...At first the Nationalist forces denied that any of their planes had left the ground "on Tuesday" (sic) because of fog...

...Most Basques fought on the losing, or Republican, side in Spain's Civil War...

...But the Basque country, with its heavy concentration of workers and its separatist inclinations, has always been a thorn in the side of the Franco regime, and continues to be today...

...Before, the houses were old and the streets were narrow????a truck could hardly get through...

...Says another: "It was a sin to give Franco the medal of Guernica, an offense to the Basque people...

...The plane was very low, and my mother could see the pilots laughing...

...On these points the evidence is quite clear...

...Navaso Arzanegui, who bears a striking resemblance to Speaker of the House John McCormack, owned a dry goods store in Guernica in 1937...

...They spared the factories, but they bombed the old-age home, even though it had a large red cross on its roof...

...It remained for the Fascist warfare to select the deadliest weapons which the ingenuity of man has contrived and to show to the world how thorough and effective these weapons are when used for the destruction of women and children...

...One priest wanted to rush to the town to put the fires out, but Arzanegui says the militia told him not to, that the property owners could collect damages from the fire...

...We could hear many explosions...

...Only this past Easter club-wielding police broke up an illegal rally of Basque nationalists in Pamplona, and the workers of the area have not been averse to illegal strikes as a means of protesting their condition...

...The planes also machine-gunned an emergency hospital, where many of the wounded had been taken...

...There is still plenty of controversy over what actually happened, but local authorities (obviously committed to "the regime," as Franco's government calls itself) are currently willing to concede that the Germans ????and the Germans alone????were responsible...

...His version supports Bilbao's contentions...

...The bombing of Guernica caused a resurrection among Basques and has greatly strengthened the feelings of Basque nationalism...

...It was just for terror...

...One of the bullets broke a window on our balcony...

...More than 300 people were killed in that shelter alone...

...Twenty miles to the east the front had been broken in a Nationalist advance, so that Republican troops and militiamen were also filtering through the area on their way to new defensive positions in the West...

...Unceta is one of Guernica's most prominent citizens, and his family has owned the arms factory on the outskirts of town for many years...

...The prosecution demanded that the priest spend four years, two months and a day in prison for making that equation...

...Like Unceta, he believes the Germans were experimenting?testing out new techniques of aerial warfare in preparation for the major conflict they knew was coming...

...It was an experiment by the Germans," he said...

...The very accuracy of the initial reports?,654 killed and 889 wounded????makes them suspect, considering that the Nationalist forces occupied the town less than three days after the bombing and much of the rubble had yet to be cleared away...

...The Condor Legion, brutally and without the permission of Franco's headquarters, converted Guernica into a forerunner of Coventry," says Bilbao...

...Finally, in an official report issued the following September, Franco's government admitted that the outskirts of Guernica had been bombed, but stated that the planes involved were either unidentified or similar to those of the Republicans...

...When the people tried to run out, they were machine-gunned by the planes...

...It was packed with people, and a bomb fell in the middle of it...

...Few of the survivors encountered today report having lost any relatives, though there were only 1,200 families in the town at the time...

...The city was undefended...

...I remember that the streets were littered with bodies...

...Not everyone agrees with this account...

...The Germans were very methodical...

...But what about more prosperity...

...I was over there on a hill," says Arzanegui, "and I saw it all as well as Nero saw Rome burn...

...We had a shelter at the arms factory and a few makeshift shelters in the town, but no organized defense...

...Later they admitted Guernica was "bombed intermittently over a period of three hours," but insisted the real damage had been done by "Red arsonists" who had set the town ablaze for propaganda purposes and to strengthen the Basque resistance...

...Ironically German tourists now flock to Guernica...

...After listening to such conflicting stories, the truth of Guernica seems more elusive now, with 30 years' perspective, than in the immediate aftermath...

...Moreover, after a careful investigation of the town's burial records, his study indicates that not more than 98 deaths????as opposed to the 1,654 originally reported????can be attributed to the bombing...

...Now this fiction is finally being put to rest...

...By his account, one single plane came at 4:00 p.m...

...Here are her recollections: "It was about four o'clock...

...There is more prosperity in the Congo, too...

...Indeed, Franco must have been horrified by the news, recognized that its effect would be????to use a term that is popular with the Spanish term?contraproducente...

...to make observations only...

...he is prompted, for Madrid wears her new material bounty with a special elegance...

...Prosperity is a technological phenomenon that all Europe enjoys, but we have not had any moral progress for 30 years...

...As though heeding these words, Pablo Picasso, himself a Spaniard and sympathetic to the Republican cause, set about describing the horror in his own medium...

...Captured Nazi archives also show that the then German ambassador to England, von Ribbentrop, urged Berlin to make Franco deny the Germans were responsible????hence the "Red arsonists" story...

...Unceta's arms factory is humming (a new annex has been built) and employs more than twice as many workers now as it did during the fighting...

...About 15 or 20 minutes later three or four more planes came over, dropping explosive bombs "on the road to block traffic" and then dropping incendiaries...

...His painting, now housed in New York's Museum of Modern Art, depicts the agony of Guernica's destruction and is generally regarded as one of the great masterpieces of the 20th century...

...Last year when Guernica celebrated the sixth centennial of its founding in 1366, Unceta still occupied the office to which he had been appointed, like all mayors in Spain, by the authorities in Madrid...

...The Nationalists' protestations of innocence went unappreciated in the liberal democracies of the West...

...Nothing of the sort can be said of Spain today...

...With its munitions factory and its concentration of Republican troops, says Bilbao, Guernica was a legitimate target for attack...

...One young man, who was seven years old when Guernica was bombed and whose father was a high official in the Republican government, says bitterly: "I would have every German who comes here do forced labor for a week as penance...

...Father Arbeloa had written in the Catholic Action youth weekly, Signo, that he "lamented" not only the murder of nuns and priests by Republicans during the Civil War but the bombing of Guernica and the mass killings at Badajoz by the Nationalists as well...

...The physical scars are gone, but the emotional scars remain...

...Thereafter, at 20-minute intervals, wave upon wave of planes attacked until, three hours later, Guernica lay destroyed and burning, the cries of its wounded echoing over the flames...

...The wave of student and worker demonstrations this year has apparently shaken the regime's confidence in just how far it can allow the liberalizing process to go, and has strengthened the hand of the hardliners among General Franco's advisors...

...According to various press accounts at the time, church bells began sounding an air raid alert at about 4:30 p. m. Ten minutes later the first wave of German planes roared in low, releasing bombs and machine-gunning the streets...

...Depending on the political proclivities of one's witness, the number killed seems either to be steadily shrinking or greatly expanding...