Long-Playing Big Lie

...In a few cases, the fanaticism persisted into the 1970s, surviving even the admissions of Franco' s propagandists...

...Only outsiders, ignorant of the Basques' profound attachment to Guernica, could have invented such nonsense...

...The bombardment of this town, far behind the lines, occupied three hours and a quarter, during which a powerful fleet of airplanes consisting of three German types, [mainly] Junkers and Heinkels, did not cease unloading bombs...

...Outside Spain, controversy over Guernica raged for decades...

...The four foreign correspondents who witnessed the raid—three Englishmen and a Belgian—agreed...

...Someone posing as Ray Alan and claiming to be the air correspondent of the London Economist surfaced in Washington recently...

...It was not until 1970 that Franco's censors allowed part of the truth to appear in a Spanish newspaper...

...So casualties were heavy when Guernica suddenly became an inferno...

...It began: "Guernica, the most ancient town of the Basques and the center of their cultural tradition, was completely destroyed yesterday afternoon by insurgent air-raiders...

...Nobody knows how many victims there were...

...The British daily papers, and weeklies like the Economist (liberal), Spectator (conservative) and New Statesman (socialist), reported the Guernica bombing as such...

...Luis Bolin, a senior Franco propagandist who threatened to shoot correspondents who failed to write the kind of reports he liked (it was he who arrested Arthur Koestler), revealed in his memoirs something of the massive effort made to harness American Catholics to Franco's cause...

...On one occasion, in order to block a possible sale of U.S...

...The Times bombs Guernica...

...It is concerned less with the logistics of the air-raid than with its moral and political consequences?and with journalism and historiography at their best and worst...

...and, it is calculated, more than 3,000 incendiary projectiles...

...Last year Basque representatives privately urged King Juan Carlos to go to Guernica and make an appropriate declaration...

...The men who planted it thought it would live for 200-300 years, but they didn't know much about industrial pollution...

...Guernica...

...University of California, 537 pages, $19.95...

...South-worth reveals more than one complacent, insufficiently meticulous academic, who has sought kudos in this field, with egg on his face...

...Nowadays indeed, particularly in Spain and France, more priests are active in Left-wing politics than in Right-wing movements...

...Catholic publicists even sought to discredit George Steer personally and undermine his editors' confidence in him...

...Somewhere near the heart of the Basque country is a bustling, disappointingly modern looking town with one of the most emotive names in history: Guernica...

...Who he was and for whom he was working?the KGB, Idi Amin or Hammer Films —I don't know, but I'm fairly sure he wasn't me...

...If anyone calling himself Ray Alan tries to sell you a moonshine-powered flying saucer or buy your office missile, please let me know—and call the sheriff...

...The religious entanglement interests me personally for a reason I shall mention in a moment, but it was, of course, only one act of the tragedy...

...so the King stayed away...

...After dropping bombs, the attackers machinegunned the blazing ruins and terrorized fleeing survivors...

...I can't imagine any significant body of Catholic priests or journalists supporting a Franco-style "crusade" or propagating a Guernica-type lie in Europe today...

...They pretended that the airraid had been dreamed up by the four journalists who reported it...

...The Catholic Herald deplored "the utter one-sidedness of the press and public in this country" in sympathizing with the Spanish Loyalists and "falling for the Guernica 'massacre.'" The Tablet, which argued that "the Fascism of Spain will be something new in Europe," voiced alarm at "the flood of emotion in this country [aroused by] the alleged destruction of Guernica...

...According to Francoist and Nazi spokesmen, Guernica was destroyed on the orders of the Basque government...

...On April 3, the citizens of Guernica —and of every other town in Spain?will vote in their first democratic local election in more than 40 years...

...the congested valleys are hazy with smog and littered with factories and narrow-chested apartment blocks...

...Travel-poster glimpses of ocean and mountain alternate with industrial eyesores...

...Thus past and future, memory and hope, are linked...

...Happily, the new orientation of the Church since the Vatican Council has swung Catholic publicists away from that kind of extremism...

...As a result, more than 1 million telegrams were received at the White House and the munitions never reached Spain...

...The affair erected an entanglement of mistrust between anti-Fascists and Catholics, provoked many a crisis of faith, divided families and lashed outwardly staid people into fanaticism...

...A few weeks ago an oakling grown from an acorn of the dying tree was set in the earth beside its parent...

...The heart of Guernica is a garden that has been presided over for centuries by a dynasty of oak trees...

...arms to the Republicans, personal telephone calls were made to all American bishops asking them to request their priests to urge their parishioners to send telegrams to President Roosevelt...

...The British Catholic weeklies, following the line of Osser-vatore Romano, insisted that there had been no air-raid...

...Southworth—an Oklahoma-born, Texas-reared journalist, historian and university teacher—is one of America's and Europe's leading authorities on the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship...

...In the United States, Britain, France, and Ireland, where Franco's keenest supporters were Catholics (influenced by the strong backing that the Spanish bishops and Vatican diplomacy gave the Right-wing "crusade"), the argument acquired at times a religious flavor...

...His 200,000 words of narrative, inquiry and analysis are backed by nearly 2,000 source-notes, many of them as fascinating as the mainstream of the book...

...He tells the story brilliantly, disentangling skein after skein of lies, exposing the liars and elucidating their motives, unscrambling diplomatic doubletalk, and piecing together the truth...

...His important, fascinating book is rightly subtitled/4 study of journalism, diplomacy, propaganda and history...

...The Basque government announced that the town had been bombed by German airmen serving General Franco...

...Still, it might soon have been forgotten by the outside world—like the ruthless bombing of Elgueta and Durango, also by German aircraft, a few days earlier—had not the Francoist and Nazi propaganda machines made an incredibly stupid blunder...

...Guernica became the center of another battle-between journalists and historians on the one hand and propagandist thugs on the other—that was to continue for more than 30 years...

...The full story of Guernica's martyrdom and the "big lie" industry that fattened on it was first published only a few months ago in Herbert R. South-worth's Guernica...

...Beneath the Guernica oak, in previous centuries, rulers of the region took an oath to respect Basque rights...

...Some refugees from Guernica who told people in other regions that their town had been bombed were imprisoned...

...One of them, George Steer of the London Times, filed a report (carried also by the New York Times) that has become one of the classics of journalism...

...Herbert Southworth covers all aspects of the affair...

...Some British commentators and members of Parliament, and the United States ambassador in London, suspected that it was a "practice" for the bombing of English and French towns...

...But his advisers considered the security problem too great—a royal target would have been too big a temptation for the terrorist wing of the Eta separatist movement—and the political implications might have upset some Spanish Army officers...

...Most people would cheer him, they said, and the Basque problem would become manageable overnight...

...ACrimeof the Times' Guernica was not a military target, and many observers guessed that its destruction was an experiment in shattering civilian morale...

...and he wipes the floor with a whole platoon of pro-Franco apologists...

...The official German news agency put out a story headlined...

...On April 28, Franco's troops occupied the ruins, and the region was blacked out by censorship and repression...

...Even then, the medium chosen was the Falangist daily Arriba, with a circulation of less than 15,000 copies, and the author of the revelation was an official propagandist, Ricardo de la Cierva, who claimed that Guernica was bombed "by a special testing-unit which came directly from Germany, destroyed Guernica and went back to Germany, without our knowing anything about it...

...Monday, April 26, 1937, was a market day in the town and it was crowded with farmers and their wives as well as refugees from areas recently conquered by General Franco...

...On April 26, their new mayor and municipal council will attend ceremonies in memory of the victims of the air raid that devastated most of Guernica 42 years ago...

...The London Daily Express ran a report from its correspondent, Noel Monks, under the headline: "I saw German planes bomb Guernica...

...The present tree was planted in 1860 and is now dying...

...but after Franco's conquest of northern Spain it was dangerous for Basques to contradict it...

...Personal The only hostile reviews my book Spanish Quest (Macmillan, 1969) received were by a British Catholic who objected to my chapter on Guernica and Franco's persecution of the Basques (a chapter based partly on conversations with Basque priests), and by an American Catholic named Ernesto Siciliano, writing in the Boston Globe, who got so worked up he nearly blew a fuse: He attributed to me several statements that I have never made, in that book or elsewhere, and even ascribed to me a sentence written by a priest...