The Bombing of Guernica

Summary

Dan Snow's History Hit: The Bombing of Guernica

Episode Date: December 8, 2025
Guest: David Bryden, Senior Lecturer in Modern International Relations, King's College London
Main Theme:
This episode explores the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, examining its historical context, the motivations and methods behind the attack, its legacy and symbolism, and how it became a touchstone in the global consciousness of the brutality of modern warfare.

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Episode Overview

Dan Snow delves into the events of April 26, 1937, when German and Italian forces bombed Guernica, a Basque town in Spain, marking one of the first systematic aerial bombardments of civilians in Europe. Joined by historian David Bryden, the conversation covers the Spanish Civil War’s context, the significance of Guernica, the details of the bombing, the aftermath, and the global resonance ignited by Pablo Picasso’s painting and international outrage.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

The Spanish Civil War Context

• Origins of the War (03:42–05:31)
  • Civil war began in July 1936 after a failed coup by Spanish generals, including Francisco Franco.
  • The war quickly polarized into Republican-held cities (Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia) and rebel-controlled territories.
  • David Bryden: "So civil war breaks out in July 1936, and it's really the consequences of a failed coup which is launched by a group of Spanish generals, including Francisco Franco..." (03:49)
• International Dimensions
  • The conflict became a proxy for broader ideological and geopolitical battles, with Germany and Italy supporting Franco’s rebels, and the Soviet Union supporting the Republic.
  • Britain and France pursued a policy of “non-intervention,” hoping to avoid escalation (06:57).

Guernica’s Symbolic Importance

• Why Guernica? (08:46–10:34)
  • Not a major military target, but a Basque cultural and political symbol.
  • Guernica was traditionally where Spanish rulers pledged to defend Basque liberties; highly significant to Basque nationalism.
  • David Bryden: “Guernica isn’t really important militarily, but it’s important symbolically...had this kind of ancient significance, and that was really picked up and magnified by the modern Basque nationalist movement...” (08:46)

The Bombing: Methods, Motives, and Witness Reports

• Events of April 26, 1937 (13:49–15:30)

  • The German Condor Legion, with Italian support, used high explosives and incendiary bombs, coordinated with rebel ground troops.
  • Journalists arrived soon after, providing immediate accounts—most famously George Steer’s in The Times.
  • George Steer's eyewitness report:

    "At 4:30pm when the market was full and peasants were still coming in, the church bell rang the alarm for approaching airplanes and the population sought refuge in siles. Five minutes later, a single German bomber appeared...About a quarter of an hour later, three Junkers arrived...the whole town was slowly and systematically pounded to pieces...The rhythm of this bombing was a logical one. First, hand grenades and heavy bombs to stampede the population, then machine gunning...Next, heavy and incendiary bombs to wreck the houses and burn them on top of their victims." (13:49–15:30)

• A New Type of Warfare (18:24–19:55)

  • Systematic destruction of the entire town using combined high explosive and incendiary bombs—a methodical, pre-planned assault aimed at crushing morale, not merely hitting military targets.

  • Key detail: the main bridge and a munitions factory were left largely undamaged, implying the true goal was civilian terror, not strategic destruction of infrastructure.

  • David Bryden:

    "What hadn’t happened before was this kind of systematic carpet bombing, this attempt to destroy entire towns. And so this is what is really new and unique about Guernica...it seems very clear that this is more than just an attempt to block off...the Basque troops...what they're really trying to do is to effectively annihilate the town as a whole." (18:34–19:55)

• Experimentation & Legacy (12:07–13:10, 19:55–21:44)

  • The Germans used the opportunity to refine new aerial warfare tactics, later deployed in WWII.

  • The bombing shocked the world, foreshadowing mass destruction in WWII—Rotterdam, Coventry, Dresden, Warsaw, and, by extension, Hiroshima.

  • Dan Snow:

    "It does sound, David, like they're trying to showcase a new way of war. This is the first time a sort of city wide experiment taking place. Can you destroy neighborhoods from the sky?" (19:55)

Civilian Impact and Casualty Uncertainty

• Casualties and Atrocities (22:15–24:08)
  • Precise casualty numbers are uncertain; estimates range from hundreds to around 1,600 deaths, amidst destroyed infrastructure and mass panic.
  • Many bodies were never recovered due to rapid rebel occupation post-bombing.
  • Eyewitnesses described machine-gunning of civilians, intensifying the sense of terror.

Aftermath: Propaganda, Denial, and International Response

• Propaganda and Denial (24:08–25:39)

  • Immediate Francoist denials; conspiracy claims that Republicans destroyed their own town; claims German planes couldn’t fly due to bad weather.
  • Misinformation and denial lingered for decades, impacting Spanish memory and public discourse.

• Military Consequences (25:39–27:17)

  • Despite Guernica being undefended and quickly falling, the attack’s main effect was in intimidating the Basque population and hastening the rebel advance toward Bilbao.
  • "Arguably they succeeded in their goal of undermining morale enough to ensure that Bilbao could be taken." (27:03–27:17)

The Legacy—Art, Memory, and Symbolism

• Guernica’s Symbolic Power and Picasso’s Painting (27:17–30:27)
  • Internationally, Guernica became an anti-war symbol, largely due to immediate press coverage and Picasso’s iconic mural.
  • Picasso started work days after the bombing, altering his World’s Fair commission to immortalize the atrocity.
  • The painting toured internationally, fundraising for humanitarian aid, and has continued to resonate, e.g., as a tapestry at the UN Security Council.
  • David Bryden:

    "He began the preparatory drawings on the 1st of May, so only a couple of days after the bombing, and immediately upon reading the first French accounts, eyewitness accounts of what had happened...he produced it incredibly quickly..." (28:36–30:27)

Lasting Lessons and the Failure of International Response

• Diplomatic Fallout (30:27–32:22)
  • Despite global outrage, Britain, France, and others did nothing effective to curb aerial bombardment or punish the perpetrators.
  • The international “non-intervention” effort was mostly for show; air raids continued with no meaningful diplomatic restraint.
  • David Bryden:

    "Ultimately, this desire from Britain and France, particularly to prevent a wider conflict, meant that there was no diplomatic consequences for the bombing of Guernica." (32:22)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the unique horror of Guernica:

  “This is more than just an attempt to block off the lines of retreat for the Basque troops...what they're really trying to do is to effectively annihilate the town as a whole.” (David Bryden, 18:34–19:55)

• On its significance as a warning:

  “Everyone realized very quickly that this could happen to a town in northern Spain, it could happen anywhere…Guernica is a precursor to what happens in Warsaw, in Rotterdam, in Coventry, in Dresden...” (David Bryden, 20:07–21:07)

• On Picasso’s rapid artistic response:

  “He began the preparatory drawings on the 1st of May, so only a couple of days after the bombing...the reports of the bombing inspired him to change his plans and to turn this mural into a portrayal of the horrors of modern warfare...” (David Bryden, 28:36–30:27)

• On modern resonances:

  “Something our modern audience will be all too familiar with—the denials and fake news really kick in...something that we've become all too familiar with, this very murky picture emerges immediately afterwards." (Dan Snow, 24:08–24:35)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 03:42 – Spanish Civil War background
• 08:46 – Guernica's symbolic importance
• 13:49 – George Steer's eyewitness report and systematic nature of bombing
• 18:34 – New era of warfare; methodical city destruction
• 22:15 – Casualties and human cost
• 24:08 – Propaganda, denial, and historical memory
• 25:59 – Aftermath: military and psychological effects
• 27:17 – Guernica’s legacy in Spain and internationally
• 28:36 – Picasso's painting and its global impact
• 30:41 – Ongoing aerial warfare in the civil war
• 32:22 – International response and lasting lessons

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Conclusion

Dan Snow and David Bryden’s discussion reveals how the bombing of Guernica encapsulates the horrors and innovations of 20th-century warfare—serving as both a specific atrocity and a wider warning. While the attack hastened the Basque collapse, it was its symbolic resonance—immortalized by Picasso—that gave Guernica global, enduring significance. The episode's analysis, eyewitness testimony, and personal reflections drive home how Guernica became a benchmark for the deliberate targeting of civilians and the power of art and memory in shaping historical legacy.

Transcript

[David Bryden]

Did I talk too much?

[Dan Snow]

Can I just let it go?

[David Bryden]

I wish I would stop thinking so much.

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[Dan Snow]

On the evening of the 26th of April, 1937, the town of Guernica was bustling with life. It was market day. Families were out shopping. Traders were packing up their stalls. Church bells were echoing through the streets. But within a few hours, Guernica would be changed forever. That afternoon, waves of German Italian aircraft fighting on the side of General Franco in the Spanish Civil War descended on the town. Bombs and incendiaries rained down with devastating precision. Buildings collapsed, fires raged. Civilians fled in panic as the first deliberate aerial bombing of a defenseless civilian population in Europe unfolded. By nightfall, much of Guernica lay in ruins. The bombing sparked international outrage, inspired one of the most famous paintings in the world, and became a warning of what the future of war would look like. But why Guernica? Was it a strategic military target? Or was it just a horrifying experiment in modern warfare? How exactly did the attack play out? And what makes this moment such a defining example of the brutality of 20th century warfare? In this episode, we'll uncover the motivations behind the bombing, explore the events that fateful day, and examine how Guernica became one of history's most enduring and haunting symbols of human suffering. For this, we're joined by David Bryden, a senior lecturer in the history of modern international relations at King's College, London. He specialized in the history of the 20th century, including the history of modern Spain. Let's get into it.

[David Bryden]

T minus 10. Atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima. God save the King. No black white unity till there is first some black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And liftoff. And the shuttle has cleared the tower.

[Dan Snow]

David, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

[David Bryden]

My pleasure. Thanks for inviting me.

[Dan Snow]

Just give us a sense of where we are. 1936. How and why does civil war break out in Spain?

[David Bryden]

So civil war breaks out in July 1936, and it's really the consequences of a failed coup which is launched by a group of Spanish generals, including Francisco Franco. It's launched From Morocco on 17th of July and it fails in its goal of taking over the Spanish government. It's defeated by supporters of the republic, but it succeeds in certain parts of the country, succeeds in parts of the north and center of Spain and parts of the south. But the republican supporters maintain control of the major cities of Barcelona, Madrid, Valencia, and all of the land in between, as well as parts of the north. And so that's the situation that launches the war.

[Dan Snow]

And roughly speaking, I'm going to be a naughty here, but roughly speaking, what this is an anti woke putsch against a sort of a coastal elite, big city, socialist, anti God coalition of people that are progressives trying to move Spain in directions that landowners, army types, conservatives, Catholics don't like.

[David Bryden]

Yeah, I mean, as you suggest, it's not a million miles away from some of the culture wars of today, but broadly speaking, that's right. So on one side, those who support the coup are the Catholic Church and devout Catholics. They're landowners, they're the military. And on the other side are liberal Republicans who tend to be more anti clerical or anti church, but also socialists, anarchists, communists, who tend to be focused in their big cities.

[Dan Snow]

Right, okay. So the coup doesn't work, as you say. There's sporadic areas in which it gets a bit of a grip in parts of Spain, but it's not clear immediately this is an existential threat to the Republic, the illegitimate government of Spain. What turns that into a bloody and intractable civil war? What is the sort of accelerant?

[David Bryden]

This is partly international intervention. So one of the kind of the main things to be aware of with Spain is that it's in some ways both a very kind of local war. Its root is in recent Spanish history, but also a very international war because it breaks out at the time when all of Europe, all of the world, knows that another big conflict is coming soon. So all of the great powers who are kind of positioning themselves for the coming conflicts immediately either want to get involved in Spain or don't want to get involved in Spain because they're thinking about their own interests so, most importantly, in the Spanish case, Franco manages to convince Hitler to send air support to help airlift his army of Africa in northern Morocco into southern Spain. And that's the thing that really gives the coup plotters a kind of a military advantage in the south at least. And what they do with that advantage is they begin to expand the territory they hold in the south, and they approach Madrid. So they go on this kind of big encircling maneuver up through the west of Spain, aiming to take Madrid from the west. And they reach Madrid in about November 1936. And that's the point where the kind of international involvement expands even further, because the Soviet Union at that point decides to come in on the side of the Republic and manages to get significant arms in to support the republic, which helps them to defend Madrid.

[Dan Snow]

But critically, not Britain and France, the two great liberal democracies supporting their legitimate, democratically elected republican colleagues in Spain.

[David Bryden]

No. So while the Soviet Union and Germany and Italy are very keen to get involved in the Spanish conflict, or at least Germany and Italy are, Britain and France, which, as you rightly say, should have been supporting their liberal democratic brothers in Spain, particularly France, which has got a Popular Front government like Spain does, are terrified that the Spanish conflict is going to spill over into a European war, which they're not ready for. So the British government, in particular strategy is to try and put off war as long as possible. So their goal is to stop this escalation, the spread of the conflict beyond Spain. And so they support what they call non intervention, which isn't really non intervention, because everyone knows that the Germans and the Italians and the Soviets intervening very actively. But they create this non intervention committee which meets London, which is this kind of diplomatic charade where everyone pretends that they're trying to stop all foreign powers intervening in the Spanish conflict.

[Dan Snow]

Okay, so let's get to April 1937. Madrid hasn't fallen. The siege has begun, as I understand it. So Madrid is under siege, it's under attack, Yep.

[David Bryden]

But the rebels have launched various attacks to try and encircle Madrid, and they've all been beaten back. And so they turned to the other bit of Republican held territory, which is the north of Spain. So most of the Basque country on the northern coast, spreading east towards the city of Santander, and they launched an offensive against the north at the beginning of 1937.

[Dan Snow]

And what's interesting thing about Guernica is that sometimes art, like the war poetry of the First World War, can give emphasis to things that weren't immediately strategically important. In the case of Guernica, actually this painting, the subsequent. It was a big moment. Guernica itself is important, and the attack on Guernica matters. So tell me, what is Guernica and why is it important?

[David Bryden]

Yeah, so Guernica isn't really important militarily, but it's important symbolically. And that's partly because of the town's importance in the history of the Basque country and the Basque people. So the Basque country in the north of Spain is kind of culturally very different from the rest of Spain. It has its own language, it has its own history. And the town of Guernica was traditionally where the rulers of Spain would come to pledge to defend the traditional liberties of the Basque people, and where the Basque people, in return, would pledge allegiance to the rulers of Spain. And so it had this kind of ancient significance, and that was really picked up and magnified by the modern Basque nationalist movement, which emerged around the end of the 19th century, which kind of used this ancient history to kind of buttress its claims to legitimacy. And it was particularly important to the Basque nationalist government that ruled the Basque country at the outbreak of the civil war. And so to go back to our previous question about who supported the republic and who supported the coup, in some ways, the Basque government and the Basque nationalist movement were very similar to a lot of the people. The groups who'd supported the coup, as in they were Catholic, they were largely middle class. But the reason they threw their lot in republic was that the republic offered them or promised them autonomy and independence, which the coup potters did against, because they were primarily interested in maintaining a strong central Spanish state.

[Dan Snow]

Was it on the front line in April 1937, or was it slightly behind the front line? Were there military targets in town?

[David Bryden]

It was slightly behind the front line. The rebel forces were advancing towards Bilbao, and Guernica is around 20 miles east of Bilbao. So the rebels were advancing, the Republicans were retreating. They hadn't yet got to Guernica, but Guernica kind of stood between, on the path of their retreat from the front lines back towards Bilbao.

[Dan Snow]

So in narrowly military. I mean, this is an argument that we'll be having again and again in the Second World War, a year or two later on, with the bombing of Dresden, for example, was there a military case for a massive aerial onslaught on the city? Or do you think this was a target that was important to strike for those morale and strategic reasons?

[David Bryden]

So this has been kind of a big debate ever since, and I think we'll never know for sure. There were certainly kind of military reasons to attack Guernica. So the obvious one would be to disrupt the retreat of Basque troops. But for reasons we'll discuss later on the actual attack, the way the attack was carried out didn't necessarily align with that objective and so a crucial bridge wasn't destroyed. So what I think we can say is that there was a combination of relatively kind of justifiable military reasons for attacking Guernica. But the nature of the attack and the way the attack was carried out maybe was influenced by different factors.

[Dan Snow]

Well, let's talk about one of those factors because we have got a tool that is available to be used by the rebels. It's always curious, isn't it, because we're talking about the rebels and yet the rebels can deploy some of the full panoply of the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe, you know, these goose stepping dictatorships. So in a way these rebels are actually better equipped and look a bit more like the dictatorships of Central Europe than the republican government. And one of those is a really impressive and potent air force. It's just German, is it? It's just German aircraft have been rebadged and are flying missions in support of these rebels on the ground.

[David Bryden]

Most of the aircraft used in the attack are from the Condor Legion, which is a German legion that was sent to Spain at the end of 1936 and was crucial in this kind of assault on the north. It was supported by some Italian aircraft as well. So there was a huge amount of Italian military support for the rebels. And Germany had sent this legion with the explicit goal of trying out the Luftwaffe, experimenting this new air force. They've created the new technologies, the new techniques of aerial warfare and they were working hand in glove with the rebel military commanders to coordinate air and ground attacks during this assault.

[Dan Snow]

Yeah, because we should remember that the Germans were not allowed by the terms of the treaty of a side to have an air force. And the Luftwaffe was founded effectively in 1935. So this is a very, very young organization with cutting edge technology, aircraft and aviation developing super fast as people know in this period. So yeah, macabre desire to see what works to refine tactics and look at for examp the after battle reports on which bombs did what damage where and things, I suppose.

[David Bryden]

Yeah, absolutely. So all of the aircraft and all of the weapons that are used by the Wehrmacht in their assault on Poland and on the Netherlands and France a couple of years later are tried out in Spain. So it's absolutely crucial for German military preparation for the Second World War.

[Dan Snow]

So this Condor Legion is told to work with rebels that are advancing to strike the town of Guernica. Are they using high explosive bombs, as you mentioned, to try and blow up bridges to knock out key infrastructure, or are they hoping just to set fire to the city? Incendiary bombs, the payload can be very different on these aircraft. What can we tell about the mission from the things they carried?

[David Bryden]

Well, I mean, maybe at this point it's worth turning to George Stier, who is a British journalist. So one of the reasons why Guernica became so famous is that in Bilbao at the time, there was a group of foreign correspondents, many of them British, and they were able to get to Guernica just a few hours after the bombings and report what had happened. So that's one of the reasons it became such a big international scandal, really. And so it might be worth just reading a little bit from George Stier's report. He was a British journalist who wrote for the Times, and so he published a report on April 27, just a couple of days after the bombing. And this is what he said about what happened. So he said. Monday, the day of the bombing was the customary market day in Guernica. At 4:30pm when the market was full and peasants were still coming in, the church bell rang the alarm for approaching airplanes and the population sought refuge in siles. Five minutes later, a single German bomber appeared, circled over the town at low altitude and then dropped six heavy bombs. The airplane then went away. In another five minutes came a second bomber which threw the same number of bombs into the middle of the town. About a quarter of an hour later, three Junkers arrived to continue the work of demolition. And thenceforward the bombing grew in intensity and was continuous, ceasing only with the approach of dusk. At 7:45, the whole town was slowly and systematically pounded to pieces. All the villages around were bombed with the same intensity as the town itself. And as a little group of houses at the head of the Guernica inlet, the population was machine gunned for 15 minutes. The rhythm of this bombing was a logical one. First, hand grenades and heavy bombs to stampede the population, then machine gunning to drive them below. Next, heavy and incendiary bombs to wreck the houses and burn them on top of their victims.

[Dan Snow]

The.

This is Dan Snows History. There's more on this topic coming up.

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[David Bryden]

Did I talk too much?

[Dan Snow]

Can't I just let it go?

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[Dan Snow]

What comes out so powerful is that it was systematic and lengthy. So they're testing out whether they can use this new aerial platform to destroy towns and cities.

[David Bryden]

Yeah, so I think that's it. So obviously aerial bombardment wasn't entirely new. There'd been aerial bombing in the end of the First World War. European Paris had been using aerial bombardment in colonial context in the interwar period. Think about like Britain in the Middle east or Italy and Abyssinia, even Spain in Morocco. But what hadn't happened before was this kind of systematic carpet bombing, this attempt to destroy entire towns. And so this is what is really new and unique about Guernica. And so over the course of these three hours, they destroy basically every part of the city. So 70, 75% of their buildings are completely destroyed. The rest are severely damaged. And you can see maybe from the description of Speer that this isn't an accident. Right. This, this seems like a very kind of methodical, pre planned process. And it seems very clear that this is more than just an attempt to block off the lines of retreat for the Basque troops, which is suggested, for example, by the fact that the bridge that these troops would likely retreat over was not destroyed. And it wasn't destroyed partly because they were dropping the wrong kind of bombs. They were dropping incendiary bombs which are going to burn buildings largely made of wood, but are not going to destroy large stone bridges. And they don't destroy, there is a munitions factory on the outskirts of town. They don't destroy that. So what they're really trying to do is to effectively annihilate the town as a whole.

[Dan Snow]

It does sound, David, like they're trying to showcase a new way of war. This is the first time a sort of city wide experiment taking place. Can you destroy neighborhoods from the sky?

[David Bryden]

Yeah, I think that's exactly it. So this is something that the rebel forces have been threatening. So the day before the bombing of Guernica, the leading Spanish general in the North, Emilio Moller, had gone on the radio and had threatened Bilbao and the Basque country with devastating attacks unless they gave in, unless they surrendered. And so this aligned really with the rebel strategy of trying to destroy the morale of the Basque people, but on a kind of a wider European context. I said before that everyone knew a war was coming, a continent wide war was coming. And everyone knew that aerial warfare was going to change the nature of the war. It's going to be different from wars that happened previously. And when people thought about that, they mainly thought about this question of aerial bombardment. And so the reason why Guernica became such a kind of a global scandal was because everyone realized very quickly that this could happen to a town in northern Spain, it could happen anywhere. And so Guernica is a precursor to what happens in Warsaw, in Rotterdam, in Coventry, in Dresden, in Hamburg and all of these kind of places.

[Dan Snow]

And eventually Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And if you'd asked the Germans, they presumably would have justified it by saying, well, we are seeing whether we can win wars from the air. We can smash entire cities and bring about a strategic effect. Defender of the government forces in this part of Spain for his other Basque forces. So there is a line, I suppose, from here to. Well, to the atomic strikes, which Strangely, less than 10 years later, George D. Said it was an unparalleled in military history. So it's one of those interesting stories that almost immediately, thanks to those journalists being there and images and it is something that immediately feels like the dawn of a new era. Does it? Globally?

[David Bryden]

Yeah. And I think in some ways it's hard to appreciate that now, precisely because of all of the horrors that occur over the next 10 years. In some ways the bombing of Guernica was quite small scale. So we're talking kind of probably the hundreds of deaths rather than thousands or tens of thousands that we see later. And obviously people become very familiar in the Second World War with this kind of mass bombing of cities and the consequences. But I think it's important to kind of appreciate the psychological shock that came from the fact that this was the first example of this happening. I think that's the thing that really caused such an international scandal.

[Dan Snow]

So you said 75% of the buildings perhaps destroyed, not bizarrely, the arms factory, which seems to me an extraordinary oversight. And what about the people? His description of people being machine gunned, which does add an element, it makes you wonder whether there was just a sadistic as well as this attempting to achieve a strategic effect to actually then machine gun survivors does feel particularly cruel and excessive. So what do we know about casualties?

[David Bryden]

So we don't know for sure and we'll never know how many casualties there were. That's partly because two or three days later Guernica was taken by rebel forces and there wasn't time in the meantime to dig out all the buildings and to recover all the bodies. So in the immediate aftermath of the bombing, the Basque government said that around 1600 people had been killed. The town itself probably contained about 10,000 people at the time. So it's regular inheritance, plus people who come from the market, plus quite a lot of refugees. Who've been fleeing the front line. Subsequently, there have been lots of lower estimates about the number of dead. So pro Francoist historians after the civil war claimed that it was in the low hundreds. Other historians have suggested 200 to 300. I think it's likely to be much higher than that figure. But maybe somewhere between those figures and the 1600s that the Basque government said at the time, there's a precedent that we can maybe use to judge that, because a few days before, another Basque town called Durango had been bombed, and that was a smaller town, and the bombing had happened on a smaller scale. But the number of casualties has been accurately counted then, and that caused over 250 deaths. So it seems very likely that a much greater number of people died in Guernica. And indeed, in George Steer's article and other eyewitness accounts, there's some horrific descriptions of groups of women and children buried in burning cellars and so on. So I think probably somewhere in the high hundreds of deaths at least. But like I said, we'll never truly know how many people died.

[Dan Snow]

And then something our modern audience will be all too familiar with, the denials and fake news really kick in. There were suggestions that in fact it hadn't been that bad. There were suggestions that in fact the communists had destroyed their own city. So you see that sadly, familia, I didn't think it would have been when I was a student in the 90s and noughties. But something that we've become all too familiar with, this very murky picture emerges immediately afterwards.

[David Bryden]

Absolutely. So the Francois kind of press service initially deny that anything happened, and then say that the town was burned by retreating Basque forces, as indeed has happened in other parts of the front line. And then the lies evolved slightly. So then they'd claimed that German planes haven't been able to take off because of bad weather, or then they claimed that the town had been attacked, but only a few casualties seas. And then the rest of the burning had happened by Basque forces. And these kind of attempts to cover up what happened continued well after the war. So pro Francoist historians of the 60s and 70s were claiming either that this was caused by the Basques themselves, or for example, that it had been something carried out purely on the initiative of the Luftwaffe, of the Condor Legion, without any knowledge of the rebels or Franco himself. It's difficult to prove. That seems very unlikely because the Condor Legion was working incredibly closely and under the command of rebel officers. And there's no evidence to suggest that this was something that the Spanish General, Spanish forces didn't know about or hadn't approved in any way.

[Dan Snow]

And the Luftwaffe, the whole point of the Luftwaffe doing blitzkrieg warfare is that they work closely with the troops on the ground to achieve the effect of combining together and mutually supporting ways. So in the aftermath, let's start on the purely military Guernica falls. Is the road to Bilbao open? Does it help the rebel march?

[David Bryden]

So Guernica wasn't defended, it was an open city, so it had no air defences. It probably made it slightly easier for the advancing rebel troops to pass through, but they were very quickly anyway going to have reached the outskirts of Bilbao, which was their main target. Bilbao was surrounded by a series of defences that was known as the Iron Ring, that had been under construction since the beginning of the war. But the general who had designed and helped build the Iron Ring had defected to the rebels a few months previously with the blueprints, which meant that effectively, those fortifications were kind of useless. And in the end it was, despite kind of fears to the contrary, proves fairly easy for rebel forces to capture Bilbao. And so one of the things that we maybe suggest is that this goal of kind of using terror, mass air bombardment to break the morale of the Basque people maybe was successful. Maybe we see in the relatively straightforward fall of Bilbao the impacts of that terror and the impact it had on Basque marriage out.

[Dan Snow]

So actually, the Germans would have regarded this great experiment as something of a success?

[David Bryden]

Yeah, I think so. They certainly succeeded in destroying the town, which it seems like that's what they want to do. And arguably they succeeded in their goal of undermining morale enough to ensure that Bilbao could be taken.

[Dan Snow]

What about its wider aftermath in Spain? Is it remembered as a particular atrocity until today? Is it something that has left scars?

[David Bryden]

So it certainly has. It's an interesting question if we compare the legacy in Spain to the legacy elsewhere. The problem was that under the Franco regime, which lasted until Franco died peacefully in his bed in 1975, there was no public discussion about Guernica, so the regime denied or minimized what happened there. So the Basque nationalist movement, it was symbolically important and became even more so after the end of the Franco regime and the transition to democracy. My impression is that in some ways it has slightly less symbolic centrality in Spain than it does internationally. As in, I think, when people think of the Spanish Civil War in Britain or in America or in France, Guernica is one of the first of atrocities they think of, whereas I think within Spain, there's so many atrocities to choose from. It doesn't necessarily have that kind of iconic symbolic significance that it does abroad.

[Dan Snow]

And so the reason for that iconic symbolism and significance outside Spain is the fact that the Times newspaper was there and then, of course, the astonishing Pablo Picasso painting. Did he dash that off straight away? Was he particularly moved to do that?

[David Bryden]

Yeah, so he kind of did. He began the preparatory drawings on the 1st of May, so only a couple of days after the bombing, and immediately upon reading the first French accounts, eyewitness accounts of what had happened, already been commissioned to produce a mural for the Spanish pavilion at the World's Fair that was taking place in Paris later that year. So he'd been commissioned by the Spanish Republican government, and originally he'd had some kind of different plans for what that would look like, but the reports of the bombing inspired him to change his plans and to turn this mural into a portrayal of the horrors of modern warfare and aerial bombardment as symbolised by Guernica. So he produced it incredibly quickly over the course of a couple of months, and it was exhibited, exhibited later in 1937 in the world's Fair. And then after that it went on a kind of publicity tour. So around kind of northern Europe, it came to the uk, it was exhibited in Whitechapel, in Manchester and other cities, and then went to North America. And it was used as part of that tour as a way to raise funds for the Aid Spain movement, which was kind of a huge humanitarian, anti fascist movement across Britain and North America during the time, ended up in New York until the fall of Franco, and then it was returned to Madrid, where it is today. And obviously it has this other symbolic afterlife, both as probably the most famous anti war piece of art of the 20th century. But also one, for example, that's a tapestry of the image is displayed outside the Security Council Room in the UN headquarters in New York. I remember a few years ago, during the run up to the invasion of Iraq, there was a big controversy because Colin Powell, I think, asks for it to be covered up so it wouldn't be in the background of the press conference he was given to try and justify the invasion of Iraq. So it remains an iconic image into the 21st century.

[Dan Snow]

It remained enormously powerful. Did the international outcry have any impact on curbing the use of force from the air, or did they actually ramp it up? Are there more gunnacas that we outside Spain don't know about?

[David Bryden]

Mass bombing continued throughout the Civil War, mainly from the rebel side, because they had a much superior air force forces and mainly of the big Cities. So Madrid, which had already suffered serious bombardments, Barcelona, Valencia, later in the war. So yeah, it remained a feature of the war throughout, but without the kind of iconic international symbolic power of coenica.

[Dan Snow]

So the strongly worded discussions with the ambassadors, summoning the ambassadors to various foreign offices around Europe and the world to lecture them on not area bombing civilians had no impact, what, whatsoever?

[David Bryden]

No, absolutely not. Because this has been reported so widely. There was a huge outcry, particularly in Britain and the United States. There was kind of debates in parliament and so on. But again, the priority of Britain and France and to a lesser extent the US government was to prevent Spain spilling out into a wider European war. So in this non intervention committee being held in London, there were guarded discussions about Guernica and what could be done. There were lots of calls for an international investigation and there were suggestions that maybe the non intervention committee would call on both sides of the conflict to refrain from bombarding open cities. But the idea of an international investigation proved too controversial. The Germans and their allies refused and even this idea of calling for an end to aerial bombardment ended up being watered down. So all the non intimidation committee produced in the end was a very anodyne statement calling on all sides to protect civilians where they could. Ultimately, this desire from Britain and France, particularly to prevent a wider conflict meant that there was no diplomatic consequences for the bombing of Gurkha.

[Dan Snow]

Well, David, thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast and talking all about it.

[David Bryden]

Thank you very much.

[Dan Snow]

Thank you so much to you for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's HistoryIt. We could not make this podcast without you. That's actually true. So make sure if you want to keep it going, that is to hit follow in your podcast player right now, you'll get new episodes dropped into your podcast library automatically. By the power of tech, you can listen anywhere you get. Your pods, Apple, Spotify, even BBC Sounds. Imagine a world. Just imagine you never miss an episode of this podcast. I mean it's there. The technology makes that possible. That could be your reality right now if you hit follow. See you next time.

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