Eyewitness Accounts of the Bombing of Guernica (1937)

While the Nazis solidified their power in Germany, Spain was at a political crossroads. Spanish republicans had succeeded in overthrowing the monarchy in 1931 but proved ineffectual as a governing body. Right-wing forces led by Francisco Franco (1892–1975) took advantage of republicans’ struggle to maintain popular support by launching an uprising of their own. Four years of civil war ensued as Spain teetered between two antithetical visions for its future, authoritarian and democratic. Fascists from other regions of Europe flocked to Franco’s aid, including military personnel sent by Hitler and Mussolini. Both fascist leaders saw the civil war as a prime opportunity to test new weapons and strategies. Their involvement had devastating consequences in Guernica, a small market town in the Basque region of Spain. On April 26, 1937, several squadrons of German and Italian aircraft swooped down over the town, dropping high-explosive and incendiary bombs. The eyewitness accounts that follow vividly describe an attack that lasted for hours; by the end, the town lay in ruins and hundreds of men, women, and children were dead. The story of Guernica made international headlines; at the time, the idea of targeting civilians to achieve military ends was shocking to most people. Tragically it would soon become the norm on an unimaginable scale.

The Spanish Civil War: Eyewitness Accounts of the Bombing of Guernica, 1937. From Blood of Spain: An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War (pp. 398-401) by Ronald Fraser, New York: Pantheon Books, 1986. Reproduced by kind permission of the author's estate and The Sayle Literary Agency.

“Amatxu, the church bells are ringing,” Ignacia OZAMIZ’s three-year-old son kept saying as, from early morning, the bells tolled out warnings of enemy planes in the vicinity. The front was barely 20 km to the east at Marquina as the crow flies. Four months pregnant, she had put her child—the youngest of four—to bed after lunch when her husband, a local blacksmith, sent her a message to go down to the shelter. People had seen a big plane—the abuelo—over the mountains. . . .

Monday, 26 April was market day. The livestock market had been suspended for the duration of the war, but the ordinary market, Ignacia OZAMIZ recalled, continued as usual. Father Dionisio AJANGUIZ was on his way to his home town from his parish of Aulestia, halfway to Marquina, to spend the afternoon chatting and playing cards with fellow priests. One of them, whose mother that very morning had offered them a glass of cognac each not to go to Guernica, was accompanying him. They had drunk the cognac and set out. He had taken no heed even of his own brother’s admonitions; Father José AXUNGUIZ had been warning his parishioners at Marquina not to continue the traditional practice of going to Guernica on market day.

—It was an outing for the youth; buses brought people from as far away as Lequeitio on the coast. The people lacked war training. I blame the Basque authorities. They shouldn’t have allowed the practice to continue, they were responsible for a great number of deaths. Those of us who lived virtually on the front, as in Marquina, had learnt the importance of building good shelters. But in Guernica they hadn’t taken adequate precautions; the shelters were rudimentary. I kept telling my mother: “Build a good one.” “Poor child, poor child,” was all she could say. . . .

As Father Dionisio AJANGUIZ walked into Guernica, a solitary Heinkel III flew over and dropped half a dozen bombs. “It was the people’s salvation; they ran from their houses to the shelters.” He was still half a kilometre from the centre when he saw nine planes appear, flying low, from the direction of the sea. He threw himself on the ground as the first bombs fell.

Hearing the explosions, Ignacia OZAMIZ, who had taken her husband’s advice and gone to the shelter next to her house, thought the end had come. So did others.

—“Ignacia, where have we come to die?” the church organist from my home village said. “Here—” I replied. The shelter was packed: 150 people at least between neighbours and people who had come for the market. The bombs crashed on the near-by hospital, killing twenty-five children and two nuns. Debris fell on the shelter, and we thought it had been hit. It was little more than a roof of sandbags, narrow and short, in the patio next to our house. Soon it filled with smoke and dust. “Amatxu, take me out,” my son began to cry in Basque. “I can’t breathe. . . .”

Her eldest daughter, Manolita AGUIRRE, had gone with girlfriends to the plain that began at the edge of the town. There had been no school that day. As they were playing, they saw the planes coming. Workers shouted at them to get into the shelter close by the small-arms factory. As they ran in they heard the tat-tat-tat of the fighters’ machine-guns. An old man pulled out a religious medallion and gave it to her to kiss. “Pray, child, pray, the planes are bombing us—”

—The fighters dived down and machine-gunned people trying to flee across the plain. The bombers were flying so low you could see the crewmen, recalled Father Dionisio AJANGUIZ. It was a magnificent clear April evening after a showery morning. . . .

The house on one side of the shelter, and then Ignacia OZAMIZ’s house on the other, began to burn. The smoke poured into the shelter. Someone drove a cow in. It started to shriek.

—All the smoke came in with it. We had to keep our mouths shut, we could hardly see each other, and the smell was awful, remembered her seven-year-old daughter, KONI. I didn’t think of dying, I was too young perhaps. But I thought we were going to suffocate. . . .

—People started to panic, recalled Ignacia OZAMIZ. “The house is on fire, we’re going to be burnt alive,” they screamed. Gudaris guarding the shelter let no one leave. One man tried to force his way out with his young child. “I don’t care if they kill me, I can’t stand it here.” He was pushed back. “Keep calm,” the soldiers shouted. . . .

The town was beginning to burn, the wooden rafters catching alight. After the high explosive bombs, successive waves of planes dropped incendiaries.

From the shelter of an iron-ore bore hole about a kilometre from the town, Father Dionisio AJANGUIZ saw the roofs catching alight. Even at that distance he found breathing difficult because of the smoke. He feared that at least half the town’s population must have been killed. “And that’s what would have happened if they had dropped the incendiaries earlier instead of towards the end.” . . .

A pall of smoke rose into the sky. Between waves of bombers, Juan Manuel EPALZA, now serving in the war industries’ chemical section, who by chance was lunching at a factory on the outskirts of the town, came out of an air raid shelter to look. Thoughts of Nero crossed his mind. The bombing was of a different intensity to any that he had suffered.

After some three hours it ended. As Ignacia OZAMIZ and her two children emerged from the shelter, she saw the town was alight. “Don’t cry,” her husband consoled her. “We’ve got our hands, we’re unharmed, alive.” But she could think only of her eldest daughter and her mother, neither of whom had been in the shelter with her. Her house in Asilo Calzado was burning from the roof. Her husband rushed in to rescue papers and money.

—“Oh, if only you’d managed to save my sewing machine,” I said. He went back in. As he came down with the machine, he found the staircase alight. He threw the machine out of the window, only just managing to jump out himself. “Woman, I got your machine but it nearly cost me my life.” “Why did you go up?” “To do you a pleasure.” The machine broke in its fall on the air raid shelter we’d just left, but I picked up the head, and I’ve got it still.” . . .

As her eldest daughter, Manolita, came out of the shelter on the edge of the town—where none of the industrial plants including the small-arms factory, had been hit—a wave of heat struck her face. She told a man that she had to join her parents who were in the blazing ruins she could see beyond the railway station. Together, they skirted the town along the railway track to reach the main road. A gudari carried her on his shoulders to reach her burning house, one of the first on the street into the centre.

Everywhere people were fleeing. The water main had been broken in the raid, and there was little to be done to put out the fire. Juana SANGRONIZ was led out of the blaze by her novio.¹ Crying uncontrolledly, she refused to look back at the burning town. Ignacia OZAMIZ’s husband ran to rescue his crippled mother; he arrived too late. She and three other old women had been burnt alive. Leaving their house burning, the family made their way out of the town by a path known as El Agua Corriente; the main street through the centre was impassable. As they reached the higher part, they saw that the area around the oak tree had not been hit. That night, given shelter outside town at the home of the Count of Arana, one of whose sons her husband had managed earlier to get released from gaol, she had a miscarriage. Her husband took her to a relative’s farm. She left her four children with her mother. Little did she think it would be three years before she saw them again.

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