Total War that Shocked the World
Eighty-seven years ago last month on the 26th April 1937, a town in northern Spain was about to become world famous. For more than three hours on market day ―when thousands of people crowded the Basque town’s square― the town was bombed by wave after wave of Germany’s best-equipped bombers. Those trying to escape, put out the fires or who had taken refuge in the fields were machine-gunned by fighter planes. Thousands died, shot down, or incinerated and asphyxiated in the collapsing buildings and in the fires that ensued.
Five foreign journalists arrived in the town of Guernica just hours later. One, George Steer described a vision of hell: ‘at every window piercing eyes of fire’; ‘where every roof had stood wild trailing locks of fire’; ‘black or burning beams [and] the houses on either side streamed fire as vapour rises effortless from Niagara.’ Steer collected fragments of incendiary bombs, all of which had been made in Germany.
Guernica was bombed by Nazi Germany’s Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion and the fascist Italian Aviazione Legionaria at the behest of General Franco and the fascist forces that had overthrown the democratically elected government in Spain. Steers’ eyewitness account was published by The Times in the UK and The New York Times in the US. It shocked the world. This was the first time in history that civilians were blanket-bombed and that a town was completely destroyed in a matter of hours ―this ‘total war’ it was a completely new form of warfare.
Total Lies and Total War
Realising that they faced a propaganda disaster, Franco’s spokespeople vehemently denied everything. They claimed their planes had not flown that day owing to fog, and that the Basque people of Guernica had destroyed the town themselves with dynamite. The German government, too, denied everything. These outright lies were magnified by pro-Franco press from around the world, sowing doubt, and controversy for decades. During the 39 years of Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, the mere mention that Gernika had been bombed could be punished with heavy fines or imprisonment. It meant people believed what they wanted to believe. Total lies went hand in hand with total war.
One of the reasons the appalling destruction of Guernica horrified the world was because many believed, quite rightly in fact, that this was a vision of the world war that would follow. That Germany was practicing in Spain for destruction that would be wrought all over Europe and the world.
The Collective Punishment of Germany
In the end, although Germany did bomb many towns and cities during World War Two, notably almost all the big towns in the UK during the Blitz, it was actually the British and the United States that did most to normalise the blanket bombing of civilians and cities.
The allied bombing campaign involved the dropping of a million tonnes of bombs on 131 cities and towns in Germany, with the resulting deaths of 600,000 civilians. Flames leapt 2,000 metres into the sky over Hamburg after a combined British and US air raid with the grisly codename ‘Operation Gomorrah’. This immense exercise in collective punishment was explicitly done to break the morale of the civilian population.
Buildings reduced to rubble and jagged outlines like broken teeth. Windows without glass like empty eye sockets. The uniformity of the destruction, with all buildings, and all streets looking suddenly the same, like human bodies when reduced to skeletons all resemble each other. In death all towns and cities are rendered identical.
The Jewish activist and publisher Victor Gollancz visited Germany and vividly documented the destruction and ongoing starvation of Germans, who were on around 1,000 calories a day, in his pamphlet, ‘In Darkest Germany’.
Save Europe Now
These shocking stories and revelations led to a public outcry and outpouring of public sympathy and support. Gollancz, who had been an early opponent of fascism and predicted the Holocaust, could nevertheless see no justification for this treatment of people in Germany. He asked people in the UK to send him a postcard if they were willing to forego some of their own meagre food rations to send food to Germany. He received over 75,000 postcards. One of the organisations that was a part of this campaign to “Save Europe Now” was the very recently formed Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, now known as Oxfam. At the time, there was a government ban on sending any food parcels ― the public campaign led to the UK government overturning this ban, and during the next two months, despite one of the coldest winters in memory, 100,000 food parcels from individual families in the UK were delivered to families in Germany.
Today, pictures of once vibrant cities now totally destroyed are still sadly familiar to us all.
The pictures are in colour now, but in many ways it doesn’t make much difference- as they are still always the uniform grey of smashed concrete and dust. Of homes reduced to ruin and rubble.
Even vivid pictures and videos from Gaza posted on X or TikTok cannot begin to fully convey what it is like to be swept up in such destruction. I can only try to imagine the noise, the smell, the bitter taste of endless dust. The cold, the fear, the disorientation. The hunger too. Oxfam has calculated that people in northern Gaza have been forced to survive on an average of 245 calories a day.
Just as Gollancz’s pictures of human suffering in Germany moved the UK population, the pictures and videos of Gaza on social media of the appalling suffering of the Palestinian people have had a huge impact on public opinion worldwide. The public is out in front of their leaders in demanding that Israel’s brutal, horrific, and destructive war is immediately stopped.
No more Guernicas
Newspaper reports of the bombing of Guernica most famously inspired Picasso to paint his picture of the same name. A copy of the painting was on the wall at my school when I was growing up ―an iconic surreal reflection of the insanity of the industrial destruction of innocent people.
In December last year, the people of Guernica came together to form a human Palestinian flag, in solidarity with Palestinians.
Although it can feel at times overwhelming and hopeless, the global outrage at what is being perpetrated in Gaza is beginning to have an effect. We must keep protesting, keep fighting and keep demanding that that the Israeli bombing of Gaza stops. More than this, that blanket-bombing of cities and of civilians is no longer normalised, no longer accepted.
That there are no more Guernicas.
ENDS.
Author: Max Lawson, Head of Inequality Policy at Oxfam International and EQUALS podcast co-host. He is also the co-chair of the Global People’s Medicines Alliance.
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great, max.