The bombing of the Basque town of Guernica, in Spain, in 1937 “heralded a terrible new age of warfare” that, almost 90 years later, remains graphically notorious as a “wanton man-made holocaust”. Over the last twelve months, Israel has made exceptional progress towards crafting a similar enduring understanding of the hellscape it has created in Gaza.

Guernica

The Spanish Civil War, fought primarily between Republican and Falangist-Fascist forces extended from 1936-1939. General Franco, leading the Falangist bloc, enjoyed powerful external backing from Hitler’s Nazi Germany and Mussolini’s Fascist Italy, while the Republican side enjoyed less forceful backing from Stalin’s USSR.

According to the LSE historian, Professor Paul Preston, Franco, “frustrated with the slowness of the advance” sought assistance from German airpower to use “terror bombing [on the Basque town of Guernica] to break the morale of the [enemy] civilian population”. The Chief of Staff of the German Condor Legion in Spain was a Prussian aristocrat, Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen – a cousin of the WWI, “Red Baron” air ace, Manfred von Richthofen. The Condor Legion lent conspicuous air power to the Falangists. Wolfram planned “the entire [Guernica] operation as an experiment in terror” and as an instructive, deadly rehearsal for the German use of air power in the anticipated major war with Britain and France.

As Preston explains, Guernica was a small but culturally important Basque town. It was essentially defenceless and, in particular, had no air defences. A crowded market day (April 26, 1937) was chosen for the attack to maximise casualties. New German fire-making incendiary bombs were used to create a fire storm in the town, which had many wooden buildings. The water supplies were bombed first to ensure the fires would spread without hindrance. Residents trying to escape from the town on foot were machine-gunned from lighter, circling aircraft. The toll of dead and injured – from a........

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