Dan Snow's History Hit - The Bombing of Guernica

Episode Date: December 8, 2025

The aerial bombardment that rained down on the Spanish city of Guernica in 1937 was one of the most shocking atrocities of the Spanish Civil War. Dan and David Brydan - historian of Modern Spain at King's College London - explain why this Basque town was targeted, how the attack unfolded and what it meant for civilians on the ground. They explore the political motives behind the raid as well as its enduring impact on Europe and trace how Guernica became a symbol of the horrors of modern warfare.Produced by James Hickmann and edited by Dougal Patmore.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear your feedback - you can take part in our podcast survey here: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on.You can also email the podcast directly at [e-mail]. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

On the evening of the 26th of April 1937, the town of Gernica 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, Gernica 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 rain 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 Gernaecalean 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 Gernica? 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 Gernica became one of history's most enduring

and haunting symbols of human suffering. For this, we're joined by David Bryden, a scene lecture in the history of modern international relations at King's College London. He specialised in the history of the 20th century, including the history of modern Spain. Let's get into it. quite unity till there is first than black unity. Never to go to war with one another again. And lift off, and the shuttle has cleared the power. David, thank you so much coming on the podcast. My pleasure. Thanks for inviting me. Just give us a sense of where we are, 1936. How and why does Civil War break out in Spain? So Civil War breaks out in July 1936, and it's really the consequences of a fail.

coup, which is launched by a group of Spanish generals, including Francisco Franco, is 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 centre 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. And roughly speaking, I'm going to be a naughty here,

but roughly speaking, what this is an anti-woke push 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. 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 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. 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 legitimate government of Spain. What turns that into a bloody and intractable civil war?

What is the sort of accelerant? This is partly international intervention. So one of the main things to be aware of with Spain is that it's in some ways both a very kind of local war. It's rooted in recent Spanish history. But it's 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 conflict immediately either want to get involved in Spain or don't want to get involved in Spain because they're thinking about the rent interest. So most importantly, in the Spanish case, Franco managed 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 coupons 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're holding the South. And they approach Madrid. So they go on this big encircling manoeuvre up through the West of Spain, aiming to take Madrid from the West. And they reached 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. But critically not Britain and France, the two great liberal democracies supporting their legitimate, democratically elected Republican colleagues in Spain. 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 is a 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 continent. OK, 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. But the rebels have launched various attacks to try and circle. Madrid, and they've all been being back. And so they turn 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. And what's an interesting thing about Gernica 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 Gernica, actually this painting the subsequent,

it was a big moment. Gunnaker itself is important and the attack on Gernica matters. So tell me, what is Gernica and why is it important? Yeah, so Gernica 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 Gernica 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, on which kind of used this ancient history to kind of buttresses 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 of in the Republic was that the Republic offered them or promised them autonomy and independence, which the coup potters were did against because they were primarily interested in maintaining a strong, central Spanish state. Was it on the front line in April, 1937, or was it slightly behind the front line?

Were there military targets in town? It was slightly behind the front line. The rebel forces were advancing towards Bilbao, and Goernica was around 20 miles east of Bilbao. So the rebels were advancing. The Republicans were retreating. They hadn't yet got to Goernica, but Goernica kind of stood between, on the path of their retreat from the front lines back towards Bilbao. 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? 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 Gernica, so the obvious one would be to disrupt the retreats 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 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 Gernica, but the nature of the attack and the way the attack was carried out maybe was influenced by different factors.

Well, let's talk about one of those factors because we have got a tool that is available to be used by the race. 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 these goose-depping 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. It's just German aircraft have been rebadged

and are flying missions in support of these rebels on the ground. Most of the aircraft used in the attack 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, and they created the new technologies, the 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. Yeah, because we should remember that the Germans were not allowed by the terms of the Treaty of Ossight to have an Air Force, and the Luftwaffe was founded, effectively, in 1985. So this is a very, very young organisation with cutting-edge technology, aircraft and aviation developing super fast, as people know in this period. So, yeah, a macabre desire to see what works,

to refine tactics and look at, for example, the after-battle reports on which bombs did what damage were and things, I suppose. Yeah, absolutely. So all of the aircraft and all of the weapons that are used by the Vermacht in their assault on Poland and 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. So this Condor Legion is told to work with rebels that are advancing to strike the town of Gernica? Are they using high explosive bombs, as you mentioned, to try and subject

bridges to knock out the 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? 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 Gernica 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 Gernica 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 Steers report.

He was a British journalist who wrote for the Times. And so he published a report on April the 27th, 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 Gernica. At 4.30 p.m. 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 silas. 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 Juncker's

arrived to continue the work of demolition, and thence forward the bombing grew in intensity and was continuous ceasing early with the approach of dusk at 745. 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 Gernica 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 bit. There's Dan Snow's history. There's more on this topic coming up. 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. 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 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 Gurneka. 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 Spear that this isn't

an accident, right? 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 for retreat for the Basque troops, which is suggested, for example, by the fact that the bridge that these troops would, like you retreat over, was not destroyed, and it wasn't destroyed partly because they were dropping the wrong-tigned bombs. They were dropping exendry bombs, which are going to burn buildings largely made of wood, but are not going to destroy large stone bridges. 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. 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? 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 Gunnaker, the leading Spanish general on the North, Emilio Mola had gone on the radio and it had threatened Bill Bauer in 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, you know, 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 Gurneke 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 Gernica is a precursor to what happens in Warsaw and Rotterdam, in Coventry, in Dresden, in Hamburg, and all of these kind of places. 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 of the surrender of the government forces in this part of Spain for his other vast 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, he said it was an unparalleled in military history. So is there, 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? 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 Gonica was quite small scale. So we're talking kind of probably their 100. 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 citizens 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. So you said 75% of the buildings, perhaps not bizarrely the Arms Factory, which seems to me an extraordinary oversight. And what about the people? His description of people making machine gunned, which Does add an element, it makes you wonder whether there was just a sadistic, as well as this kind of attempting to achieve a strategic effect.

So actually then machine gun survivors does feel particularly cruel and excessive. So what do we know about casualties? 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, Gernica 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 1,600 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'd been fleeing the front line. Subsequently, there have been lots of lower estimates about the number of dead.

So pro-Franquist 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 1,600s that the Basque government said at the time. There's a precedent that we can maybe use to judge on 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 great a number of people died in Guernica. And indeed, in George Stier'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. And then it's 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, familiar to people. I didn't think it would have been when I was a student in the 90s and 90s, but something that we've become all too familiar with. This very murky picture emerges immediately afterwards.

So the Francoist 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. the front line. And then the lies evolved slightly so then they've 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, 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, up with the 60s and 70s, were claiming either that this was caused by Basques themselves, or, for example, that it had been something carried out purely on the

initiative of the Luftwaffe of the Kondal Legion without any knowledge of the rebels or Franco himself. It's difficult to prove that seems very unlikely because the Kondal 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. And the Luftwaffe, the whole point of the Luftharfer doing blitzky 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. Gernica Falls is the road to Bilbao open. Does it help the rebel march?

So Gernica wasn't defended. It was an open city, so it had no air defenses. 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 abscates of Bilbao, which was their main target. Bill Bao 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 fierce, the contrary, it proves fairly easy for rebel forces to capture Bilbao. And so one

of these that we maybe suggest is that this goal of kind of using terror and mass Arab bombardment to break the morale of the Basques people maybe was successful. Maybe we see in the relatively straightforward fall of Bilbao the impact of that terror and the impact it had on Basque morale. So actually, the Germans would have regarded this great experiment as something of a success. Yeah, I think so. They certainly succeeded in destroying the town, which seems like that was what they want to do, and arguably they've succeeded in their goal of undermining morale enough to ensure that Bilbao could be taken. What about its wider aftermath in Spain? Is it remembered as a particular atrocity until today? Is it something that has left scars?

So it certainly has, it means an interesting question if we can pair the legacy in Spain to the legacy elsewhere. The problem was that under the Franco regime, which lasted until Franco died peaceful in this bed in 1975, there was no public discussion about Gernicus, 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 their Spanish civil war in Britain or in America or in France, Gernicru is one of the first of atrocities they think of, whereas I think

within Spain, there's so many atrocities to choose from, right? They doesn't necessarily have that kind of iconic symbolic significance that it does abroad. 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? 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. He'd 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 symbolized by Gernica. So he produced it incredibly quickly over the course of a couple of months.

And it was 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, in 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 AIDS, Spain movement, which was a kind of a huge humanitarian, anti-fascist movement, prospering, and North America during the time. It 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 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, and 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. 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 Gannicas that we and outside Spain don't know about? Mass bombing continued throughout the Civil War, only from the rebel side because they had a much superior air forces, and mainly the big cities, so Madrid, which had already suffered serious bombardments, Barcelona, Valencia later in war. So it remained a feature of the war throughout, but without the kind of iconic international, symbolic power of Konica. 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 whatsoever? No, absolutely not, because this has been reported. So widely, there was a huge outcry in, 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 to a wider European war. So in this non-intervention committee being held in London, there were guarded discussions about Gernica 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, yeah, 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 to all the non-initemichikoviti produced in the end was a very anodyne statement calling on all sides to protect civilians where they could. So ultimately, this desire from Britain and France, particularly to prevent a wider conflict, meant that there was no diplomatic consequences for the bombing of America.

care. Well, David, thank you very much indeed for coming on the podcast and talking all about it. Thank you very much. Thank you so much to you for listening to this episode of Dan Snow's history. 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 any way 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 Follett. See you next time.