When I see the animals, and the dead people in the picture,
I remember that night when I went along the road to Guernica,
after we left the air-raid shelters.
It was full of dead animals,
and people covered in sacks,
... dead.
I've always been filled with emotion
to see that woman burning on the balcony.
with her arms outstretched.
I think she could be my grandmother.
Picasso's painting, Guernica.
For two survivors, the towns bombing in the Spanish Civil War
is a personal memory.
For nearly fifty years it has echoed in the conscience of the world.
Spain, in the 1930s, was in many ways
still struggling out of the 19th century.
But it found itself the arena and battlefield
for the ideologies of the 20th century.
Men and women from all over the world fought for dreams
of democracy, or communism, or fascism.
Those ideas were later given a bitter new meaning
by the hindsight of global conflict, and the cold war.
Europe, in 1936.
Hitler had been in power for three years.
Mussolini had ruled Italy since 1922.
In Russia, Stalin had begun the show trials and purges of his enemies.
Democracy everywhere was on the defensive.
Britain and France were fearful of a European war.
Then came the news from Spain.
All is turmoil in turbulent Spain,
and the cost of political anarchy is death and destruction.
This unhappy country, reft into two almost equal camps,
illustrates all the tragedies of civil war under modern conditions.
Innocent people lose their lives, property of law abiding citizens is wrecked
and half the combatants fight half- heartedly for one cause or the other
because they're forced to take sides
Such is the fruit of anarchy, and a people divided against itself.
The newsreels, as usual, had a simple explanation.
anarchy ... but in truth,
Spain's crisis confused many an outsider.
To understand it, they translated the peculiarly Spanish issues into their own
Spain became Europe's obsession.
The idea of Spanish liberalism,
and the Spanish workers, the Spanish people,
seemed a very passionate and pure cause.
I remember that my Oxford philosophy tutor
said it was the only cause in his lifetime
in which there seemed an absolute choice between
good, as represented by the Spanish republic,
and evil as represented by the Francoist forces.
The convictions of Europe's left,
were matched by their enemies on the right.
Renzo Lodoli was an Italian fascist.
I thought that in Spain it was necessary to defend Christianity
It was under siege.
We thought fascism was valid as a social and political doctrine.
So it was our duty to go and help those
who wanted more or less the same thing as we did.
Immediately, both sides sought and found,
gestures of support from rival sponsors abroad.
In the liberal democratic world, individual sympathy for
the plight of the Spanish republic was widespread.
But practical help from governments
was to prove a different matter.
The army rebels pleas, on the other hand,
were soon answered.
Franco was not, at that time at least, a fascist.
He was a conservative monarchist, but he was immediately assisted
by European dictators who were fascists.
So he was inevitably identified with their kind of political despotism
Nevertheless, there is no evidence of any international fascist complicity
in the Spanish general's original coup.
On the contrary, in the summer of 1936
Hitler's thoughts were far from Spain.
He was building a war machine for his own purposes.
Expansion in the east,
and the oppression of his opponents inside Germany.
Hitler promised Britain that Germany wouldn't get involved in Spain.
It was the first example of double-talk in the civil war.
Saying one thing, and doing the opposite.
Hitler had already sent aid.
Two days after the Spanish uprising,
Franco had appealed to the fuhrer for help.
After considering the consequence of a communist influenced government
controlling the Strait of Gibraltar, Hitler decided to send,
not the few anti-aircraft guns and fighters that Franco had asked for,
but a full squadron of Junkers transport planes
to airlift the Spanish Army of Africa from Morocco.
1,500 of these troops were transported to Seville
to begin their fighting passage to Madrid.
These crack troops of the Spanish Army were to play
a decisive role in the war.
Hitler said later that Franco should erect a monument to the Junkers 52,
the aircraft that Franco had to thank for his victory.
Hitler might have congratulated himself too.
His help was later rewarded with a constant supply of Spanish iron ore.
This gave him a great advantage in his preparations
for the world war that was to follow.
But in 1936, most people still thought
that war could be avoided.
In 1936, Mussolini had not yet become Hitler's pawn.
Indeed, many British hoped Italy could become an ally.
But Mussolini's conquest of Abyssinia had already shown
that he was preparing aggressive expansion.
He wanted to turn the Mediterranean into what he called:
"Mare Nostrum" ... "Our sea"
Another Italian lake.
There was a natural challenge at the entrance to that lake.
Throughout the thirties, Mussolini had dabbled with
small-scale right-wing plots to subvert Spanish democracy.
He had modestly financed the leader of Spain's fascist party, José Antonio
and allowed right-wing military groups to train on Italian soil.
In 1934, in a written, though informal, agreement
Mussolini had promised to supply arms
to Spanish monarchist conspirators.
should they overthrow the republic.
When the time came, after the uprising,
he supplied twelve bombers, the first foreign military hardware
to arrive in Spain's war.
While Germany and Italy supported the army rebels,
Léon Blum the French prime minister
of the recently elected Popular Front government,
naturally identified with the republican government of Spain.
Léon Blum feared France's isolation.
Still haunted by the terrible French losses in the 1914-18 war
and already flanked by two fascist powers,
France certainly did not want to be trapped
in a fascist triangle.
Blum went to London to discuss plans
for a collective security treaty with the British.
Before he went, he ordered that arms be sent to Spain.
At this meeting with Anthony Eden, the British Foreign Secretary,
Spain was not officially on the agenda,
but Blum discussed it anyway.
On his return to Paris, he reported the conversation to Jules Moch,
a member of his government.
Blum told me of his talks with Eden.
And the extraordinary non-European stance,
that both Eden and his colleagues were taking
Eden told Blum we shouldn't get mixed up in it.
That even if war broke out in Europe over Spain,
England, who was distant from all that, would remain neutral.
Therefore, since France could not count on support from England
it would be wise for her to adopt the same position as the English.
I think I can recall that Blum told me that
that would be a cowardly position.
In London, the British national government was worried.
Conservative Prime Minister Baldwin and his ministers
were concerned, at all costs, to avoid another world war,
and feared it could start in Spain.
Alec Douglas-Home was then a backbencher.
If country after country began to take part in the war,
then nobody could see the end of it,
and it could end up in a big European conflict.
Mussolini was careering around in the Mediterranean
and making all sorts of trouble.
Japan was restive, and of course, German rearmament was in full flood.
So we were very apprehensive
about getting entangled in any other situation.
Britain's attitude didn't help the French Prime Minister, Léon Blum.
His plan to keep a European peace by protecting Spain
was also in trouble at home.
His policy of unrestricted military sales had threatened to split his government.
and might have precipitated serious civil unrest.
He therefore reversed his original decision to send arms to Spain.
and devised another policy to save his face.
On August 2nd, the French cabinet announced that
they had decided to appeal urgently to interested governments
for a pact of non-intervention.
The British government, supported at this stage by its Labour opposition,
responded eagerly.
I think France and Britain felt exactly the same on this issue.
We did not want to get embroiled.
Mr Blum thought of the policy of non-intervention,
which wasn't an heroic policy at all, but nevertheless a pragmatic policy.
As France closed its borders,
the Spanish republic felt let down.
Under international law it was legally entitled to buy arms abroad,
but non-intervention stopped that.
No-one had ever claimed heroic intention for the policy
It was a diplomatic strategy
A framework in which, everyone could safely pursue
their individual ends.
They would fight their battles without actually going to war.
No-one thought it could curtail hostilities in Spain,
or even that it should. Spain provided a safety valve
to siphon off the political clashes of Europe at that time.
Nowadays when you say fascist
you think of violence or dictatorship.
But at that time we youngsters didn't know anything else.
We had been brought up and educated under fascism.
We were convinced that it could be a valid formula
to solve social problems.
Not all Italians were so convinced.
Giovanni Pesce had been brought up in France
His parents had fled there to escape Mussolini's Italy.
The fight for the Spanish people was also a fight against Italian fascism.
This was the reason I came, voluntarily, to fight in Spain.
La Pasionaria, who's real name was Dolores Ibárruri,
was a communist member of the Spanish parliament.
Her rhetoric rallied worldwide support for the republic.
La Pasionaria had come to Paris to ask for support or help
from the French people and the French government.
She finished her speech by saying: "If Spain is defeated
"the world will be flooded with blood."
So I, a very young militant of the anti-fascist movement
said that I must also go to give my contribution.
In Germany, communists had been the first target of Hitler's terror.
So when Hitler made clear his support for Franco,
German communists knew which side they were on.
I believe that for us German anti-fascists
is was more poignant than for anybody else.
We had tangibly experienced Hitler.
Thousands of German anti-fascists were already
in prisons and concentration camps.
We immediately recognised the connection
between Franco's intentions and those of Hitler.
The politics of economic depression spilled over from the cities of Europe
to a full scale battlefield in Spain.
It was mainly communists who traveled to do the fighting.
Frank Deegan was an unemployed communist docker from Liverpool.
I believed that if Hitler and Mussolini
managed to help Franco to win,
then this would be a defeat for the whole labour movement
throughout the world.
We thought the fascists of the world were ganging together,
so a call went out for volunteers
to help the republican government.
The call came from Moscow.
The international committee of communist leaders, the Comintern,
organised an international column of volunteers.
Stalin himself, however, had his doubts.
He was wooing Britain and France as allies against the Nazi threat,
and didn't want them scared off by communist intervention in Spain.
He held back from sending arms.
He did send advisers, ambassadors, and food.
When the first Russian ship arrived in Barcelona,
Initial rapture gave way to disappointment when
the consignment turned out to be, not the guns the republic wanted,
but canned milk.
The guns only came later.
Meanwhile the Italian Foreign Minister, Ciano, met Hitler
at Berchtesgaden in Germany.
They agreed that their aid to the Spanish army rebels
had to be increased, partly to counter Russian aid
and partly because Hitler had now decided he wanted to
go over to the attack against the democracies.
What had previously been a reflex action,
a decision to supply Spain on request,
became a concrete policy.
A joint front against communism.
A few days after Ciano and Hitler's meeting,
Mussolini was heard for the first time to refer to the Rome-Berlin axis.
Events in Spain had drawn Italy and Germany closer together.
A step down the path towards a Second World War.
I hate war.
The world was very different in 1936.
America was not the fulcrum of the world's foreign policy decisions.
Still in dogged isolation from Europe's affairs,
Roosevelt ignored the Spanish conflict,
and allowed the Texas oil company to supply Franco with fuel.
In London, the non-intervention powers examined allegations
of Italian, German and Portuguese intervention.
The committee was chaired by the British.
No-one wanted the charges to stick, ... and they didn't.
von Ribbentrop, the German ambassador later joked:
"A more appropriate name for the organisation would had been:
"The Intervention Committee".
Nowhere was this intervention clearer than in the battle for Madrid.
Until October, the skies were dominated by the rebels,
reinforced by German and Italian planes.
The Spanish republican air force was no match until
Soviet planes arrived.
Just before the Soviet aid arrived,
I'd seen a demonstration of women,
marching along the Gran Vía, the principal street in Madrid,
shaking their fists at the German and Italian planes
and shouting "No Pasarán!", "They shall not pass."
Two weeks later, there was another flight of planes over Madrid.
This time they flew very low, and dropped no bombs.
Everyone looking up from the streets suddenly saw
they were no longer Germans or Italians, they were Russian planes.
And a cry went up that ran right through the city:
"Son nuestros, son nuestros", "They're ours, they're ours".
One day we were surprised to see some new machines in the sky
and we saw these small ones with snub noses.
They flew around at a tremendous speed,
and shot down a nationalist plane occasionally.
People began to get excited, started shouting: "Long live Russia".
They started to hug each other.
Just 15 weeks after the start of the war,
the republic's capital, Madrid, was on the front line.
The rest of the republic lay behind.
The army rebels held the territory north and west of the capital
Their land offensive began on November 7th.
With only 25,000 men, the nationalists were attempting
to capture a city of one million inhabitants.
Franco had made ready lists of people to be arrested.
Having met little resistance so far, he could not have anticipated
the stubborn reaction of the Madrid people.
"No Pasarán!", "They shall not pass",
had become the slogan of Madrid, and indeed, all republican Spain
The government, under Largo Caballero,
left the capital for the safety of Valencia.
So did many of the population.
For those who stayed, some preparation to defend the city
had already been made.
Gen Miaja, one of the army officers
who stayed loyal to the republic, led the defence junta in charge of
the overall political and military control of Madrid.
Miaja, and his staff officers, were joined by
communist brigade commander, Enrique Lister.
The population had been prepared politically
to receive the enemy with boiling water, with oil,
with anything that came to hand, from their balconies and roofs.
The defence of Madrid was more thanks to
the people of Madrid, than to the militias.
People joined up at once, they didn't even bother to go home.
They were given some hand grenades and a rifle,
and with their ordinary jacket and trousers,
they got into waiting vehicles, or into a tram,
and went off to fight.
This was really striking and wonderful.
It was one of the most wonderful moments of the war.
Everyone in Madrid was involved.
Loyal officers staffed the army.
Ordinary people built defenses for the city.
Political parties recruited men for defence militias.
But most of all, an organised army was created.
However badly trained and equipped,
ten new brigades of the popular army of regular soldiers
mixed with volunteers, were naturally a more
effective fighting force than the old militia columns.
The people's resistance was stiffened by the approach of Franco's troops,
and by potent propaganda.
For two generations, the Spanish Civil War
has been remembered for the international brigades.
This fighting force of 40,000 men,
was a unique expression of international solidarity.
There were Frenchmen, Greeks, Poles, Italians, Americans,
Canadians, Irish, Czechs, Australians, Swedes, Swiss.
There were 2,000 British,
... 500 of them died.
But the war was already 4 months old and Madrid under siege
by the time the first organised volunteers arrived in the city
to take up positions at the front.
One of the first battalions was predominantly German
It was named after Ernst Thälmann,
the leader of the German Communist Party,
who was in a Nazi concentration camp at the time.
They took us straight to their hearts.
They knew why we'd come.
They had one slogan for us all: "Long live Russia".
They treated us as if we were Russians,
and only slowly they got to realise we were Germans.
So far, Madrid had been bombed by Germans, the Condor Legion,
and now suddenly, there were Germans on their side.
With a background of military service,
a life of resistance to persecution that bred political discipline,
these German communists were an example to the Spanish.
For me, seeing them brought the joy of solidarity and warmth.
They left a profound impression on me.
Also, they showed us the things we had to learn.
What discipline is, what an army is.
Until then we'd been a militia, not a regular army.
Not all republicans were so happy about the volunteers.
In Catalonia some anarchists feared their revolution
was being taken over by communists.
They arrested a party of international brigaders arriving from France
But in Madrid, everyone was grateful for any relief from the enemy.
The international brigaders were rushed up to the front
to help their Spanish allies resist the rebel army attack.
There was fighting in the Casa del Campo,
a park on the western edge of the city.
On November 15th, 1936,
The rebels finally broke through Madrid's defenses at a point
in the university campus overlooking the park
The international brigades held the line in the philosophy faculty.
But two days later, the rebels attacked again.
and occupied part of the clinical hospital.
The Thälmann battalion found themselves defending
one floor of the hospital from the Moors on the floor below.
We were on the third floor.
We may knock holes in the ceiling, then we'd throw
hand grenades down to clear them out.
In this fight there was hardly ever a real front.
A front which was clearly defined.
Eventually the line stabilised and Madrid held out.
So Franco tried a new tactic.
The Civil War became a testing ground for modern weapons.
It was a foretaste of what was to happen a few years later
in London, Hamburg, Tokyo and Leningrad.
But until now, no city in history had been so sorely tested.
Scenes like this on newsreels all over the world
confirmed the sympathy that attracted so many people to the republic.
Journalists like Ernest Hemingway went to report,
and became propagandists.
The original complex Spanish causes of the war
were distilled into the poetic certainties of right and wrong.
Wogan Philipps, now the only communist
in the British House of Lords, went to drive an ambulance.
Stephen Spender, the English poet, went with him to look.
We were obsessed by the feeling that this was
the supreme cause of our time.
A cause of poets, and writers. The cause of freedom.
And that unless the cause of anti-fascism was won,
unless fascism was defeated,
we wouldn't be able to exist as writers.
Like so many British radicals, Spender at time
was a member of the communist party.
But he represented the liberal wing of English intellectual thought.
I think there was a later generation of John Cornford and Julian Bell,
who got killed in Spain,
who felt that they want us to submerge their literature,
their independence of mind as intellectuals,
even their existence as intellectuals,
which was seen subjective to them,
within the objectivity of Marxism.
This was the generation of Philby and Maclean.
Philby was in Spain for a while, working as
a Times correspondent with Franco's forces.
In fact he was spying for the Russians.
Julian Bell had developed his Marxist ideas at Cambridge,
in the same secret society, the Apostles, which included Anthony Blunt.
The threat of fascism had turned a generation
of English intellectuals into communists.
The brutal realities of Stalin's Soviet Union
had not yet been made known.
Some people, like George Orwell, however,
who had gone enthusiastically to fight for the Spanish republic,
came to appreciate in Spain the danger
of all pervasive totalitarian communism.
He joined the anti-Stalinist party, the POUM.
The persecution of the POUM by the official communist
disillusioned many who thought the republic was a democracy.
Most volunteers though, were communists.
and those who weren't felt isolated.
I remember going to the front near Madrid once,
and meeting a young man there,
who was an English public schoolboy.
And he said to me: "Well, you know I came to Spain
"and joined the international brigade
"because I understood it to be a liberal, republican organisation,
"and what I found is that it's an entirely communist organisation."
And then he said: "I would spend the rest of my life
"everyday walking up to that ridge to see a few hundred yards away,
"and that will be the end of me."
He certainly was disillusioned, though he accepted this.
and he was killed within six weeks.
But for many Spaniards, the Soviet Union's support seemed a salvation.
In 1937, Teresa Pamies was a member of the Socialist Youth.
The Soviet Union sold guns to the government of the legitimate republic.
Guns came to Barcelona in their ships.
It brought us this feeling of mythical togetherness
which became very solid.
This comradely solidarity had a hard business edge.
All the arms were paid for.
Spanish gold reserves had been sent to the Soviet Union.
They supplied the arms, political influence came with them.
In Madrid, moral was sustained by showing epic Soviet films like Cronstadt,
celebrating the defence of the Soviet revolution of 20 years earlier.
But the Soviet influence was not revolutionary in Spanish terms.
On the contrary, the Communist Party's disciplined approach
to fighting the war and keeping order,
attracted large sections of the middle classes
in the republican zone. They had been frightened by
the rival anarchist revolutionary ambition for the republic
At the end of 1936,
Stalin wrote to Largo Caballero and argued in diplomatic French,
that the republic should collaborate with liberals
and conservative peasants.
"It is necessary to prevent the enemies of Spain
"considering her a communist republic", he said.
Stalin, remember, still needed Britain and France on his side.
They were still not his certain allies against the threat of Hitler,
and in Spain, Hitler's intentions were becoming clear.
His ambassador formerly recognised the Franco regime
during the battle for Madrid. Now, Hitler could hardly afford
to let the rebels lose.
Germany increased its aid, and sent instructors to train
nationalist officers.
This gave Franco's rebels, a useful, but still not decisive advantage.
The nationalists were holding about 60% of Spain.
But they were short of troops,
and had stalled on a front of 1,200 miles.
In spite of a dangerous bulge round Madrid,
the republic was holding its ground.
The nationalist sponsors became impatient, particularly Mussolini.
Without even consulting Franco, he began to send large numbers
of Italian volunteers to Spain.
Their first battle was at Málaga, ... it was an easy victory.
It shortened the front, and raised nationalist morale.
The nationalists now tried to encircle Madrid,
first from the south by crossing the Jarama valley.
Republican reinforcements, including international brigaders,
were rushed up to the front line.
After ten days, the battle had spent itself,
with heavy losses on both sides.
There immediately followed another attempt to encircle Madrid,
this time from the north at Guadalajara.
The Italians, supremely confident after their victory at Málaga
persuaded Franco to let them fight alone.
On the republican side, the Italians
from the Garibaldi battalion of the international brigades,
took up position against their fellow countrymen.
This was the position of the Garibaldi battalion.
Headquarters was near the woods.
The fascists were here, ... here, all in this area.
Then, at about noon, we saw two cars go by.
We stopped them and they said to us: "But we are Italians."
We answered: "We're Italians too."
Giovanni Pesce and his comrades had found
just what they'd come to Spain for.
The opportunity to fight Italian fascists.
They started to raise their hands, very worried, and began to cry:
"Don't shoot us, we are Italians too.
"It's not our fault if Mussolini sent us here.
"They told us they were sending us to Abyssinia."
We took them prisoner, and took them to the command.
When the republican troops routed the Italian opposition,
Mussolini was furious.
He decided that no Italian could return home
until they'd won a victory.
Foreign aid on both sides poured into Spain
at a faster rate than ever before.
But it was not enough to clinch the war,
... only to prolong it.
And Madrid was now a stalemate.
It remained so until the end of the war, two years later.
So the nationalists switched their offensive to the north.
The western part of the Basque country was still republican.
It had been separated from the main republican zone
since the early days of the war.
This northern region was a potentially valuable prize
on account of its heavy industry and mineral wealth.
It was a special region in other ways.
Here conservatives were fighting side-by-side
with anarchists and socialists.
The Basques gave the lie to Franco's claim
that his campaign was a Christian crusade.
The region is the most devout Catholic area in the country.
Here people prayed for victory against the nationalists.
Their opposition to Franco, and support for the republic,
came from the traditional Basque yearning
for the home rule of their region,
so distinctive from the rest of Spain.
The liberal republic recognised that ambition,
but the nationalists, who believed in the unity of Spain,
were determined to crush it.
The attack began on March 31st.
The nationalist, General Mola,
threatened to raise the region to the ground.
He nearly succeeded.
But first the nationalists tried to starve the Basques into submission.
The sea blockade of republican ports
posed an embarrassing problem for Britain.
Several British merchant ships,
legally commissioned to deliver food supplies to the republic,
were stuck in the French port of St Jean de Luz.
The British government was reluctant to challenge Franco's navy
by supplying escorts for their merchantmen.
Despite outcry from the House of Commons,
Eden announced that British ships would be protected
only outside a three mile limit of Bilbao.
At the same time the British were secretly negotiating with the nationalists,
for the output of British owned mines in Spain.
On April 19th, 1937,
Captain Roberts, the master of one of those ships,
the Seven Seas Spray, became anxious
to leave St Jean de Luz before his cargo rotted.
Captain Roberts defied the British order
and set sail for Bilbao.
His daughter, Fifi, was on board.
At 10 o'clock we darkened ship, pulled up anchor, and sailed out.
Frantic flashings from the shore,
and a searchlight was played on us, but father did a Nelson act,
and said we need to shut that eye, and we sailed on.
I mean there was nothing to it.
In spite of the warnings of the British government,
under threats that Bilbao harbour had been mined by the nationalists,
the Seven Seas Spray arrived unscathed and sailed up Bilbao river.
We were the first in and the town had only
four days food left for the people.
Everybody was cheering, hooters were going.
It was rather like a ticker tape reception.
We were coming up the river, and everybody was hanging out
from all the windows, and waving and cheering.
It was quite emotional.
Captain Roberts and Fifi, became the Basque people's heroes.
The Seven Seas Spray had exposed the nationalist blockade as a myth,
and other British merchant ships followed with food supplies.
But the Basques couldn't celebrate for long.
Ten miles behind the front line,
was the small market town of Guernica, with a population of 7,000.
It was the historic centre of Basque nationalism.
The tree of Guernica, the symbol of Basque freedom,
stood beside the parliament building where traditionally
all Spanish monarchs had sworn to uphold Basque liberties.
April 26th, 1937, was market day.
The market was held where the public gardens of Guernica are now.
Everything was normal, but then the planes came in the afternoon.
Dona Ignacia Ozamiz lived in Guernica
with her two daughters, Koni and Manoli.
We were in the industrial zone,
and over the hills opposite, I saw the planes arriving.
First just one of them. It circled twice.
but we were used to seeing it do that and fly away again.
But scarcely ten or fifteen minutes later, more arrived,
and we were able to count them, there were eight,
all in a line ... black.
I remember them as very black and ugly.
I'll never forget the noise the bombs made,
... a kind of fizz,
... followed by cries.
Then a tremendous crash, over and over again.
I can still hear the noises,
and we could feel everything tremble.
Smoke and heat came in.
43 aircraft, mainly German,
took part in wave after wave of attacks on the small town.
Karl von Knauer was a squadron leader of the Condor Legion,
which bombed Guernica.
This had no impact on me.
I conducted these attacks and operations in the course of my duties
as a soldier carrying out my orders without heed for my life.
At the time, we thought we were fighting a war against communists.
The Condor Legion might had believed the catholic Basques were communists.
but the Spanish High Command who ordered the attack knew otherwise.
For both of them, Guernica's cultural significance
was more or less irrelevant.
It was a military target. There was a small arms factory,
and republican soldiers retreating from the nationalist attack had to
pass through the town to reach the last line of defence round Bilbao.
The Germans claimed that instructions were to bomb
the bridge and crossroads at the edge of Guernica
in order to make the road to Bilbao impassable.
In three hours, 100,000 pounds of incendiary, high explosive,
and shrapnel bombs, were dropped on the town.
Little remained standing, except the arms factory,
and the German's main target ... the bridge.
We could clearly see that the wind blew the bombs onto the fields.
They missed the bridge and the houses about.
The Junkers were really commercial airplanes,
converted into bombers.
That is, they were equipped with what we call "the pot",
slung underneath the plane.
It could be retracted during take-off and landing,
and lowered during flight.
The poor observer had to climb down a tiny ladder to this contraption
with his goggles and his flying helmet on.
There he had a primitive targeting device and rangefinder.
The Germans excuses do not explain why
they did not use accurate Stuka dive bombers
to destroy their objective, the bridge at the edge of Guernica.
Nor the fact that they machine- gunned the fleeing population.
Nor the magnitude of the whole operation.
I can still remember, and I was just nine years old,
the force of the blast of heat in my face as I came out.
All the buildings next to the factories were burning,
... everything on fire.
The sky was red with reflections.
Two days after the bombing, Fifi Roberts was taken with her father
to see the devastation of the town.
45 years later, she returned to Guernica,
to revisit the scene she had photographed with her own camera.
Along the road were streams of refugees, trudging along.
I don't think they had any idea where they were going,
what they were going to do.
They were on, carts, wheelbarrows, anything that had a wheel,
and being pushed with a few of their belongings on it.
It's rather heartbreaking to see.
When we got into Guernica itself, there wasn't a building standing,
and rubble all over the place.
Nobody to be seen except the odd soldier,
who may be still looking in the ruins for bodies.
Luckily, we didn't see any,
but the place was an absolute shambles.
72 hours after the raid,
before the reckoning of destruction could be competed
the rebel army arrived at Guernica.
They immediately began a propaganda offensive as well,
making show of guarding the famous Basque tree of liberty.
They even tried to put the blame on the Basques
for destroying their own town
Some people were even prepared to believe this.
The nationalists real prize lay ahead.
To protect their rich industries, the Basques had built
a defensive wall around Bilbao ... a ring of iron.
But it could not protect the city from intensive bombing.
With Bilbao about to fall, the western democracies
finally felt free to help.
The children of republican Spain were catalogued,
given medical inspections, labeled, and transported to
England, France, Belgium, America and the Soviet Union.
Franco soon broke through Bilbao's defenses,
and seized the region's industries and mines intact.
Soon, ships left Bilbao with new cargoes,
Soon Franco was exporting iron ore.
His clients included Germany and Britain.
Both countries were to use the captured resources of the republic
for their own rearmament program.
Non-intervention, either real or phony,
didn't interfere much with business
or prevent the world war that was to follow.