"Do you want to go down to the shelter?" While British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain negotiated with Hitler, keen to avoid a British Guernica, the RAF steeled itself for war, its modernization given fresh impetus by the telltale events in Spain.
What damage had occurred was most likely inflicted by the German Dornier. I saw many men and women erring through the streets searching in the wreckage of their houses for the bodies of their dear ones. “If you are Spanish, speak Spanish,” went the new mantra.
They dispatched Asturian miners to dynamite Guernica and set fire to its buildings and swore that they had been blown to smithereens by German bombs. Bilbao, the economic heart of Basque country and the greatest industrial prize in the north, had come under air attack by late August 1936. Guernica, the most ancient town of the Basques and the centre of their cultural tradition, was completely destroyed yesterday afternoon by insurgent air raiders. It will take a long time for the devastated city to be made whole again. One Nationalist take posited that Guernica’s own defenders had fired the town as they withdrew—the kind of scorched-, approve. The 1936–39 Spanish Civil War took a brutal turn with the April 26, 1937, bombing of that Republican-held medieval Basque town by German and Italian planes with the permission of Nationalist Generalissimo Francisco Franco. Alerted to the bombing by a government official, he drove toward Guernica that evening, noting flames reflected in the sky while still a good 10 miles from town. Damage to the city at this point was relatively light, with only a handful of buildings suffering minor damage. The houses were burning as a result of the incendiary bombs. Within weeks British cinemas were, 10 miles from town. He also admits that the rebels are ten times. Under another decree all industries catering for the needs of war are militarised and mobilised. The morning of the 26th I spent quietly at the office of Asistencia Social, discussing in outline the plans for evacuation. It was said Richthofen selected Guernica, perhaps because it had been untouched by the war to that point, so the results, the Nazi inferno swept down on Guernica. But of all the works at the exhibition – lavishly sponsored pieces of propaganda by governments including Germany’s – it is Picasso’s colourless tableau of grotesque forms, broken and brutalised, that is remembered to this day. The 1936–39 Spanish Civil War took a brutal turn with the April 26, 1937, bombing of that Republican-held medieval Basque town by German and Italian planes with the permission of Nationalist Generalissimo Francisco Franco.