Authors: Dave Boling
Miren turned at the doorway to follow them, but a screaming whistle caused her to look into the smoky air as a bomb sliced
through the middle of the small hotel. The explosion thrust a column of air through the funnel of the entryway, and within
seconds, the hotel’s concrete facing sloughed off, burying those in front of it beneath several tons of flaming rubble.
When the strafing fighters peeled away after others, Xabier knelt to inspect the small family that had been gunned down. The
youngest, a girl of perhaps four, bled from her side but continued to tug at her mother as if to wake her from a nap.
Xabier pulled her away from her dead family and carried her to the nearest
refugio.
The door opened quickly, allowing him to squeeze inside a different level of hell.
Hundreds had wedged into a space meant for dozens, and as layers of incoming souls entered, they compressed those in the back.
Early arrivals, gagging on the superheated air, begged those in the front to leave the doors open for ventilation.
“Get us out,” a woman screamed.
But when they swung the double doors open, a percussion bomb landed just outside, and its violent intake of air sucked four
people into the fireball. In shock, others tried closing the doors, but they were blocked by the lower part of a man’s leg,
still wearing a black espadrille.
At the back, in the dark, people licked the walls, trying to suck in condensation to fend off the steaming heat.
They stumbled and could feel with their feet in the darkness that they were now standing on the bodies of those who had collapsed.
At times, men or women overtaken by claustrophobia would scream wildly, crawling over others, clawing against flesh to clear
their way to the front.
They would take their chances with the bombs and the fire rather than die from being trampled or smothered.
As calmly as he could, standing at the gate between two hells, with a little girl dying in his arms, Father Xabier offered
prayers of absolution.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us now and at the moment of our death . . .”
Wolfram von Richthofen and his aide, standing on the northern face of Mount Oiz, admired the precise waves of planes on their
approach to the valley. But even from this vantage, some ten air miles south of Guernica, they were unable to see the village
itself. A rising mass of smoke and dust from the explosions climbed above the hilltops, providing evidence that heavy damage
was being inflicted. But von Richthofen could not see the destruction as clearly as he had hoped.
He discarded his cigarette and headed down the mountain for a quick drive back to Vitoria.
As the town emptied, Miguel rushed against the flow into the core of devastation. His instincts were to fight through the
mayhem and get to the market.
They would be with Alaia, and all of them would have gone to the closest
refugio
in the middle of Calle Santa María, the one Miguel had shown her.
Why did he let her talk him into staying another day?
He would scold her when he saw her.
No, he wouldn’t.
Bombs still fell from the chevrons of airplanes droning above the town. Smoke and dust rose, but Miguel barely noticed the
explosions, and none of his impulses to run away from the destruction registered.
Near the market, Mrs. Arana bent and keened over a mass of concrete and brick rubble that had once been a store. She saw Miguel
running in her direction and shouted, “They’re here, help them!”
Miguel threw himself on the pile. He could not know that he was blocks from his family. He could not understand that this
was futile, that the bodies beneath were neither alive nor his loved ones.
He thought of none of these possibilities. “They’re here,” he had heard.
Miguel lifted concrete, slab after slab, tossed aside broken bricks, and dug into glistening piles of shattered window glass
with his bare hands.
Bombs fell and buildings ignited. He heard none of it.
Dig to find them. Dig to save them.
Miren. Miren and Cat.
He hoisted off more slabs and shards, which began to bite at him, and he could not lift them as well as he had. Even the smaller
bricks became slippery and difficult to grasp.
There was no air to breathe.
The bombs fell and the ground shook and guns fired. He didn’t hear them. He didn’t hear Mrs. Arana begging him to stop and
to look at his hands.
He had no hands, he had no feeling; he would dig until he rescued them. He’d dig because he promised. He’d dig until he found
them.
Until he was blown from the pile by an explosion.
Souls in shredded clothes, with gaping mouths and blank eyes, stumbled past Justo as the streets became smoking flues. He
dropped his
laia
as he entered town, realizing his ancient tool would be useless against the airplanes he saw winging overhead.
Legarreta, the fireman, brought him to a halt by clasping his shoulders and speaking into his face. Justo wrestled against
him, looking past him to places where his wife might have sought protection.
“People are still alive in parts of this building, Justo; you have to help me get them,” Legarreta explained with uncommon
calmness, barely glancing away from Justo as a man crawled past using his arms to pull along his mangled legs.
“Have you seen Mariangeles or Miren?” Justo shouted as a bomb exploded a block away.
“No, Justo, I need you to help lift debris; we need manpower,” Legarreta said, his face soiled black as a sheep’s. “People
are in here now.”
“Mariangeles and Miren?”
“I promise . . . I promise . . . I’ll help you find them if you help me get these people.”
A bomb had fallen on a boarding house, but as it collapsed, the wooden joists and beams jackstrawed in a way that allowed
people to breathe but not escape. Legarreta knew that to go in and randomly hoist beams without cross-braces and supports
would cause the structure to collapse on anyone who had survived.
But when Justo crawled in and discovered a young woman with her head turned around on her neck and bones protruding from her
cornflower-blue dress, he could not respect Legarreta’s urges of caution from just outside the building.
“Help me,” another woman called with a fading voice. She was deeper in the pile, wedged beneath a tangle of crossbeams, her
face covered in dust that had caked onto the blood tributaries seeping from a head gash.
Justo recognized her; she was the baker’s wife. The debris was strewn like puzzle pieces, and Justo’s eyes moved upward from
her trapped legs, tracing the pattern of load-bearing beams.
“Don’t move anything yet, Justo, we’ve got to get in there and shore it—” Legarreta’s voice was muted by a bomb blast that
shook down more dust and larger pieces of wood.
“Help,” she called again, weaker, more urgent. “Justo . . . help.”
An oak beam angling up from the pile was the key to her release. If he could pry that up even a few inches, it would raise
the pile so she could pull herself free.
He was made for this, he told himself as he backed in under the beam and tested for footing and leverage.
Inflating himself mentally as he found purchase amid the tangle, Justo strained against the underside of the beam with his
left shoulder, his head tilted far to the right, with his left arm wrapped around the upper side for grip.
He pushed against it lightly at first, as a test, and he sensed it budge.
I can do this, he thought. No one else can, but I can do this.
With a scream, he thrust his legs and his back and shoulder muscles upward; the beam groaned and raised off the legs of the
baker’s wife, and the creaking from behind him was replaced by a grinding above. A joist lying across the angled beam broke
free and slid toward Justo as if greased.
Justo never saw it ride down the beam with the weight of the building behind it, never slowing as it wrenched his arm off
the top of the beam and left it hanging behind his head. He collapsed beneath the network of wood and concrete and bones.
The bodies lay in parts and Guernica burned. The attack had been going on for almost two hours by six P.M., but the Condor
Legion’s main bomber force was only now taking off. The largest squadron, almost two dozen Junkers, circled over the field
at Vitoria before heading north.
Messerschmitt fighters joined them again for their duties of rounding up the strays fleeing to the fields and forests. More
of the Heinkel bombers returned at seven P.M. to complete the cycle of bomb-refuel-bomb. At seven thirty, more than three
hours after the initial bomb fell, the fliers retired for the day.
The bells of Santa María tolled eight P.M., ringing through smoke from the fires that consumed the town’s buildings.
Bucket brigades stretching to the river were formed, and fire trucks and crews from Bilbao arrived. But bombs had gouged out
the water mains, leaving no pressure for their hoses and limiting their contribution to standing and watching the blazes.
They joined the line of bucket passers.
By the time the buckets advanced through dozens of hands, only small sloshes of water remained in each, and the fires flamed
at such temperatures that the last man in the line could not stand near enough for the small splashes of water he threw to
touch the crumbling buildings. Those near the flames saw the absurdity of the endeavor, but they knew it helped the others
in line feel as if they were putting up a fight, so they continued the charade until the fires had consumed all available
fuel.
Father Xabier moved between clusters of the suffering, offering comfort, manning stretchers for the wounded, and joining in
rescue efforts. All the while, he shouted, “Justo!” searching for his brother and his family. He saw men respectfully aligning
blackened figures, charred beyond identification. Others were engaged in the reconstruction of parts, attempting to find something,
anything, that would help loved ones grieve the victims.
He saw the vagaries of the attack. Most of the town was destroyed or aflame, but on top of a pile of rubble sat a birthday
cake that had somehow gone untouched although all who had gathered for the celebration that afternoon were dead. He saw young
children, unscathed, racing and chasing others near the fragmented remains of their classmates. He saw on the hill that the
Parliament somehow appeared unharmed, and, thank God, the tree of Guernica stood untouched.
In the timeless aftermath, he searched, bending to pray over the wounded and dead every several yards, but searching. And
as he reached the station plaza, a train carrying rescue workers arrived from Bilbao. Xabier knew he had to tell President
Aguirre of the atrocity. Aguirre might not be able to comprehend the enormity of this attack without the word of someone he
trusted, someone who had seen it all in person. He decided he could come back to Guernica on the next train to continue searching
after he reported to Aguirre.
Xabier boarded with many hundreds of stunned refugees, and the wounded, and the aged and the bloodied. He squeezed from car
to car, looking for family. As they gained distance from Guernica, Xabier could see the red-amber glow of the burning town,
and in his priest’s mind, he wondered if the night sky was filling with smoke from the raging fires or from the ascending
souls of the needlessly dead.
The ground crews applauded as each plane was chocked and the flight crews debarked. The pilots who had shuttled across northern
Spain all afternoon and evening had returned to their fields in Burgos and Vitoria in a jubilant mood.
Following the initial debriefing, von Richthofen sent a quick message to his superiors: “The concentrated air attack on Guernica
was the greatest success.” Von Richthofen knew that war is impatient and impossible to appease; it allows little time for
savoring a victory. Yet he was more than satisfied by the day’s events. He had never expended more resources toward the destruction
of a single target, and the town of Guernica had been leveled without a Condor casualty.
He had always been cautious in his reports to Berlin, knowing that it was better to be accurate and conservative with damage
assessments than to earn a reputation among the brass as a breathless self-aggrandizer. But, yes, he was comfortable reporting
that the day’s events had been “the greatest success.”
The crews celebrated through the night in the lounge of the Fronton Hotel, drinking and singing. Using their flattened hands
like wings, the fighter pilots mimed the banks and dives they used to gun down fleeing peasants, making glottal
ack-ack-ack-ack
sounds to represent their gun bursts.
Von Richthofen had been right; the people had been like sheep, clustering together in predictable patterns, exposing themselves
on bends in the road and at the edges of wooded areas, as if leaves and foliage would block machine-gun fire. He had taught
them an art. There would be more difficult tests in the war to follow, but now they were learning their craft.
Von Richthofen chose not to join the celebrants, but rather took his nightly stroll among the planes at the airfield, conducting
his customary inspection as he formulated the more detailed official report he would send to Berlin. This was a genesis moment,
he felt. This had been unexpected, instantaneous, all-consuming, compellingly lethal, and without prejudice between military
and civilian. Effective. Modern. The new war.
Of course, he could not be certain that Mola’s ground forces would act appropriately and occupy the town quickly, before the
Basques could physically retrench or emotionally recover from this bombing. The opposite had been his experience with these
Spaniards; they would find reasons to delay their advancement and reduce the effectiveness of the entire campaign.
The next objective, he knew, would be Bilbao, and it would require a different approach, one demanding greater precision.
Bil-bao would be the final battle on the northern front, and the Basques would retreat there with all their remaining resources.
It would take time to rout them out, although the naval blockade and a ground siege would undermine their determination. But
how much of that could remain after the events of this day?