The Bombing of Guernica

On 26 April 1937, airplanes of the rebels’ Nazi and Fascist allies bombed the town of Guernica, the symbol of Basque national identity. This map illustrates what happened and who was involved. The attack was carried out in four stages by a combination of bombers, represented by the larger planes, and fighters, represented by the smaller ones. German planes are shown in blue, Italian planes in green. They combined percussion and incendiary bombs – the impacts are indicated by the fire symbol, - as well as strafing with machine guns.

At 16:15, the planes of the German Condor Legion and the Italian Legionary Air Force reconnoitered the target. (This is shown in the top rectangular box on the right.) The first attack, shown in the second box, took place at 16:30 and was carried out by a German Dornier Do-17 bomber, which did two runs over the town. Five minutes later, three Italian Savoia-Marchetti S-79 bombers carried out the second attack, shown in the third box. There was then a break until 18:00 when one or two German Heinkel He-111 bombers and five Italian Fiat CR-32 fighters attacked. This is shown in the last box.

The main attack, which is shown in the central map, began at 18:30. Nineteen Junkers-52 bombers escorted by five Fiat- CR-32 and five Messerschmidt B-109 fighters, again dropped combined explosive and incendiary bombs and strafed the people in the streets. In military terms, this is known as carpet bombing, a tactic intended to cause the uniform devastation of a defined area. The planes had taken off from Burgos, the Francoist capital, but the regime’s propaganda would later claim, among many other lies, that the Caudillo had had nothing to do with it. And this came only after having made enormous efforts to cast the blame for what happened away from the bombing and on the “reds” who had supposedly blown the town up as they retreated.

The four attacks were devastating. 85 percent of the city was destroyed. The number of people killed has been the subject of debate, with calculations ranging from a low of 126 and a high of 1654. The most likely number is between 250 and 300.