SPAIN: Freedom of the Borough

The town of Guernica, twelve miles northeast of Bilbao, is the ancient seat of Basque democracy. At the sacred Oak of Guernica (now a dried old stump), the Kings of Spain used to swear to protect Basque rights, whereupon the citizens would confer on the sovereign the title of Senor de Vizcaya.

Monday, April 26, 1937 was a market day in Guernica. The town’s 7,000 population was swollen by 3,000 Loyalist refugees. Francisco Franco’s rebel armies were still far away—but at 4:30 p.m. German Junkers and Heinkels started coming over in waves, every 20 minutes. They dropped 1,000-pounders (monsters at that time) and great showers of incendiaries, and since there was no antiaircraft they flew low and machine-gunned fleeing victims.

Said Herbert L. Matthews in The Education of a Correspondent: “The destruction of Guernica will forever rank as the prototype of totalitarian bombing. There one had the systematic and complete obliteration of a town far behind the front lines—which was going to be taken without difficulty anyway, since the Loyalist troops were routed. … It was the heart of Vizcaya, and to smash it was to break the heart of the Basques.”

Hermann Wilhelm Goring, the man who was said to have ordered the Guernica job as practice and demonstration for his Luftwaffe, was ignominiously dead last week, his ashes scattered to the four winds. But the man for whom Goring did the job—Francisco Franco—was very much alive. Moreover, Guernica had been completely rebuilt. In gratitude, the citizens of Guernica last week honored Franco with the “freedom of the borough.”