Many farmers would have come to town to sold their produce. To this day, American politicians bluster with alarming glee about the prospect of carpet-bombing other parts of the world. The region’s resilient stand was punished by Franco when he allowed the unprotected city to be bombed by Hitler’s air force. In April 1937, Guernica was the first city to be deliberately targeted for aerial bombing. Multiple waves of planes were involved in the bombing of Guernica, carpeting with the city with bombs and mowing down civilians who attempted to flee. Three planes flew in full of bombs and then left empty. Guernica. A large market would be held with people buying and selling goods, especially agricultural produce. For this is one of the air-raid sirens that sounded 80 years ago, on April 26 1937, as German and Italian planes bombed the Basque market town of Guernica …
Guernica in the Basque Country was bombed, pictured, by Nazi German and Italian Fascist forces in April 1937. It was market day and many people from the countryside were visiting the town. On April 26, 1937, in the midst of the Spanish Civil War, German war – planes bombed Guernica, the ancient Basque capital and the center of Basque culture, in perhaps the most famous conventional bombing raid of all time. At about 16:30 on Monday, 26 April 1937, warplanes of the German Condor Legion, commanded by Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, bombed Guernica for about two hours. Steer was the correspondent of The Times whose account of the bombing of Guernica perhaps had more political impact than any single article written by any correspondent during the Spanish Civil War. After a Spanish town was bombed in 1937, overheated—and inaccurate—accounts of civilian deaths shook the world. Luis Iriondo Aurtenetxea, a survivor of the Guernica bombing “On the day of the bombing, I was just 14. Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, until everything was burning." Guernica is one such name in modern military history. The German planners with the agreement of the Spanish Nationalists deliberately targeted Guernica on a busy market day in order to force the Basques to sue for a separate peace and abandon their allegiance to the left-wing government in Madrid. It is thought between 200 and 250 people died
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. Guernica was the ancient capital of the Basques – a group who had withstood the advances of the army since the Spanish Civil War begun in 1936. The bombing of Guernica occurred on a Monday, the traditional market day, and historians believe that this day was probably deliberately selected to maximize casualties. Germany, at this time led by Hitler, had lent material support to the Nationalists and were using the war as an opportunity to test out new weapons and tactics.