Guernica remembered: Picasso's legacy

It was a busy market day in a small town then little known beyond Spain. The central square was alive with the chatter of the peasants selling their produce and the noise of their livestock. But at 4.40pm on 26 April 1937, this bustling scene was reduced to carnage as Luftwaffe bombers unloaded their deadly cargo on Guernica.

The church bell rang out to warn the townsfolk of their approach, but though many found makeshift shelters, these offered little protection from the onslaught. Three hours later, the indiscriminate carpet bombing of this defenceless civilian population would propel the ancient capital of the Basques on to the world stage.

Hundreds of miles away in Paris, Pablo Picasso read about the massacre and was outraged. He immediately decided to change a canvas he was painting for the Paris Exhibition and the result was Guernica, the masterpiece which has come to symbolise the barbarity of war.

Today, exactly 70 years after the Luftwaffe's Condor Legion led the attack which is thought to have claimed 1,600 lives and left about 800 injured, survivors will mark the atrocity.

The attack, was the first use of what came to be known as total war. This put civilians, not just soldiers, in the front line; targets who were as legitimate as armed combatants. It has come to be an integral part of war since.

At the time of the attack, during the peak of the Spanish Civil War, Guernica was not on the front line. Nationalist troops led by General Francisco Franco had been advancing towards Bilbao but faced strong resistance from the retreating Republican forces.

Franco was determined to deal a devastating blow to Republican morale and at the same time cut important supply lines. Who better to help him than his Fascist allies in Germany and Italy?

Nazi Germany, like Fascist Italy, was officially not involved in the war and both had signed a non-intervention pact. But it was widely known the German and Italian forces had been arming Franco's Nationalist troops.

At Guernica, the Luftwaffe and planes from the Italian Aviazione Legionaria had their first chance to see action in Operation Rügen, which was to prove a dress rehearsal for the Second World War. Led by Generalfeldmarschall Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen, the Condor Legion launched a series of low-level attacks on the small town of about 5,000 people. The carpet bombing created a firestorm in which the townspeople were burnt alive. Only 1 per cent of the town's buildings were said to have survived - most of them were on the outskirts.

Ricardo Arrien, now 80, was 10 at the time of the raids. He recalled: "When I returned, the house had disappeared. Our photographs were burnt, the brown coat I had got for Easter, my mother's sewing machine, the marbles I had played with and some gold my father had hidden under the table. All gone."

Luis Iriondo, who was 14 in 1937, fled to one of the shelters in the centre of the town. But soon after the bombing started, he decided to take his chances on the streets instead of suffocating inside the shelter. "After three minutes we could not breathe. We were so many people and the shelter was so small and without any ventilation or light," remembers the 84-year-old. "To die buried alive terrified me. I left the shelter but then we heard the bombers coming closer and closer. I thought of a friend, Cipriano Arrien."

Later, Luis found his friend Cipriano lying dead in a wood nearby. It is an image that has stayed with him all his life.

The raid was not a strategic success. Two arms factories were untouched, as was the main bridge. The tree of Guernica, where the Basque parliament had traditionally met, and which symbolises Basque independence, also escaped without a scratch.

Von Richthofen later said that the attacks were a failure militarily. What he could not have reckoned with was the political fallout which the raid would cause worldwide. George Steer, a British journalist who worked for The Times, revealed to the world proof the Nazi regime had led the raids, breaking the non-intervention pact. He discovered three small bomb cases stamped with the German imperial eagle; it was proof enough to condemn Nazi Germany and cause Franco's Nationalists huge embarrassment around the world.

In his report, published in The Times and later The New York Times, two days after the bombings, Steer wrote: "Guernica was not a military objective ... the object of the bombardment was seemingly the demoralisation of the civil population and the destruction of the cradle of the Basque race."

The report brought international revulsion and widespread condemnation against Franco and the German Condor Legion which led the attack. Britain, France and the United States condemned Franco's Nationalist forces and Adolf Hitler's Germany.

But Franco claimed the attack on Guernica never took place and was in fact Republican propaganda. Later, in an attempt to avoid condemnation by the international community and the Catholic Church, Franco suggested the town was burnt as part of the Republicans' slash and burn policy which was repeated at nearby Irun by its retreating troops.

But the damage had been done. Picasso's Guernica occupied pride of place in the Republican Spain pavilion at the Paris Exhibition of 1937, reminding the world what had happened days before in the town. Picasso, who died in 1973, refused to let Guernica return to Spain during Franco's dictatorship. It finally returned in 1981, six years after El Caudillo's death, and hangs in Madrid's Reina Sofia Museum.

Guernica is now at the centre of a new row, as Basque nationalists want the painting to be returned to the place which inspired the canvas. Though they do not expect this internationally famous canvas to be exhibited in Guernica, they claim it should hang in Bilbao's Guggenheim Museum.

The plan has been opposed by the Spanish government, which has claimed Guernica is too fragile to be moved again. Instead, as a goodwill gesture, the Spanish government is to send up to 30 sketches that Picasso used to paint Guernica which will go on show at the Guggenheim to mark the anniversary of the bombings.

Thirty Spanish artists are also to mark the anniversary with a major exhibition in Guernica dedicated to the events which took place 70 years before. Among the artists are Juan Lui Geonaga and Iñaki Ruiz de Eguino. They will attempt to interpret the original vision of Picasso's mural in a series of paintings and other works.

Hundreds of miles away, though, perhaps an equally significant ceremony will take place in Berlin. The German capital is to show films, contemporary dance shows and lectures and official homage will be paid to the victims of Guernica by the German government.

For some survivors, the memory never fades. Consuelo Agirre-Amalloa, 79, who was nine at the time of the bombings, is like many others in this small town; they measure life in terms of "before" the bombardment and "after". "It was so tremendous that I have tried to forget it all," she says.

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