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"I Saw the German Planes Bomb Guernica," article by Noel Monks in the Daily Express, May 1, 1937 (p. 10).

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“I am just back on leave from Bilbao and Guernica.

Six people already have asked me: “Who did bomb Guernica?”

I will swear to it that Franco’s German avia-tors bombed Guernica, and that they killed 1000 civilians.

When Franco hastened to deny that his German planes have wrecked the ancient Basque capital, he was trying to make liars of the three accredited war correspondents who were on the spot.

Another London newspaper correspondent, Reuter’s correspondent, and myself.

He tried to tell us that we didn’t see thirty German Junkers bombers flying towards Guernica at four o’clock on the afternoon of April 26, just ten minutes before, according to the stories the survivors told us later, they swooped on the defenceless town.

Franco told the world there were none of his planes up that day, because of bad weather.

I’m telling the world now that there were. I saw them. My two colleagues saw them. Six thousand inhabitants of Guernica saw them. And Monday, April 26th, was the sunniest day of all I spent on the Basque front.

I’m not calling Franco a liar. Maybe he didn’t know the Germans were up. Franco’s German allies of the air work independently of Salamanca.

I think their strafe of Guernica was done entirely off their own bat.

I was among the ruins of Guernica one hour after the raiders had done their work.

I wandered all over them, as far as I was able: the whole town was in flames.

I saw bodies in the fields spotted with ma-chine-gun bullets. I interviewed twenty or thirty survivors. They all told the same tale. Those who could speak. Some of them could only point skywards, put their hands over their ears and rock to and fro in terror.

I went back to Bilbao and wrote my story.

I was back at Guernica at day-break. I saw 600 bodies. Nurses, children, farmers, old women, girls, old men, babies. All dead, torn, and mutilated. Basque soldiers were getting the bodies from the wreckage, many of them weeping.

I came to what had been an air-raid shelter. In it were the remains of fifty women and children. A bomb had dropped right through the house into the cellar.

Does Franco expect the world to believe that fifty women and children fled into an air-raid shelter when their house was mined?

Or trapped themselves below there while the house above them was set alight?

I went back to Bilbao and wrote another story, just what I had seen. Just as I would have written it if it had been a Franco town in ruins.

Then next day came the cable from my office. I read it three times before I was convinced that it was serious.

My two colleagues who had been with me at Guernica received similar messages. We took them in to Foreign Minister Men-tiguren. I'll never forget the look on his handsome face.

He shrugged his shoulders. Gentlemen what can I do for you? You saw really more than I or any member of my Government. Go back to Guernica, talk to whom you like. There will be no censorship today.

We all three went back to Guernica. We searched the ruined town and surrounding countryside. One of my colleagues found three dud incendiary bombs. They were German bombs, branded with the German eagle. We were more convinced than ever that the Germans had destroyed Guernica if we needed anything more convincing than what we saw with our own eyes at four o'clock on the afternoon of April 26^th.

I cabled the office the details required, that the German bombers we had seen near Guernica were of the heavy Junkers 52 type with chasers of the Heinkel 51 type. That has never been denied.

I’m waiting now for Franco to produce proofs that the Basques destroyed their own ancient capital and murdered their own women and children. Franco has had what is left of Guernica for ten days now. I’m waiting for the personally conducted tour of Guernica by correspondents with Franco’s forces. How well do we know these tours it was with Franco's forces when he took Malaga.

I waited for three days outside the city, with other journalists, while the Press officers went in and did a little “arranging”.

Not one journalist was allowed inside Malaga until three days after it was captured. The only journalist who stayed in there until Franco came in was arrested. He is still in jail at Seville.

We correspondents at Bilbao were in Guernica before representatives of the Government were there. We went alone. The journalist who moves a single kilometre alone in Franco’s territory is jailed at once or expelled.

And now I'll give you a personal reason why you should not take much notice of what Franco’s mouthpiece, bull-throated General Queipo de Llano, says. Speaking from Se-ville the other night, on a further denial of the Guernica outrage, the general said: “That Señor Noel Monks. He’s a drunkard. He was drunk all the time he was with our forces”.

Fact is, I’m a teetotaller. Have been all my life. Ask anyone who knows me. But don’t ask me who bombed Guernica. I might take to drink.”

Article by George L. Steer, “The Tragedy of Gernika,” for The Times, (Tuesday, April 28, 1937).

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“Guernica, the most ancient town of the Basques and the centre of their cultural tradition, was completely destroyed yester-day afternoon by insurgent air raiders.

The bombardment of this open town far behind the lines occupied precisely three hours and a quarter, during which a power-ful fleet of aeroplanes consisting of three German types, Junkers and Heinkel bombers and Heinkel fighters, did not cease un-loading on the town bombs weighing from 1000 lb. downwards and, it is calculated, more than 3000 two-pounder aluminium incendiary projectiles.

The fighters, meanwhile, plunged low from above the centre of the town to ma-chinegun those of the civilian population who had taken refuge in the fields.

The whole of Guernica was soon in flames except the historic Casa de Juntas with its rich archives of the Basque race, where the ancient Basque Parliament used to sit.

The famous oak of Guernica, the dried old stump of 600 years and the young new shoots of this century, was also untouched. Here the kings of Spain used to take the oath to respect the democratic rights (fueros) of Vizcaya and in return received a promise of allegiance as suzerains with the democratic title of Señor, not Rey Vizcaya.

The noble parish church of Santa Maria was also undamaged except for the beautiful chapter house, which was struck by an in-cendiary bomb. At 2 a.m. today when I visited the town the whole of it was a horrible sight, flaming from end to end.

The reflection of the flames could be seen in the clouds of smoke above the mountains from 10 miles away. Throughout the night houses were falling until the streets became long heaps of red impenetrable debris.

Many of the civilian survivors took the long trek from Guernica to Bilbao in antique solid-wheeled Basque farmcarts drawn by oxen. Carts piled high with such household possessions as could be saved from the conflagration clogged the roads all night.

Other survivors were evacuated in Government lorries, but many were forced to remain round the burning town lying on mattresses or looking for lost relatives and children, while units of the fire brigades and the Basque motorized police under the personal direction of the Minister of the Interior, Señor Monzon, and his wife continued rescue work till dawn.

Church Bell Alarm

In the form of its execution and the scale of the destruction it wrought, no less than in the selection of its objective, the raid on Guernica is unparalleled in military history. Guernica was not a military objective.

A factory producing war material lay outside the town and was untouched.

So were two barracks some distance from the town. The town lay far behind the lines.

The object of the bombardment was seemingly the demoralization of the civil population and the destruction of the cradle of the Basque race. Every fact bears out this appreciation, beginning with the day when the deed was done.

Monday was the customary market day in Guernica for the country round.

At 4:30 p.m., when the market was full and peasants were still coming in, the church bell rang the alarm for approaching aero-planes, and the population sought refuge in cellars and in the dugouts prepared after the bombing of the civilian population of Durango on March 31st, which opened General Mola’s offensive in the north.

The people are said to have shown a good spirit. A Catholic priest took charge and perfect order was maintained.

Five minutes later a single German bomber appeared, circled over the town at a low altitude and then dropped six heavy bombs, apparently aiming for the station. The bombs with a shower of grenades fell on a former institute and on houses and streets surrounding it.

The aeroplane then went away.

In another five minutes came a second bomber, which threw the same number of bombs into the middle of the town.

About a quarter of an hour later three Junkers arrived to continue the work of demolition, and thenceforward the bombing grew in intensity and was continuous, ceasing only with the approach of dusk at 7:45. The whole town of 7000 inhabitants, plus 3000 refugees, was slowly and systematically pounded to pieces.

Over a radius of five miles round a detail of the raiders’ technique was to bomb separate caserios, or farm houses. In the night these burned like little candles in the hills.

All the villages around were bombed with the same intensity as the town itself, and at Mugica, a little group of houses at the head of the Guernica inlet, the population was machine-gunned for fifteen minutes.

Rhythm of Death

It is impossible to state yet the number of victims. In the Bilbao Press this morning they were reported as fortunately small, but it is feared that this was an understatement in order not to alarm the large refugee population of Bilbao. In the hospital of Josefinas [Asilo Calzada], which was one of the first places bombed, all the 42 wounded militiamen it sheltered were killed outright.

In a street leading downhill from the Casa de Juntas I saw a place where 50 people, nearly all women and children, are said to have been trapped in an air raid refuge un-der a mass of burning wreckage. Many were killed in the fields, and altogether the deaths may run into hundreds. An elderly priest named Aronategui was killed by a bomb while rescuing children from a burning house.

The tactics of the bombers, which may be of interest to students of the new military science, were as follows: First, small parties of aeroplanes threw heavy bombs and hand grenades all over the town, choosing area after area in orderly fashion.

Next came fighting machines which swooped low to machine-gun those who ran in panic from dugouts, some of which had already been penetrated by 1000 lb. bombs, which make a hole 25 ft deep. Many of these people were killed as they ran. A large herd of sheep being brought in to the market was also wiped out.

The object of this move was apparently to drive the population underground again, for next as many as 12 bombers appeared at a time dropping heavy and incendiary bombs upon the ruins.

The rhythm of this bombing of an open town was, therefore, a logical one: first, hand grenades and heavy bombs to stampede the population, then machinegunning to drive them below, next heavy and incendiary bombs to wreck the houses and burn them on top of their victims. The only counter-measures the Basques could employ, for they do not possess sufficient aeroplanes to face the insurgent fleet, were those provided by the heroism of the Basque clergy. These blessed and prayed for the kneeling crowds-Socialists, Anarchists, and Communists, as well as the declared faithful in the crumbling dugouts.

When I entered Guernica after mid night houses were crashing on either side, and it was utterly impossible even for firemen to enter the centre of the town.

The hospitals of Josefinas and Convento de Santa Clara were glowing heaps of embers, all the churches except that of Santa Maria were destroyed, and the few houses which still stood were doomed. When I revisited Guernica this afternoon most of the town was still burning and new fires had broken out. About 30 dead were laid out in a ruined hospital.

A Call to Basques

The effect here of the bombardment of Guernica, the Basques’ holy city, has been profound and has led President Aguirre to issue the following statement in this morning’s Basque Press: “The German airmen in the service of the Spanish rebels have bombarded Guernica, burning the historic town which is held in such veneration by all Basques. They have thought to wound us in the most sensitive of our patriotic sentiments, once more making it entirely clear what Euzkadi may expect of those who do not hesitate to destroy us down to the very sanctuary which records the centuries of our liberty and our democracy.

Before outrage all we Basques must react with violence, swearing from the bottom of our hearts to defend the principles of our people with unheard of stubbornness and heroism if the case requires it.

We cannot hide the gravity of the moment; but victory can never be won by the invader if, raising our spirits to heights of strength and determination, we steel ourselves to his defeat.

The enemy has advanced in many parts elsewhere to be driven out of them after-wards. I do not hesitate to affirm that here the same thing will happen. May today’s outrage be one spur more to do it with all speed.”