The Destruction of Guernica. Paul Preston
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for the scale of another attack on 4 January. In an even more ferocious incursion into the city’s four prisons, 224 rightists were killed including several priests, most Carlists but some Basque Nationalists.9 As long as the siege of the capital was the principal rebel preoccupation, the Basque front remained static until late March 1937. However, the Republican victory at Guadalajara on 20 March 1937 finally undermined Franco’s belief that he could win the war at Madrid and imposed upon him a momentous strategic volte-face. The lesson to be drawn from contrasting the easy victory at Málaga in early February with the immense cost of the battles around Madrid at Jarama and Guadalajara was clear. The Republic was concentrating its best-trained and equipped troops in the centre of Spain and leaving other fronts relatively neglected. Against the Republican army of the Centre, the military rebels were achieving only small gains at the cost of massive bloodshed while against the militias of the periphery, substantial triumphs could come relatively cheaply. Thus, there was a case for desisting from the obsessive concentration on Madrid and destroying the Republic by instalments elsewhere. This was the view of Colonel Juan Vigón Suerodiaz, chief of Mola’s general staff, who argued for priority to be given to operations in the north so that the rebel cause might be strengthened by the seizure of the coal, iron and steel reserves and the armaments factories of the Basque provinces.10
Franco initially remained obsessed with Madrid. The commander of the Condor Legion, General Hugo Sperrle, put forward similar arguments with greater insistence. It took the news of the defeat at Guadalajara to change Franco’s thinking, and for him to succumb to the pressure from Sperrle and Vigón and accept that the defeat of the Republic must be sought somewhere other than the outskirts of Madrid. Sperrle persuaded him that resistance in the north would be slight, with promises about the likely impact of concerted airborne ground attacks by the Condor Legion. On 22 March, the Generalísimo presented Kindelán with a sketchy outline of his immediate plans for a huge new force to be massed to attack and take Bilbao. On 23 March, he summoned Mola to Salamanca and gave him specific orders for the assault on Bilbao which derived from Vigón’s suggestions and Sperrle’s proposals.11
The operational details were hammered out at meetings held on 24 and 26 March involving General Alfredo Kindelán, as head of Franco’s air force, General José Solchaga and General José López Pinto as field commanders, Vigón as Mola’s chief of staff and Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen, the Condor Legion’s chief of staff. Richthofen explained to his Spanish counterparts the novel strategy of ‘close air support’, using aircraft for sustained ground attack to smash the morale of opposing troops. Accordingly, arrangements were made at these meetings for continuous and rapid liaison between the headquarters of the Spanish ground forces and the Condor Legion. Two hours before any attack, the air force commanders would inform the ground headquarters in order for the necessary coordination to take place. It was also agreed at these meetings that attacks would proceed ‘without taking into account the civilian population’.12
Mola gathered a large army consisting of African Army units, of the Carlist militias or requetés now fully militarised as the Navarrese Brigades and of mixed Spanish-Italian brigades. It was backed by the air support of the small but well-equipped Condor Legion and of units of the Italian Aviazione Legionaria under Richthofen’s command.13 After Guadalajara, the Germans were keen to show their superiority over the Italians and to practise and develop their techniques of ground attack from the air. In this context, the relationships between Mola and Sperrle and between their chiefs of staff, Vigón and von Richthofen, were constant and close if not exactly cordial. The German government had made it clear in late October 1936 that the commander of the Condor Legion would be solely responsible to Franco. Sperrle was meticulous about observing that hierarchy and, in consequence, enjoyed generally good relations with Franco.14
In practice, however, the need to integrate joint air/ground operations on an hour-by-hour basis rendered liaison with Salamanca impracticable. So, content with Sperrle’s deferential manner, Franco allowed him a free hand to liaise directly with Mola and Vigón, except on major issues. Franco was delighted to be able to consider the crack Condor Legion as part of his forces and to sit back and take the credit for its achievements. In the field, Mola and Vigón were also happy to accept the help and advice of Sperrle and Richthofen and the consequence was that, with Franco’s conscious acquiescence, the Germans had the decisive voice in the campaign. Sperrle wrote in 1939, ‘All suggestions made by the Condor Legion for the conduct of the war were accepted gratefully and followed.’ While the advance was being planned, von Richthofen wrote in his diary on 24 March, ‘we are practically in charge of the entire business without any of the responsibility’ and, on 28 March, ‘I am an omnipotent and effective commander (Feldherr) … and I have established effective ground/air command.’15
On 31 March, Mola arrived in Vitoria to put the final touches to the offensive that was to be launched on the following day. He began by deploying the weapon of mass fear which had been so effective for Franco in the advance on Madrid of the African columns. He issued a proclamation that was both broadcast and printed in a leaflet dropped on the main towns. It contained the following threat: ‘If your submission is not immediate, I will raze Vizcaya to the ground, beginning with the industries of war. I have ample means to do so.’16 In a similar spirit of crushing enemy morale, he ordered the execution of sixteen prisoners in Vitoria. The fact that among them were several popular local figures including the Alcalde, Teodoro González de Zárate, provoked protests from the local right.17 This act of gratuitous violence was followed by a massive four-day artillery and aircraft bombardment of eastern Vizcaya in which the small picturesque country town of Durango was destroyed by two bombing attacks carried out by four bombers and nine fighters of the Italian Aviazione Legionaria. Unlike Guernica, after the bombing, Durango remained under the jurisdiction of the Basque Government until 28 April. This permitted an investigation to identify the victims. As a result, the government published the figure of 258 civilians, 127 died during the bombing and at least a further 131 who died shortly after as a consequence of their wounds. Among the dead were fourteen nuns and two priests. Subsequent exhaustive research by Jon Irazabal Agirre reached the figure of 336 dead, of whom 276 could be identified and a further 60 who could not. As was later to be the case with the more notorious bombing of Guernica, Salamanca denied that the raid on Durango had taken place and attributed the damage to the Basques themselves.18
Rebel progress in the first three days of Mola’s campaign was so slow that Sperrle sent a report to Kindelán in which he complained that ‘if the troops do not advance faster, we will not enter Bilbao’. Sperrle believed that Franco had retained too much artillery and infantry on the Madrid front.19 On 2 April, Sperrle and Richthofen complained about this to Mola. Equally anxious to speed things up, Mola suggested to Sperrle that the industries of Bilbao be destroyed. When the German commander asked why it made any sense to destroy industries which it was hoped to capture shortly after, Mola replied: ‘Spain is totally dominated by the industrial centres of Bilbao and Barcelona. Under such a domination, Spain can never be cleaned up. Spain has got too many industries which only produce discontent’, adding that ‘if half of Spain’s factories were destroyed by German bombers, the subsequent reconstruction of Spain would be greatly facilitated’. In response to the notion that Spain’s health required the elimination of the industrial proletariat, Sperrle pointed out that the German air forces in Spain would attack factories only when Franco gave them specific orders to do so. According to Richthofen, Mola told Vigón to issue the order. Richthofen said that it had to come from a higher authority. Mola then signed orders himself for attacks on Basque industrial targets. Richthofen agreed to bomb the explosives factory at Galdácano on the ‘next free day’. Sperrle and Richthofen, however, informed Franco and awaited his permission to carry out Mola’s orders. Sperrle even offered to put an aircraft at Franco’s disposal for him to come to Vitoria to discuss the situation.20
In expecting the entire north of Spain to fall in under three weeks, Franco and Mola had underestimated the determination of the Basques. They were both disconcerted by the slowness of the first stage of their advance towards Bilbao’s unfinished ‘iron ring’ of fortifications. By 8 April, the rebel forces had completed only the first part of their planned offensive. After intense bombing on 4 April, they occupied the village of Otxandio (where the Basques had temporarily