THE BOMBING OF GERNIKA
[To the Editor of THE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—It is, and should be, unusual for reporters of events to enter into public controversy. We generally have enough to do each day not to waste our time on baseline propagandists. But Mr. D. Jerrold's letter in your issue of last week throws such doubt on my professional competence that as the Corre- spondent to whom Mr. Jerrold refers I feel I must abandon anonymity, and warn the author off the course.
I did not, as Mr. D. Jerrold alleges, pay a " hurried visit " to Gernika. I was walking in and around Gernika between p.m. and t a.m. in the evening of April 26th-27th, carrying out the careful enquiries which the situation demanded. In order to make absolutely certain of the facts, I chose not to hurry back to Bilbao and send a story that evening, but to wait until the next afternoon. By that time I had questioned about twenty of the homeless people in Gernika itself, and eighty more in Bilbao next morning. They showed no signs of war-hysteria.
In the two hours that I was at Gernika I had, and used, every opportunity for the " meticulous examination " of the new bombholes there. It is not true, as Mr. D. Jerrold states, that there were none in open spaces in Gemika. I saw three immense bombholes in the open space immediately east of the Casa de Juntas ; about forty feet wide and twenty deep, they were of precisely the same kind as that in which I and other correspondents sheltered that afternoon in the village of Arbacegui-Guerrikaiz. The metal fragments were exactly the same type. The bOmbholes were bombholes, not shellholes. As for the idiotic story about mines, what retreating army in the world mines and destroys roads fifteen miles behind the fnrthest point of its retreat, on the only line of communications
with its base, and lays the mines so badly that they go off in the _middle of a public. square ? For the whole assumption at the back of Mr. Jerrold's argument is false. There were no departing troops going through Gernika on April 26th : the Basque army did not fall back on Gernika until two days later.
As for gardens in which Mr. D. Jerrold will find bombholes, I suggest that he should visit the hospital on the left of the main road going out of Gernika- to Bermeo, opposite -the burnt out main garage of the town. And the now tumbled buildings of Gernika were plastered with bombholes, including the school buildings and the two churches of Andra Mari and San Juan, when I visited the town..
I do not think that either Mr. Jerrold or myself can deny that Gemika was burnt to the ground in a very thorough way. If therefore grass and flowers are, as he alleges, in fine condition, it does not seem to affect the argument in either sense. I- may add, however, that the German two-pounder thermite bomb dropped in enormous numbers on Gernika does not normally burn vegetation : if it falls on open ground it penetrates up to the fin, and there are no signs of burning on grass, for instance, but a narrow ring of grey ash round the projectile. Its effect on houses and pinewoods with their carpet of needles is, I have seen many times, entirely different.
In order to clear away the extraordinary confusion of the issues established by Mr. Jerrold, may I put it on record here, as a correspondent who travelled freely over the province of Vizcaya in the months April, May, June, 1937, that the town of Gernika never was bombed before April 26th, and that as far as I know no such claim was ever made by either side ? The story of earlier bombings, so far as I have been able to discover, was only invented after April 26th as a final line of defence against overwhelming evidence that Ger/Aka had in fact been bombarded.
Finally, after Mr. Jerrold's long-distance demolition of
alleged eyewitnesses " such as myself, may I be permitted to analyse Mr. Jerrold's fabrication of an " eyewitness " to his 'own argument ? He cites Mr. Gerahty, author of The Road to Madrid, to clinch the matter : but I fear that Mr. Jerrold is incapable of reading black and white. Or perhaps he is over eager.
r. On p. 233 of The Road to Madrid Mr. Gerahty leaves Salamanca on a Sunday morning (April 25th) and p. 234 rests the night at Vitoria. P. 234, " Next day," Monday, April 26th, he was " unable to visit the front as rapid movements were going on," and " had to content himself with making the closer acquaintance " of Vitoria. fle was " not able entirely to forget the war as a fleet of fifteen bombing planes on their way to attack the enemy . . . passed over the town." ; p. 235, " next morning," Tuesday, April 27th, Mr. Gerahty was able to leave Vitoria and visit the front.
In other words, Mr. Gerahty was 'at Vitoria the day Gernika was bombed, 4o miles away across mountains, and he saw 'the planes flying there. So much for Mr. Gerahty's claim to be an eyewitness of no bombardment.
2. Nor does Mr. Gerahty say, as Mr. Jerrold alleges, that he was " in a position to see the bombardment." On p. 242, he says that on Tuesday, April 27th, he was at Markina, " where the alleged bombing could easily have been heard had it taken place." As a noisy battleline 'on April 27th lay between Markina and Gernika this statement is, to say the least, meaningless : but in consideration of the fact that Gernika was bombed twenty-four hours before, we can let Mr. Gerahty step off the witness-stand with the modest sugges- tion that, as a correspondent, he should in future ,be quicker on his stories.
As for Mr. Jerrold, lessons in reading and basic chronology are indicated.
Nor can I accept the evidence of other journalists who were allowed to enter Gernika three days after the insurgents occupied it as in any sense valuable. Why were they not allowed to enter Gernika immediately after the troops ? I was myself in the Basque front line (so far as it could be called one) when Gernika, was abandoned : 'there- was no fighting and no danger. But, for some reason or other, they had to wait. Why ? Can it have been war-hysteria? Or • simply war preparation ?—Yours, --G. L. &mitt. London, W.. r.
Previous page
