Sixty-eight years ago today bombers of the Nazi Condor Legion, doing the bidding of Spain's fascist elements, obliterated the hamlet of Gernika and its civilian population.
It is a day and event worthy of commemoration given all it signifies for the innocents and powerless who suffer the consequences of schemes conjured by the unsettled minds of egomaniacal people seeking satiation through power over others.
It represented, militarily speaking, the first time air bombing had been used upon the unarmed going about their lives in the centuries-old way.
Gernika was only the first, but once the genie was out of the bottle, Belgrade, Dresden, London, and others leading up, catastrophically, to Hiroshima would all serve as targets in the cruelest kind of warfare imaginable. The tactic has been popular and useful ever since.
the scribe takes a break from pithy commentary on the pawns and pukes that pass for political leaders today and reproduces – in selective form – an account of what happened at Gernika written by a British writer for the “The London Mercury,” G.L. Steer.
The situation in Iraq, where thousands of civilians have died from bombings committed by bothinsurgents and occupying army alike, is invoked here. Americans’ casual insensitivity to the suffering our weapons have brought upon others needs to be shaken. We must know what our tax dollars are going to; must be aware of the suffering children, elderly, of the young and strong alike and must face up to our responsibility for it.
It is simply too easy to endure these living room wars. the scribe is particularly disheartened by how September 11 served to refine our callousness, rather than open our hearts to the realities of massive, organized, scientific violence.
Gernika remained a modest Vizcayan country town. The population behaved itself, the priests walked about in the cloth, mass was held in the churches all day and every day. At four there were farm carts coming into Gernika, rolling on solid wooden wheels and drawn by oxen whose heads were shaded under fleeces of sheep. Basque peasants in their long puckered market smocks walked backwards in front of them, mesmerizing the oxen to Gernika with their slim wands, with which they kept touching the horns and yoke gently. They talked to the oxen. Others were driving sheep to market. There was an assembly of animals near the parish church, a stately structure cavernous and dark within, standing upon a flight of thin steps like leaves piled one upon the other...
...It is improbable that anyone was thinking about the war, when at four-thirty the church bell rang out loud. All over Spain a peal on a single bell is an air-raid warning...
...In a few minutes a Heinkel III came over and dropped six medium bombs, probably fifty-pounders, near the station, with a shower of grenades...
...A few minutes later another Heinkel III appeared, to bomb the same area, but nearer the centre...
...The parish priest, Aronategui, left his church with the sacraments, for dying people were reported near the railway station. He went calmly through the deserted streets with the bread. No fires had yet started...
...Fifteen minutes passed, and the people were coming out of their shelters. A heavy drumming of engines was heard to the east. It was what we called in lighter moments the trolley cars – the Junker 52s who were so clumsy that they seemed to clang rather than fly...
...Over the town, whose streets were once more empty trenches, they dispersed their load a ton at a time...
...Besides many fifty- and hundred-pound bombs, they dropped great torpedoes weighing a thousand. Gernika is a compact little town, and most of these hit buildings, tearing them to pieces vertically from top to bottom and below the bottom. They penetrated refuges. The spirit of the people had been good, but now they panicked...
...An escort of Heinkel 51s had been machine-gunning the roads around Gernika, scattering, killing or wounding sheep and shepherds. As the terrified population streamed out of the town they dived low to drill them with their guns...
...The little fighting planes came down in a line, like flashing dancing waves on shingle. They burst in spray on the countryside as they merrily dived. Twenty machine-guns working together in line, and the roar of breakers behind them from ten engines. Always they flew nose towards Gernika. For the pilots it must have been like surfing. The terrified people lay face down in ditches, pressed their backs against tree trunks, coiled themselves in holes, shut their eyes and ran across sweet green open meadow. Many were foolish, and fled back before the aerial tide into the village. It was then that the heavy bombing of Gernika began.
It was then that Gernika was smudged out of that rich landscape, the province of Vizcaya, with a heavy fist.
It was about five-fifteen. For two hours and a half flights of between three and twelve aeroplanes, types Heinkel III and Junker 52, bombed Gernika without mercy and with system. They chose their sectors in orderly fashion, with the opening points east of the Casa de Juntas and north of the arms factory. Early bombs fell like a circle of stars round the hospital on the road to Bermeo: all the windows were blown in by the divine efflatus, the wounded militiamen were thrown out of their beds, the inner fabric of the building shook and broke.
On the shattered houses, whose carpets and curtains, splintered beams and floors and furniture were knocked into angles and ready for the burning, the planes threw silver flakes. Tubes of two pounds, long as your forearm, glistening silver from their aluminum and elektron casing: inside them, as in the beginning of the world in Prometheus’ reed slept fire. Fire in a silver powder, sixty-five grammes in weight, ready to slip through six holes at the base of the glittering tube. So as the houses were broken to pieces over the people sheathed fire descended from heaven to burn them up.
Every twenty minutes fresh raiders came. And between the explosions and the spurts of flame as the burning metal seeped into curtains and beams, doors and carpets, while a grey pall stood over Gernika supported from below by white pillars where fires were starting, in the pauses of modern battle the population ran about the streets to clear away the doors of smothered refuges, to pull children and other small worthless belongings from houses afire...
...In the intervals people moved out of the town, but the fear of the fighting planes and separation from their families persuaded many to remain in Gernika. And then the planes returned with their tinsel tubes to shower over Gernika and another part was destroyed, and more were buried in the shelters...
...At seven-forty-five the last plane went away. One could hear now, through ears half-numbed by the engines of the heavy bombers and explosion of the heavy bombs, the nervous crackle of arson all over the town and the totter and trembling collapse of roofs and walls. Gernika was finished, and as night fell and the motorized police stumbled along the road to ring up Bilbao to say that all was over, the total furnace that was Gernika began to play tricks of crimson colour with the night clouds...
It is a day and event worthy of commemoration given all it signifies for the innocents and powerless who suffer the consequences of schemes conjured by the unsettled minds of egomaniacal people seeking satiation through power over others.
It represented, militarily speaking, the first time air bombing had been used upon the unarmed going about their lives in the centuries-old way.
Gernika was only the first, but once the genie was out of the bottle, Belgrade, Dresden, London, and others leading up, catastrophically, to Hiroshima would all serve as targets in the cruelest kind of warfare imaginable. The tactic has been popular and useful ever since.
the scribe takes a break from pithy commentary on the pawns and pukes that pass for political leaders today and reproduces – in selective form – an account of what happened at Gernika written by a British writer for the “The London Mercury,” G.L. Steer.
The situation in Iraq, where thousands of civilians have died from bombings committed by bothinsurgents and occupying army alike, is invoked here. Americans’ casual insensitivity to the suffering our weapons have brought upon others needs to be shaken. We must know what our tax dollars are going to; must be aware of the suffering children, elderly, of the young and strong alike and must face up to our responsibility for it.
It is simply too easy to endure these living room wars. the scribe is particularly disheartened by how September 11 served to refine our callousness, rather than open our hearts to the realities of massive, organized, scientific violence.
Gernika remained a modest Vizcayan country town. The population behaved itself, the priests walked about in the cloth, mass was held in the churches all day and every day. At four there were farm carts coming into Gernika, rolling on solid wooden wheels and drawn by oxen whose heads were shaded under fleeces of sheep. Basque peasants in their long puckered market smocks walked backwards in front of them, mesmerizing the oxen to Gernika with their slim wands, with which they kept touching the horns and yoke gently. They talked to the oxen. Others were driving sheep to market. There was an assembly of animals near the parish church, a stately structure cavernous and dark within, standing upon a flight of thin steps like leaves piled one upon the other...
...It is improbable that anyone was thinking about the war, when at four-thirty the church bell rang out loud. All over Spain a peal on a single bell is an air-raid warning...
...In a few minutes a Heinkel III came over and dropped six medium bombs, probably fifty-pounders, near the station, with a shower of grenades...
...A few minutes later another Heinkel III appeared, to bomb the same area, but nearer the centre...
...The parish priest, Aronategui, left his church with the sacraments, for dying people were reported near the railway station. He went calmly through the deserted streets with the bread. No fires had yet started...
...Fifteen minutes passed, and the people were coming out of their shelters. A heavy drumming of engines was heard to the east. It was what we called in lighter moments the trolley cars – the Junker 52s who were so clumsy that they seemed to clang rather than fly...
...Over the town, whose streets were once more empty trenches, they dispersed their load a ton at a time...
...Besides many fifty- and hundred-pound bombs, they dropped great torpedoes weighing a thousand. Gernika is a compact little town, and most of these hit buildings, tearing them to pieces vertically from top to bottom and below the bottom. They penetrated refuges. The spirit of the people had been good, but now they panicked...
...An escort of Heinkel 51s had been machine-gunning the roads around Gernika, scattering, killing or wounding sheep and shepherds. As the terrified population streamed out of the town they dived low to drill them with their guns...
...The little fighting planes came down in a line, like flashing dancing waves on shingle. They burst in spray on the countryside as they merrily dived. Twenty machine-guns working together in line, and the roar of breakers behind them from ten engines. Always they flew nose towards Gernika. For the pilots it must have been like surfing. The terrified people lay face down in ditches, pressed their backs against tree trunks, coiled themselves in holes, shut their eyes and ran across sweet green open meadow. Many were foolish, and fled back before the aerial tide into the village. It was then that the heavy bombing of Gernika began.
It was then that Gernika was smudged out of that rich landscape, the province of Vizcaya, with a heavy fist.
It was about five-fifteen. For two hours and a half flights of between three and twelve aeroplanes, types Heinkel III and Junker 52, bombed Gernika without mercy and with system. They chose their sectors in orderly fashion, with the opening points east of the Casa de Juntas and north of the arms factory. Early bombs fell like a circle of stars round the hospital on the road to Bermeo: all the windows were blown in by the divine efflatus, the wounded militiamen were thrown out of their beds, the inner fabric of the building shook and broke.
On the shattered houses, whose carpets and curtains, splintered beams and floors and furniture were knocked into angles and ready for the burning, the planes threw silver flakes. Tubes of two pounds, long as your forearm, glistening silver from their aluminum and elektron casing: inside them, as in the beginning of the world in Prometheus’ reed slept fire. Fire in a silver powder, sixty-five grammes in weight, ready to slip through six holes at the base of the glittering tube. So as the houses were broken to pieces over the people sheathed fire descended from heaven to burn them up.
Every twenty minutes fresh raiders came. And between the explosions and the spurts of flame as the burning metal seeped into curtains and beams, doors and carpets, while a grey pall stood over Gernika supported from below by white pillars where fires were starting, in the pauses of modern battle the population ran about the streets to clear away the doors of smothered refuges, to pull children and other small worthless belongings from houses afire...
...In the intervals people moved out of the town, but the fear of the fighting planes and separation from their families persuaded many to remain in Gernika. And then the planes returned with their tinsel tubes to shower over Gernika and another part was destroyed, and more were buried in the shelters...
...At seven-forty-five the last plane went away. One could hear now, through ears half-numbed by the engines of the heavy bombers and explosion of the heavy bombs, the nervous crackle of arson all over the town and the totter and trembling collapse of roofs and walls. Gernika was finished, and as night fell and the motorized police stumbled along the road to ring up Bilbao to say that all was over, the total furnace that was Gernika began to play tricks of crimson colour with the night clouds...
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