THE TRAGEDY OF GUERNICA

George Steer was born in South Africa in 1909 and went on to study classics at Oxford, but he soon decided to follow in the footsteps of his father, a newspaper editor, and become a journalist. In 1935, after working in London as a reporter for the Yorkshire Post, he became a war correspondent for the Times. The newspaper sent him to Africa to cover the Second Italo-Abyssinian War, where he reported on how the Italians were using yperite (mustard gas) on the Ethiopians—a practice that had been outlawed by the Geneva Protocol of 1925—and bombing Red Cross ambulances.

In 1937 the Times sent Steer to cover the Spanish Civil War. One of his early reports described how British ships had broken the naval blockade of Bilbao by the Fascist forces under General Francisco Franco to bring food to starving Spaniards, and he also traveled to the front lines to see the fighting up close. But the story that earned Steer a place in the history books was his report on the virtual obliteration of the Basque town of Guernica by German and Italian warplanes. Times New York Times L’Humanité Guernica,