Guernica! Guernica!: A Study of a Journalism, Diplomacy, Propaganda, and History

By Herbert Southworth

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1977.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520336377

Herbert Southworth

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A Study

of Journalism,

Diplomacy, Propaganda,

and History

HERBERT RUTLEDGE

SOUTHWORTH

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

BERKELEY, LOS ANGELES, LONDON

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

ISBN: O-52O-O283O-9

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 74-82850

Copyright ©1977 by The Regents of the University of California

Designed by Kadi Karist Tint

Printed in the United States of America

This book is dedicated to the journalists, men and women, in Bilbao and on the Spanish-French frontier, who gave to the world the news of the destruction of Guernica; and especially to George Lowther Steer, to Noel Monks, to Christopher Holme, and to Mathieu Corman; and also especially to Jean Richard and to Canon Alberto de Onaindia, who broke the wall of silence constructed in France to keep out the news about Guernica.

Contents

Contents

Foreword

Preface

Acknowledgments

A Preliminary Note

1 The News from Bilbao

2 Riposte from Salamanca

3 Parenthesis on the Working Conditions of the Foreign Press in the Nationalist Zone

4 The News

Part One THE CONTROVERSY DURING THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR

1 The Public Controversy in England and the United States

2 The

3 The Secret

Part Two THE CONTROVERSY FROM 1939 TO 1975

Introduction

1 The Problem of Steer, Holburn, Botto, and the Havas Agency

2 The Dead and the Dying

3 How Was Guernica Destroyed? By Whom? Why?

4 The Reasons for the Existence and the Persistence of the Controversy

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Foreword

THE VALUE OF A NAIVE RETURN TO TEXTUAL CRITICISM

When asked not how one writes history but how one does history, I am tempted to answer, somewhat jocularly, but with the intention of being enlightening: is there much difference between doing history and doing art? History has its classic and its baroque styles, its impressionistic and its abstract works, its cubists, as well as its fauves, hacks, and engages, weekend scholars as well as professionals. And in history as in art only talent distinguishes between those who can uncover a whole universe in a few lines and those who will never uncover anything. To explain why Herbert Southworth’s historical method so enchants me I can do no better than to compare him with the so-called naive artists.

Let me be clearly understood: that is the greatest compliment I can give. Beyond all snobbism, all fashion, I have not only loved but admired the Naive school of painting for its purifying role among the modern imbroglio. Naturally I speak of the true Naifs, those whose every touch is sincerity itself, each reworking a scruple, each emphasis a necessity, each hesitation a search for certainty.

I am told such a search is chimerical and that history is an artificial construction just as a painting is not a photograph. But every passionate quest for a concrete truth is in effect a spontaneous critique of false constructions, of fake compositions. The true naif never has the ambition to achieve reality. On the contrary, he begins with the images imposed upon the public by bad painters and photographers, and because he cannot accept these images, he draws nearer-and draws us along with him-to the inaccessible truth. Southworth proceeds in a similar manner for the event, by proceeding to a critique of its image.

THE RETURN OF THE EVENT

Much has been said against the event. I do not wish to repudiate my own adherence to the effective criticism—already three-quarters of a century old- brought against history reduced to the event, such as positivists had conceived it. Paradoxically, however, the period of this criticism has coincided, through the accession to information of growing masses, with a metamorphosis of the event—a new dimension of the event that is now capable of becoming monstrous. And this even before the bewitchment of television, as soon as the printed media were able to relay, immediately and with awareness, the news. For each event, then, has posed a political problem: is it to be revealed or should it be suppressed?

It is striking to be able to use almost word for word Pierre Nora’s enumeration of the phases of the Dreyfus case in order to describe the themes of South worth’s Guernica! Guernica!. Initial rumors; the exploitation of silence; the persistent paralysis of official information; hints of compromise within the spheres of power; the affront to great principles; dichotomy of the world into good and evil people; augmented suspense through false documents and a series of leaks; appeal to public opinion through open letters and manifestoes; the mediating function of ‘intellectuals’ between the public and the event.

In this sense Southworth’s work, easily mistaken as a classic study of documentary evidence, will be shown to be, in some future historiography, as one of the first and best responses to Pierre Nora’s call: Today, when the whole of historiography has based its modernity upon the obliteration of the event, the denial of its importance, and its dissolution, the event returns—a different event—and with it, perhaps, the potential for a purely contemporary history.¹

With South worth we are plunged into contemporaneity. Forty years have not yet gone by since Guernica was destroyed. At least 6,000, perhaps 10,000 individuals felt the destruction in their flesh, their belongings, in any way through several hours of anguish. And yet, even today, even in far away American universities, the evidence is suspect because a press staff in a military headquarters, on the evening of April 27, 1937, twenty-four hours late and with error in the date, dared to deny the event. Thus, the case is not one of an event becoming a problem but of the problem itself taking the place of the event: why is a local but widely witnessed incident blown up, deflated, reconstituted, distorted, and reborn into two contradictory images, passionately argued throughout the entire world? It is because there are symbolic events.

THE ADVENT OF THE SYMBOLIC EVENT

From the very first day Guernica became a symbolic event, owing to its unexpected repercussions.

Durango had suffered before Guernica, other villages had been razed to the ground, and there had been protests; corpses had been counted. Yet the world had barely reacted. No one thought of denying these events. Thus, after Guernica, the representatives of Germany, Italy, and Portugal easily proclaimed, and had their colleagues proclaim in turn, at the Non-Intervention Committee that the bombing of open cities, however regrettable, was not the first atrocity in this nine-month-old war. But what they did not say, what they could not say, was that they had insisted (and succeeded in obtaining) that the word Guernica never be uttered, not only in the motion voted upon but even in the discussion of the motion. Southworth details this stupefying episode in diplomatic history. In a few days the very name of Guernica had become a more burning subject than the flames of its conflagration.

And this is indeed the first distinctive aspect of a symbolic event.

If it bears heavy human responsibilities, and once the controversy is started from below, the unavowable can no longer be admitted from on high nor the confession be demanded without a dramatic rupture. Disquiet then becomes cynicism, and prudence becomes cowardice. Could a non-intervention committee utter the name of a town bombed by Germans and partially occupied by Italians? This prelude to Munich, as viewed by the Powers, is frightening in its simplicity.

It is less simple to establish how one had proceeded from intention to the event, from the event to the news, and from the news to myths and to silences. It is through this labyrinth, full of logical constructions of the collective imagination- bright spots as well as dead ends—that Southworth offers to guide us. He hides no zone of doubt, no hole in the documentation, no area where hypothesis replaces certainty. He fustigates only those propositions that go against the evidence in the service of an undeniable initial lie.

The most difficult problem lies at the origins of the event: intentions, decisions, where these were elaborated. Charles Morazé once demonstrated that the documentary evidence behind a decision is all the more likely to be destroyed the more important the political significance of that decision becomes. The same is true of course of military decisions. Can one picture a headquarters carefully preserving orders whose very existence are denied, directed at a body of troops that is not supposed to exist? It is true that all parties soon agreed that the bombing had taken place, only to minimize its importance by discovering a tactical justification for it. The order, then, could be exhibited. But only reports written after the event were furnished. The quest for the objective document, at the sources for the event, is often illusory.

Southworth offers only reasonable conjectures on this point, none favorable to the dramatized versions. Mola, in order to hasten the fall of Bilbao and avoid another Madrid, needed (as his campaign shows and his threats emphasized) intensive bombings of the Basque communication network. His instrument was the Condor Legion. It was under his command, and he was thus responsible for its actions. Technically, it was autonomous. Was Mola aware of its strength? Was the Legion itself aware of its own effectiveness? In fact, they were experimenting. Although bombing Guernica for more than three hours, alternating explosive bombs, incendiaries, and strafing, the Legion did not destroy the bridge and the munitions plant on the edge of town: an annoying detail for the tactical justification. It did not touch the Casa de Juntas or the tree of Guernica: an annoying detail for the symbolic version, particularly one that claimed that the fire was a provocation started on the ground (it is easy to make mistakes from the sky).

Thus, another lesson for the historian: the concrete event does not bend to either the logic of avowed intentions or to that of attributed intentions. The event does not of itself clarify the aim it carries out.

If the event is sufficiently significant, however, and touches some sensitive points, then, once broadcast by the mass media, it can set in motion psychological responses on an unpredictable level. The responsible parties must then deny, equivocate, reverse roles. This is still being done in the case of Guernica. In 1937, in order for the wave of indignation to surface, and in order that an ambiguity be opposed to it, it was necessary that the event assume an amplitude that transcended it, by its meaning in the group structures and in the class structures, in their ideological makeup, and in the terrible conjuncture of that springtime. Since then one can measure the continuity of the conflicts and their varying intensity by the softening or hardening of the Franco version of the Guernica affair. One of the great merits of Southworth’s work is to have opened this theme: the relationship, up to our own time, between official history and a political drama, between the renewed sharpness of the Basque problem and the bad conscience remaining from an incident.

GUERNICA: THE COMPLEXITY OF THE SYMBOL

AND THE LOGIC OF THE IMAGES

The Guernica event transcends Spain. As an assault against a national shrine, it is also, on the world scale, the revelation of a danger. It is both Reims and Hiroshima. The two symbols complement each other without being confused.

Guernica: holy city of the Basques, say the guidebooks. The word holy may surprise, but it is proper for a community anchored in the immemorial and which still feels religious sentiments. The word holy is present in the Gernikako arbolo, the hymn of Carlist origin, but sung by all Basques as a popular song. Of course, the distance is great from the liberties sworn to under the tree of Guernica by the lords of Vizcaya to national freedom in the modern sense. Yet the symbolism of Guernica, precisely because it was revived in the nineteenth century, took its place in its ideology. The duality community-liberty retained its emotional weight: the proof is that people still die in 1970 in its name—Euzkadi ta Askatasuna. In a war carried on in the name of Basque liberties, the word Gernika touched (he very deepest chord. To tax with hypocrisy, or to suspect a scenario behind the tears of those who told newspapermen Guernica bums, or behind the religious tone of President Aguirre calling upon world conscience, is even more absurd than it is in bad taste. The Guernica operation had a painful and contradictory effect on the Basques: it broke their morale, while binding them to fight to the end.

Was this effect purposely sought? Can one, following Aguirre, accuse the Germans in the service of the Spanish rebels of wanting to wound the Basques in their very soul by attacking their sanctuary? It is hard to conceive of the Condor Legion realizing this was the meaning of their objective, or of receiving instructions to that effect. Was the attack deliberate? All evidence points to it: the vocabulary and the terroristic practices of the generals, the passionate centralization of their doctrine, the denunciation of separatism by the Falange as a sin that cannot be forgiven. The event seemed to echo only too well a publicly avowed hatred to be merely an accident.

Thus it was not enough for the Franco government, faced with a bombing of such dimensions as to affect the entire world, and whose objective could shock its own supporters in the Carlist sector, to sute: We did not wish to do this. It preferred to say: We did not do it. But it erred by twenty-four hours in its justification. Yet, within its own camp, its credibility was hardly weakened. Another lesson—an existential adhesion needs coherence: the reds, in their retreat, had burned Irún, Eibar (and even Moscow in 1812: the argument was made!), therefore they had burned Guernica. Those who did not wish to express their indignation—ambassadors, ministers, the moderate press—were eager, outside of Spain, to grant the Franco government the benefit of the doubt. The most anxious to prove, to demonstrate, were the Anglo-Saxon Catholic circles, to whom Southworth devotes deserved attention. Bothered by the event, they discriminated between men: good versus bad, God against the Devil. But who is closer to God than the Basque people? A fault appears within the logic of the myth. How is one to believe that among God’s enemies victims pray, priests bless, or even that Canon Onaindia, a witness shouting in anguish, is truly a canon? The relentless denials and the disqualifications of witnesses, surprise by their violence. In high circles, the campaign was organized. On lower levels, there most probably was sincerity in the belief. A veteran of 1914 can honestly ignore a new aerial technique; an honest parish priest can think it impossible that pilots might enjoy shooting at fugitives and at sheep. Those people think with their leaders. And they did not live through 1940.

Those who did, know better. I retreated through Villers-en-Argonne in flames, after a bombing with incendiaries. I did not set the fire myself! And a Spaniard, a member of a worker’s regiment, retreating along with me, declared: Ahora os toca a vostros (now, it’s your turn).

Guernica was the key to the realization that the Spanish conflict might prefigure further conflicts to come. This realization was massive in England, much more attenuated in France. Southworth explains why: In France, the news of Guernica was voluntarily blocked, while in England there was a traditional interest in Bilbao coupled with a denser journalistic network. By April 28, the English press lucidly predicted Coventry.

It is true that political logic immediately transcends concrete information. Prieto, Peri, Pertinax, the English labourites pointed to one responsible party: Göring. This was an oversimplification. Yet it serves today to free the Franco government of any responsibility. Southworth shows that the hypothesis of an order issued by Berlin is in no way supportable. Göring is supposed to have said to officious inquirers in Nuremberg (the question was never asked during the official trial) Guernica? We had to gain experience somehow. This only confirms one fact, that the Condor Legion was indeed experimenting. But let us not forget— under Spanish orders, in a civil war. The accidental aspect resulted from the intensity of the bombing, the violence of the fire, and the fact that only the inhabited town was hit, and not the military objectives, or the symbolic quarter. It is probable that there were recriminations, even some violent scenes, and possibly some sanctions were taken. But this is easier to imagine than to document. Yet the telegrams specifying the common version to be upheld, and the refusal to allow an international inquiry are in our hands. The final word probably was uttered by Jaime del Burgo: What rotten help they gave us! But, after all, their help was requested.

It is somewhat artificial, or calculating, to dismiss, as has been done recently, both Guernica mythologies: one based on an idyllic, conventional view of the Basque city, and on an exaggeration of the catastrophe; the other on a lie conceived in panic, because of the very innocence of the responsible parties. There is myth on both sides, in the sense that on each side an existential logic prevails. But is it unimportant to note that one image is constructed upon a conscious lie, while the other is based upon a reality perceived as a symbol and a symptom: a symbol of the broken. Basque people; a symptom of a sickness that gave us Coventry, Dresden, Hiroshima, and Hanoi? It has been fashionable for some time to dcmythify both memories left over from the Spanish conflict. Some say that without Picasso Guernica would not be Guernica. Picasso answered that point himself: Did you make Guernica? he was asked by a German officer. No, you did. The answer, according to Vicente Talón, is itself part of the myth. Its authenticity is not important; it démythifiés the démythification.

There are many ways to handle a myth. One consists in building a new one. Others consist in concentrating only on the psychosociological fact—that is, on the acceptance of the myth as the sign of belonging to a group, a class, that secretes an ideology. Perhaps this is the most important aspect for the historian. Yet the latter cannot ignore, at the birth of this acceptance, the original propositions. Southworth has made it his specialty to research, around the most controversial episodes of the Franco crusade, the organization of silences, of denials, of affirmations, of transmissions, of repetitions, that impose doubts and negations, beliefs and attitudes. He has brought the problem of myth to the level of information, of directed information, of disinformation.

INFORMATION: ITS MECHANISMS AND ITS MYSTERIES

Southworth places a primordial importance to the first news, the initial manner in which the event, or the imaginary affirmation, is presented. Then he follows step by step, in strict chronological order, the transmission, denials, distortion of this news item. This is classical scholarship, although rarely pushed to so deep a level as in GUERNICA! GUERNICA! A comparison only brings forth the weaknesses of earlier works in this field. The reader, at first surprised, quickly discovers that although Franco, Mola, Göring, or Sperrte cannot be dismissed at the origin of the drama. Bolin, Steer, Onaindia, and Botto, are just as important as historical personalities, since they were responsible for the repercussion that followed the event—that is, for its new dimension.

Thus, since the problem is essentially that of this repercussion, it is essential to know, in order to illuminate the problem, that Bolin, the author of the absurd denial, was bound to Franco since before the insurrection, that Steer, a passionate and the adventurous reporter, still had the full confidence of the Times, that Canon Onaindia was heard by only very narrow French circles, that Botto, who managed to have Havas distribute the Bolin denial, was a venal character who ended with the collaborationist Radio-Paris, despised by everyone, and that Captain Aguilera, who acted as a guide for foreign journalists on the Franco front, confided to them that he regretted the loss of those hallowed times when pestilence, thanks to the absence of sewers, decimated the always-too-numerous lower classes. This world of the news media deserves to be thus unveiled, since it has become one of the great historical agents.

The connection between information and power is no less important. Southworth shows how the French foreign ministry controlled, through the Agence Havas, the diffusion of news, and also how this diffusion, within the agency itself, was operating according to the wishes of this or that manipulator. We can see in some high functionaries, in Yvon Delbos himself, the relief felt when the Havas dispatch cast some doubt upon the English version of Guernica. And this despite the triumphal acceptance accorded it by Berlin.

It is worth asking, however, whether the ministries relied solely upon the press agencies for their information. Still, the French and the British ambassadors, both frankly pro-Franco, lived in Hendaye and received their information from Irún. Sir Anthony Eden, more tortured, had in his hands the Stevenson report from the Bilbao consulate, which left no possible doubt on the Guernica affair. He kept it hidden, for fear of unleashing the opposition of the Labour party and of compromising nonintervention. This too must be known.

Finally, as far as the current use of archival sources is concerned, it is both sad and comical to hear through Southworth how the French archives carefully preserve the secrecy of the records from the Non-Intervention Committee that are freely available in London; or how an official Spanish historical office recently announced as a sensational revelation the existence of a new report on Guernica— that had been published in English in 1938, although it is true that no one had ever dared to publish it in Spain. In order to be blind to the contradictions, one had to be a good English or American Catholic, solidly anchored in one’s vision of Spain. Southworth has been aware of this for a long time.

SOUTHWORTH, OR PASSIONATE OBJECTIVITY

GUERNICA! GUERNICA! will anger some people. South worth has already been called, by those whom he has not treated gently, an anti-Spanish propagandist. Few foreigners, however, have loved Spain as much as he. He simply believes that the best way to love a country is to try to understand its history.

Can one be objective in writing contemporary history? I have long ago stated my views on this. The historian is part and parcel of his work, and his own time is ever present within himself. Differences among historians are to be found in their attitudes. There is the dishonest attitude: to call oneself objective, while knowing oneself to be partisan; there is the blind attitude: to be partisan while believing oneself to be objective; and then there is the attitude of clarity: to state one’s position, while believing firmly that thorough analysis is the best way to buttress that position. It is pejorative to say of a work of history that it is a plea for a cause. Yet a good plea made by a good lawyer and for a worthy cause can become a model to the historian.

Southworth, however, and with a very personal style, has adopted a solution that at the same time safeguards and exposes. He has been careful not to be a propagandist. He has preferred to be a polemicist, and that is often less easily forgiven. He has never hidden his point of view, that of Republican Spain. He has not taken on the task of defending or exalting it. He has attacked the theses of its enemies, not the ideological theses, known and understood by him, but the factual affirmations, the presentations of events, the organized silences, the systematic distortions. When he is passionate, it is not against partisan blindness, but against the lie that supports it. Southworth believes in the value of information, but he knows its pitfalls. And he will not allow a compromise between half-truths and half-lies to pass as history.

He is not, in any case, an amateur, a weekend historian. He began in the world’s temple to bibliography, the Library of Congress. He has remained, by vocation, a collector and a bibliographer. He gathered together one of the greatest collections of documents on the Spanish Civil War, now in the library of the University of California, San Diego. He has practical experience in the news media, something most historians lack. And all this results in a work whose origin is in bibliography and textual criticism, and opens up onto a new vision of the event as transformed by news—that is, history in the grand manner. I should like to terminate this foreword by saying why I have particularly appreciated Southworth’s work on Guernica, and why I have desired for him the sanction of the university.

At the International Congress on Historical Sciences in Moscow in 1970, I overheard, on a tourist bus, a Spanish university professor loudly proclaim that recent historical research, especially in the United States, had finally established definitively that Guernica had been burned by the red dinamiteros, by the fleeing militiamen.

I must admit that in 1939 1 had believed such an opinion could come only from the pen of a Bardéche or of a Brasillach. I was wrong. I did not realize the power of an official denial upon those who are inconvenienced by the impact of an event upon the vision they want to have of things. Here we were, in 1970, at a convention of historians, faced with yet another form of that informatory terrorism: the latest research proves... I made a vow to find out for myself.

I hardly expected to be so soon faced with an exhaustive, irrefutable analysis of the phenomenon event-information, leading us through the Guernica affair from the first Steer dispatch to the latest book by Talón and to the rediscovery of Bolin by Professor Jeffrey Hart of Dartmouth College. I now know that there are two memories of any Spanish event. But this does not mean that the lie is as strong as the truth.

Pierre Vilar

Preface

I have wanted to write this book for many years—I can almost say since 1937. A more definite intention took form in 1942, when for a few months I took a postgraduate course at Columbia University with Professor José Antonio de Aguirre, then president of the Basque Republic in Exile. 1 was his only student, and we spent our time talking about the Spanish Civil War. He had only recently escaped from Nazi Germany, where, had his true identity been discovered, he would certainly have been delivered to Franco and to a firing squad, as had been Luis Companys, the president of the Generalität of Catalonia.

But the first lines of this present work were written as part of a revision, undertaken in 1967, of my first book on the Spanish Civil War, El mito de la cruzada de Franco. While working on the chapter entitled Los católicos en favor de la Espana nacional, I became aware that what I had written about Guernica had already been said many times, and that thirty years after the tragedy it should be possible to find something new to say about the subject. I decided to add a few paragraphs, or even a few pages. Today, some years later, these few pages have become a few hundred.

The purpose of my initial investigation was to find the answers to two questions: How was Guernica destroyed? By whom was Guernica destroyed?

Later, I added to this double interrogation a third: Why was Guernica destroyed?

It was some time later, in the course of my research, that I understood that, in view of the number and diversity of the commentaries on Guernica written during the controversy that followed the disaster, I should have to make an effort to explain the polemic, its beginnings, its characteristics, its surprising vitality.

From the first moments of my research on Guernica, it became evident that the sources of the news about the tragedy were to be found in the press dispatches sent from Bilbao within the twenty-four hours that followed the destruction of Guernica, this destruction, according to these reports, having taken place during the late afternoon of April 26, 1937.

In normal circumstances, these news reports would have been enough to establish the facts. But the press telegrams from Bilbao were immediately disputed, their good faith denied by the military rebels fighting against the Basque forces allied with the Spanish Republic. Less than seventy-two hours after the destruction (always according to the times set by the first news dispatches from Bilbao), the ruined town fell into the hands of the Nationalist forces, and a new series of dispatches were sent, from Vitoria, to newspapers all over the world.

Two new problems arose from the preliminary examination of these sources:

1. The news from Bilbao was an almost exclusive scoop by the English press.

In France the news from Bilbao was handled in an inexplicable, unprofessional manner by the Havas Agency. How did this happen?

2. The news cabled from Vitoria to France was in open contradiction to what had been telegraphed from Bilbao a few days earlier; even the press dispatches sent from Vitoria to England seemed to cast a doubt on the earlier messages.

Were certain journalists lying? And, if they were, why?

It was doubtless possible to find out how, by whom, and why Guernica had been destroyed, while leaving to one side the unresolved questions of the contradictory news dispatches and of the strange behavior of the Havas Agency; but the acceptance of this compromise would have resulted in an incomplete, unsatisfactory account. The sole justification of a new inquest on Guernica was that the problems raised by the controversy be resolved, and not that the dispute be enflamed anew.

An explanation of these new problems would necessarily mean an investigation into what lay behind the printed dispatch. This would require a study of the personality of the correspondent, of the circumstances under which he wrote his message, of the nature of the censorship exercised by the Spanish press officers, of the mechanical means by which his report had been sent out of Spain, of the time involved in transmission, of the political prejudices of his press agency or of his newspaper editor (or owner), and even of the possible pressures employed by an unavowed censorship in the country that received his dispatch.

But how could such an inquiry be carried out after the passing of so many years? Not only were the materials involved ephemeral in nature—press dispatches to which no one could have thought of assigning more than a temporary value—but the personalities behind the telegrams were themselves shadowy and indistinct. The two cablegrams sent from Vitoria which seemed most to impugn the truthfulness of the news received from Bilbao-the one published in the Times and that distributed by the Havas Agency—were both unsigned.

The press officer in charge of relations with the foreign journalists in the Rebel zone at the time of the destruction of Guernica was Luis Bolin. He had written that the Times report from Vitoria had been written by H. A. R. Philby, known to have been at the time a Soviet spy. Philby was still alive but was living in the Soviet Union. At any rate, the pro-Rebel content of his press dispatches could easily be explained as forming part of his espionage cover.

The circumstances surrounding the unsigned dispatch of the Havas Agency seemed still more obscure. It was this same agency that had been so slow and so niggardly of details when the first news had come out concerning Guernica from the Basque side. Moreover, the Havas Agency had been suppressed as a news service at the end of World War II because of its collaboration with the Vichy government, and all inquiries about any papers left by the defunct service received the answer that all the documents of the agency has been pounded up for wood pulp during the German occupation of France.

An obsession with this, doubtless minor, problem, kept my research on the principal themes from advancing. Then, when I was beginning to feel that all progress was impossible, I discovered one day in a Montreal bookshop a book on the Philby case, and in it I found a reference suggesting that it was not Philby but, rather, James Holburn who had telegraphed the message about Guernica from Vitoria for the Times. A look at Who’s Who gave me Holburn’s address, and a few weeks later I was talking with him in London. A part of the mystery was cleared up. At the same time I found in the Public Record Office at London a considerable number of significant English diplomatic documents dealing with different phases of the Guernica problem; one of these furnished me the beginning of an explanation of the Havas cablegram from Vitoria. It was, however, only a partial explanation. The papers of the Non-Intervention Committee were also available in the Public Record Office, their silences on Guernica filled with surprise and interest; these papers, supplemented with information from other sources, permitted the inclusion of a chapter on Guernica in the diplomatic history of its time.

The cryptic references to the Havas telegram found in the English archives encouraged me to try, once again, to find the missing dossiers of the Havas Agency. I had been, some years before, Administrateur-Délégué of a commercial broadcasting company in Tangier, Morocco. The company had subscribed to the news services of TAgence France-Presse (AFP), successor to the suppressed Havas Agency. I had had, at that time, the pleasure of meeting and talking with Jean Marin, director of AFP. Although I had been assured by persons in the FrancePresse agency that all the Havas papers had been destroyed, I decided to make a last effort by writing directly to Jean Marin. A few days later I received a telephone call informing me that 1 might find some Havas papers at the French National Archives in Paris. At the National Archives I was told that some Havas papers were in fact on deposit there, but that a permit from AFP was needed before consulting them. Finally, armed with this permit, I was able to open the dossiers that, in all probability, constitute the most important collection now known to exist of material relating to the foreign press coverage of the Spanish Civil War. One of the folders was entitled Affaire, ‘destruction de Guernica.’

I now possessed, with Holbum’s testimony and with the Havas files, a possible explanation of the contradiction existing between the press cablegrams sent from Bilbao and those sent a few days later from Vitoria. With these documents, I also had a plausible interpretation of the highly unprofessional manner in which the Havas Agency had acted in handling the news from Guernica. This new information removed certain psychological blocks that could interfere with the pursuit of the main work; it also permitted these problems to be viewed from a fresh outlook.

This work divided itself naturally into two parts chronologically: The Event and The Controversy.

I have arbitrarily fixed the date for the ending of The Event around May 6, a little more than a week after the occupation of Guernica by the Insurgents. It could be maintained that The Controversy began with the first denials of The Event from Salamanca, and that the press reports of The Event continued beyond May 6. But the significant phase of The Controversy began after May 6, and the basic newspaper dispatches were written before this date. Thanks to the details gleaned from the considerable library formed by the published memoirs of newspapermen and newspaperwomen who had worked in Spain during the civil war, and to the information received from their colleagues who had not yet committed to print their experiences, plus the rich contribution of the Havas dossiers, I was able to construct an indispensable chapter on The Working Conditions of the Foreign Press in the Nationalist Zone. The first part of the work, The Event, was then built up in this manner-. 1. The News from Bilbao; 2. Riposte from Salamanca; 3. Parenthesis on the Working Conditions of the Foreign Press in the Nationalist Zone; 4. The News from Vitoria.

In studying the elements of The Controversy—during the last two years of the Civil War, which followed the destruction of Guernica—I could see a profound difference between the nature of the polemic that developed in England (and in the United States) and the nature of the polemic that took place in France. In England, the discussion grew between, on the one hand, the feverish partisans of the Catholic minority and their Tory accomplices, and on the other hand, the English Labourites and the left in general, supported by Protestant spokesmen. In France, the debate raged between the politically conservative wing of the Roman Catholic Church and the more socially troubled elements of that same church.

The declarations and the documents concerning Guernica, considered vital to the controversy in the one country, were often ignored in the other. The disputants did not have the same public. A significant piece of testimony produced in England could be unknown in France, as for example, the editorial in the Times on May 5, 1937. Father Onaindia’s report of what he had seen in Guernica, the very basis of the controversy in France, was paid scant attention in England. It was therefore relatively easy and certainly necessary to divide into two parts the narrative concerning the public controversy during the civil war. The sources for these two parts were public: newspaper dispatches, magazine articles, pamphlets and a few books.

Then came the private controversy, politely carried on among the members of the diplomatic corps in post at London, seat of the Non-Intervention Committee. The papers of this committee and the English diplomatic documents—information kept secret for many years—formed the kernel of this chapter; the published Protuguese diplomatic documents and the world press in general were also useful. This chapter could not have been written, or even imagined, if the rule prohibiting the use of official diplomatic papers until fifty years after the date of their composition, now in force in France, had been applied in England. It is probably for this reason that French diplomatic documentation has been of little help for this chapter, or for this work in general. Even the copies of the Non-Intervention Committee papers held in France are forbidden to researchers and are kept under key, although the same papers can be freely consulted and copied in England. With this diplomatic chapter, the controversy has been carried to the end of the Spanish Civil War.

The last part on the controversy was at first conceived in two sections: The Public Controversy in Spain, 1939-1975, and The Public Controversy outside Spain, 1939-1975. But this formula involved numerous repetitions, and, moreover, it soon became evident that despite the Spanish censorship—floating, capricious, and undecided—there was considerable interplay between what was published in London, Paris, and New York and what was eventually published in Madrid and Barcelona. Finally, it was decided to class this material chronologically, whatever its country of origin. The changed nature of the controversy was apparent here in the fact that most of the new material on Guernica came out in book form, thus reversing the basic nature of the polemical documentation used during the war years.

This chapter developed in a more complicated and more detailed manner than had been foreseen in the initial project. The destruction of Guernica took place more than thirty-five years ago; The Event could be treated as an event of 1937, but The Controversy frequently came from today’s newspaper. More than half of this long chapter deals with books and articles written since 1967-that is, since the present work was begun. It is worth noting that articles and book reviews that I published during the time of my research have provoked, in their turn, new documentation on Guernica. Such is the nature of research on a subject that feeds on polemic. The mere knowledge that the destruction of Guernica was the object of research outside Spain forced the Neo-Franquista historians to adopt positions that, curiously enough, unbeknownst to their authors, clarified certain aspects of problems that had remained in obscurity up to now.

Once the documentation of The Event and The Controversy had been examined in detail, there was left but to draw the conclusions. This has been done in the following manner:

1. The Problems of Steer, Holburn, Botto, and the Havas Agency. The solutions proposed have been found in the Archives of The Times, in the Havas files, and through interviews with survivors of that period of journalism.

2. The Dead and the Dying. The relationship between this feature of the tragedy and the controversy—the curious manner in which the subject disappeared from the arguments of writers and orators defending the Spanish Rebel position—determined my giving this matter an independent treatment. The sources are generally those used in the studies of the controversy.

3. How was Guernica destroyed? By whom? Why? These basic questions, laid down at the beginning of the research, here find their answers: by documentary proofs, or by an attempt at a convincing hypothesis, if the documents do not allow a conclusive response.

4. The Reasons for the Existence and the Persistence of the Controversy. The argumentation advanced here involves one of the principal problems of the Spanish Civil War—the moral justification for the war given by the Spanish Insurgents to the Spanish people and to the rest of the world.

This work, undertaken as a study of a single event of the Spanish Civil War, has been, under the pressure of documents discovered and facts unearthed, amplified to the point of becoming at times a general inquiry into journalism in wartime, an investigation into the manipulation of news by governments, an examination of the methods by which diplomatic prestidigitation makes problems disappear, an observation of the realities and unrealities of propaganda. These additions have considerably lengthened the manuscript. It is my hope that they have added to its interest.

Acknowledgments

I owe a considerable debt to the many friends who, knowing that I was working on the subject of the destruction of Guernica, have during many years forwarded to me information and documentation. Melvin Voigt, head librarian of the University of California, San Diego, has been especially generous. I am grateful to Victor Berch, Special Collections Librarian at Brandeis University, for his ever present aid. Professor Robert H. Whealey, of the department of history at Ohio University, lent me a helping hand and guided me through the labyrinth of English and German documents. Luis Portillo has assisted me in research on English newspapers. James B. Childs, now retired from the Library of Congress, has kept me abreast of American newspaper commentary on Guernica. Marianne Bruhl has given freely of her time to find documents and articles for me.

I am also obliged to Spanish friends in Spain, who will not be named, especially to Señor A. M., for aid they have furnished for my research. I thank all those who have kindly replied to my inquiries, either in person or by letter; their names appear in the text and in the footnotes. 1 especially thank, for their support and encouragement, the president of the government of Euzkadi in Exile, Jesús María de Leizaola, and the former minister of the Spanish Republic, Manuel de Irujo. I am grateful to Canon Alberto de Onaindia, who has afforded me, on several occasions, proof of the interest he bore for my investigations.

I wish to express here my gratitude to the following persons for the encouragement and suggestions they have proffered me during the course of this work:

Professor Gabriel Jackson, of the University of California, San Diego; Professor William B. Watson, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Professor Paul Preston, of the University of Reading; Professor Charles V. Aubrun, of the University of Nice; Professor Clara Lida, of Wesleyan University; Professor David Wingeate Pike, of the American College in Paris; Professor Iris Zavala, of the State University of New York, Stony Brook; Professor Pierre Dussauge, of the University of Bordeaux; Juan García Duran, of the Fondren Library, Rice University; and José Martínez Guerricabeitia, of Editions Ruedo Ibérico.

I want to thank The Regents of the University of California, and Dean Roy Harvey Pearce, of the University of California, San Diego, for the chance to spend some months in La Jolla, where the finishing touches were given to this manuscript. The Faculty Senate Committees aided financially in the preparation of the manuscript, for which 1 hereby thank them.

A special expression of gratitude is here expressed to Professor Pierre Vilar, of the University of Paris I (Panthéon-Sorbonne), who has counseled me with great understanding throughout the many months of research and writing.

My wife Suzanne merits particularly of my gratitude for her aid, encouragement, and patience, without which I should never have arrived at the final page.

H. R. S.

Château de Roche, Concrémiers, Indre, France

Department of History, University of California, San Diego, California March 1974

A Preliminary Note

The Spanish Basque provinces in 1937 (and today) were three in number: Guipúzcoa (capital, San Sebastian), a maritime province on the French border; Vizcaya or Biscay (capital, Bilbao), also on the sea and west of Guipúzcoa; and Álava (capital, Vitoria), an inland province, south of the other two and west of Navarre. (Navarre is often considered part of the Basque country; this is a proposition subject to discussion.) Álava is territorially the largest, but the maritime provinces are more heavily populated. The people are engaged principally in agriculture and, along the coast, in fishing. The leading city, in 1937 and now, Bilbao, was and is, an industrial center, noted for iron production and for its busy port. Bilbao was also in 1937, as today, a banking center, with three of the great national banks having their headquarters there.

During the Carlist wars of the past century, the Basque provinces vigorously upheld Don Carlos, whose movement, dominated by the clergy, was politically reactionary. The Basque position had been adopted in part in order to defend the fueros, or local privileges, which permitted the Basques to maintain a certain independence from the central power in Madrid. These privileges were greatly diminished during the early nineteenth century. In 1876 a system called conciertos económicos was established; the Basque provinces paid a tribute to Madrid, but they had a certain liberty as to how these sums were obtained. Consequently, the tax system in the Basque provinces was not always the same as in the rest of Spain.

In spite of the concessions obtained through the conciertos económicos, nostalgia for the lost fueros was widespread throughout the Basque country. At the end of the nineteenth century, the idea of Basque nationalism, founded on the defense of regional privileges, was advanced by Sabino Arana y Goiri, and the Basque Nationalist party (PNV) was founded. This party pleaded for a free Basque state, but it was essentially a clerically dominated movement that placed the maintenance of the Catholic faith before its nationalist objectives. It had varying electoral successes during the first three decades of the present century.

General Primo de Rivera abandoned his dictatorial powers in 1930. There then began in Spain a campaign of agitation in favor of a republic. The members of the PNV, belonging to the middle classes and the bourgeoisie, were not hostile to a republic any more than they were opposed to a monarchy. They were against the hegemony of Madrid and Castile. The political debate in the Basque provinces became triangular between the conservative monarchist parties, the Socialists and the Republicans, and the Basque Nationalists. During the municipal elections of April 12, 1931, which brought about the fall of the monarchy, the Republican and Socialist groups formed a common front in the Basque country, and carried Bilbao and San Sebastian and the surrounding regions. Vitoria also voted Republican. However, the PNV fared better than did the monarchists in Bilbao. Eibar, an industrial town in Guipúzcoa, was the first in Spain to proclaim the Republic.

The question of regional autonomy was in the forefront of the political scene. On August 17, 1930, a private meeting had been held in San Sebastian among political leaders of the Republican groups, with the Bilbao Socialist Indalecio Prieto attending on his own behalf, to decide on overthrowing the monarchy and setting up a republic in Spain. There were also present members of the autonomy movements of Catalonia and of Galicia, and a clear decision was taken to grant an autonomy statute to Catalonia when the Republic was established.

The Basque Nationalists were fully aware of the possibility of obtaining autonomy concessions from the Republic. At the same time, they feared having to endorse the avowed anticlericalism of the Republican leaders. The nonmomarchist Catholics of the three Basque provinces and of Navarre formed an alliance called the Basco-Navarese Bloc, and a draft project for a Basque and Navarese autonomy statute was approved by 427 municipalities—chiefly rural-of the region. The Basco-Navarese Bloc campaigned in the 1931 elections for the Constituent Cortes, on the one hand, against the monarchists and, on the other hand, against the Republicans and the left.

The bloc won one seat in Alava, four in Guipúzcoa, two in Bilbao, three in Vizcaya province, and five in Navarre—a very respectable result. The new head of the PNV, a young lawyer named José Antonio de Aguirre, won two seats, one of which was in Navarre.

The Basco-Navarese Bloc was then tempted to become Republican, in order to realize its autonomist objectives, but when, later in 1931, the debate in the Cortes took place concerning Article 26 of the proposed constitution—an article that established the separation of Church and State—the Basco-Navarese took up a firm position against the Republicans. This did not mean that the Basques were satisfied with the Catholic Church in 1931. The PNV program demanded that the Basque provinces negotiate directly with the Holy See, and that a change be effected in the rule that permitted the Basques to approach the Pope only through the intermediary of the Spanish primate, the cardinal archbishop of Toledo. Moreover, there was no bishop in either San Sebastian or Bilbao, although the latter was one of the largest cities in Spain. Ecclesiastically, the Basques were dependent on the bishop of Vitoria. There was no Basque cardinal.

In 1932, when the municipalities of the three Basque provinces and Navarre voted on a statute of autonomy, profound differences appeared. The seabound provinces, Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa, voted overwhelmingly for the statute. Alava gave a feeble majority for autonomy, and Navarre voted no. In September of this same year, the Basque nationalist deputies voted for a Catalan autonomy statute.

Navarese opposition to autonomy (to the Republic?) pushed the Basques toward an independent operation. Work was begun on a plan for Basque autonomy, and on November 9, 1933, a nonofficial referendum on a draft project was voted on in the three Basque provinces. Navarre was not included in the voting. Guipúzcoa and Vizcaya balloted in favor of the proposition by more than 88 percent of the registered voters; Álava voted favorably, but by only 46.40 percent of those eligible to vote. Significantly, the bishop of Vitoria, when asked to state whether or not believers could vote for the measure, replied affirmatively. Early on the voting day, he had the announcement made that he himself had voted for the measure.

This plan, however, had to be discarded, for on November 19 Spain again voted to elect deputies to the Cortes, and the conservative right triumphed over the disunited Republican and left parties. The Traditionalists (Carlists) refused to campaign with the Basque Nationalists on a program including the draft project of autonomy. In the three Basque provinces, the PNV elected twelve deputies, of whom one was from Álava. But the majority of the seats in this latter province was won by the right. Bilbao, which, as a large city, formed an electoral district by itself, gave a majority to the PNV, but the minority representation was won by the left (Manuel Azaña, Republican leader, and Indalecio Prieto, Socialist chief in the Basque country).

The Basque Nationalists continued to be torn between their religious sentiments, which were under attack from the left, and their aspirations for autonomy, which were repulsive to the right. On June 12, 1934, when the contitutionality of the Catalan law granting the leaseholders of vineyards (rabassaires) the right to purchase these lands was being discussed in the Cortes, the Catalan left (Esquerra) abandoned the assembly as a sign of protestation. The Basque Nationalists followed them in a gesture of solidarity. Later, during the summer of 1934, the Basques lowered the tax on wine, contrary to instructions from Madrid; in the discussion that followed, the Basque position was upheld by the Catalan Nationalists. During the summer, there was considerable agitation in the Basque country. The Bilbao city government decided to honor the hero of Catalan autonomy, Macia, who had just died, by giving his name to a street in the capital previously called Avenida de Espana. The civil governor, nominated by Madrid, forebade the public ceremony intended to celebrate the event. On this occasion, the Catalan left supported the actions of the Basque Nationalists. On September 2, a joint meeting of Basque and Catalan parliamentarians was organized at Zumárraga. This time again the civil governor prohibited the reunion, and only the deputies were allowed to enter the meeting place.

The Basque Nationalists apparently did not play a role in the general strike that took place in the two Basque maritime provinces during the October 1934 uprising, although certain elements of the Basque Workers’ Solidarity (Solidaridad de Obreros Vascos), the Basque Nationalist trade union, participated in the strike in some places. There is no proof that the PNV took part in any action at this time. The Basque Nationalists voted with the Lerroux-Gil Robles government when they were assured that some imprisoned Basques would be freed. But the Basque member of the Commission on Parliamentary Immunity consistently voted against a project to deliver a deputy of the left to the vengeful justice of the center-right government.

During the two black years (bienio negro) —1934 and 1935—the Basque Nationalists were forced to leave in suspension their hopes for autonomy. Then came the dissolution of the Cortes and new elections on February 16, 1936. The Spanish electoral system was conceived to guarantee a majority strong enough to govern; it gave most of the seats in a district to a majority however feeble; at the same time, unless this majority was overwhelming, the minority was assured of some seats. If no electoral list had 40 percent of the vote, there was a second balloting. Each province formed an electoral district. In addition, the eight most important cities (of which one was Bilbao) constituted independent electoral districts. There were thus in the Basque country, with three provinces and the city of Bilbao, four electoral circumscriptions. The Basque Nationalists fought alone, against the Popular Front of Republican and left parties, and against the clericalmonarchist right, with the slogan For Christian civilization, for the freedom of the fatherland [Euzkadil and for social justice.

There were sixty electoral districts in Spain; in 1936, there were only five districts in which a majority did not gather 40 percent of the vote, and in which, consequently, there were runoff elections. Three of these five districts were in the Basque country, where only in the city of Bilbao was there a definite result on the first ballot. The left won in Bilbao, upsetting the results of 1933, when the PNV had taken a majority of the seats. In the runoff elections, the PNV won four seats in Guipúzcoa and three in Vizcaya, which, with the two seats won as the Bilbao minority, gave it a total of nine deputies, three less than in 1933. The PNV did not elect a single representative in Álava province, where the right and the left shared the two seats. In Navarre the right took all seven seats, but in the two maritime provinces no candidate of the right was elected.

In fact, the right withdrew from the runoff elections when the bishop of Vitoria made a declaration that could be interpreted as favorable to the Basque Nationalists.

The Basque Nationalists were from then on ineluctably drawn toward the Popular Front, albeit without enthusiasm. Of their three objectives, expressed in the electoral slogan, two at least-autonomy and social justice—found therein a chance to progress. The draft project for Basque autonomy, submitted to plebiscite just before the 1933 elections, was now disinterred and presented to the Cortes, with the approval of all the Basque deputies, from the Communist to the Nationalists. But other more pressing problems kept this project from being acted on before the civil war broke out in the Peninsula on July 18, 1936.

In the provinces of Vizcaya and Guipúzcoa, the working class was well organized and politically disciplined. The military revolt was badly prepared. Guipúzcoa was one of the rare provinces where the Republican authorities gave arms to the workers. Only on July 21 did some elements of the armed forces in San Sebastián attempt an uprising. They were soon driven back to their barracks and to a few other buildings by a column of armed workers from Eibar and by some groups of the military who stood by the Republic. After three days of fighting, the Insurgents surrendered. In Bilbao, the chief of the armed forces, Lieutenant Colonel Vidal, took the side of the Republic; some arms were given to the people; miners and other workers converged on the capital. The military did not dare to revolt and there was little or no fighting in Bilbao in July 1936.

What was the position of the Basque Nationalists during these events? Documents and testimony indicate that from the first moments of the military revolt the Basque Nationalists chose the Republic. Around noon on July 18, the San Sebastián radio station broadcast a message asking the armed forces and the citizens to come to the aid of the legal government. This message was written by two Basque deputies, Manuel de Irujo and José Maria de Lasarte. A solemn declaration of adherence to the cause of the Republic was broadcast from Radio Bilbao on the evening of July 19 in the name of the Basque Nationalist party. This statement was published in the press thè next day:

In view of the events that are taking place in the Spanish state and that could have a direct and sorrowful repercussion on Euzkadi and its destiny, the Basque Nationalist Party declares—aside from all that to which it is bound by its ideology and which it solemnly ratifies today—that faced with the struggle between the citizens and fascism, between the Republic and the Monarchy, its principles place it inevitably on the side of the citizens and of the Republic, in agreement with the republican and democratic regime that was one of the distinctive characteristics of our people during centuries of liberty.¹

It is at times alleged that the Basque Nationalists hesitated in their manifestations of loyalty to the Republic during the first days of the insurrection. This was perhaps true, and for the person who believes in the reality of the class struggle, it is difficult to conceive how it could have been otherwise. The PNV was not a party of the working classes. Its political base was among the middle classes, the small landholders, the members of the liberal professions. The rich men of the Basque country were generally monarchists. What