Bombing of Guernica, 26 April 1937

On a Monday afternoon, the town's market day, aircraft of the German Condor Legion and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria bombed Gernika in relays for some three hours, using high explosive to open the buildings and incendiaries to burn them, while fighters strafed people escaping into the fields. The town had no significant defences. Estimates of the dead range from about two hundred and fifty to over a thousand, and the town centre burned for days. The oak of Gernika, the tree under which Basque rights had traditionally been sworn, survived.

The attack was reported within days by a correspondent who reached the town that night, and the denial — that the Basques had burned their own town — was issued immediately and maintained for decades. Picasso, who had been commissioned for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris exposition, painted Guernica in five weeks: no aeroplanes, no uniforms, only a bull, a horse, a lamp and screaming figures in black, white and grey. Germany apologised in 1997, sixty years later. Spain has not held a trial.