GUERNICA AND BADAJOS [To the Editor of Tire SPECTATOR.] Snt,—You
publish in your issue of July 9th three comments on my letter relating to the bombing of Guernica. Let me begin by railing your readers' attention to Mr. Stather-Hunt's refer- ence to my " famous letter to The Times denying the presence of Italian troops in Spain." There is no such letter. My letter, published in The Times of March 22nd, is on the files for anyone to read ; it estimates the number of Italian troops in the line on the Guadarrama front at that time at something in the neighbourhood of 8,000. The figures of Italian casual- ties since published confirm this estimate as approximately Correa.
Mr. Stather-Hunt goes on to infer that, because thermite incendiary bombs have been used in military operations on the Basque front with success, therefore they were used to destroy Guernica. Mr. Stather-Hunt does not apparently make a habit of reading the letters to which he refers, or he would have seen that I did not deny the use of bombs, either high explosive or incendiary, on the Basque front. Nor has it ever been denied that Guernica itself was frequently bombed, and all the evidence regarding the existence of unexploded bombs picked up in Guernica and elsewhere is therefore, with one exception, irrelevant. The exception is provided by The Times' Bilbao correspondent, who saw bomb holes which he had not seen the previous day. I do not doubt his good faith for a moment, bin it is difficult to be satisfied that a hurried visit in the middle of the night to a burning town provided an opportunity for such meticulous examination. In any case they may have been shell holes, or, as has been claimed, land mines.
Mr. Hunt has completely misunderstood, as have your other correspondents, the important point which is at issue. Is the evidence provided by the ruins, the streets, and the gardens and open spaces of Guernica consistent with the theory that the burning of this whole town of Guernica was the result of air bombardment, or is it consistent only with a deliberate act of incendiarism by the departing troops ? The conditions of the grass and flowers adjoining burnt-out houses, the absence of bomb holes in the streets and gardens, and the nature of the damage suffered by the buildings themselves are matters of fact. Unless the journalists representing in particular The Times and the Agence Havas and of numerous other eye witnesses are incorrect in their statements, and no one has suggested that they arc, this material evidence is not consistent with the attribution of the bulk of the damage to the effects of it bombardment. The complete destruction of a whole small town, street by street and house by house, could not possibly be undertaken by 40 or 5o aeroplanes, and if sufficient aeroplanes were available to drop the necessary number of bombs (and no one even claims to have seen aeroplanes in anything like sufficient numbers), it would be possible for a proportion of the bombs not to have fallen in the streets and open places of the town. The proportion would, of course, be the same as the proportion which the area of the streets and open places bears to the whole area of the town. This propor- tion, even in a closely built city like London, is more than 5o per cent. The absence of bomb holes in the principal streets, courtyards, and other open places is, therefore, conclusive, not as evidence that Guernica was never bombed, but as evi- dence that the destruction by fire of the whole town was the work of some other agency.
Had there been nothing to guide us as to the nature of that agency, it would remain a mystery, but as Iran and Eibar were admittedly destroyed by incendiaries serving the Basque Government (though whether acting under instructions or not, we do not know), there is no mystery at all. The only mystery that exists is the conflict of testimony as to whether some bombs were dropped on Guernica notonly prior to the day of its destruction, but on the day of its destruc- tion. I gave my view that this was a case of war hysteria,
that the sorely tried inhabitants of Guernica and the neigh- bourhood, hearing the explosions and seeing the smoke and flames that accompanied the burning of the town, assumed that it had been bombed on that day as it had been on previous occasions. Mr. Gerahty, in his book The Road to Madrid, states that he was in the neighbourhood of Guernica on the day when the alleged bombing took place, that he was in a position to see any bombing that had taken place, and that none took place. He is the only Englishman, as far as I 1-.now, who was in a position to see the bombing, had it taken 'place,- and he did not see it. The Times correspondent at Bilbao has been repeatedly referred to as an eye-witness. But he does not claim to have been an eye-witness of the bombing, but only of its effects. I therefore. regard Mr. Gerahty's explicit statement. as very strong evidence in support of the view which I have put forward as to the value. of the testimony of certain other alleged eye-witnesses. I repeat; however, that the main issue • concerns the complete and deliberate destruction of Guernica by fire. To that issue the whole of the facts adduced by your correspondents is irrelevant. That issue must be decided by the technical considerations which. I have mentioned, and it was these technical considerations, of course, which led the journalists who entered Guernica with General Franco's forces to the unanimous conclusion that the burning was the work of Basque incendiaries. The full report of these journalists was published in the Temps, the Matin, and 'other papers.—
[We have allowed so much space to Mr. Jerrold because of his complaint that he has been misrepresented in deny the existence Of Italian troops in Spain. We regret having been the instruments of causing pain to Mr. Jerrold. Though ninth' of his letter is .highly controversial, pressure of space compels us to confine any further correspondence to those with first-hand 'information to cffr.—En. The Spectaior.]
Previous page
