Before Shock and Awe
Guernica and Total War
By Ian Patterson
Harvard University Press, 2007
208 pages, $22.95
The bombing of cities large and small, the murder and terrorization of women, children and noncombatant men did not begin on April 26, 1937, when the German Luftwaffe and subordinate Italian forces, supporting Franco in the Spanish Civil War, leveled the Basque town of Gernika. Nor did it end on August 6, 1945, when the U.S. dropped the first atomic bomb on Japan. But Guernica and Hiroshima are the iconic symbols of the devastating effects of one of the 20th century’s most horrific inventions — the deliberate aerial bombardment of civilian populations.
Ian Patterson’s study considers why the “Operation Rugen” bombing of a small city of no military importance by Condor Legion planes shocked public opinion at the time and shaped subsequent collective memory about the meaning of total war. The destruction of Guernica seemed to initiate a new kind of warfare, but one long anticipated in the popular imagination. The attack, which killed hundreds (estimates vary from 200 to 1,700) and reduced most of the town to rubble, served no tactical or strategic purpose. Rather, it was calculated solely to demoralize the civilian population. The very scale of the carnage, which was rapidly to be surpassed by Japanese bombings in China, Germany’s across Europe, an British and U.S. on Germany and Japan, “crystallized many of the disparate fears connected with technology and air warfare.”
These were fears about modern machinery, mass society, and the threats they represented to individualism and masculinity. Patterson unravels these fears by analyzing both how Guernica was viewed through the lens of fictional treatments of air war and how it encouraged a vast proliferation of novels, poems, radio shows and films about a kind of warfare that in the 1930s was seen as both unimaginable and inevitable.
While the attack dominated conversation and debate in Western Europe, the very event was denied by its perpetrators. However much military strategists such as the 1920s Italian theorist Giulio Douhet had advocated civilian bombings, however much fictional accounts imagined it, many found it hard to believe the reports of what actually happened. This opened the way for Hitler and Franco to deny that Guernica had been bombed, as they blamed fleeing Republicans for blowing up and burning the city. Only in 1997 did the German government acknowledge responsibility. Guernica thus initiated both a new kind of warfare and an enduring and maddening tradition of denying the practice and consequences of civilian bombardment.
This first attempt at totally destroying a European city by aerial warfare was the subject of Pablo Picasso’s moving commemorative mural “Guernica,” the creation and reception of which this book traces. As Patterson’s conclusion reminds us, a tapestry copy of the unforgettable painting that hangs at the United Nations was covered over when Secretary of State Powell argued for war on Iraq in February 2003. U.S. officials, of course, denied insisting that this outstanding reminder of the effects of total war be concealed.
Patterson’s book brings together a rich array of literature, art, and political commentary to reconstruct how total war was imagined and realized in the 1930s and 1940s. His argument is often difficult to follow; there is neither a linear narrative of the destruction of Guernica and responses to it, nor a broader context of the 20th century warfare in which it was embedded. Of greater importance, the focus moves unevenly among Britain, continental Europe, and the rest of the world. We learn most about British fears that air war would lead to panic, chaos, and the destruction of not only industry and homes, but also the thin, insecure veneer of civilization. We learn about Churchill’s enthusiasm for “strategic bombing,” about the predictable inaccuracy of the bombs Britain dropped on Germany, and about British stoicism in the face of Germany’s air war. The book concludes with a long discussion of World War II on the British homefront during the blitz.
We learn much less about attitudes and responses to air war elsewhere in Europe and across the rest of the world. There is some useful discussion of the origins of civilian bombardment, which Spain, Italy, France, and Britain practiced first in North Africa and the Middle East as a cheap and — it was assumed — easy way to terrorize colonial populations into submission. British officials subsumed the resulting killing, maiming, and burning of homes, crops and livestock under the bland designation “frightfulness.”
We do learn about the fears of those bombed. We learn what U.S. bombing did to Japan, much less about the Japanese bombing of China, and nothing at all about how civiilians in Asia feared and responded to total war. Patterson’s book is a thoughtful addition ot a growing literature; the best single book remains Sven Lindqvist’s A History of Bombing.
