Guernica

CCXLVIII

“Guernica” (1937) by Pablo Picasso. At more than 11.5 feet high and 25.5 feet wide, the impact of this mural-sized oil painting is overwhelming in person (as this blogger can attest). After the bombing many artists produced works based on the horror of the event

Juan and Betty Trippe had been Dr. Hugo Eckener’s guests aboard the October 9, 1936 “Millionaire’s Flight” of the Hindenburg. Although the flight did not inspire Trippe to become interested in airships, the lush accommodations of the zeppelin contributed to his ideas of what a Pan Am Clipper could be. Trippe had his vision fixed on augmenting both the new Pacific and the not-yet active Atlantic routes, and had spent the months between the1935 introduction of the M-130 and the Millionaire’s Flight shopping around for a new design. In August, he had contracted with Boeing to build six immense new Clippers, but they were still only pencil sketches. Now he had a template.

The Boeing  314. After the introduction of this plane Boeing would build all of Pan American’s subsequent aircraft

The British had been stalwart in denying Pan American an Atlantic route for years. Successive Air Ministers quoted “Provision H” by heart: No foreign carrier could operate in a zone where Great Britain was not operating a substantially similar aircraft. Imperial Airways had the big Short S.23 Empire flying boats but they kept them well away from the Western Ocean so as not to impinge on Cunard-White Star’s domination of the North Atlantic Ferry.

 

The Short Empire flying boat flew the All-Red Route to Australia and New Zealand

By 1937, Provision H was beginning to sound very hollow. His Majesty’s Government had carved out an exception for Hong Kong, and New Zealand had broken with the Empire to allow the China Clippers to operate there. 

 

Pan American’s new Atlantic routes, 1939

Juan Trippe probably thought he’d been particularly convincing, but it was world events, not one man’s charisma, that finally erased Provision H from the statute books.

  

The Treaty of Versailles of June 28, 1919: “Severe on Germany”

From the moment the Great War had ended in 1918 and the Allies had imposed the draconian Treaty of Versailles on a defeated Germany, Germans of every political stripe had worked to evade its provisions. The largely ineffectual Weimar Republic quietly advised German manufacturers and entrepreneurs to move their plants and businesses beyond the borders where the Treaty did not apply. German-owned companies, along with German populations, began moving into the new nations of Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, and the Balkans. Fascist Italy had an influx of German capital, as did half a dozen nations in South America. SCADTA, the German-owned Colombian airline, was born in this period.

The Treaty of Versailles imposed immense war reparations on Germany, stripped her of her colonies, and forbade heavy manufacturing

Within Germany, individuals began appealing to the Allied Control Council (the real rulers of Germany) for exceptions to manufacture items such as cars, airplanes, and Luftschiffen. Dornier and DELAG came back from the brink when they were allowed to take up operations again. LZ-126, the zeppelin that would become the U.S.S. Los Angeles was a product of this time.

The Heinkel 111 transport was used as an airliner by Eurasia Air / CATC, CNAC’s  German competitor in China

After 1933, the Nazi Government simply sidestepped the remaining restrictions of Versailles by enacting new standards for German products --- military standards. All heavy trucks were required to have four-wheel drive. Heinkel, which had been building a fleet of dual-engine medium airliners for Lufthansa, began installing oddly-placed belly hatches in the aircraft. Ferdinand Porsche stopped producing the little bug-like rear engine family car that Hitler considered his “People’s Car”, and began producing heavier vehicles with more cargo capacity. Mercedes built tracked all-terrain sport vehicles. Aircraft manufacturers like Willy Messerschmitt began building more rugged and speedier planes for the private aviation market. And so it went.

With a few simple modifications the Heinkel 111 became a medium bomber

The Allied Control Council, sensing what was happening, adopted an ostrich-like approach. Even after a small but resurgent German Army re-entered the Rhineland in 1934, the Allies did nothing.

 

A VW Beetle? Not exactly. A Czech Tatra built in 1931 by Hans Ledwinka, a German-Austrian expat

Although Hitler made no more demands in the heart of Europe for four years, the world got a preview of just what a second World War would look like in Spain in 1936.

The familiar rounded VW beetle body was replaced with a slab-sided body, producing the Kubelwagen, Germany’s answer to the jeep. Before the war kubelwagens functioned as SUVs. Long after the war VW released The Thing, a jauntily-appointed Kubelwagen as a novelty vehicle

Throughout the Nineteenth Century Spain had swung between an ossified monarchism and a chaotic liberalism. By the dawn of the 20^th Century, Spain was poor, agrarian, and a hotbed of small intrigues that led to coup after coup. Waves of violence passed over the country, consuming lives but accomplishing little else.

Generalissimo Francisco Franco in 1937. Despite the political debt he owed to Germany and Italy he detested Hitler personally, refused to join the Axis, aided Jews who managed to escape to Spain, and held power until he died in 1975. He’s still dead.

The early 1930s saw the rise of two powerful factions, the fascist Nationalists led by Francisco Franco*, and the Republicans (or Loyalists), a hydra-headed group that was comprised of the members of the Second Spanish Republic and assorted Liberals, Democrats, Anarchists, Marxists, and Communists. After forcing King Alfonso XIII to abdicate, the Republicans attempted to stabilize the country, but the Nationalists, backed by the Catholic prelates of Spain, the remaining monarchists, and various conservative business elements, went to war against the Republic in 1936. Franco’s forces were backed by Hitler and Mussolini. What followed was one of the bloodiest and politically confusing civil wars in history.

Hemingway wrote this stirring novel of the Spanish Civil War in 1940 based on his own experiences in Spain. Of Nazi aircraft he wrote, “I obscenity in the milk of their motors.”

The Western Powers were unenthusiastic about the Republicans, mostly because they were chiefly backed by the Soviet Union. Still, many Westerners fought in Spain as volunteers or mercenaries. The Abraham Lincoln Brigade was such an American unit.

The Lincoln Brigade lost a third of its men fighting the fascists in Spain

Both the British Foreign Office and the U.S. State Department were deeply divided on the issue of supporting Spain’s Loyalists. Many officials believed that defeating Communism was a far more important goal than stopping the spread of Fascism. The Republican cause was not helped by the fact that its various elements often fought among themselves or committed atrocities against the population as did the Nationalists.

The flag of the Popular Front, a Loyalist faction in Spain

For Hitler and Mussolini, Spain was a proving ground for their new modernized military. Bomb racks were installed in the transports, the heavy trucks and tracked vehicles were painted in military hues, and the well-trained German Condor Legion went in on the ground.

“A Spanish Loyalist at the Moment of Death”. One of the world’s most famous photographs, it appeared in Life Magazine as part of their coverage of the Spanish Civil War

 

World opinion largely swung in favor of the Loyalists in the wake of the bombing of Guernica, a small Basque market town in the northeastern corner of Spain. Guernica was the capital of the Basque country, loyal to the Loyalists, and served as a local communications hub. It was 20 miles from the front.

Fascist Italian Savoia Marchetti SM. 81s dropping bombs in Spain

On April 26, 1937, Luftwaffe units acting at the behest of Francisco Franco, attacked Guernica without warning. There were no troops quartered there and no anti-aircraft emplacements. It was market day, which meant that the town was crowded not only with its own 7,000 residents but with farmers come to buy and sell.

Guernica in ruins

The raid, planned and led by Wolfram Von Richthofen, came in several waves between 4:30 and 6:30 P.M., and included bombing and strafing attacks against buildings and civilians on the ground. The town was left a burning wreck. No one knows how many people died at Guernica, but estimates range from 250 to 1,650. Although the Germans denied “terror bombing” the town and claimed to be acting only in support of local Nationalist units, the attack on Guernica seemed to be reasonless, and certainly without precedent.  It did however prove the efficacy of air superiority, which may have been the Germans’ intention all along. Loyalist forces either died or fled or surrendered, and the Republican cause began a slow collapse that ended in 1939 with Franco triumphant. He would rule Spain until 1975, the year of his death, an anachronism --- the last of the Fascist dictators of the early 20^th Century.

Death and terror in Guernica

After Guernica, the British Foreign Office recognized the need for rapid communication and air transport between the United States (its ostensible ally in the war that was clearly to come) and the Scepter’d Isle. Pan American was not just granted landing rights in the British Empire, it was encouraged to begin service as soon as possible. 

In 1941 Great Britain acquired three B-314As from Pan Am, naming them Bristol. Berwick, and Bangor. Generally they flew between Britain and Africa, keeping isolated Free French garrisons in the war. Churchill flew on both Bristol and Berwick and praised them intensely

Juan Trippe had won his Atlantic airline war --- with an assist from Hitler.

During the Second World War Pan Am’s entire transoceanic clipper fleet was seconded to war service. Painted in military livery they all served honorably, even acquiring decorations. The Boeing 314 Dixie Clipper served as the original Air Force One when it carried President F.D. Roosevelt to Casablanca for meetings with Churchill in 1943

*Historians are deeply divided on Francisco Franco’s legacy. After winning the Spanish Civil War in 1939, he declared himself El Caudillo, The Leader, much as Mussolini (Il Duce) and Hitler (Der Fuhrer) had done. He was brutal to his enemies --- besides ordering the bombing of innocent civilians in Guernica, he was the victor in a civil war that cost 500,000 lives, and after assuming power killed at least another 300,000 Spaniards either by execution, forced labor or incarceration in concentration camps wherein conditions were execrable. During World War II he flirted openly with the Axis, but did not enter the war. However, he did stabilize Spain, a country which had been essentially a failed state for a century, and as time passed he undertook liberal reforms and introduced a free market economy, so that immediately after his death Spain smoothly transitioned into a constitutional democracy and a full participant in the life of Europe.