the last book I ever read (Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939, excerpt nine)

from Spain in Our Hearts: Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939 by Adam Hochschild:

Before long, the war reached a small inland city, less than ten miles from the front lines and filled with refugees fleeing the Nationalists, their belongings piled in ox carts. Guernica (today usually called by its Basque name, Gernika) had long had a special place in the history of the independent-minded Basques. Legend has it that Ferdinand and Isabella, the monarchs who helped to unify Spain, came to Guernica in 1476 and, standing beneath an oak tree, pledged to preserve ancient Basque privileges. A poet wrote a famous song dedicated to the tree. Two trees later but in the same spot, delegates had assembled in 1936 to swear in the president of an autonomous Basque territory allied with the Republic.

Late on the afternoon of April 26, 1937, a church bell tolled an air-raid warning. Some people rushed to their cellars; others, including farmers who had brought their cattle and sheep to Guernica for market day, fled to the fields outside of town. A single Nazi plane flew overhead, dropping its load of bombs on the city, and when nothing more happened, people again emerged onto the streets. At just that moment—now that the lack of fire on the first flight had revealed that Guernica had little in the way of antiaircraft defenses—the real attack came. Twenty-three Ju-52 bombers from the Condor Legion, accompanied by some two dozen other aircraft, flying in relays from bases close by, began dropping antipersonnel bombs, high explosives, and incendiaries in aluminum tubes designed to set exposed wood in smashed buildings on fire. German pilots nicknamed this mixture Generalstabsmischung, or General Staff’s Blend, and they dropped more than 30 tons of it over some three hours.

Families were buried in their houses; clouds of smoke and dust rose into the air; sheep and cattle, covered in flaming chemicals from the incendiaries, stampeded in terror through streets filled with shattered masonry. At the Santa María church, the priest managed to use communion wine to put out an incendiary, but it was a rare piece of luck on a day of destruction. As people realized that cellars would not save them from collapsing buildings and began to flee, waves of Heinkel He-51 fighter planes zoomed in low, strafing every human or animal in sight. Some 200 people were killed and many more wounded. The greater part of the city was reduced to charred, smoldering ruins. As night fell, an eerie orange glow filled the sky.