Guernica and Total War

by Ian Patterson

One of the most horrific innovations of the twentieth century was the deliberate strategy of total warfare--the obliteration of entire civilian populations. The first and in many ways the most striking use of this extreme measure came nearly 70 years ago when the ancient Basque hilltop town of Guernica was destroyed by the bombs of the German Condor.

Ian Patterson begins with a graphic account of what happened in Guernica on April 26, 1937, and its place in the course of the Spanish Civil War. This event focused the spotlight of media attention on the town of Guernica, and established Picasso's painting as the most famous modern image of the horrors of war. Yet Picasso's Guernica was only one of a huge number of cultural artifacts--paintings, films, novels, poems, plays--to explore the idea of indiscriminate death from the air. From the Blitz to Hiroshima to the destruction of the World Trade Center to daily carnage in Darfur and Iraq, war has been increasingly directed against civilians, who constitute an ever larger proportion of its casualties. Patterson explores how modern men and women respond to the threat of new warfare with new capacities for imagining aggression and death. An unflinching history of the locationless terror that so many people feel today, Guernica and Total War will engage anyone interested in the survival of cultures amid the disasters of war.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, Spain

208 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2007

Reviews

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though on a small scale by later standards, the bombing of the Spanish town of Guernica on April 26, 1937 ranks as one of the iconic moments in the 20th century. Memorialized by Picasso in what is perhaps his most famous work, it was an event that shocked the West for the degree of death and destructiveness inflicted on a single, defenseless community. For many Europeans it symbolized their fears for what a new war would bring to the continent, and indeed in retrospect it also served as a precursor for the conflict that was soon to come. Ian Patterson’s book about the bombing of the town is both more and less than a study of the attack, as he broadens his focus beyond the actual event to fit it into the context of its era.

Patterson’s focus is evident from the start, as he begins not with the bombing of the town but with how it was initially covered by the media of the time. This approach serves to demonstrate how the meaning of the event was contested from the start, as both the Republican and Nationalist sides in the Spanish Civil War present it as an example of their opponents’ barbarity. Charged with launching the attack, the Nationalists denied any responsibility and instead accused the Republicans of attacking the village in an effort to galvanize public opinion against General Franco’s forces. The images of the destroyed town, though, quickly took on a larger meaning, as they served as visual embodiments of the new type of war, one in which civilians suffered as well as combatants.

From here Patterson brings in the larger context of the literature of the times about war, particularly war from the air. The limited use of air power against cities during the First World War created awareness of the threat, while the advances in technology and the warnings of experts served to magnify it. This anxiety was a consequence of the emergent concept of total war, where whole societies were now targeted by enemy forces as a means of waging war. Though the fears of the 1930s proved exaggerated in some respects, Guernica’s fate was indeed one that would soon be inflicted on an increasingly escalating scale upon Rotterdam, London, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and others, all of which helped to cement Guernica’s status as a harbinger for the decades that followed.

Short yet enlightening, Patterson’s book is a thoughtful examination of the bombing of Guernica and the broader meaning it held for his age. While his definition of total war (which he limits to the use of air power to effect destruction) is rather narrow, his book nonetheless serves to illustrate how closely we have come to associating the concept with the devastation brought by the bombing of cities. This is a work that should be read not just by people seeking to learn about Guernica’s destruction, but also by anyone interested in modern warfare and its impact on Western thought in the modern age.

[Douglas · Rating 3 out of 5]

The author does a good job of putting the bombing of Guernica in perspective. Mr. Patterson, a professor at Oxford, draws upon literature and poetry from the 1930's and beyond to demonstrate the sweeping impact that the Germans' bombing of Guernica had. Prof. Patterson also explains well how the Guernica tragedy ---- along with the brutal Japenese attacks in China --- essentially opened the door to war deliberately targeted upon civilians that has plagued the world ever since 1937.

[Berna Labourdette · Rating 4 out of 5]

Un gran ensayo sobre cómo el bombardeo a Guernica cambió la forma en que la guerra se entendía (bombardeo masivo a población civil e intervención de la famosa Legion Cóndor alemana, como preludio a lo que sería la 2 Guerra Mundial después) y cómo se presentó en la prensa internacional. Muy bueno.

[Florence Ridley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting, engaging, and most importantly a quick read. Read for my dissertation. Touched on a number of works by civilians facing bombardment but was rather limited in scope. I felt it was an error not to discuss Bowen more thoroughly in the section on time, as Heat of the Day explicitly addresses "Blitz time" (see Pong, Rawlinson, Piette on Bowen). Otherwise an excellent study.