On the evening of 26 April 1937, George Lowther Steer, a correspondent for the Times, was having dinner with other reporters at the Torrontegui Hotel in Bilbao. Sometime after nine, a distraught Basque official rushed into the dining-room: 'Guernica is destroyed,' he told them. The town was still burning when the journalists got there. Flames were licking at windows, the cobblestones were hot coals, buildings slithered to the ground. It had been market day, and hundreds of people had travelled in from the outskirts. Witnesses told Steer that, for three hours, wave after wave of Junkers and Heinkel bombers had flown over Guernica, dropping high explosives and incendiary devices; people running into the open had been chased by the planes and gunned down.

LRB 5 June 2003 | PDF Download