Bombing of Guernica - Casualties: A Controversial Track

Casualties: A Controversial Track

The number of civilian casualties has been debated and is still a matter of propaganda.

A recent study by Vicente del Palacio and José Ángel Etxaniz for the Gernikazarra Historia Taldea estimated the number of victims to be 126. Those incomplete data roughly corresponding to the congruous part of the mortuary records of the town that survived owerdays, are not even including the 592 deaths registered in the Bilbao's hospital. Raul Arias Ramos in his book La Legion Condor en La Guerra Civil states that there were 250 dead; and the study by Joan Villarroya and J.M. Sole i Sabate in their book España en Llamas. La Guerra Civil desde el Aire states that there were 300 dead These studies, cited by historians such as Stanley Payne and Antony Beevor as well as media such as the BBC and El Mundo, provide the currently recognized death toll.

See also the Bombs to casualty ratio next subsection.

After Nationalist forces led by General Emilio Mola's forces took the town three days later, the Nationalist side claimed that no effort to establish an accurate number have been made by the opposite side. The Basque government, in the confused aftermath of the raids, reported 1,654 dead and 889 wounded. It roughly agrees with the testimony of British journalist George Steer, correspondent at the time and place of the Times, which estimated that 800 to 3,000 of 5,000 people perished in Guernica. These figures were adopted over the years by some commentators outside of the conflict as accurate. These figures are represented in a majority of the literature from that period and up to the 1970s, although they were always disputed.

The Nationalist junta gave a patently false description of the events (claiming that the destruction had been caused by Republicans burning the town as they fled) and seem to have made no effort to establish an accurate number. At an extreme low, the Francoist newspaper Arriba claimed, on January 30, 1970, that there had only been twelve deaths.

Russian archives, through the historian Sergei Abrossov, mention 800 dead as of May 1, 1937. This is an incomplete figure and does not take into account either the people later found under the rubble, nor those who died later of their injuries, but is certainly objective. It should be recalled that the Soviets were the only ones in the world, at that time, to maintain a strategic air force consisting mainly of heavy bombers Tupolev TB-1, R-6 and TB-3 whose general condition was good but that were becoming obsolete. The whole cost them dearly, especially since their replacement by the Tupolev ANT-42 was planned: the validity of the doctrine of Douhet was therefore constantly discussed in the VVS-RKKA headquarters. Consequently, the interest of Soviet military advisers present in Spain, was the collection of reliable data for internal use and the devastating effects of the bombing "mass" scale, not for controversy. Moreover the adviser Arjenoukhine, being responsible for Northern Front air defence area, had no personal interest in inflating losses at Guernica.