Spanish Civil War
The Luftwaffe's Condor Legion experimented with new doctrine and aircraft during the Spanish Civil War. It helped the Falange under Francisco Franco to defeat the Republican forces. Over 20,000 German airmen gained combat experience that would give the Luftwaffe an important advantage going into the Second World War. One infamous operation was the bombing of Guernica in the Basque country. It is commonly assumed this attack was the result of a "terror doctrine" in Luftwaffe doctrine. The Luftwaffe did not apparently have an official policy of terror bombing in which civilians were deliberately targeted, but the effects of the raids on Guernica and Madrid caused many civilian casualties and a wave of protests in the democracies. It has been suggested that the bombing of Guernica was carried out for military tactical reasons, in support of ground operations, but the town was not directly involved in any fighting at that point in time. It was not until 1942 that the Germans started to develop bombing policy in which civilians were the primary target, although The Blitz on London and many other British cities involved indiscriminate bombing of civilian areas.
Read more about this topic: Luftwaffe
Famous quotes containing the words spanish civil war, civil war, spanish, civil and/or war:
“Stiller ... took part in the Spanish Civil War ... It is not clear what impelled him to this military gesture. Probably many factors were combined—a rather romantic Communism, such as was common among bourgeois intellectuals at that time.”
—Max Frisch (1911–1991)
“The United States is just now the oldest country in the world, there always is an oldest country and she is it, it is she who is the mother of the twentieth century civilization. She began to feel herself as it just after the Civil War. And so it is a country the right age to have been born in and the wrong age to live in.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“How can I, that girl standing there,
My attention fix
On Roman or on Russian
Or on Spanish politics?”
—William Butler Yeats (1865–1939)
“The Count is neither sad, nor sick, nor merry, nor well; but civil count, civil as an orange, and something of that jealous complexion.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse.... A war to protect other human beings against tyrannical injustice; a war to give victory to their own ideas of right and good, and which is their own war, carried on for an honest purpose by their own free choice—is often the means of their regeneration.”
—John Stuart Mill (1806–1873)