KEY POINTS:
BARCELONA - It was a busy market day in a small town little known beyond Spain.
But at 4.40pm, Heinkel 111, Dornier 17, Junkers 52 and Italian SM 79 bombers started to unload their deadly cargoes on Guernica.
Three hours later, the indiscriminate carpet bombing of this defenceless civilian population and its repercussions would propel the ancient capital of the Basques on to the world stage.
Hundreds of kilometres away in Paris, Pablo Picasso read about the massacre and was outraged.
He immediately decided to change a canvas he was painting for the Paris Exhibition. The result was Guernica, the masterpiece which has come to symbolise the barbarity of war.
Today, exactly 70 years after the Luftwaffe's Condor Legion led the attack which is thought to have claimed 1600 lives and left about 800 injured, survivors marked the atrocity.
The attack, on April 26, 1937, was the first use of what came to be known as total war. Civilians, not just soldiers, were in the front line, legitimate targets as much as armed combatants. It has come to be an integral part of war since.
At the time of the attack, during the peak of the Spanish Civil War, Guernica was not on the front line.
Nationalist troops led by General Francisco Franco had been advancing towards Bilbao but faced strong resistance from the retreating Republican forces.
In order to launch a devastating blow against the morale of the Republican side and cut important supply lines, Franco decided to use his Nazi allies to attack the civilian population.
Nazi Germany, like Fascist Italy, was officially not involved in the war and both had signed a Non-Intervention Pact. But it was widely known the German and Italian forces had been arming Franco's Nationalist troops.
At Guernica, the Luftwaffe and planes from the Italian Aviazione Legionaria, would have their first chance to see action in the front line in Operation Rugen.
Led by General Fieldmarshall Wolfram Freiherr von Richthofen, a distant cousin of Manfred Von Richthofen, the World War I fighter ace known as the Red Baron, the Condor Legion launched a series of low-level attacks on the small town of about 5000 people.
The result was mayhem. What had been a bustling market day turned into a scene of carnage, with makeshift shelters unable to hide people from the deadly load raining down.
The carpet bombing created a firestorm in which people inside the flimsy shelters were burned alive. Only 1 per cent of the town's buildings were said to have survived and most of them were on the outskirts.
Ricardo Arrien, now 80, who was 10 at the time of the raids, recalled: "When I returned, the house had disappeared.
"Our photographs were burned, the brown coat I had got for Easter, my mother's sewing machine, the marbles I had played with and some gold my father had hidden under the table.
"All gone."
Luis Iriondo, who was 14 in 1937, fled to one of the shelters in the centre of the town where he had been working in a bank.
But as the bombing started, he soon decided to take his chances on the streets instead of suffocating inside the shelter.
"After three minutes we could not breathe. We were so many people and the shelter was so small and without any ventilation or light," remembers the 84-year-old Iriondo.
"To die buried alive terrified me.
"I left the shelter but then we heard the bombers coming closer and closer. I thought of a friend, Cipriano Arrien."
Later, Iriondo found his friend, Cipriano; but the teenager saw his friend's lifeless body in a wood.
It is an image he has carried with him all his life.
From a strategic point of view, the raid was not a success.
Two crucial targets, the arms factories, Unceta and Company and Talleres de Guernica, were left untouched, as was the town's main bridge. The tree of Guernica, which was where the Basque Parliament had traditionally met, also escaped without a scratch.
Von Richthofen later said the attacks were a failure militarily. What he could not have reckoned with was the political fallout which the raid would cause worldwide.
George Steer, a British journalist who worked for the Times, revealed to the world proof that the Nazi regime had led the raids, breaking the Non-Intervention Pact.
He discovered three small bomb cases stamped with the German Imperial Eagle; it was proof enough to condemn Nazi Germany and cause Franco's Nationalists huge embarrassment around the world.
In his report, published in the Times and later the New York Times, two days after the bombings, Steer wrote: "Guernica was not a military objective ... the object of the bombardment was seemingly the demoralisation of the civil population and the destruction of the cradle of the Basque race."
The report brought international revulsion and widespread condemnation against Franco and the German Condor Legion which led the attack.
Britain, France and the United States condemned Franco's Nationalist forces and Adolf Hitler's Germany.
But Franco tried to claim the attack on Guernica never took place and was in fact Republican propaganda.
Later, in a effort to avoid condemnation by the international community and the Catholic Church, Franco suggested the town had been burnt on purpose as part of the Republicans' slash and burn policy which had been repeated at nearby Irun by its retreating troops.
But the damage had been done.
Picasso's Guernica occupied pride of place in the Republican Spain pavilion at the Paris Exhibition of 1937, a reminder of what had happened just days before over the border.
Picasso, who died in 1973, refused to let Guernica return to Spain during Franco's dictatorship. The painting finally returned to Spain in 1981, and now hangs in Madrid's Reina Sofia Museum.
The anniversary of the bombings has led to fresh calls for Picasso's masterwork to be brought to the Basque Country, but it appears unlikely it will happen. Instead, a the Spanish Government is to send up to 30 sketches which Picasso used to paint Guernica which will go on show at the Guggenheim to mark the anniversary.
Thirty Spanish artists are also to mark the anniversary with a major exhibition in Guernica dedicated to the events which took place 70 years before.
Among the artists are Juan Lui Geonaga and Inaki Ruiz de Eguino.
They will attempt to interpret the original vision of Picasso's mural in a series of their own paintings and other works.
Hundreds of kilometres away, though, perhaps an equally significant ceremony will take place in Berlin.
The German capital is to show films, contemporary dance shows and lectures as a homage dedicated to the events of 70 years ago in Spain.
An official homage will be paid to the victims of Guernica by the German Government.
Ten years ago, on the 60th anniversary of the attack, German President Roman Herzog wrote to the Basques expressing his "sorrow" for the actions of the Condor Legion.
It was the first time Germany had officially apologised for its part in the attack.
For some survivors, though they were very young at the time, the memory never fades.
Consuelo Agirre-Amalloa, 79, who was 9 at the time of the bombings, is like many others in this small town; they measure life in terms of "before" the bombardment and "after".
"It was so tremendous that I have tried to forget it all," she said.
- INDEPENDENT
