Authors: Preston Paul
The Times
cabled George Steer in Bilbao:
VIEW OTHER SIDES DISMISSAL YOUR GUERNICA STORY FURTHER JUDICIOUS STATEMENT DESIRABLE.
Steer’s reply, sent on 28 April, was published the next day:
The denial by Salamanca of all knowledge of the destruction of Gernika has created no astonishment here, since the similar but less terrible bombing of Durango was denied by them in spite of
the presence of British eye-witnesses. I have spoken with hundreds of homeless and distressed people, who all give precisely the same description of the events. I have seen and measured the enormous bomb-holes at Gernika, which, since I passed through the town the day before, I can testify were not there then. Unexploded German aluminium incendiary bombs were found in Gernika marked ‘Rheindorf factory, 1936’. The types of German aeroplane used were Junkers 52 (heavy bombers), Heinkel 111 (medium fast bomber), and Heinkel 51 (chasers). I was myself machine-gunned by six chasers in a large bomb-hole at Arbacegui-Gerrikaiz, when they were returning from Gernika. According to a statement made by the German pilots captured near Ochandiano early in April at the beginning of the insurgent offensive, they are manned entirely by German pilots, while nearly all the crew are German, and the machines left Germany in February. It is maintained here that the entire insurgent air force used in this offensive against the Basques is German, except for seven Italian Fiat fighters and three Savoia 81 machines. That they bombed and destroyed Gernika is the considered judgement of your correspondent and what is more the certain knowledge if that is possible of every wretched Basque civilian who was forced to suffer it.
Fearing that
The Times
might not publish it, Steer copied his original telegram to Philip Noel-Baker, urging him to use it in the House of Commons and get the information to Lloyd George and Anthony Eden.
43
He refuted Francoist denials again in
The Times
on 6 May and, on 15 May, was able to report the shooting down near Bilbao of a German pilot whose log-book showed that he had taken part in the attack on Guernica.
Accusations that Steer had lied about Guernica continued to be made until the 1970s. In the early days, material that was found by the occupying forces in the telegraph office in Bilbao included
The Times’
cable to Steer requesting more information. It was given by Bolín to the American Catholic propagandist for Franco, Father Joseph Thorning. When he published it in 1938, Thorning claimed that it proved that
The Times
suspected the accuracy of his report. The cable was among large quantities of documents seized by the rebels in Bilbao and taken to Salamanca for sifting for information to be used in the repression. The British partisan of Franco, Major Francis Yeats-Brown, went to Salamanca, where the Francoists showed him a correspondence between ‘an English MP’ (Noel-Baker) and ‘a journalist in Bilbao who excelled himself in describing the Guernica affair’ (Steer). Without any sense of the irony of his own position as a propagandist for Franco, he wrote delightedly that the cables showed conclusively that ‘both were very much mixed up in Basque affairs, too much so in fact’.
44
Although the publication of the despatch had probably led to the Nazi expulsion of Norman Ebbutt, the
Times
man in Berlin, the paper continued to accept the veracity of Steer’s report.
The Times
had published Steer’s despatch in the period of the most avid appeasement demonstrated by the paper’s editor, Geoffrey Dawson. In response to the virulent Anglophobia with which the controlled German press had reacted, Dawson wrote to
The Times’
acting correspondent in Berlin, H. G. Daniels:
I did my utmost, night after night, to keep out of the paper anything that might hurt their susceptibilities. I can really think of nothing that has been printed now for many months past which they could possibly take exception to as unfair comment. No doubt they were annoyed by Steer’s first story of the bombing of Guernica, but its essential accuracy has never been disputed, and there has not been any attempt here to rub it in or harp upon it.
It was to no avail. As Daniels informed him, Nazi propagandists had noticed that
Times
spelt backwards is
Semit,
which was broadcast as proof that the newspaper for which Steer wrote was a Jewish-Marxist operation.
45
George Steer’s name was placed on the Gestapo’s Special Wanted List of 2,820 persons who were to be detained after the Germans occupied Britain in 1940.
46
Steer received threats from abroad that, if he was caught alive by the Francoists, he would be shot immediately. He continued to go to the front, carrying now a machine pistol which he did
not know how to use.
47
Holme and Monks were also denounced by General Queipo de Llano in his infamous radio broadcasts.
48
Steer stayed in what was left of Euskadi through the next six weeks of relentless bombing, going to where the fighting was thickest with Monnier and reporting almost daily on the dogged defence against the Francoist advance on Bilbao despite the lack of air cover. Indeed, aware that rebel air superiority was the key issue to the defence of the city, he bombarded Noel-Baker with requests to use his influence to get the French to permit Republican aircraft to fly over their territory. Writing from Aguirre’s office, the Presidencia, he wrote:
We
would have cut off the Italians in Bermeo and along the western side of the Gernika outlet if
we
had had the aviation to deal with them. Considering the complete demoralisation and lack of order in the infantry of the last fortnight
we
resisted and counterattacked very well upon the new line, and with proper military elements
we
would have finished the offensive for ever.
Urging Noel-Baker to press Pierre Cot, the French Minister of Aviation, to breach the non-intervention agreement and send aircraft, Steer wrote revealingly: ‘And tell Cot that if he has any fears of English I.S. [Intelligence Service] men reporting his naughtinesses in Bilbao, they will be idle. I am the only trusted one here, and when the time comes I can deny it all more than thrice.’
49
That his involvement could hardly have been greater is revealed by many passages in his book along the following lines: ‘I went up to Begoña to talk with the armoured car men. They were tired and angry.
Our
own artillery had fired on them and the infantry that afternoon in mistake for the enemy, causing heavy loss.
We
had been forced to withdraw to the right of the Casino in consequence, and that was the beginning of the movement that let the enemy in.’ Steer accompanied the Spanish delegation that went to the League of Nations in Geneva at the end of May in search of recognition of Axis aggression. The Spanish Foreign Minister, Julio Álvarez del Vayo, produced evidence of Italian intervention, while the Basque Government produced proof of German involvement. It was to no avail and Steer wrote to Noel-Baker that ‘Del
Vayo was sold a pup’, as well as describing a highly unsatisfactory conversation that he had had with an infuriatingly complacent Roberts, head of the Western Department of the Foreign Office. Steer also visited the American Consul in Geneva and showed him a collection of photostats of documents proving German participation in the bombing of Guernica, including an annotated map. On 13 June, he even participated at the Hotel Carlton in a meeting of the Basque Government and military high command called by Aguirre to discuss whether to defend Bilbao to the last man. When the city fell, he covered the subsequent retreat westwards into Santander. He wrote a moving account of the evacuation of 200,000 people first on trawlers and then, when the Francoists had taken the port, on lorries along the road to the west, the refugees being bombed and strafed by the Condor Legion along the way.
50
During these last desperate days in Bilbao, he assisted the British Labour Member of Parliament, Leah Manning, who was helping the Basque Government organize the evacuation of four thousand children to Britain. She later described Steer, and another British journalist, Philip Jordan, as ‘towers of strength and encouragement’.
51
The Dean of Canterbury, Hewlett Johnson, wrote to
The Times
to commend Steer, whom he described as ‘your own heroic and extremely able correspondent, whom I had the privilege of meeting in Bilbao as the only British journalist at that time in that city’.
52
Philip Noel-Baker wrote to Steer that his report on Guernica had helped change British Government policy, by which he almost certainly referred to the decision to permit the evacuation of four thousand Basque children to Britain.
53
When the Basque Government left Bilbao on 18 June, Steer went to the deserted rooms of the president and took his pen and his last notepad on which to start writing
The Tree of Gernika.
He then finished the last bottle of champagne on the premises. At dawn on the following day, he walked west until he could find a driver ready to take him along the clogged road towards Santander.
54
It was there that Steer wrote his last, long article for
The Times,
an elegiac account of Bilbao’s heroic last stand.
55
At the end of June, having lost virtually everything he owned in the retreat from Bilbao, Steer managed to find his way to Paris. He went
to the gracious apartment of his friend Thomas Tucker-Edwardes Cadett,
The Times’
correspondent in France. At first, Cadett did not recognize the unshaven, malodorous tramp, in dirty clothes and
alpar-gatas.
When he realized it was Steer, he was alarmed to see that he was feverish and ‘pretty well at the end of his tether’. After a bath and a change of clothes, he began to write in Aguirre’s notebook.
56
He could not, however, just cut himself off from his beloved Basques. Having interrupted his writing to seek more material, on 18 August, he made the dangerous flight across the Bay of Biscay to Santander, where they were cornered, facing superior Italian forces. He stayed with them for a few days, flying back before their ignominious end.
57
Steer finished his book in a remarkably short time and it was published in early 1938. The text reflected his romantic commitment to the Basque part in the battle against fascism, a battle with which he had become involved in Abyssinia. It also reflected his contempt for the farce of British commitment to non-intervention. By the time it came out, Steer was in South Africa doing research for a book on German ambitions in Africa. On the day he left London, he wrote a scribbled note to Noel-Baker: ‘If you want me for any really major crisis of a warlike kind, you’ve only got to flash me.’
58
Noel-Baker was one of the first people to read
The Tree of Gernika,
and he wrote enthusiastically to Steer:
What I have read I think quite brilliant. The Times gave it an extremely good review considering everything, and I am told by The Observer that it is a best seller, which I hope may be true. I lent it the other day to Morgan Jones for a speech he had to make about air bombing, and you will see he quoted it sensibly. The speech sounded better than it reads, but the best part of it was by you.
59
The Tree of Gernika
was described by James Cable, the historian of the siege of Bilbao, as
a work of passionate engagement, a vivid, moving, exciting justification of Basque nationalism, a shrewd if slanted, analysis of the circumstances and causes of their defeat, an urgent
warning to his own country-men of the wrath to come. Steer was something of an artist and his book has a quality rare in the productions of even the most brilliant journalists. The historians who have followed his version of events, however, had more than the seduction of his style to excuse their choice. Steer had seen for himself much of what he described and, as a brave man driven to desperation by the recent loss of his first wife, he saw more than most, being particularly fascinated by the detailed conduct of military operations. Of course he also had the faults of his professional virtues. He was a journalist, not a historian, and he affected the omniscience of his trade, too often blurring the distinction between observation and deduction, evidence and hearsay. His facts are not always reliable, his judgements are occasionally hasty, his dates are slapdash. Nevertheless, anyone who takes the trouble to compare Steer’s guesses with the evidence of the documents is continually astonished, not at his inevitable errors, but at the frequency with which his assumptions were correct.
60
The Tree of Gernika
is a classic of Spanish Civil War historiography. Beautifully and incisively written, it is a moving defence of Basque Nationalism and a heart-breaking account of the reasons for its defeat at the hands of Franco. It was written as a warning to the democracies of what awaited them. Romantically attached to the Basque cause, Steer wrote of his own book: ‘it will, perhaps, be banned by the Basques when they get back to Bilbao’. He need not have worried. He became something of a Basque hero – and unable to see the book published in Euskadi in Franco’s lifetime, exiled Basques published the book in translation in Caracas in 1963. Only after the dictator’s death was it published in Spain.
61
That was hardly surprising given its deep sympathy with Basques. He wrote in the preface to the book: ‘The Basques are industrious and the Spanish are idle. The Basques are all yeomen and the Spanish would all be gentlemen.’
62
At the time, Steer’s sympathy with the Basques and criticisms of the Spanish Left were the focus of a less than fulsome review of the book by George Orwell. Opening with the words, ‘It goes without saying that
everyone who writes of the Spanish War writes as a partisan’, Orwell went on to reflect his chagrin that the object of his own partisanship, the anti-Stalinist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, had had little or no success in the Basque Country. He acknowledged that Steer had been right in observing that there was no social revolution among the conservative Basques. However, he went on to comment: