Guernica and Total War (Profiles in History)

"One of the most terrible ideas of the twentieth century was that of total war - war by the obliteration of whole civilian populations. The first and in many ways the most striking use of this in Europe came exactly seventy years ago on 26 April 1937, when the ancient Basque town of Guernica was almost completely destroyed by the bombs of the German Gondor Legion and Italian fascist planes operating in support of Franco's rebels in the Spanish Civil War." "Almost at once Guernica became a media focus, and Picasso's painting, which rapidly made Guernica the most famous image of total war, was only one of a huge number of paintings, films, novels, poems and plays to explore this new fear of death from the air. Since the first bomb was dropped from an Italian aeroplane over Libya in 1911, bombing became a central weapon in the armoury of European warfare. The zeppelin and bombing raids of World War I showed how effective they could be. Between the wars, apocalyptic ideas of the mass destruction of civilisation gave mass bombing a new currency of fear. This was the context in which news of the bombing of Guernica was received. Ian Patterson brilliantly traces this hidden story of terror through World War II to Hiroshima, and shows how the image of Guernica is just as relevant today, in the World of 9/11 and Iraq."--Jacket.