BOMBING OF GUERNICA

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 107, 7 May 1937, Page 9

BOMBING OF GUERNICA

WITNESS'S TESTIMONY

RED INCENDIARISM DENIED

LONDON, May 6.

The special correspondent of "The Times" at Bilbao categorically declares that the statement that "Guernica was destroyed by red incendiaries" is false.

"I was on the spot shortly after the bombing of the town." he says. "The roofs were a mass of bombho'les, and trees were injured by bomb splinters, of which I collected several. They are of exactly the same metal as that used by General Mola's German aircraft on the front line.

"A journalist accompanying me picked up three incendiary bombs, all German, and dated 1936. Everyone in the town knows that a number of women and children were trapped in bomb refuges. People obviously do not enter bomb refuges when Reds are burning their houses above them.

"I entered a church which was burning fiercely. It had a hole in the roof where a bomb had entered. A priest was helping to evacuate the poor who had taken refuge there. He forgot to tell me that anarchists had wrecked the church from that peculiar angle.

"The houses were not burnt like those I saw at Irun, but were shattered through the roofs and walls. Next day I visited the ruined hospital, which was surrounded by bomb holes, and saw 40 dead, mostly women, who had been killed not by petrol, but by bomb wounds.

"When the insurgents led journalists on a conducted tour they may have filled in the bombholes and even obligingly provided a smell of petrol, but the fact remains that General Franco's aeroplanes burnt Guernica.' The Basques will never forget."