Both governments and publics in Britain and France were gripped by a generic dread of mass air attacks on cities, and governments misread the size and nature of the German Luftwaffe, taking at face value Hitler’s announcement in 1935 that Germany already had air parity with Britain. They saw in war with Germany immediate and massive air attacks on London and Paris. The dread of air attack stemmed from a belief that strategic bombardment was irresistible and that its potential effects could include rapid disintegration of the political and social order. In 1932 British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin had famously declared: "There is no power on earth that can protect [its people] from being bombed. . . . The bombers will always get through. The only defense is in offense, which means that you have to kill more women and children than the enemy if you want to save yourselves." Baldwin’s view was certainly the starting point for British and American air power advocates from the early 1920s onward. They believed that air power, not armies and navies, would determine the outcome of future wars, and that the best defense against air attack was a good offense in the form of massive bomber forces. They rejected investment in defenses which (in the days before radar and “pursuit” aircraft that could fly as fast as bombers) they rightly regarded as futile, and they were firmly opposed to diverting air power to assist ground and naval forces.(pp. 30-31; my emphasis)

During the interwar years, public views on warfare tended to embody extremes — either a determination to avoid the topic altogether, or a tendency to articulate it in the most apocalyptic terms. Perhaps this should be unsurprising in the aftermath of the unremittingly grim experience of World War I, but its effect was to leave little room for rigorous or considered analysis. Dark forebodings in the realm of popular culture resulted in a flurry of books addressing the apocalyptic side of the spectrum: The Poison War, The Black Death, Menace, Empty Victory, Invasion from the Air, War Upon Women, Chaos, Air Reprisal, and What Happened to the Corbetts. The impact of these was augmented not only by the futurist scenarios being played in the (increasingly popular) cinemas, but also by the ominous and troubling events of the 1930s, including the Japanese attack on Manchuria, the Italian attack on Abyssinia, and the Spanish Civil War.

By this time as well, the ideas of Italian air enthusiast General Giulio Douhet were becoming more widely known in English-speaking countries. Douhet's 1921 book, The Command of the Air, had painted a graphic vision of societal collapse in the face of air attack. Indeed, it was the futurist drama he conveyed rather than the analytical rigor of his ideas that gave Douhet a lasting place in the canon of air warfare. A poet, painter, playwright, and amateur novelist, Douhet brought to bear on his work "the intense modernist fascination with the latest advances in science and technology — with the automobile, with electricity, with gas, and finally with the aeroplane — prevalent in prewar Italian protofascist avantgarde culture." Though both British and American airmen had developed indigenous theories of air warfare that did not depend on Douhet — and though there is no evidence that Douhet was read widely in Britain or the United States before the 1930s — his ideas were cited thereafter and used to support apocalyptic visions of air warfare. His prose seemed to capture an important element of the mood in the West, and it seemed to capture, as well, a kind of archetypal image of the airplane as weapon. (p. 336; my emphasis in bold)

The technical aspects of the bombing of Gernika are still one of the most passionate topics of modern history. The destruction of Gernika was perpetrated by the German Condor Legion and the Italian air force, acting on the commands of Franco’s rebel army. The military tactics applied were so devastating that Gernika has gone down in history as the first experiment in total war.

The planes took off from the aerodrome at Vitoria, flew out over the sea and then performed a half-turn to follow the Oca valley and attack Guernica from North to South. Apparently there were three types of plane: Heinkel 111s and Junker 52s for bombing purposes, and Heinkel 51s for air combat and machine-gunning. They must have come in two groups working in shifts, and there is general discrepancy as to the numbers of each. We calculated that between 15 and 20 bombers and fighter planes took part in each wave of bombing. Their numbers were quite sufficient. The tactics employed were to drop ordinary shells first, and then small incendiary cluster bombs, at the same time machine-gunning any villagers who had not yet reached cover - not only in the town itself, but also in its outlying districts and also around the neighbouring parishes.

Gernika es hoy la capital mundial de la paz. A primera hora de la mañana se han reunido en el Ayuntamiento los alcaldes de varias ciudades que sufrieron bombardeos durante la II Guerra Mundial: Hiroshima (Japón), Hamburgo, Pforzheim y Desdre (Alemania), Volgogrado y Stalingrado (Rusia) y Varsovia (Polonia).

[Guernica today is the world capital of peace. At the first hour of the morning, the mayors of various cities that suffered bombing during the Second World War met in the Ayuntamiento: Hiroshima (Japan), Hamburg, Pforzheim and Dresden (Germany), Volgograd and Stalingrad (Russia) and Warsaw (Poland).]