November is Aviation History Month

On December 17, 1903, a plane flew 120 feet near Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. The flight was the world's first powered flight, and it marked the culmination of years of intense research by the Wright brothers.

On April 26, 1937, a much darker experiment in aviation took place in the Spanish town of Guernica. What was it?

In the World Conflicts Today report on the Basque country, you can read about Spain's civil war, which pitted defenders of Spain's democratic republic against fascist rebels. In the belief that the continuation of democratic rule would give them the greatest chance of achieving independence, most of Spain's Basque population fought against the fascists. The fascist armies, under the command of General Francisco Franco, made the Basques pay a terrible price for this choice.

Some of the most intense Basque suffering is described here in this excerpt from World Conflicts Today:

• Late in the afternoon of Monday, April 26, 1937, German fighter planes from the Condor Legion dropped bombs on a crowded marketplace in the small Basque town of Guernica.
  
  
• The attacks occurred on a market day, when the town center was full of peasants selling their produce. In fact, it was extra full because of all the refugees who had come to Guernica from Durango and other bombed-out Basque towns. Because the Basque forces possessed no anti-aircraft fire, the German planes could fly very low. This allowed them to guide their bombs with precision and then swoop in to shoot survivors of the blasts.
  
  
• Late in the evening, buildings were still burning, and corpses lay in puddles of blood. The next day, survivors sorted through the rubble and buried their dead.

The planes that bombed Guernica and the pilots that flew them were German. Germany's leader, Adolph Hitler, had ordered the attack in part because he wanted to drive what he regarded as a Communist Spanish government out of office, but probably even more importantly because he saw the attack as an opportunity to test out the capabilities of the German air force's new war planes. In a very literal sense, then, the bombing of Guernica during the Spanish civil war served as a dress rehearsal for the bombing of London and other European cities during World War II.

The great Spanish painter Pablo Picasso commemorated the awful event in his masterpiece, Guernica. Eleven feet tall and 23 feet wide, Picasso's black and white painting depicts the terrible suffering of both humans and animals, while documenting one of the darkest phases in aviation history.

Find a large replica of Picasso's Guernica, and show it to your students.

Have them discuss or write answers to the following essential questions for critical thinking:

1. How does Picasso use animal and human elements to suggest the destructive power of technological advances?
   
   
2. How does Guernica, a highly non-representational piece of art, capture some of the power of a newspaper photograph?
   
   
3. When asked about the meaning of Guernica, Picasso said it was "not my idea to give this meaning." What does it mean to say that a painting has meaning, and how--in the absence of guidance from the artist--should that meaning be determined?