Getafe and the Manufacturing of an Atrocity

On the last day of October 1936, in the police mortuary of Madrid, someone photographed the bodies of children killed in the previous afternoon’s air raid and fixed a number, name and address to each corpse. Tag 4-21-35 is María Santiago, of No. 6 Calle de la Paloma. Two boys named Blanco, Blas and Teodoro, shared an address at No. 26 Calle del Humilladero; three more children lived within a few doors of one another in the Calle del Amparo. These are the narrow streets of old Madrid just south of the Plaza Mayor, overcrowded that autumn with refugees from the advancing front. “The children were nearly all wearing coats or warm clothing,” Robert Stradling observes, “and had obviously been playing in the street.” Within days the photographs had begun to travel. On the evening of 4 November a messenger laid the portfolio on the desk of Mikhail Koltsov, senior editor of Pravda and Stalin’s personal emissary in Madrid, who recorded the moment in his diary:

Today alone there have been a further four aerial bombardments. Many children have died. Twenty photographs have just been brought in and placed on my table. They are large and beautiful photographs of children who appear like dolls. They are broken dolls, with great black holes in their faces, in their necks and around their ears. If these black holes of death were not present, the children would seem to be alive. Some of them even have their eyes wide open, as if in surprise.

Three days later, with the government preparing to abandon the capital for Valencia, the head of the foreign press bureau, Luis Rubio Hidalgo, was burning his files, and the portfolio of photographs lay on his desk awaiting its turn for the grate. His subordinate, the censor Arturo Barea—realizing their propaganda value—asked to take it, hid it under his bed, and on 9 November handed it to the Communist Party. On 11 November the London Daily Worker printed the faces beneath an account of “What Happened” at Getafe, a town on the southern approaches to Madrid, “when death fell among 100 schoolchildren, playing in a sunlit street”: three of “Franco’s Nazi Junker planes” had flown over, dropped a bomb on the street where the children played, and “That bomb killed 72 schoolchildren.” That month the Republic’s new Ministry of Propaganda set the face of María Santiago, cropped to a morbid death-mask, beneath a sky full of German bombers, and printed under it the words “If You Tolerate This – Your Children Will Be Next.” On the night of the raid, the British chargé d’affaires had cabled London that “In Getafe about thirty small children were killed or horribly maimed,” and Anthony Eden had portentously scrawled across the telegram, “Can we do anything now with Franco’s people?”

These are just a few examples among the twenty-eight published accounts of the massacre tabulated in Robert Stradling’s Your Children Will Be Next, in which the aircraft number one, three, six or more, and the dead children twelve, twenty-five, sixty and, at the outer limit, 363—almost certainly because, as Stradling, Emeritus Professor of History at Cardiff and a Hispanist of long standing, argues in his preface, the incident at Getafe “never possessed empirical reality.” The Republican government, he explains, presented the deaths as a deliberate atrocity “at Getafe, a small town lying about ten miles to the south of the actual site of the children’s deaths.” Take, for instance, the shifting casualty figures and locations given by two prominent papers: The Times, whose correspondent first seemed to have witnessed the raid and then quietly withdrew from the scene, gave “73 dead and 175 wounded”; and the Daily Mail placed seventy dead in a sunlit street of “the ‘Croydon’ of Madrid.” Hugh Thomas recorded the figure of sixty children in the first edition of his standard history in 1961, and a Catalan monograph repeated it as recently as 2003. The scene, Stradling speculates, shifts between street, school and hospital, because, as he puts it, “a school, or a hospital, places which resonate an almost tangible discourse of communal goodness and peace, have a higher impact margin than any old shop or square or street.”

Stradling’s revisionist conclusion is not that the children were invented: “The real tragedy remains that Koltsov’s children were killed, probably on 30 October, almost certainly by enemy bombs, which were very likely dropped from Junker aircraft crewed by German or Spanish Nationalist personnel.” He disputes where they died, and what was done with their deaths afterwards. The book’s own argument can be put briefly: “Getafe” was what he calls a “composite” of an atrocity manufactured for export by the Republic’s propagandists and their Soviet advisers, and its success did more than any single fact to persuade the democracies that only one side in Spain bombed civilians.

The concern with historical myth remains relevant to a Spain that passed its Law of Historical Memory in 2007, overturning the tacit “pact of forgetting” of the transition, and whose Democratic Memory Law of 2022 widened the state’s role in how the war is remembered. This makes Stradling’s deconsecration of a historiographical reliquary all the more relevant. To this effect, Stradling throws a jibe or two at the ideological axioms of the generation of new historians in Spain and questions their biases, noting how carefully they excise the bombings carried out by the sanctified Republic, or by and large any massacre on its side, from the historical record. Stradling’s core contribution is a detailed forensic examination of the alleged atrocity at the heart of the myth. He reconstructs the military context of the Nationalist advance, the available aircraft and targeting practices of the period, contemporary press reports, official Republican statements, and subsequent historiography. Stradling subjects Republican claims to the scrutiny typical of careful military and political history: What precisely was bombed? How many children really died? Was the attack intentional terror bombing or the tragic byproduct of operations against military or logistical targets near a suburban town? How did the story travel through the international press, and how was it amplified or simplified for propaganda effect? What Stradling undertakes over some 260 pages is the unmasking of a particularly vital constructed myth, which opens the door for all others of its kind to be struck at the root.

What makes the book so engrossing, beyond this forensic precision, is the professor’s cultural nous. The enduring legacy of Getafe—and Guernica—alongside the visceral reaction to death from machines above, is not just evoked through references to the Blitz, Dresden, Vietnam and Lebanon in 2006; Stradling effortlessly weaves in references to Guillermo del Toro’s film El Espinazo del Diablo, “Spanish Bombs” by The Clash, and “If You Tolerate This Your Children Will Be Next” by the Manic Street Preachers, Welsh rockers of radical socialist orientation. Much attention is given to how the reappropriation and reinforcement of propaganda molds what becomes consensus, and then belief, in public memory. Indeed, the centerpiece around which the historical investigation revolves is the famous poster of a dead child with a numbered tag, allegedly killed by Fascist barbarians. As early as the spring of 1937, the poster appeared on a pamphlet circulated by the British Labour Party, one of many versions—but, curiously, no version of the poster, Stradling notes, ever carried the name of Getafe. Much of the book concerns how such images are reworked and reinforced until they become first elite consensus and then widespread belief.

Stradling begins, as a forensic historian should, with the place. In July 1936 Getafe was a town of some eight thousand people that lived largely by the airplane: an aviation school since 1913, a propeller factory since 1915, the works of Construcciones Aeronáuticas, and a new military aerodrome opened in 1935. Its first battle of the war was fought on 19 July, when an artillery battery that had declared for the rising shelled the airfield and was silenced within hours by the airfield’s own planes. The revolution that followed burned the churches and shot at least fifty-five “fascists” over four months; nineteen prisoners were murdered on a single day, 7 October, after raids on the airfield had killed civilians in the town. On 29 October the Republic launched its first counter-offensive of the war from positions around Getafe, with Soviet tanks and the communist Fifth Regiment under Enrique Líster. By the next day it had failed, and as Líster’s men fell back the Nationalist command sent “all available Junkers and Savoias” to “plaster the airbase at Getafe.”

This same process of selective historical memory is thrown into sharp relief by cases that invert the familiar narrative. Oviedo is in many senses shown to be the anti-Getafe: the population of the city at the heart of Asturias—a province whose miners had risen in open revolution in 1934—gradually came to sympathize with the Nationalist garrison, defending it under the repeated bombardments of the Republican air force. The Asturian capital was held for the rising by about a thousand defenders and besieged, in effect, for more than a year by Asturian miners, the most implacable opponents of the military in Spain, who shelled and bombed it from the surrounding heights while most of its seventy thousand civilians lived in cellars. The American reporter Webb Miller, who reached the city with the relief column, described its children playing a game they called “bombing”: one boy lay on the ground while another held half a brick above him and let it fall, the excitement lying “in rolling over before the brick hit him.” Stradling remarks in a footnote that no general history of the war in English that he has seen, Hugh Thomas’s and Antony Beevor’s among them, mentions the aerial bombardment of Oviedo at all.

Another example is Córdoba, bombed repeatedly from a Republican airstrip at Conquista some twenty kilometers away; by the end of the summer, before any comparable Nationalist operation, some fifteen children had died there among a total of around eighty. The Republican press celebrated these raids openly. On 1 August Mundo Obrero announced that “the bombings of Cádiz and Palma have sown panic”; after the first enemy raid on Madrid, another Republican newspaper dismissed the rebel airmen as “men of morbid disease and inferior mentality” on the same front page that boasted of eighty-five bombs dropped on Oviedo.

Spanish Morocco was one of the very first places where the military uprising broke out, and it served as the launching pad for the entry of General Francisco Franco’s battle-hardened Army of Africa into the conflict. Before the first full day of the war was out, a sortie from Seville had bombed the rebel headquarters at Tetuán, but it damaged no military targets and killed a dozen people in the crowded souk, an act that turned local Arab leaders towards full-throated support for Franco’s uprising.

Why have Republican atrocities in all these places remained obscure? Stradling highlights an informative letter of 1938 from Cardinal Hinsley, Archbishop of Westminster, written in response to Catholic members of the Labour Party who had protested the Church’s silence over Nationalist raids. Hinsley answered from the Republic’s own newspaper of record: “For eighteen months towns in Nationalist territory have been repeatedly bombed by Government forces. The authority I quote for this is the Barcelona Government organ La Vanguardia.” He added that Oviedo had been attacked from the air on no fewer than 208 occasions. Such evidence, Stradling observes, made no lasting impression on the public narrative, because “Unquestioning faith in the integrity of the Republican cause – perhaps above all on the matter of war crimes – was an instinctual element in the ambience of the vast majority of people in the democracies who were sucked into the emotional and intellectual vortex of ‘Spain’.”

That faith was sustained in part by the continued activity—and later the lingering mythology—of the Republican air force itself. Republican raids on Valladolid continued as late as January 1938, and in July of that year Juan Negrín’s cabinet discussed reprisal bombings of Italian cities. After the Popular Front’s victory in the elections of February 1936, the aeronautical director, Miguel Núñez de Prado, anticipating an uprising, had concentrated the best aircraft in the vicinity of Madrid. This paid off, as the majority of air force officers rallied to the Republic; at Tetuán in Spanish Africa the airmen were the only component of the military to oppose the uprising. As much as 80 percent of the air fleet remained in the hands of the Republic, and deliveries of planes, often bombers from France, exceeded the overall supply of planes to the Nationalists until 1938. On 23 July, the day after Franco petitioned Hitler for transport planes, the Republic asked France for thirty bombers and accompanying munitions. For all its superiority in numbers, the ineffectiveness of La Gloriosa was made clear in its inability to stop the airlift of Franco’s Army of Africa into Andalusia by German Junkers and Italian Savoia-Marchettis, and in its failure to check the Nationalist advance on Madrid.

Yet Stradling refrains from partisanship. He freely admits that Franco began to use aerial bombardment as a tactic of fear once the balance in the air began to equalize, as the Nationalists approached Madrid in late 1936: “it becomes difficult to avoid the conclusion that deliberate terrorism against civilians had indeed become part of the Nationalists’ tactical equation.” One also finds multiple instances throughout the work where shabby Nationalist attempts to deflect or retort are found wholly in thrall to the opposite narrative, demonstrating its vitality. Constant reference is also made to the Italian bombardment of Catalonia and the Levante directed from Majorca. He calls the Italian raids on Barcelona in March 1938 “arguably Italian fascism’s worst-ever war atrocity,” but notes that Franco was appalled by them, and that Pius XI publicly rebuked Franco over the raids. Mussolini had his own reasons: putting into practice the doctrine of Giulio Douhet to impress his new German partners and to shake off the perceived image of Italians as “lute-players.” But even so, the hypocrisy of the media response is pointed out. Dino Grandi, Mussolini’s ambassador in London, said as much sardonically at a meeting of the Non-Intervention Committee about Soviet propaganda: “On reading the Soviet statements one really wonders whether the Spanish civil war is not after all a strife between the men under General Franco and the women and children that Soviet Russia has taken under her motherly wing.” The truth, to which Stradling resolutely holds, is that both sides, in his paraphrase of Orwell, continued “to drop bombs on each other’s mothers.”

Nowhere is the machinery of that one-sided myth-making laid bare more starkly than in the section on Arthur Koestler and the propaganda school of Münzenberg in Chapter 8. Willi Münzenberg, the Comintern’s impresario in Paris, set the tone when Koestler handed him a first draft on Nationalist atrocities: “Too weak. Too objective. Hit them! Hit them hard! Tell the world how they run over their prisoners with tanks, how they pour petrol over them and burn them alive. Make the world gasp with horror.” Koestler accordingly obliged. His Spanish Testament, published by the Left Book Club and sold in more than a hundred thousand copies in Britain alone, opens its account of 30 October with children playing in the Plaza del Progreso, an infants’ crèche destroyed, and the sentence “In the streets of Getafe sixty children lay dead, blown to pieces.” Koestler is shown to be the most effective propagandist at the Comintern’s disposal, adapting the creed of Münzenberg and Otto Katz “that any lie, however extreme or absurd, was justified in the struggle against Fascism and counter-revolution.” Stradling traces how the Hungarian émigré’s concoctions and adaptations of the Getafe story circulated widely in the democracies and made their way into the creative allusions of a largely left-leaning intelligentsia, John Steinbeck’s reportage on the dust-bowl migrants among them. But Stradling does not make Koestler a villain; he calls him “an extravagantly gifted polymath... a man endowed with both moral and physical courage.”

Likewise Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, who refused to fly for either side and spoke of the ethical equivalence of both, could not resist describing Christian aviators turning “Barcelona into a bonfire in which women and children burn.” This speaks to something larger that perforated into the culture than the mere suborning of journalism in the liberal nations to Soviet atrocity pornography. It is worth mentioning, beyond the scope of this work, that Koestler and many ex-communists like him later offered their services and talents to the United States and to the CIA front, the Congress for Cultural Freedom, to counter the apparatus of Soviet cultural influence that he had done so much to build. Both Koestler’s Spanish Testament and Darkness at Noon continue to enjoy resounding popularity, replete as the culture is with the moral vocabulary of anti-fascism.

The French journalist Louis Delaprée, a covert communist writing for the center-right Paris-Soir, specialized in what Stradling calls “prose-pictures of dead or dying children,” and sent home evidence of Nationalist gas attacks on Madrid that, the book flatly states, never took place. When he discovered that his editor had cut or spiked most of his dispatches, he wired to accuse him of finding “the massacre of a hundred Spanish children less interesting than Mrs Simpson’s sigh,” and boarded a plane for Paris. A fighter—most likely Republican—attacked it, and Delaprée died of his wounds; his death was presented as murder by fascist airmen. The photographs themselves went by post to the sympathetic and the undecided. Virginia Woolf, who received them, wrote in Three Guineas that “The Spanish Government sends [the photographs] with patient pertinacity about twice a week.” She described them to her nephew Julian Bell in the hope of deterring him from Spain; he went, and was killed by a bomb at Brunete. “Perhaps,” Stradling sarcastically remarks, “Bell was the only verifiable victim of ‘Getafe’.”

The later chapters turn from the press to the image, to the making of the atrocity exhibition as an art form unto itself, and to the input of the art professors of the Prado in Republican propaganda. The Pietà, the mother holding her dead son, became one of the Republic’s commonest motifs, and Stradling notes that “no-one has commented the paradox of an explicitly anti-Catholic regime resorting to a stratagem so obviously aimed at evoking quasi-religious passions.” Picasso’s incorporation of the Pietà into his iconic Guernica, and the popularity of the poster as an art form in its own right, are shown to belong to the same visual grammar: the dead child, the grieving mother, the body laid out for public beholding. Divine sorrow is turned into secular tragedy. Guernica, the event, thus enters the picture as the prime archetype of aerial holocaust. The motif that Stradling follows is the paradoxical reappropriation of an enduring religious image, the lachrymose Virgin, for the ends of a viciously anti-religious regime.

There was also a concomitant running theme of the Fascist barbarian despoiling cultural monuments in atavistic rage. Through what the Prado’s professional eye helped to stage and circulate as exhibition and poster, Guernica became Getafe: “the abundant atrocity material presented tendentiously to the world six months earlier by the designers and disseminators of ‘Getafe’ (and similar ‘events’),” he writes, “became by osmosis a post-validated species of truth.”

The poetry of Norman Rosten, Stephen Spender and George Barker, which takes up these themes, testifies to their dispersion. The 1945 Hollywood adaptation of Graham Greene’s The Confidential Agent is highlighted as an example of the transfer of this art to the silver screen, its Spanish Republican hero closing on a line Greene never wrote, “One day, I know, we must win,” as the final push of the great anti-fascist crusade was under way. The movie also carries the running theme of “If you tolerate this, your children will be next.” The pattern holds to the present, in which the bombing of civilians “is invariably linked to the role of Nazi Germany, thus highlighting Franco’s alliance with Hitler, which in turn tends to implicate the Nationalist side in the supreme atrocity of the Jewish Holocaust.” Stradling points out that the Condor Legion took no part in the Madrid campaign at all, though accounts of the war long credited it with leading the assault.

Meanwhile the original story was quietly airbrushed out of the record. After 1936 the name of Getafe all but vanished from Republican publicity. The government’s own tally of bombed children, submitted to the League of Nations, does not mention it. By July 1937, when the Party had a new use for the dead, a communist magazine in London explained that on 30 October bombs had been thrown from buildings onto women queuing for milk, and that “upon investigation, it was found that no-one had seen or heard a single plane over Madrid at the time.” The enemy was now the fifth column, and the campaign against the POUM required it. Stradling’s final judgment on the poster is accordingly divided. In none of its versions does it name Getafe, and its subject “was (almost) certainly killed by a Nationalist bomb”; its prophecy that the children of those who looked at it would be next proved true. Yet “when María Santiago was reborn in The Poster, Spanish children were also being bombed from the air by the very side which was demanding salvation.”

The remedy for a false memory is not a rival memory but a truer one, and Stradling has done more than most to provide it. As the battle for memory continues in Spain, a battle which is shaping up to be existential, the book answers a pivotal problem on understanding of historical time: that collective memory is never simply the recovery of the past but continuous negotiation between the accumulated weight of experience and the expectations projected onto it by rival horizons of expectation. When the past is released from its function as an instrument for the present, it becomes again a field of open judgement.