By: HISTORY.com Editors

1937

Nazis test new air force, Luftwaffe, on Basque town of Guernica

Published: February 09, 2010Last Updated: September 17, 2026

During the Spanish Civil War, the German military tests its powerful new air force—the Luftwaffe—on the small Basque village of Guernica in northern Spain.

Although the independence-minded Basque region opposed the Nationalist forces of General Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War, Guernica itself was a small rural city of only 5,000 inhabitants that declared non-belligerence in the conflict.

With Franco’s approval, the cutting-edge German aircraft began their unprovoked bombing attack at 4:30 p.m., the busiest hour of the market day in Guernica. For three hours, German planes poured down a continuous and unopposed rain of bombs and gunfire on the town and surrounding countryside. One-third of Guernica’s 5,000 inhabitants were killed or wounded, and fires engulfed the city and burned for days.

The indiscriminate killing of civilians at Guernica aroused world opinion and became a symbol of fascist brutality. Unfortunately, by 1942, all major participants in World War II had adopted the same bombing innovations developed by the Nazis at Guernica, and by the war’s end, in 1945, millions of innocent civilians had perished under Allied and Axis air raids.

Timeline

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Discover more of the major events, famous births, notable deaths and everything else history-making that happened on April 26th

1777

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1798

Mountain man James Beckwourth is born

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1865

Lincoln assassin John Wilkes Booth dies

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1913

Murder in Atlanta pencil factory leads to lynching of Leo Frank

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1915

Allies sign Treaty of London

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1954

Geneva Conference to resolve problems in Asia begins

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1954

Polio vaccine trials begin

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1977

Studio 54 opens in New York City

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1983

Soviet leader Yuri Andropov writes letter to U.S. fifth-grader Samantha Smith

The Soviet Union releases a letter that Russian leader Yuri Andropov wrote to Samantha Smith, an American fifth-grader from Manchester, Maine, inviting her to visit his country.

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1984

President Reagan visits China

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1986

Test triggers nuclear disaster at Chernobyl

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1986

Maria Shriver marries Arnold Schwarzenegger

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2012

Former Liberian president Charles Taylor found guilty of war crimes

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