On 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, aircraft of the German Condor Legion and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria bombed the Basque town of Guernica on market day for more than three hours, leaving its center in ruins. In 1538 Hernando Pizarro defeated Diego de Almagro's army at Las Salinas, near Cuzco.
Market day in Gernika
On Monday 26 April 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, aircraft of the German Condor Legion and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria, fighting for Franco's Nationalists, bombed the Basque town of Gernika, Guernica in Spanish. Monday was market day, and the town was crowded with refugees and visitors as well as its own people. The raid came in waves and lasted more than three hours, from late afternoon into the evening.1
Explosive and incendiary bombs set the town center ablaze, while fighters machine-gunned people trying to escape into the fields. Most of the center was destroyed. The war in Spain is told in our article on the military history of Spain.2
Denial and the dead
George Steer's report in The Times on 28 April carried the news around the world. Franco's headquarters denied that Gernika had been bombed and claimed that retreating Basque troops had destroyed the town themselves.3
How many people died is still disputed. The Basque government recorded 1,654 dead and 889 wounded. Writers sympathetic to Franco's side later put the dead at about two hundred or fewer.4
Moved by the news, Pablo Picasso painted Guernica for the Spanish pavilion at the Paris International Exhibition of 1937.5
Battle of Las Salinas
26 April 1538 · 488 years ago
Las Salinas, 1538
On 26 April 1538, by the date Agustín de Zárate and William H. Prescott give, two Spanish armies fought at Las Salinas, the salt pits about half a league from Cuzco. Inca Garcilaso de la Vega and Pedro de Cieza de León place the battle instead on a Saturday of Lazarus in Lent, which Garcilaso gives as 6 April. Diego de Almagro and Francisco Pizarro had been partners in the conquest of Peru, but they fell out over Cuzco; Almagro seized the city and imprisoned Francisco's brothers Hernando and Gonzalo. He later set Hernando free, and Hernando led the Pizarro army against him.6
Almagro was too ill to fight, and Rodrigo Orgóñez commanded his men in the field while Almagro watched from a height. Hernando's arquebusiers fired at the raised pikes of Almagro's men and broke more than fifty of them. The battle was over in about two hours. Orgóñez was killed after he had surrendered. Between about 120 and 200 men died, most of them on Almagro's side. Almagro fled to the fortress of Cuzco and was captured there.7
Hernando had him tried and sentenced to death; Almagro was strangled in prison and his body beheaded in the main square of Cuzco. In 1541 Almagro's followers killed Francisco Pizarro in Lima. See also our article on Cajamarca.8
Also on this day
Second Battle of Nowa Wieś
26 April 1863 · 163 years ago
Near Nowa Wieś in Congress Poland, January Uprising insurgents, including a unit led by the Frenchman Leon Young de Blankenheim, attacked a Russian detachment. After a fierce fight the Russians were driven back and some crossed the border into Prussia.
In 1865, at Bennett's house near Durham's Station, North Carolina, General Joseph E. Johnston and Major General William T. Sherman signed a military convention ending all acts of war by the troops under Johnston's command. Washington had rejected their broader agreement of 18 April. Lieutenant General Ulysses S. Grant approved the new terms at Raleigh the same day. See also our article on Sherman.9
