On April 26, 1937, the Condor Legion, German Nazi support to Franquist troops during the Spanish Civil War, bombarded the historic cultural capital city of the Basque Country. The outcome of the attack on Guernica , emblematic because of its violence and regarded as the acid test for Luftwaffe´s involvement in the Second World War, was estimated at around 250 civilian deaths, with hundreds of wounded and the majority of the city buildings demolished by the fire which kept burning well until the following day. 

Though there is strong evidence showing that Franquists were accountable for such a brutal bombing, they systematically rejected any kind of involvement in the attack, denied having been in charge of operating German and Italian airplanes, and even attributed the slaughter to “reds in retreat”, and “Asturian dinamiteers”, going as far as to level accusations on Guernica´s firebrigade, for having “let their own city be burnt away ”.

However, the above arguments were refuted by firsthand eyewitnesses: standing before the tribunal which had sentenced him to death at the Nüremberg Trial, Marshal Hermann Goering explained that Guernica had only been a rehearsal: “We wanted to see the effect an aerial attack with heavy bombs followed up by a carpet raid involving incendiaries produced over the population”.

Between 13 February and 15 February, 1945, the British Royal Air Force and the USA Air Force, staged four subsequent air raids over Dresde, at the time the seventh most important city in Germany as regards population, with 642,000 inhabitants. The air agression, which was carried out eight months before the landing on Normandy and two months before the final defeat of the German Army at The Ardennes, destroyed the city almost thoroughly, causing a large number of civilian casualties which exceeded the 35,000 dead, though such figure can remarkably vary depending on the cited sources . 

Only five months earlier, on 8 September, 1944, Germany had dropped the devastating V-2 missiles over London. For some time, the British Government had tried to conceal the event by pretending the explosions had been caused by faulty gas pipes, however, due to the pressure exercised by the nazi propaganda, it was later forced to admit the real truth. The destruction contributed to raise the death toll by several zeros in a city where the constant effects of war over its population were directly being suffered since the sustained aerial attack known as the Blitz –which caused around 43,000 deaths between September 1940 and May 1941.

Also dated in the year 1940 is the bombing on Coventry , the city “sacrificed” by British Prime Minister Winston Churchil, who abstained from giving the evacuation order in spite of having been notified of an imminent attack by Intelligence Services, which had deciphered the German Enigma code: if they evacuated, their enemies would discover that the British had broken the code, and therefore that would mean the loss of advantage during the war.

Between the population and the advantage, Churchill decided upon the second option. Barely a group of children were taken out of the city with the excuse of going on a holiday outing.