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  • Guernica and Total War
  • Leo Mellor
Guernica and Total War. Ian Patterson . Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; London: Profile Books, 2007. Pp. 199. $22.95; £15.99 (cloth).

In Hangover Square, Patrick Hamilton's great novel of quasi-somnambulistic self-loathing, murder, and love of cats, the sunny calm of London in the summer of 1939 contains a bleak and inescapable teleology. For as the post-Munich antihero par excellence, George Harvey Bone, notes to himself it was: "Fine, fine, fine . . . . Blue and sunshine everywhere . . . . You could hardly believe it would ever break, that the bombs had to fall."1 That "had to" mattered to Hamilton, as it did to many other writers. The seeming inevitability of destruction from the air marked culture—and with good reason; for it was a decade where the image of the bomber, the "Junker angel in the sky" (166) as the poet George Barker put it, dominated conceptions of what war would mean and what vulnerability might be.

Ian Patterson's Guernica and Total War addresses such concepts: it is a short, significant, and troubling work. It is not a study of Picasso's painting or merely a way of marking the anniversary. Rather it calibrates how the shock waves that traveled out from the attack on the Basque town of Guernica in 1937 impacted on European culture; and it explores how fears of bombing altered what was written, how it was written, and how it was read.

Beginning with the attack by the Luftwaffe's Condor Legion on 26 April 1937 the first chapter details the event, and how the story was subsequently altered, spun and rewritten. T. S. Eliot was at his most disdainful, repeating the claim in the Tablet (a British Catholic newspaper) that the most likely perpetrators were: "the Basque's own allies, their shady [i.e. Anarchist] friends in Catalonia" (37). But as the evidence of the German attack mounted—notably in the reports by G. L. Steer for the Times—Guernica became a potent symbol of military aggression, the lie of non-intervention in the Spanish civil war, and—most terrifyingly—civilian vulnerability. As Patterson argues: "It was the first time that a completely unmilitarised, undefended, ordinary civilian town in Europe had been subjected to this sort of devastating attack from the air" (17).

The second chapter, "Civilisation and its Discontents," tours interwar culture; where a love of "airmindedness" in air races, trophies, and pilots-as-heroes was intermeshed with the fear of aerial attack. This was a fear that in Britain grew from memories of the Zeppelin raids in the First World War; but it also fed off continual fictional extrapolations, from H. G. Wells onwards, of the destruction that gas, bombs, or heat-rays could bring to cities lying open under the sky. Here Patterson weaves together anecdote, reportage, and numerous texts. He moves from a reading of Stanley Baldwin's speech, contextualizing the phrase "the bomber will always get through," to Auden and Isherwood watching attacks in China; and from Giulio Douhet to close analysis of poetical "raids on the inarticulate" (132). There are some frightening shards: Le Corbusier's 1935 text Aircraft theorizes the architect's view moving from birds-eye to bombsight: "The airplane eye reveals a spectacle of collapse . . . . Cities must be extricated from their misery come what may. Whole quarters of them must be destroyed and new cities built" (117).

Guernica is itself illustrated with some choice visions. The demi-chivalric jocularity of Sidney Riesenberg's drawing of a First World War airman, leaning from his open cockpit and trying to bowl a small grenade at a Zeppelin, is particularly memorable (85). But so too is the illustrated guide to 1930s dust jackets with their various visual codes for future air bombardment:

Menace [1935] uses the analogy with the eagle; C. R. W. Nevinson's painting [for Exodus A. D., 1934] emphasises the vast and monstrous nature of the threat; the design for Invasion from the Air [1934] stresses the threat to democracy, and recalls the searchlights of the First World War; and Macleish's post-Guernica radio play [Air Raid, 1938] has a purely stylised image of bombers...

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