Civilian Bombing and Civil Defence in the Spanish Civil War

This book explores the impact of the bombing of civilians during the Spanish Civil War. The Civil War has long been recognized as bringing together the political, social and other elements key to understanding the 1930s in Europe and later, the Second World War. It was a conflict involving fascism, communism, anarchism and other movements of the day, and led to a dictatorship that kept Spain separate from the rest of Europe until the late 1970s. Recent scholarship on the Civil War has focused on the deaths of 200,000 civilians in the conflict, largely as a result of executions, a number that equals and perhaps surpasses the number of those killed in battle. This effectively recasts the conflict as one that is better thought of as a systematic attack against civilians, rather than as a traditional military conflict. What is missing from this new understanding of the Civil War is an analysis of the impact of bombing. The infamous bombing of civilians in the Basque town of Guernica is widely known but, in reality, the bombardment of civilians was a regular feature of the conflict, including in both Madrid and Barcelona. This book therefore provides a study of the war against civilians from the air, civilian responses to these attacks, and the contemporary memory of this part of the Civil War.