Ian Patterson (1)
Teoksen Guernica and Total War tekijä
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Patterson’s focus is evident from the start, as he begins not with the bombing of the town but with how it was initially covered by the media of the time. This approach serves to demonstrate how the meaning of the event was contested from the start, as both the Republican and Nationalist sides in the Spanish Civil War present it as an example of their opponents’ barbarity. Charged with launching the attack, the Nationalists denied any responsibility and instead accused the Republicans of attacking the village in an effort to galvanize public opinion against General Franco’s forces. The images of the destroyed town, though, quickly took on a larger meaning, as they served as visual embodiments of the new type of war, one in which civilians suffered as well as combatants.
From here Patterson brings in the larger context of the literature of the times about war, particularly war from the air. The limited use of air power against cities during the First World War created awareness of the threat, while the advances in technology and the warnings of experts served to magnify it. This anxiety was a consequence of the emergent concept of total war, where whole societies were now targeted by enemy forces as a means of waging war. Though the fears of the 1930s proved exaggerated in some respects, Guernica’s fate was indeed one that would soon be inflicted on an increasingly escalating scale upon Rotterdam, London, Hamburg, Dresden, Tokyo, Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and others, all of which helped to cement Guernica’s status as a harbinger for the decades that followed.
Short yet enlightening, Patterson’s book is a thoughtful examination of the bombing of Guernica and the broader meaning it held for his age. While his definition of total war (which he limits to the use of air power to effect destruction) is rather narrow, his book nonetheless serves to illustrate how closely we have come to associating the concept with the devastation brought by the bombing of cities. This is a work that should be read not just by people seeking to learn about Guernica’s destruction, but also by anyone interested in modern warfare and its impact on Western thought in the modern age.… (lisätietoja)