Talk:George Steer
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(Cut n paste from the Reference desk, in hopes it may prove useful (Wetman 04:19, 21 May 2007 (UTC))
This site has a little more info than our George Steer article, including his first dispatch about the bombing.--killing sparrows (chirp!) 18:29, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
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- The Times Online also has this, which appears to be more complete.--killing sparrows (chirp!) 18:39, 19 May 2007 (UTC)
Besides the Guernica article, which appeared in The Times and The New York Times on 28 April 1937, you might care to look for Steer's book The Tree of Gernika: A Field Study in Modern War, originally published in early 1938. Soon after it was published Martha Gellhorn wrote to Eleanor Roosevelt, saying; You must read a book by a man named Steer; it is called the Tree of Gernika. It is about the fight of the Basques-he's a London Times man-and no better book has come out of the war and he says well all the things I tried to say to you the times I sae you, after Spain. It is beautifully written and true, and few books are like that, and fewer still that deal with war. Please get it.
There are few journalists that have had managed to impact on modern consciousness, especially on the consciousness of war, in the manner that George Sreer managed to do. Guernica was not the first attack on an undefended town by aerial bombardment; it was not even the first such town in the Spanish Civil War to be so treated, for that dubious honour belongs to Durango, which was destroyed in March, 1937. But Steer's eye-witness report on Guernica did much to alert the world that it stood on the verge of a new type of warfare, a warfare in which civilians were not incidental but deliberate targets; In the form of its execution and the scale of the destruction it wrought, no less than in the selection of its objective, the raid on Guernica is unparalleled in military history. Guernica was not a military objective. A factory producing war material lay outside the town and was untouched. So were the two barracks some distance from the town. The town lay far behind the lines. The object of the bombardment was seemingly the demorilisation of the civil population and the destruction of the cradle of the Basque race.
As a result of Steer's report the attack was condemned across the world. On 29 April it was reproduced in L'Humanité, the daily paper of the French Communist Party, where it was read by Pablo Picasso. He was in France working on a commission for the government of the Spanish Republic for the Paris Exhibition, scheduled to take place that summer. He at once abandoned his work in progress, and started on Guernica, now among one of the most famous depictions of suffering in war ever painted.
Interestingly, Steer's description of the attack also had an impact in the Fascist camp. Realising that a propaganda coup had been handed to the enemy, denials were immediately issued that the attack had ever happened, even though General Emilio Mola had issued warnings of wholesale destruction at the beginning of the Basque campaign, if surrender was not immediate. Luis Bolín, head of the Francoist foreign press bureau, spread stories that Guernica had been dynamited by the Basques themselves. In Germany, Steer's newspaper came under attack from Nazi propagandists, who announced that 'Times' spelt backwards was 'Semit', proof that it was part of a Jewish-Marxist conspiracy. Steer himself was later placed on a Gestapo Special Wanted List of 2,820 people to be detained in the event of a successful German invasion of England in 1940.
Steer's politics, though, were not Marxist; rather he was attracted by the struggle of small nations fighting against huge odds. Later, during the Second World War, his reports from Finland on the course of the Winter War drew parallels between Russian actions and what the Condor Legion had done in Euskadi. For his work in Spain he had been given a gold watch by José Antonio de Aguirre, the Basque President, inscribed 'To Steer from the Basque Republic.' It was found beside him the day he died. Clio the Muse 00:29, 20 May 2007 (UTC)
