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Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781497658745 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2014 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 319 |
| File size: | 7 MB |
About the Author
Gordon Thomas is a political and investigative journalist and the author of fifty-three books, published in more than thirty countries and in dozens of languages. The total sales of his works exceed forty-five million copies.
He has been a widely syndicated foreign correspondent and was a writer and producer for three flagship BBC programs: Man Alive, Tomorrow’s World, and Horizon. He contributes regularly to Facta, a respected monthly Japanese news magazine. Thomas was the lead expert for a twelve-part series on international intelligence for Ian Punnett’s Coast to Coast, the most listened-to overnight radio broadcast in North America, with three million weekly listeners. He has recently appeared on Euronews (available in ten languages and three hundred million households) and Russia Today.
He has received numerous awards for his reporting, including an International Television Award and two Mark Twain Society Awards. Shipwreck won an Edgar Award.
Four of Thomas’s books—Voyage of the Damned, Ruin from the Air, The Day the Bubble Burst, and The Day Their World Ended—have been made into feature films starring such A-listers as Paul Newman, Billy Crystal, Robert Vaughn, and Jacqueline Bisset. The Day Guernica Died is currently under option.
Thomas’s most recent bestseller is Gideon’s Spies: Mossad’s Secret Warriors. Published in sixteen languages and forty countries, Gideon’s Spies is known throughout the world as the leading resource on Israeli intelligence. It was made into a major documentary for Channel 4 in Britain, which Thomas wrote and narrated, called The Spy Machine. The Observer called The Spy Machine a “clear” picture of Israeli intelligence operations, and the Times called it “impressive” and ”chilling.”
A member of the London Speaker Bureau and Macmillan Speakers, Thomas continues to grow his already-impressive platform, lecturing widely on the secret world of intelligence. He also regularly provides expert analysis on intelligence for US and European television and radio programs.
Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts are authors of four previous books, all highly successful in bookstores and book clubs, all acclaimed in the United States and abroad. The Day the World Ended and Voyage of the Damned were made into major motion pictures; Shipwreck won the Edgar Allan Poe Award in 1973; and The San Francisco Earthquake has been hailed as a major achievement of reporting and writing.
Read an Excerpt
The Day Guernica Died
By Gordon Thomas, Max Morgan-Witts
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1975 Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-WittsAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4976-5874-5
CHAPTER 1
Midnight—6:00 A.M.
•1•
Two sounds made Teresa Ortuz pause in her task. The first was dull, like a hammer blow on an anvil bedded in earth. It was artillery fire, coming closer to Guernica.
The second sound was nearer. Something alive was with her in the mortuary.
Teresa lifted her lantern. Its light barely carried to the open door at the opposite end of the morgue. Beyond, dim illumination from the main hospital building cast shadows on the flagstone courtyard outside this long, low, windowless room.
Teresa heard the footsteps of the patrolling sentry. Around her were the sheeted forms, each a dead soldier. She replaced the lantern on the floor. Then, kneeling beside a naked body still warm after its journey from the operating room, she wiped away the blood and dirt of the battlefield, closed the eyes and mouth, and folded the arms.
The only signs of violence on the body were the surgical sutures that ran from gullet to abdomen. Behind the stitches were the man's intestines, bundled back into his abdominal cavity following his death.
Teresa heard the sound again, a crunching noise.
She rose to her feet and moved toward the door, holding the lantern higher for more light. Ahead of her, something was tugging at a corpse. As she watched in horror, a huge, lean dog backed away, dragging the body outside.
Teresa screamed. The animal growled and tugged more fiercely. Hearing its teeth grind against bone, Teresa screamed again.
The sentry appeared in the doorway, raised his rifle, and shot the animal. Then he dragged it outside by its tail.
He returned and stood in the doorway. "They are getting a taste for human flesh. It is bad...."
Teresa thanked him, assured him she was no longer frightened, and went back to her work. She could sense he was still standing there, puzzled at the sight of a dark-haired nurse laying out corpses at this witching hour. She explained this was the only free time she had, and added, "It has to be done."
Teresa Ortuz was nineteen years old. This Sunday was the two hundred seventieth day of the war she had spent in the convent of the Religiosas Carmelitas de la Caridad, one of the oldest religious orders in Europe. On July 27, 1936, the barracklike convent on the northern outskirts of Guernica had been requisitioned as a military hospital.
In the convent nearly five hundred wounded were now cramped together, many close to death. To tend them were twenty nuns and as many lay nurses. Five surgeons, led by Captain Juan Cortés, the chief medical officer, operated in shifts for eighteen hours a day.
Teresa divided her time between wards and operating room, where she had been assigned to work with Captain Cortés. Theirs was not a comfortable partnership. She recognized his surgical skill but deplored his personal habits. He drank, reeked of garlic, and swore volubly. He refused to change his surgeon's apron, while insisting she be spotlessly garbed for every operation.
Twice in the past Teresa had asked Mother Augusta, the Superior in charge of the nursing staff, to switch her to another surgical team. Mother Augusta believed Teresa was one of the few nurses strong enough to manage Cortés. She explained there was no one else available to work with him and coaxed Teresa to stay with a promise to have yet another talk with the irascible surgeon.
Teresa doubted whether another of Mother Augusta's appeals would have any effect. Previous ones had produced no change in Cortés. He still worked prodigious hours, performed great surgical feats, and drove his staff mercilessly.
Most of all, Teresa was upset that Cortés was irreligious. She marveled that Mother Augusta continued to believe he would change. The Mother Superior's faith somehow strengthened Teresa's resolve eventually to become a nun.
She knew her decision to take holy vows disappointed her father. He wanted her to be, like him, a doctor. When she had told him of her ambition, he had asked her to wait a further year before embarking on the life of self-sacrifice. Secure in her belief, she had agreed to wait.
Soon afterward, the war had started and Teresa had enrolled on the hospital staff. In the nine months that followed, she had devised several self-imposed "tests," as she put it, to "prove I still had the willpower necessary to become a nun."
One of her "tests" was to give up her midnight coffee break to go to the mortuary and lay out the dead.
Teresa completed her task and returned to the main building. Its ground and two upper floors were filled with beds. The normal living space of the convent was limited to the chapel and a small wing where the nuns slept; lay staff were never allowed into this private world.
Mother Augusta once said it was "God's will" the convent had been occupied. Captain Cortés was quick to offer a more practical explanation: The building's yard-thick walls could withstand all but the most sustained ground attack. From the air, only a direct hit by a large bomb would do any real damage. But, the surgeon had warned, the red cross painted on the convent roof was no guarantee of safety. On the contrary, he pointed out, in other theaters of the war the emblem had acted as a magnet, drawing both aircraft and artillery fire.
Bolts of black cloth, originally intended for nuns' habits, were used by Mother Augusta to black out windows; only a few on the ground floor facing into the courtyard remained exposed when the cloth ran out. Screened spaces were prepared to hide ambulances discharging wounded. An overhead covering of grass laid on wire netting was rigged to camouflage surgical linen being laundered.
Each nun gave up a portion of her free time during the day to sit on the roof of the convent and scan the sky for aircraft. Others patrolled the road, ready to stop transport from approaching the building if an air raid occurred. Several ambulance drivers had been gently admonished for driving too quickly near the hospital; dust clouds from their vehicles could provoke the interest of aircraft.
Teresa had also acted as an aircraft lookout. A few days ago, she had seen tiny specks crawling over the mountains in the south, heading in the direction of Bilbao. That night she heard the port had been bombed.
Next day, following air attacks on the Basque front line, the hospital had received its first victims of incendiary bombs. All but one of the soldiers had soon died from the terrible phosphorus burns.
The sole survivor lay in a cubicle on the ground floor. His scalp was singed, his lips were seared, and a wide bandage covered his sightless eyes. His arms and chest were yellow with blisters and weals. He had been kept alive by blood and saline transfusions.
Passing the cubicle, Teresa saw that the drips had been removed. She hurried in search of Captain Cortés. He was about to begin a ward round; he preferred the nocturnal hours to pad from one bed to another, inspecting his patients. In response to her demand for an explanation, the surgeon told Teresa he had stopped the transfusions because the man was going to die anyway, and he would not waste blood on a doomed case.
Teresa was horrified. "Only God knows for sure when a person will die," she protested.
Cortés blinked and replied, "The dead do not interest me. It is then, if at all, that they become a matter for God."
Teresa returned to the cubicle. The man had died.
At that moment she despised Captain Cortés almost as much as she hated the enemy pilots who had dropped the incendiary bombs.
•2•
Thirty-five flying miles south of Guernica, across the mountains at Vitoria, Lieutenant Colonel Wolfram, Freiherr von Richthofen, was taking his usual pre-bedtime tour around the airfield. As he did so, he detected the first signs of a "bomber's sky." The air was getting drier, the breeze was just strong enough to clear smoke from a target, cloud was breaking up to provide the right mixture of cover and visibility for his pilots. Like him, the air crews had been frustrated by long periods of bad weather that kept them grounded. Some passed the time in the Vitoria brothels. Others simply drank the strong local wines and brandies.
Von Richthofen was proud of his self-control. Partly through training and partly because of his nature, he refrained from showing emotion of any kind in public. Although he had once felt physically ill when a Spanish general greeted him with a kiss on the cheek, he had successfully concealed his feeling.
The chief of staff of the Condor Legion was forty-one, almost twice the average age of his pilots. Nevertheless, in stamina and flying ability he could match the best of them. He was impressive without being tall: firm-muscled, lithe, with a hunter's swift reaction. He reminded many people of his cousin Manfred, the German flying ace killed in World War I.
Von Richthofen's blue eyes and pursed mouth came from his father; his aristocratic snub nose had been a family characteristic for four hundred years. His strong legs were developed in boyhood through constant physical exercise over the family estate in Silesia.
Even in the heat of Spain he never missed his morning pushups, running in place, bending-and-stretching exercises. And at the end of each day he walked among the airplanes he cherished almost as much as he did his wife and young son back in Germany.
Not all the aircraft were at Vitoria. Seventy miles southwest, at Burgos, were three squadrons of Junkers bombers, the new Heinkel-111s, and the workhorses of the task force, the Dornier-17s. Here, at Vitoria, were the fighters: the HE-51s, the still secret ME (BF)-109s, and four HE-23 Stuka dive bombers whose distinctive whine produced a special terror in its victims on the ground. Also dispersed around the airfield were the reconnaisance HE-70s and HE-45s. Finally, there were the Legion's two W-34s, which rose awkwardly into the air at dawn and dusk each day so that their crews could study cloud density and windspeed. The weather forecasts were based on their flights.
Recently the forecasts had turned out to be more unreliable than usual, due to the rapid weather changes over mountainous northern Spain. The pilots blamed the luckless weather crew not only for being wrong, but for actually causing the bad weather; it was a sign of the frustration everyone felt.
Now, to the north, over the mountains, the sky was light enough to silhouette the trees and the aircraft parked under and around them. Von Richthofen paused by each aircraft, listening as the breeze rustled through the wire stays. There was no doubt in his mind: The wind was from the south, a sure sign of fine weather on the way.
Well clear of the aircraft, surrounded by a high fence, was a large compound guarded by Spanish soldiers. Inside, canvas-covered irregular mounds concealed bombs and ammunition cases.
Continuing his walk, Von Richthofen strode past the tents where the fitters stored their tools. He had once surprised a group of mechanics by reciting the exact sequence they must follow in stripping down an engine. It earned him further respect—but he had never gained the affection of his officers and men. Von Richthofen was too preoccupied with results to ever achieve more than a casual relationship with those he commanded.
As a child he had amused himself by dismantling old farm machinery. While a cadet in the Prussian Army, he spent much of his time alone, digesting technical magazines. After flying with his cousin Manfred's squadron, he ended World War I with seven "kills." Some said he had shot down more enemy aircraft than he was officially credited with; that the cousin of the Red Baron allowed them to go to others to avoid any charge of nepotism.
After Berlin University, where he earned an engineering doctorate in 1929, he went into the diplomatic service. For three years he served as air attaché at the German embassy in Rome. Late in 1932 he returned home. Within months Hitler was in power.
Initially, Von Richthofen had had doubts about Hitler. Von Richthofen was, after all, an aristocrat with a title going back to the sixteenth century; he felt nothing in common with the Nazis and their beerhall manners. Finally, however, Von Richthofen came to believe Hitler would regain for Germany "her rightful place at Europe's table after the shameful diktat of Versailles."
Among those who came to power in the Nazi takeover was Hermann Göring, who had also flown in the Red Baron's squadron. The intervening years had done nothing to soften Von Richthofen's dislike of Göring, with his gaudy uniforms, his childish vanity and greed. Von Richthofen despised Göring's undisciplined drinking habits and suspected him of being a drug addict.
When they met in 1934, Göring was building the Luftwaffe in secret. Von Richthofen, motivated by patriotism, and fearing Göring "would bungle things," saw an opportunity "to be in on the ground floor of Germany's military rebirth." He accepted Göring's offer of a planning job in the new Air Ministry. He rejected Göring's suggestion he join the Nazi party. That matter was never raised again.
Von Richthofen's work behind the impressive columns of the main Defense Ministry building in Berlin involved devising secret war games to play in Bavaria. But he yearned to see whether his theories really worked.
The Spanish Civil War was to provide that opportunity.
Within days after the war began, General Franco sent a personal message to Hitler. The Führer was on his annual pilgrimage to Bayreuth for the Wagner festival. On the night of July 25, 1936, after the curtain rang down on Siegfried at 9:50 P.M., Hitler met with colleagues to consider "the Spanish question," and decided "immediately to fulfill this appeal for help." Göring was delighted: Here was the perfect opportunity to test the Luftwaffe's men and machines in action.
Lieutenant Colonel von Richthofen arrived in Spain with the Condor Legion in November and was made its chief of staff at the beginning of 1937. The early months were difficult for him. There were the Spanish to contend with; their belief in mañana made him impatient. But he was also learning how to control his bombers and fighters in a way that would serve him well—not just in Spain, but later, in World War II.
In the years ahead, Von Richthofen's reputation would outstrip that of his famous cousin, the Red Baron, and bring additional glory to a family already prominent in German military history. For he would be credited with perfecting the aerial blitzkrieg—a sudden, unexpected, devastating attack delivered with precision at thunderbolt speed. It was a tactic he would use with ruthless efficiency in France, Yugoslavia, Greece, and Crete. Later he would lead an armada of over seven hundred fighting planes to Russia, creating terror at Sevastopol, Leningrad, and Stalingrad. He would rise to the rank of field marshal, eventually joining Adolf Hitler's personal staff.
But as Von Richthofen completed his midnight inspection of Vitoria airfield, all that lay ahead. Soon he would apply his unique qualities of ambition and invention to take a major step toward his future successes: deciding the fate of the most revered town in northern Spain.
•3•
At 1:30 A.M. an ambulance arrived at Guernica's Carmelite Convent. It carried corpses. Teresa Ortuz overheard Captain Cortés tell the driver he should be shot for wasting fuel to transport the dead. The surgeon glanced at the bodies and walked past Teresa into the hospital.
An orderly emerged and helped the ambulance driver unload the bodies. Teresa concluded that they had been dead for some time: Rigor mortis had passed and the muscles were again relaxed. She hoped death had been instantaneous.
Teresa returned inside to the sterilization room, where Cortés was checking the record book she was detailed to keep. The last entry, for Saturday, April 24, showed that twenty-two major operations had been performed and six patients had died. Cortés remarked it was "about average."
Icily, Teresa asked if he were referring to the number of operations or the dead. Cortés laughed, then closed the book and left the room.
Teresa realized she had touched a weak spot—Cortés did not like to be reminded that any of his patients died.
Since childhood she had witnessed how patients respected her father. He was a venerated figure, accorded the same status as a priest. In turn, her father had lived up to his image. Cortés, however, seemed to her to relish his own intemperate behavior: "He enjoyed shocking people," she later said.
Teresa had come to the conclusion that the only way for her to survive professionally in Cortés's company was to stand up to him. His response had shown her it was the right policy, for she had also recognized something else: "Captain Cortés could show a perverse delight in being challenged."
Now Teresa made her nightly check of the sterilization room, ensuring everything was ready for another eighteen hours of surgery, due to begin at 6:00 A.M. The poupinelle, a copper sterilizer the French had sent, was loaded with surgical instruments. She moved around the room, reflecting that its contents showed the international involvement in the war—despite the Nonintervention Pact.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Day Guernica Died by Gordon Thomas, Max Morgan-Witts. Copyright © 1975 Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan-Witts. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Contents
- Illustrations
- Personae
- Prologue
- Sunday, April 25, 1937
- Midnight—6:00 A.M.
- 6:00 A.M.–Noon
- Noon-6:00 P.M.
- 6:00 P.M.—Midnight
- Monday, April 26, 1937
- Midnight–6:00 A.M.
- 6:00 A.M.–Noon
- Noon–6:00 P.M.
- 6:00 P.M.–Midnight
- Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Appendixes
- Bibliography
- Index
- Copyright
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