The Spanish Civil War was, to a generation of American liberals, a matter of evil vs. good. The Falangists were evil; the Republicans were good; and there were no compromises. Hemingway tried to show that it wasn’t that stark, although his sympathies remained with the Republicans. George Orwell went into more detail. He showed the naked cynicism of the Communist elements of the Republic, but no one wanted to hear his message, and to this day most believe that his (largely unread) Homage to Catalonia condemns only Franco.
The world could never forget Guernica, and to prove it we had Pablo Picasso’s masterpiece hung in the Museum of Modern Art. Guernica was a Basque fishing village bombed by units of the Luftwaffe’s Condor Legion. The town was largely destroyed, and the incident was seen as one more illustration of the utter moral worthlessness of both Spain and Germany. Picasso’s violent painting, showing men and animals disjointed and scattered, was very effective in stirring up sympathy for the Republicans and hatred for both the Germans and Franco.
Later it came out that the town had been occupied by Republican military units, that at least part of the destruction came from the detonation of Republican munitions stored there, and there was a strong suggestion that retreating Republican engineers had dynamited other structures not damaged by the air raid. Whatever the truth of Guernica, the destruction there was not large compared to the damage sustained by Sidon, Tyre, and Beirut during the 1982 Israeli campaign, and was trivial compared to the damage done Tokyo in the fire raids, or the devastation of Hamburg and Dresden.
The story mirrors the Spanish Civil War, but in a sci-fi setting:
By the next morning two men had toes shot off and had to be evacuated.
They lay on the hill for a week. Each night they lost a few more men to minor casualties that could not possibly have been inflicted by the enemy; then Stromand had two men with foot injuries shot by a squad of military police he brought up from staff headquarters.
The injuries ceased, and the men lay sullenly in the trenches until the company was relieved.
I loved Homage to Catalonia when I read it a couple of decades back. His own side did not come out well. They looked like incompetent fanatics and nutcases as well as being vassals of Stalin.
There’s a Spanish guy who has written interesting comments to Homage to Catalonia here https://aussiesta.wordpress.com/2017/10/02/homenaje-a-cataluna/ and the Guernica painting and how it came to be made https://aussiesta.wordpress.com/2018/01/23/el-guernica-la-pieza-propagandistica-mas-famosa-de-la-historia/. They’re in Spanish but that’s what Google Translate is for, right?
There’s a hell of a lot of good stuff in the “There Will Be War”. I reread these every so often.