Local Government,Passive Defense and Aerial Bombardment in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War,1936–9

The infamous bombing of civilians in the Basque town of Guernica, during the Spanish Civil War, on 27 April 1937, is often recognized as the ‘first total destruction of an undefended civilian target by aerial bombardment.’ ¹ In reality, the bombardment of civilians from the air was not at all uncommon by 1937, and Xabier Irujo notes at least ‘a thousand places’ had previously been bombed from the air. ² Moreover, bombing of urban areas was a regular feature of the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939, especially in the capital Madrid and in cities along the Mediterranean coast. It is estimated some 15,000 Spaniards died as a result of air bombings during the Civil War, most civilians, and 11,000 of these Spaniards were victims of bombing from the Francoist side that rebelled against the Republican government, supported by German and Italian aviation that joined the rebellion against the Republic. ³ In Catalonia alone, some 1062 municipalities experienced aerial bombardments by the Francoist side of the civil war. ⁴ In cities across Spain, municipal and regional authorities developed detailed plans for civilian defense in response to these air campaigns. These were meant to assist communities on the ground in protecting themselves from such air bombings. In the autonomous region of Catalonia, a Junta de Defensa Pasiva de Catalunya (Catalonia Passive Defence Board) was created, accompanied by the Institut Català de Defensa Pasiva (Catalan Institute for Passive Defence, to research and develop civil defense plans. In Barcelona, the municipality similarly created the Junta Local de Defensa Passiva de Barcelona, to take the recommendations and ideas of the regional organizations and put them into practice on the ground. The Junta Local was an organization of the local government, mandated by the Generalitat of Catalonia, to organize civilian or ‘passive’ defense of the city during bombings. Its main effort was in the construction of public bomb shelters and the management of evacuations to these sites. This proactive response by the municipal government to what they recognized as a war targeting the civilian population is an important and under-studied aspect of the Spanish Civil War. This article will examine the fear and anticipation that accompanied the bombing campaign against urban areas in Spain, focus on the work of the city and the Junta Local in Barcelona, alongside efforts of the Catalan government, and also assess its role in the general mobilization of the civilian population in Barcelona during the Civil War. In sum, the work of the municipal government concerning civil defense needs to be more central in our broader understanding of the history of the Spanish Civil War.

Guernica’s bombing in April 1937 was by no means the first bombing of civilians in Spain, yet it was still hugely significant, for it represented a shift in that air raids of towns and other urban areas, with civilians as the primary targets, became more common – ‘as a way to force an enemy to surrender without begin defeated in the field.’ ⁵ What gave Guernica its power was that it came in an era of great panic about aerial bombardment of civilians, and it therefore was a ‘turning point’ in the history of terror bombing. ⁶ From the beginning, the reporting of foreign correspondents on Guernica emphasized the bombing as one where incendiary and explosive bombs were used to target civilians, followed by machine gunners in the aircraft who pursued civilians fleeing the town on foot. ⁷

There is no question that the bombing in Spain was nowhere near the level of bombings of cities that was to come in the Second World War. As Stanley Payne has noted, ‘nothing remotely’ on the scale of the war to come occurred in Spain. ⁸ However, that point should not obscure the fact that the fear of aerial bombardment of civilians was well known and widespread, and that the Great Powers of the word and their citizens were already panicked when the news of Guernica came to them. The experience of aerial bombardment in the Great War of 1914–8 shaped thinking about bombing across Europe after the conflict ended. Military strategists had thought extensively about bombing as technology improved in the interwar period. Winston Churchill, for one, advocated the use of airships for bombing on Somaliland as early as March 1914, before the start of the Great War. ⁹ The inevitability of targeting civilians arose as early as 1932, when Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin of Britain stated, ‘There is no power on earth that can protect [the civilian] from bombing, whatever people tell him. The bomber will always get through.’ ¹⁰ As Kenneth Werrell writes, this meant that from the moment the term ‘strategic bombing’ was coined, it was a given that the bombing of civilians was the ‘core’ concept. ¹¹

Working in Italy before his death in 1930, Giulio Douhet wrote his important book The Command of the Air in 1921. In it, he emphasized that the key lesson of the First World War was that any future war would be a total war marked by a completely offensive bombing campaign whose primary target was civilian morale, and thus that ‘bombing the most vital civilian centers’ to ‘spread terror through the nation’ was the purpose of an air force. ¹² Douhet was commonly read and accepted by the Italian pilots who served in Spain. ¹³ Hugh Trenchard, the Chief of the Air Staff, and later Air Marshal, of the Royal Air Force in Britain from 1919–30, agreed that civilian morale was the primary target of bombings. ¹⁴ Britain, in particular, invested in the development of technology and doctrine in bombing, planning for use in European conflicts and colonial conflicts alike. If bombing destroyed civilian morale, the war would be shorter, and therefore, more British soldiers’ lives would be saved. ¹⁵ By 1936, the Royal Air Force created Bomber Command to developed specialized strategies and expert aviators. ¹⁶

International law struggled to keep up with the technological developments and the military debates about strategic bombing. At The Hague in 1922–3, delegates in the League of Nations attempted to create some kind of international rules for bombing; in 1925, the Geneva Protocol banned the use of gas in bombings, although countries retained the right to use gas if they first had been attacked in a similar way. ¹⁷ Subsequently, the 1932–3 World Disarmament Congress debated eliminating the production of bombers, and thus limited the bombing of civilians, although with no results. ¹⁸

In Spain, the air force before the civil war was poorly developed, ill equipped, and without a consistent strategy. This continued to be the situation for the Republican Air Force in its early actions in the war, responding to Francoist attacks and defending Madrid instead of developing its own strategy. ¹⁹ Nonetheless, when the Republic sought to reorganize the air force in October 1936, it was recognized that the air war and bombing would be essential to its survival.

The outbreak of war in Spain, in July, was quickly followed, on 19 August 1936, by three Italian bombers that attacked Republican positions in Mallorca, making real the ideas and debates of those strategists and military observers described above. This was soon followed by the creation of an Italian air force base on Mallorca, designed to launch attacks on Republican territory on the mainland. In the 1930s, in Spain as in the rest of the world, a focus on air war developed within the military, despite outdated equipment, and when the Civil War broke out most of the air forces—concentrated around Madrid—remained loyal to the Republican government. ²⁰ Some of the first bombings of cities in the war came from these Republicans, against the early strongholds of the military rebels in Granada and Córdoba. Most casualties in Córdoba were civilians, and of the 127 citizens killed in the city by Republican aerial forces, most in summer 1936, only 15 had any kind of military role. ²¹

By autumn 1936, the German Condor Legion was bombing Madrid, developing a new tactic of flying in successive waves, dropping larger bombs first and then following with a payload of smaller bombs. ²² November 1936 saw large-scale and ‘indiscriminate’ bombing of the city. ²³ A writer in 1937, looking back on these first attacks, described them as ‘the West’s descent into hell.’ ²⁴ The Condor Legion has many goals in Spain, including training pilots for a future war, but also sought to destroy the enemy’s population through bombing, in an effort to demoralize the civilians supporting the Republican government at war. ²⁵ The German orders that came from the Condor Legion headquarters in Vitoria emphasized the bombing of military targets, but ‘without regard for the civilian population’. ²⁶ Terror bombing as developed by the Condor Legion used carpets bombing, not targeted attacks, as the means to deliver a crushing blow. Planes flew in tight formation to achieve saturation coverage of the bombing site. In Guernica and elsewhere, these methods were perfected, making Spain the place where the strategy of terror bombing become commonplace for the first time, and making the fear and panic of the interwar years into reality. ²⁷

The Italian air forces in Spain were even more direct, stressing the importance of bombing cities and urban populations to force a quicker surrender. ²⁸ Continued dispatch of fighter and bomber planes from Italy quickly put the Nationalist forces in a superior aerial position, despite the fact that most of the Air Force of Spain remained loyal to the Republic. ²⁹ Incidents such as the bombing of Getafe and other towns near Madrid in the last week of October 1936 where widely reported in the press, before the Nationalists entered on 4 November 1936. ³⁰ One of the journalists in Madrid, Frenchman Louis Delaprée, wrote repeatedly of the bombing of the city and surrounding areas in October and November 1936, emphasizing in his November 1936 text ‘Bombs over Madrid’ that the ‘systematic killing of the civilian population’ had begun on 16 November 1936 in the city, creating across the city sights of ‘unspeakable horror’ brought on by low-flying Nationalist planes and their ‘rain of killer meteorites’. ³¹ All of this simply underlined the fact that in Spain, the element of air power would be significant for the course of the war and, from the start, the development of aerial bombardment of civilians was to be a consistent aspect of modern warfare. By 1937, air bombings of civilian in cities were common, especially once the Francoist forces gave Italian and German aerial forces a leading role in their air war.

Barcelona was bombed 113 times by the Italians, 60 times by the German Condor Legion, and once by Nationalists themselves, leading to the deaths of some 2500 civilians. ³² Over the course of 16–18 March 1938, Italian leader Benito Mussolini ordered massive raids on Barcelona that saw 13 waves of bombers at 3-h intervals for two days. ³³ This was the most intensive bombing of Barcelona in the Civil War. Fourteen separate alarms went off in the city to inform civilians of incoming bombers. ³⁴ Italian bombers based in the Balearic Islands came to attack many notable parts of the city, such as the Gran Via, with powerful heavy bombs. By the evening of the 18^th, as the bombing came to an end and initial reports had 670 dead, 1200 injured, 48 buildings completely destroyed, and another 71 with significant damage. ³⁵ In the end, nearly 875 civilians were declared killed. ³⁶ The impact that these bombings had on the war was not a surprise; indeed, in the Municipal Gazette for the City of Barcelona, city hall reported as early as 28 September, 1936 that the need for public air shelters was clear. ³⁷ Barcelona suffered 268 deaths due to bombing in 1937 and 2160 deaths due to bombing in 1938. ³⁸ Over 1500 buildings of all types were considered completely destroyed in the May 1939 Reparations Commission report, following the end of the war. ³⁹ It has been argued that in the context of civil war, such aerial bombardment was ‘indirect’ but not ‘indiscriminate’; in other words, it was a deliberate tactic to target selected groups—in this case, Republican civilians—with violence. Those communities or neighborhoods in Barcelona with greater affiliation with the leftist side of the Republican movement were most targeted. ⁴⁰

How could the authorities, and society as a whole, respond to such incidents and work to prevent the scenes of horror so horribly described by the journalists like Delaprée who witnessed the expansion of terror bombing in Spain? The answer was the concept of ‘passive defense,’ or what is usually called civil defense in English. Passive defense was an expansive enterprise, and it included the creation of bomb shelters, warning systems, and education for citizens to best protect themselves and seek shelter in the event of a bombing raid. A great deal of emphasis was also in dealing with different types of bombings, including the use of gas, and clean up and coordination of medical and clearing and construction efforts following a bombing. The idea dates to the early part of the 1930s, when there was a noticeable growth of articles in Spain debating the most effective response to the inevitable beginning of aerial bombardment of towns and cities in war, and in particular in response to the use of Italian bombing in the Abyssinian War of 1935–6. ⁴¹ In August 1935, the Ministry of War created a National Committee on Passive Defense. ⁴² Here the emphasis from the start was at the local level, for the committee really was regional, with the Civil Governor, the regional military authorities, the Red Cross and an architect or engineer, working in communication with local mayors. ⁴³ It should be emphasized that this focus on passive defense was not just a military concern—in Toledo, a civil ‘Anti Air Aggression Association’ was founded a year earlier, in August 1934, to develop local plans for responses to aerial bombardment. ⁴⁴

Once war came, then, the ground had been prepared for communities to develop passive defense plans. In August 1936, a group of architects in Barcelona proposed constructing bomb shelters in the city. ⁴⁵ In Barcelona, the municipal government issued a statement on 21 September 1936, declaring that an aerial attack on the city was a clear ‘eventuality’ and urging residents to maintain clam, to be alert, to follow any and all instructions that might be given, to build and assist in the construction of refuges and bomb shelters. ⁴⁶ Plans to stop the movement of subways and other vehicles at the beginning of bombing were put in place at the same time. Following a request from the Engineering Department of the city, on 27 November 1936, the Office of Passive Anti-Aerial Defense was created in Barcelona by the municipal government. ⁴⁷ The office came under the Urbanization and Public Works Commission headed by Manuel Muñoz Díez. It was charged with finding and creating spaces for civilian refuges from bombing across the city, and distributing information to the public about how to access such spaces. ⁴⁸ Defensively, Barcelona was defended by one single anti-aircraft artillery piece on the mountain on Montjuic. ⁴⁹ The lack of weapons to counter air attacks was common cross Spain as the war began. ⁵⁰ A census of shelters in place and possible public shelter sites was conducted in early December 1936. ⁵¹ A follow-up document outlined the work of the Office, which was defined to research existing collective shelter sites, assist in construction of new ones, and organize the distribution of material to the public about the shelters. ⁵² It understood that many private residences and businesses might develop their own shelters, in ‘deficient conditions’ compared to the official, collective ones, but initially the focus was on public spaces. It also emphasized the need for this rather ‘modest’ office to move quickly, and maintain ‘a permanent vigilance.’ ⁵³

The first significant bombing of Barcelona came on 13 February 1937. By March 1937, 43 people had been seconded from their regular municipal positions to the Office. ⁵⁴ By June 1937, the Generalitat created a Junta de Defensa Passiva de Catalunya, meant to connect all the municipal passive defense organizations like Barcelona’s created across the region. Its primary purpose was to develop common practices and tactics for passive defense, and deliver subsidies to fund local committees and groups. ⁵⁵ The Barcelona office was reorganized and renamed as the Junta Local de Defensa Passiva in August 1937. This reorganization followed what was by then almost a year of restructuring government across Catalonia into various multi-party and movement committees, each with ‘extraordinary functions’ and a process that began with the creation of the Comitè de Milices Antifascistas on 20 July 1936, bringing organizations like the anarcho-syndicalist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) into government. ⁵⁶ The CNT militias were crucial to the defense of Barcelona, and were very active in organizing the city for war at the neighborhood level. ⁵⁷ Within a year, the new Junta Local reflected the composition of this coalition and committee-based government of the Generalitat de Catalunya in the time of war. It consisted of representatives of the military leadership in Catalonia; the office of Public Order; the Municipal architecture office; the medical office of the city; and the political movements of Barcelona, including the CNT, the socialist trade union Unión General de Trabajadores (UGT), and the Left Republican party, Esquerra Republicana de Catalunya (ERC). ⁵⁸ Indeed, across Catalonia, all municipalities with passive defense committees mirrored this membership, with representatives of the mayor’s office and city architects and engineers serving alongside representative of the CNT, UGT, and ERC. ⁵⁹ In Barcelona, this reorganization came after the tumultuous May Days of 1937 that saw communist and anarchist forces of the Catalan Republican sides fight each other in the streets. The municipality of Barcelona gave the Junta Local a budget of 300,000 pesetas in the fall of 1937 meant to coordinate their work. ⁶⁰ Soon they asked the Generalitat of Catalunya for a much-enhanced budget of 50 million pesetas, which was granted. ⁶¹ The Junta was divided into sections for Protection of Civilians, Anti-gas Measures, and Security. Coordination was arranged with other groups in the city, such as the Red Cross, the Fire Department, Urban Property Division of the city government, etc.

The rationale for active organization of passive defense was outlined by Manuel Muñoz Díez, the city’s councilor for Urbanization and Public Works. Muñoz Diez was first tasked with creating the original committee in the summer of 1936, which, as he put it, had its goal as nothing less than ‘the humanitarian aims of protecting our fellow citizens.’ ⁶² In a similarly reflective document, from November, 1937, Florencio Tor, of the Catalan Institute for Passive Defense, further developed the moral grounds for such activity. Although not part of the effort in Barcelona, Tor’s paper best describes the factors and principles behind passive defense in Barcelona and across the region. Tor begins by stating, ‘individual defense- most of the time it becomes useless and at that time collective protection and organized relief’ emerges. ⁶³ This was even more necessary given the scientific and industrial ‘transformation’ of war since 1914–8 and civil defense was an approach to civilian survival that rejected previous ‘fatalistic suicidal responses.’ Tor stated that in modern warfare, notions of front and rearguard ‘are totally and significantly disproven.’ In particular, he reviewed articles in German military journals about the German conception of ‘total victory’ as well as the writings of the Italian Douhet, already mentioned, on air warfare and civilian targets. While Tor acknowledged that the best defense against air attack was air counter-attack first, and anti-aerial weapons second, the third most effective response was passive defense of civilians such as was being organized. ⁶⁴ He concluded in a passionate argument about the value of the work to be done on civilian defense–civil defense activity was ‘because we have the alive and pulsing sensation to bring to each new perfection in our task, to contribute to a humanitarian and heroic way to redeem human pain and to the end of the black claws [causing] the death of innocent victims.’ ⁶⁵

These sentiments were not just shared amongst a small group of architects and planners. The Municipal Council in Barcelona emphasized in a debate on 12 August 1937 that the construction of air shelters in the city was ‘indispensable’ to its survival and was part of the ‘municipal character’ of the local government. ⁶⁶ And so, with broad support from all the political parties and municipal officials in the city, the Junta Local in Barcelona, as in other towns and cities, set about its work. In practice, a three-pronged approach emerged within the office: one group to inspect places and consider if they could be transformed into air raid shelters; one group to build such refuges, and a third to develop materials for the public informing them about the shelters and appropriate steps to take in case of an aerial bombardment. ⁶⁷ In one of its initial documents, it outlined the possibilities for using subway and train stations underground as shelters (capacity up to 300,000 people); explored particular sites for public bomb shelters, to be built by the city (up to 15,000 capacity); examined how small tunnels, like a mine, could be dug into hills of the city (capacity up to 120,000 people); finally, it considered basement refuges in homes and apartment buildings and businesses (up to 360,000 capacity). ⁶⁸ In a series of relatively early meetings, the enthusiasm for the work of this organization is apparent, as the executive discussed the preparation of printed materials outlining the location of bomb shelters and informing people how to best disperse gas in the incidence of a gas bomb attack; solicitations from schools for bomb shelters on their properties were made, and considered; and correspondence with the Barcelona Railway over the use of rail tunnels that could be converted to shelters was reviewed. ⁶⁹

In reality, the Junta Local went through a number of phases. Initially in the first three to four months of the war, the focus was on what was called ‘natural refuges,’ such as railway and metro tunnels, and then secondly on the development of air raid sirens across the city. It was hoped that these spaces, combined with basements, would be sufficient to protect citizens. ⁷⁰ However, the prolongation of the war and what Muñoz Díez called the ‘tragic’ experience of the first major bombings led the municipality to alter its focus away from the construction of new public shelters with a large capacity and hygienic and sanitary conditions. ⁷¹ Instead, the expansion and redevelopment of existing sites, such as the Estácio Gràcia at the corner of Via Augusta and Carrer Balmes, became the focus. This effort brought architects, engineers, and others into the planning.

The second effort was the development of a subsidy system to motivate private building owners to develop their own shelters in the basements and over 4000 subterranean spaces of the city under buildings, of which at least 700 were estimated to be viable as shelters. ⁷² Building brand new shelters from scratch was, in the midst of war, simply too expensive. Additional taxation of 5% per ticket price for cinema admissions and 10% for theater and music hall admissions helped raise funds, but grand plans were still scaled back. ⁷³ It was in the process of subsidization that evidence of community engagement, far beyond just those directly involved in the Junta emerged. Thousands of citizens participated in the construction of air raid shelters, especially in apartment buildings and in local neighborhoods. Numerous local associations got involved as the principal drivers of construction for which subsidies were sought. ⁷⁴ The connection was made between the Junta Local de Defensa Passiva and the local population, and the municipality, thought the Junta Local, got the population mobilized in the name of civil defense. In many neighborhoods, women took the lead in organizing neighbors for construction and management of the air raid shelter. Such was the case in the Barcelona shelter ‘Ruiz de Padrón’ where local women pushed the neighborhood to act. ⁷⁵ In any neighborhood undertaking construction of their own air raid shelter, meetings were organized in worker’s libraries or local cultural centers, and the spirit of ‘collective self-management’ was fostered. ⁷⁶ In many respects, then, the construction of these shelters became part of Barcelona’s larger social revolution in support of worker self-management. ⁷⁷ Subsidies provided by the municipal government in these efforts largely consisted of auxiliary materials like sand and lanterns, and rarely gave citizens building their own shelters machinery which was kept for the shelters the city itself built and managed. City architects and engineers gave advice on the topographic circumstances. ⁷⁸ Otherwise, these civilians were left on their own to build the shelters in their apartment buildings and communities. Over time, the desire of the Junta Locals to subject all shelters to external regulations appeared, especially after the hierarchical creation of the Junta de Defensa Passiva de Catalunya that saw itself working through the various Junta Locals down to the citizens. ⁷⁹ Much of the publicity created for how to act in an air raid shelter demonstrated this desire. Especially in the year 1938, after Ramon Perera was put in charge of the Shelter division of the Junta de Defensa Passiva de Catalunya, the regional organization became a ‘systematizing body of international practices, …and producer of a civil defense science’. ⁸⁰

In practice, the Junta Local in Barcelona came to be an organization focused on five things. First, it informed the public about the risk of bombings and the need to find protection. Second, it offered financial subventions to private citizens, apartment buildings, and offices to alter spaces at their locations to be suitable as bomb shelters. Third, it constructed and managed public bomb shelters. Fourth, it worked to develop a warning system to notify the public of an incoming bombing, and fifth, it created a service following a bombing to assist in rescue and clean-up operations. The philosophy of the organization was best summed up in a document published by the Catalan Institute of Passive Defense. This document of May 1938 stated that ‘modern war, in its acceptance of total war as severely barbarous, imposes in an inescapable manner, the necessity for the civil population to prepare, in the best way possible, to lessen the impacts of aerial bombers. The consequences of not doing this would be catastrophic….’ ⁸¹

In the weeks that followed the March 1938 bombings of the city, the Junta renegotiated all contracts with its staff, to get more work from them, and workers in the construction industry were mobilized in order to build more collective bomb shelters and other fortifications. ⁸² Collection of detailed bombing information such as this was the responsibility of the Order Services branch of the Junta de Defensa Passiva for the entire region of Catalonia. They collected tally sheets of bombings, locations, and victims across the city of Barcelona. In the March 1938 bombings, for example, they detailed the waves of Italian bombers, and the results from local hospitals, with 10 reported dead at 7:41 a.m. on 17 March, 270 by 1:52 p.m., and 335 dead by the end of that single day. ⁸³ The sense of urgency and an awareness that these bombings were different, of a new type, jumps off the pages of these reports. Even after the March 1938 bombings, for example, they reported at least one bombing per day from 28 August 28 through 31 December 1938. ⁸⁴ On 20 May 1938, for example, 180 bombs total hit the city, from German and Italian bombers. ⁸⁵ A more typical day would be 18 June 1938, where bombs hit in the city first at the Placa d’Horta at 4:06 a.m. and then again on the Ramblas, and then, at 5:00 a.m., at a five story building on the Carrer d’Agricultura. These attacks killed five people and wounded several more. ⁸⁶ Regular bombings of the port of Barcelona were even more frequent than bombings in town. Photos and maps depicting bomb locations often were attached to these reports.

One can look at a typical meeting of the Junta Local administration, held 4 July 1938, to get a sense of what this organization concerned itself with when it came to constructing shelters and educating citizens about bombing. In this meeting, members of the Junta Local considered a list of requests for financial support from numerous property owners to assist in the construction of shelter; held a discussion of what rations should be stored in public shelters; expressed the desire to organize civilians to remove rubble after bombings; and debated how to produce better propaganda to inform citizens of the need to be prepared in the event of a bombing. ⁸⁷

In terms of bomb shelters in Barcelona, the work of the Junta Local was impressive. A report was prepared in September 1938 to summarize the activities of the Junta Local since its creation in June 1937. New, public bomb shelters were never completely abandoned, and in that time, 24 ‘collective’ bomb shelters were built with a capacity to hold 15,000 people, and 50 mineshaft style shelters had been developed in the city’s hills. ⁸⁸ The majority of the bomb shelters built in the city were built by citizens themselves, numbering 385 shelters total, with a capacity of some 150–160,000 people. The city offered subsidies to the citizens building these shelters, with the total spent on subsidies was 676,272.30 pesetas. ⁸⁹ Support from the Republican government in Madrid and the Junta de Defensa Passiva de Catalunya totaled nine million pesetas, and an additional five million from the Generalitat. One of the themes that arise from this work was the importance of solidarity in the construction of these shelters, especially in the case of citizens and property owners using municipal subsidies to do their own work. ⁹⁰ It is important, too, to emphasize that the character of many of these bomb shelters, in privately owned buildings, was ‘provisional,’ built by civilians, usually women and children, and thus not by the military. ⁹¹ They were designed to be used by neighbors, who lived together in apartment buildings with shelters in the basement. A formal listing of all bomb shelters in the city, most not subsidized by the Junta Local, but still noted, listed 1402 shelters. ⁹² Subsequent scholarly investigations suggest the number may have been less, 1365, with 2085 bomb shelters total in Catalonia. ⁹³

An examination of the propaganda produced to inform the public of bombings and how to stay safe in the event of a bombing also demonstrates the significant efforts of this municipal organization. The primary document produced was a guidebook for citizens entitled ‘Passive Anti-Air Defense’ published in May 1937. ⁹⁴ This booklet outlined the work of the municipal government and also gave scientific diagrams of the impact of bomb explosions and the value of correctly constructed shelters. Indeed, it begins with a series of startling statistics about the impact of bombs, coming towards the ground at an angle between 70 and 90 degrees, at speeds of 260 meters per second. ⁹⁵ It then quickly moves on to the subject of building one’s own bomb shelter, emphasizing the ideal location as subterranean and the ideal form as rectangular. ⁹⁶ Realizing that the likelihood of someone building a refuge from scratch was low, the booklet encouraged people living in apartment buildings to build their own shelters by providing extensive details on how best to do so within their existing spaces. In this case, reinforcing of basement walls was seen as the most logical work someone could do, with wood and sandbags, for example. ⁹⁷ Instructions were also given for how to hid in a narrow mine-like shelter and in larger, public shelters. A renewed effort at education of the public occurred in March 1938, before the largest bombings of the city, and an internal document described the goal of such work as ‘the number of victims of a bombing can be reduced to a minimum if these rules are complied with, which requires discipline, acting in line with the competent authorities and serenity, to avoid collective panic.’ ⁹⁸

The Junta Local also used the press to try and get its message out, with a series of press releases and announcements published in local newspapers. Press coverage initially was positive, with articles such as that that appeared in La Humanitat on March 26, 1937, reporting that movement of citizens into air shelters was proper and ‘orderly’. ⁹⁹ Later, the Junta Local took to placing its own articles in the press, such as one these critiqued citizens who did not move fast enough to shelters in the moment of bombing. . On 24 November 1937, a story in La Humanitat called for more assistance in the construction of bomb shelters, and a full-page release of information about procedures and shelters was released on the front page of La Noche 11 December 1937. ¹⁰⁰

One of the largest producers of information was Section Z of the Junta de Defensa Passiva de Catalunya. This group was responsible for preparing for and educating the public about gas attacks from the air. In the aftermath of the First World War, fears about gas in bombs were widespread. Section Z developed what they called a ‘Z’ box, with oxygen and others necessities to be carried by emergency personnel, as well as a field hospital with three doctors, seven nurses and showers, and a pharmacy on site. Its purpose was the be able to move into a neighborhood hit by gas and ‘receive all those citizens who were victims of aggressive chemicals.’ ¹⁰¹ Despite the fact that gas had not been used in any attacks on Barcelona or elsewhere in the first year and a half of bombing, this group kept active through 1938 with documents on the importance of disinfection, and the goal of ‘eliminating the toxic organism’ before treating its impact on the body. ¹⁰²

Defending the citizens, producing propaganda, and reporting in depth on each bombing were not without debate. Given the great expense of funding collective shelter construction and subsidizing property owners for similar work, in May 1938, a proposal was made to end the processes that had governed the Junta Local and simply put all resources into the construction of some 20 km of tunnels under the city. In 1938 generally, due to an increase in enemy bombardment of the city, a decline in accessible materials for construction, a decline in manpower due to conscription into the military and the increasing occurrences of power outages in the city, construction of shelters declined significantly. ¹⁰³ Increasingly, in the growing desperation, the Generalitat demanded more of a say over regional organizations like the Junta Local. ¹⁰⁴ A reorganization of the Junta Local followed, but it seems that these tunnels, in the end, were not built. Nonetheless, a September 1938 report of the Junta Local concluded that it had done ‘everything’ to ‘safeguard’ the population of the city. ¹⁰⁵

By October 1938, the funds had run dry and subventions and construction completely ended. The resources still in hand could only pay for the rescue brigades who cleared the city of rubble and assisted in rescues of trapped civilians following bombings. Increased taxation in the city was debated as a means out of this situation, but rejected. ¹⁰⁶ As the inevitable defeat to Franco and his forces was on the horizon, the Generalitat de Catalunya in December 1938 moved to shut down the Junta Local and militarize its functions. However, the members of the Junta Local in Barcelona refused to comply with this order, and vowed to continue as a civilian body. ¹⁰⁷ Here, the commitment to the values which inspired municipal action to defend civilians in war is just as significant as it was back in 1936. This gesture, certainly too late, was one of the only ones in the archives that suggest that the Junta had been politicized. In general, the official documents do not suggest that politics intervened that much, and that the mobilization of the civilian population around shelters, their construction, and their significance in an era of total war was the key motivation for those involved. Certainly, future research into personal papers, letters, and diaries of those involved would probably yield a different and more complex story, given the political make-up of the Junta Local and the testy politics of Republican Barcelona. However, these issues are not found in the municipal archives. The final meeting of the Junta Local was held on 18 January 1939 just before the fall of the city to Nationalist forces on 26 January 1939. ¹⁰⁸

Barcelona was emblematic of what was happening throughout Catalonia and in other parts of Spain. Passive defense was a common and consistent activity of municipal governments during the Civil War. In the archives of the Junta Local de Defensa Passiva in the Barcelona suburb of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat, records show that a similar Popular Front committee system created the Junta Local. ¹⁰⁹ Four shelters for public usage were constructed, municipal workers and trucks were mobilized for this construction, and plans to clear streets to allow emergency vehicles to move about in the event of a bombing were developed. ¹¹⁰ The L’Hospitalet Junta Local organized their municipality into 10 zones for the purpose of shelter development, rescue operations, and use of funds. ¹¹¹ Similar work was undertaken by other municipalities, not just in Catalonia, but across Spain and especially in cities along the Mediterranean coast particular vulnerable to aerial bombardment. In Valencia, local authorities constructed public bomb shelters, developed a warning system for the community, and fortified coastal defenses. ¹¹² In Madrid, 54 public shelters were built, and another 143 in the provinces surrounding the capital city. ¹¹³ There are numerous other cases, all—as in Barcelona—led by Popular Front representative and political committees. It is worth noting that similar efforts occurred in Francoist held territories of Spain, also from the start of the war. In Palencia near Burgos, the local newspaper published municipal guidelines for passive defense in September 1936 and the Francoist Servicio Antiaernáutico de la Aviación Militar by 1938 produced a pamphlet distributed in communities across Francoist-held territories advising citizens of how to shelter if bombed. ¹¹⁴

In the Spanish Civil War, strategic bombing and the targeting of civilians not only occurred at Guernica in April 1937, but was a regular part of war for thousands of Spanish citizens. The role of civil defense and municipal governments to try and develop organized and coherent responses to this unique situation was impressive and comprehensive, ranging from incredible efforts to construct and document bomb shelters, inform the public of what to do, and record the results of bombings and thus, in some way, measure the effectiveness of civil defense. And this was done in a very short period of time. Their work was driven by a real understanding of what total war meant, and the new realities of fighting war with the technologies of the day. However, in the documents and reports produced by the Barcelona organization studied in this essay, there is also a strong sense of the morality that lay behind the work of passive defense, a sense that to protect one’s fellow citizens was a humanitarian act. In some respects, members of the Junta saw themselves as models for citizen defense and citizen mobilization in the face of total war, with a connection to other popular movements and activities that took place across the municipal territory of Barcelona.

Moreover, the work of the Junta de Defensa Passive was effective. In its final report on the activity of the Condor Legion in Spain, the German Luftwaffe concluded that bombing civilians did not impact civilian morale, and perhaps even strengthened it. Moreover, they argued that civil defense shelters ‘had generally been effective in protecting people from all but a direct hit by a heavy bomb.’ ¹¹⁵ In Britain, the head of the Air Raid Protection Institute called what had occurred with passive defense in Barcelona evidence of a ‘rea experimental war’. ¹¹⁶ This is not to say it was perfect. As a writer in La Publicat wrote, when bombings came, ‘Barcelonians…react with variable prudence, based on their temperament and the intensity of the detonations. Some take refuge; others do not move from their home’. ¹¹⁷ In reality, there was no way that the citizens of Barcelona were going to defeat to aircraft overhead. Nonetheless, the leading role of municipalities and their role in mobilizing citizens around civil defense on the front lines of modern warfare, such as occurred in Barcelona from 1936 to 1938, has been overlooked, and deserves our attention as part of the history of bombing.