Steer and Gernika

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In search of the truth

TELEGRAM FROM GUERNICA

By Nicholas Rankin
Faber & Faber, £14.99, 256pp
ISBN 0 571 20563 1

GEORGE STEER’s entire career as a war correspondent lasted little more than five years, but during that time he managed two great journalistic coups.

Today, the flamboyant, South African-born Steer is remembered mainly as the reporter who revealed most vividly to the outside world the horrors of Guernica, and was first to pin the blame fully on Hitler’s aircraft at a time when Germany was denying its role in the Spanish Civil War.

As the Times correspondent in the region, he arrived in the little Basque town just after its destruction in April 1937. Staying behind when other reporters had left to file their stories, he spoke to eye-witnesses and identified bombs and bullets; his dispatches proved German participation. A translation of Steer’s articles was read by Pablo Picasso, in exile in Paris; two weeks later he started painting the most powerful
anti-war statement YET put on canvas.

In 1935, aged 25, Steer had wangled himself the job of the Times correspondent in Ethiopia (Evelyn Waugh had used his experiences in the same region as a basis for Black Mischief and Scoop). Sympathetic to Ethiopian independence and a friend of Emperor Haile Selassie, Steer was instrumental in informing international opinion of the atrocities committed by the Italian invaders, not least their use of mustard gas — banned by an international treaty when dropped from aircraft.

When the world war came, he joined the Army and became an innovative and effective propagandist in Burma; he died, at the age of 35, in a ridiculous driving accident.

George Steer was one of the great special correspondents, a species that no longer exists: independent of mind, passionate for causes, difficult to handle, extravagant in pursuit of enjoyment. He deserves this excellent memorial that Rankin has given him.

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