Picasso also painted another great work titled "Korea" in the same vein.
War is an abomination, something we should all fight against.
This theory couldn't be tested until late 1930's, when everyone was trying variations on the "technique", adding things like explosives, incendiary, gas... and escalating the amount of bombs needed to cause the mythical collapse. I think the record was 5 million tons of bombs over Vietnam (170 kg of bombs per capita), still the collapse didn't happen.
Unsure about the tonnage, but the parallels to current events [1] and the illusion that a bombing campaign will suffice to end a war in a matter of weeks is rather eerie to me.
Germany played a part. Snark aside, v1's and 2's weren't exactly 'targetted'.
Guernica was in many ways something both the british and republicans made stand out for propaganda.
There have been far worse things in the spanish civil wars.
For example Cabra was bombed in a day of market with the intention of killing and without being any kind of strategic strategic objective, way further than Guernica from other objectives and with more dead civilians actually.
It is just less well known bc of who did it.
Wikipedia says "The airstrike was carried out in the mistaken belief that Italian mechanized troops were stationed in the village. Once over the target, the pilots mistook the market's awnings for military tents." (Carlos Saiz Cidoncha, 2006)
It had already started way before, right when armed forces started using planes, in WW1. (I was thinking even earlier, in Libya during the Italo-Turkish war of 1911, but I haven't found confirmation in a quick search)
Mine owners hired planes to bomb striking miners at the Battle of Blair Mountain in 1921