LIVING

The planes, often Savoias, flew in from the Aviazione Legionaria’s base on Mallorca. There was no radar and no land from which to telephone to warn of their approach. So residents didn’t know the planes were coming until they were actually heard or seen above the city. Attempts were made to improve warnings. The city council built contraptions that tried to pick up the sound of planes with little success. People took in stray dogs and cockerels to warn them of the approaching danger, for both have acute hearing.

As a result of the delayed warning, citizens had between one and a half and three minutes to get to an aid raid shelter. Despite this, the numbers of deaths was comparatively low—consider that some 3,000 died in the worst night of the London Blitz alone. Of course the bombing was less intensive in Barcelona, but it was also a result of the excellent network of around 1,400 air raid shelters that locals set out about building once the first bombs fell. Residents’ associations and trade unions took to the task without waiting for the authorities to give the go-ahead. As many of the men were by that point at the front, much of the work was done by women and children. As the war continued, the city council set about building larger, more secure shelters and improving the self-built ones, but without the collective effort of a large number of locals, this task would have been impossible.

At the end of the war, the British brought the chief engineer of Barcelona’s civil defence programme, Ramon Perera, to London. He advised them to do the same as the Catalans had done: dig deep and to get the whole population involved in the work. Churchill decided against this approach, arguing that making such public shelters would make people “cowardly and lazy”, and claiming that the British working class lacked the solidarity to engage in the digging. Instead the people were given the Anderson shelter, often a death trap. Confidential reports later expressed regret that the Perera model had not been adopted and estimated thousands had died needlessly in the Blitz.