"The German bombers appeared in the skies over Guernica in the late afternoon of April 26, 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, and immediately transformed the sleepy Basque market town into an everlasting symbol of the atrocity of war. Unbeknownst to the residents of Guernica, they had been slated by their attackers to become guinea pigs in an experiment designed to determine just what it would take to bomb a city into oblivion."