Bombing of Barcelona The Bombing of Barcelona was a series of Nationalist airstrikes which took place from 16 to 18 March 1938 , during the Spanish Civil War . Up to 1 , 300 people were killed and at least 2 , 000 wounded . Background . On March 1938 , the Nationalists started an offensive in Aragon , after the Battle of Teruel , and Germany occupied Austria . On 15 March , the French government , led by Leon Blum , decided to reopen the Spanish frontier and the Russian supplies began to pass to Barcelona . Then , Mussolini decided to carry out massive air bombings against Barcelona in order to " weakening the moral of the reds " . Mussolini thought , like the general Douhet , that aircraft could win a war with terror . The bombing . Between 16 and 18 March 1938 , Barcelona was bombed by bombers of the Italian , " Aviazione Legionaria " . This bombers flew from Mallorca with Spanish markings . The first raid came at ten o ' clock of 16 March by German Hidro - Heinkels . After that , there were 17 air raids by the Italian Sa - 79 and Sa - 81 bombers at three hours intervals until the three o ' clock in the morning of 18 March . Barcelona had little anti - aircraft artillery and no fighter cover . The Spanish Republican Air Force ( " FARE " ) didn ' t send fighters to Barcelona until the morning of 17 March . The repeated wave of attacks carried out by the Italians would render irrelevant the air - raid alarm system since it would no longer be clear if the sirens were announcing the beginning or the end of an attack . Furthermore , they used delayed - fuse bombs designed to pass through the roof and then explode inside the building and a new type of bomb which explode with a strong lateral force , so as to destroy things and persons within a few inches of the ground . The bombings affected all the city and the bombers didn ' t attempt to destroy military targets . On the night of 18 the working class districts were badly hit . The Italian bombers dropped 44 tons of bombs , and there were more than 1 , 000 civilian dead ( Beevor : 1 , 000 dead and 2 , 000 wounded ; Preston : around 1 , 000 dead ; and Thomas : 1 , 300 dead and 2 , 000 wounded ) . Aftermath . The Western democracies protested , the American Secretary of State , Cordell Hull said : " No theory of war can justify such conduct . . . . I feel that I am speaking for the whole American people ! " . And on 19 March , Franco asked for the suspension of the bombings , for fear of " complications abroad " . Mussolini was very pleased with the bombings . Ciano said that : " He was pleased by the fact that the Italians have managed to provoke horror , by their aggression instead of complacency with their mandolins . This will send up our stock in Germany , where they love total and ruthless war . " . Later in the year , the British journalist John Langdon - Davies - who had been present in Barcelona at the time - published an account of the attacks . He reported that the bombers had glided in at high altitude to avoid being detected by the ( pre - radar ) acoustic aircraft detection means available , and only re - started their engines after releasing their bomb loads , which he termed the " Silent Approach " method . The effect of this was that the aircraft were not detected and the alert sounded until after their bombs had exploded on target . Along with the variance of the times between each individual attack , this had a demoralising effect on the civilian population , which suffered prolonged anxiety quite out of proportion to the number of bombs dropped over a long period of time . Coupled with the fact that there was little discernable military value in the choice of targets within the city , and the cessation of the attacks for no apparent reason , Langdon - Davies determined that the raids constituted a deliberate experiment in the use of such tactics in preparation for their application in any subsequent conflict by the Germans and Italians against the United Kingdom .