Word: stuka
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...gain. Saturation bombing campaigns and continuous artillery bombardments of cities gave the world its first views of "total" war involving civilian populations. The war became a testing ground for the weapons and strategies of World War II. Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy used the Spanish war to perfect the Stuka dive bomber and the tactics of incendiary bombing that in one day destroyed the town of Guernica, among many others. The Soviet Union backed the Popular Front government, as did Communists everywhere. But the vastly greater weight of German and Italian arms, coupled with the decision by the Russians...
...keep successive invading waves of Carthaginians, Romans, Visigoths and Franks out of their fastnesses in the Pyrenees, and they were the only tribe in Europe that ever defeated the Prankish King Charlemagne. A Basque independent republic flourished briefly in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, but Hitler's Stuka dive-bombers crushed it in the rubble of Guernica thus assuring the dictatorial control of all Spain by Franco...
...that followed for three bloody years became an epic of its time, with all the emotive horror that Viet Nam has spawned today. Nazi Germany sided with Franco; the war was an apt testing ground for new weapons like the Stuka dive bomber. The Soviet Union backed the Spanish Republic and its Popular Front Government; so did Communists everywhere. Volunteers poured in from around the world, among them a brigade of intellectuals, including Ernest Hemingway, André Malraux, Arthur Koestler and George Orwell. The war was to shape their words forevermore. They carried the memory of it within their hearts...