April 26, 1937

1937Jean-Pierre Beltoise, French racing driver and motorcycle racer (died 2015)^[†]

Jean-Pierre Maurice Georges Beltoise was a French racing driver and motorcycle road racer, who competed in Grand Prix motorcycle racing from 1962 to 1964, and Formula One from 1966 to 1974. Beltoise won the 1972 Monaco Grand Prix with BRM.

1937Spanish Civil War: Guernica, Spain, is bombed by the German Condor Legion and the Italian Aviazione Legionaria.^[†]

The Spanish Civil War was fought from 1936 to 1939 between the Republicans and the Nationalists. Republicans were loyal to the left-leaning Popular Front government of the Second Spanish Republic and included socialists, anarchists, communists, and separatists. The opposing Nationalists who established the Spanish State were an alliance of fascist Falangists, monarchists, conservatives, and traditionalists supported by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and led by a military junta among whom General Francisco Franco quickly achieved a preponderant role. Due to the international political climate at the time, the war was variously viewed as class struggle, a religious struggle, or a struggle between dictatorship and republican democracy, between revolution and counterrevolution, or between fascism and communism. The Nationalists won the war, which ended in early 1939, and ruled Spain until Franco's death in November 1975.