The Italian bombers dropped 44 tons of bombs. Rather than aiming at military targets, the Italians intended to destroy industrial areas of the city and demoralize the Republican side, in what some authors have described as the first aerial carpet bombing in history. Their targets and declared objectives were military warehouses, arms factories, trains with soldiers, and the port, but civil buildings, cinemas, consulates, and theatres were also hit or destroyed during the bombing. Aftermath The attack was condemned by Western democracies all around the world. U.S. 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!" Franco was not initially informed of the attacks and was displeased; on 19 March, he asked for the suspension of the bombings, for fear of "complications abroad". Mussolini, on the other hand, was very pleased with the bombings. Italian Foreign Minister and Mussolini's son-in-law Galeazzo 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 acoustic aircraft detectors, and only restarted 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 demoralizing 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 discernible 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. In Literature Carlos Ruiz Zafón begins his novel The Labyrinth of Spirits with a story