España No Ha Muerto: If Franco brought Spain into the Second World War

[Iggies]

España No Ha Muerto
​

“We are confronted by the twin dangers of Bolshevism and Masonic-Plutocrat capitalism. The spirit of both is Judaic. But the Spanish people already know how to deal with this menace. We have defeated it once before on the battlefield, and we shall do so again. And this time, we are not fighting alone, because this time all of the nations of Europe are fighting together in a brotherly struggle for their common civilization and traditions.”

- Generalissimo Francisco Franco y Bahamonde, speech to the National Council upon the occasion of war with Great Britain, 28 June 1941

“Paco’s really fucked us now, hasn’t he?”

- General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano y Sierra to his daughter Maruja, 3 July 1941

“This time, we shall pass.”

- Spanish socialist lawyer and politician Fernando de los Ríos to fellow exile Indalecio Prieto, July 1941

“The government of General Franco is a Quisling regime, imposed upon the Spanish people by the mechanized might of the Axis powers. Indeed, the Spaniards may boast of having been the first to bear arms against this gang of tyrants that now menaces the whole world. It is to the great shame of the free nations that they fought their fight alone. But the day is soon coming when Spain, and all of Europe, will breathe free air again.”

- President Franklin D. Roosevelt, ‘fireside chat,’ 28 April 1942


Excerpt from The Spanish Ordeal by Stanley Payne

After the stunning fall of France in a mere four weeks and the capture or destruction of a significant portion of the British Expeditionary Force [1], Franco became convinced that Germany had won. He remarked to Serrano Suñer, “the English cannot fight alone; they are beaten.” But his natural prudence asserted itself, and he refrained from declaring Spain’s belligerence at that moment.

Nevertheless, Franco dispatched a telegram to Berlin, congratulating Hitler on the ‘spectacular victory’ achieved by his forces. He signed off with his customary, ‘¡Arriba España!’ but, tellingly, appended, ‘¡Arriba Alemania y Arriba Italia!’

Excerpt from The Last Crusade: Spain in the Second World War by Wayne Bowen

In the aftermath of the German victory over France and the Low Countries, the Spanish press dropped all pretense of neutrality. Little changed for periodicals like Informaciones, which had always been openly pro-Nazi. But even ‘moderate’ publications like the Catholic-conservative ABC declared that “Germany is fighting the same war that Spain fought.” Across the country, local FET delegates and even clergy harangued huge audiences on the virtues of the Axis and the iniquities of the Allies. “This is a battle,” declared one ardent young Falangist speaker in Valladolid, “against the Jew international that controls the whole world except for Germany, Italy, Japan, and Spain.”

Excerpt from “Spain’s Army on the Eve of War,” by Rafael Rodrigo Fernández, published The Spanish Military in the Twentieth Century (translated from Spanish)

In the summer of 1940, the Spanish Army numbered some 350,000 men, divided into ten Army Corps and twenty-five divisions. Each division of line infantry was composed of three infantry regiments, one artillery regiment, one battalion of sappers, one signals company, one administrative company, one medical company, and one veterinary company.

Nineteen of these divisions were stationed on the Spanish mainland, with another six in Morocco. The distribution was as follows:

1. Captaincy General of Madrid - Guadarrama Army Corps
   1. 11th Division (Madrid)
   2. 12th Division (Badajoz)
   3. 13th Division (Madrid)
2. Captaincy General of Seville - Andalusia Army Corps
   1. 21st Division (Seville)
   2. 22nd Division (Algeciras and Gibraltar)
   3. 23rd Division (Granada)
3. Captaincy General of Valencia - Turia Army Corps
   1. 31st Division (Valencia)
   2. 32nd Division (Alicante)
4. Captaincy General of Barcelona - Urgel Army Corps
   1. 41st Division (Barcelona, stationed in Morocco)
   2. 42nd Mountain Division (Gerona)
   3. 43rd Mountain Division (Lérida)
5. Captaincy General of Zaragoza - Aragón Army Corps
   1. 51st Division (Zaragoza)
   2. 52nd Mountain Division (Huesca)
6. Captaincy General of Burgos - Navarre Army Corps
   1. 61st Division (Burgos)
   2. 62nd Division (Pamplona)
7. Captaincy General of Valladolid - Castille Army Corps
   1. 71st Division (Valladolid)
   2. 72nd Division (Oviedo and Asturias)
8. Captaincy General of Coruña - Galicia Army Corps
   1. 81st Division (Lugo)
   2. 82nd Division (Vigo)
9. Ceuta - Morocco Army Corps
   1. 91st (Ceuta - Tetuán)
   2. 92nd (Larache)
   3. 93rd (Xauen
10. Melilla - Maestrazgo Army Corps
    1. 101st (Melilla)
    2. 102nd (Villa de Sanjurjo)

Along with the ‘regular’ army was the Legion, stationed in North Africa, and consisting of three ‘Tercios’ (equivalent to regiments), with three ‘banderas’ (equivalent to battalions) each, with the exception of the first Tercio, which had five banderas.

Finally was the ‘Groups of Regular Indigenous Forces’ (GFRI), the ‘moors’ which had loomed so large in Republican imagination during the Civil War. There were 10 GFRI formations, each of regimental strength, with three battalions. Both the legionary and Moorish formations were larger and more heavily officered than the regular peninsular units. [2]

Excerpt from A World at Arms, by Gerhard Weinberg

Spain’s entry into the war was by degrees. The German victories in the west had deeply impressed Franco, and over the course of 1940 he had slowly shifted his country closer to the Axis. In the autumn of that year, a new trade agreement had been concluded with Berlin, which provided for greater German shares in Spanish agricultural concerns and especially the mining industries in the north. In August, the cautious monarchist Beigbeder was removed from the foreign ministry and replaced with the fervently pro-Axis Serrano Suñer. Later in that month, Himmler made his infamous state visit to Spain, where he attended a bullfight, and then spoke privately with the Generalissimo for several hours, in the course of which Franco was apparently assured that Spain’s entry into the war would be compensated by territorial concessions in North Africa (at the same time as Hitler promised the Vichy authorities that no such thing would happen). The personal meeting between Hitler and Franco at Hendaye that Autumn confirmed the informal agreement made with Himmler a month earlier, and Spain and Germany signed a secret protocol committing Spain to enter the war by the New Year. In December, the British ambassador was ejected from Madrid.

Nevertheless in the winter of 1940 - ‘41, the ‘Caudillo’ got cold feet. The New Year’s deadline lapsed, without any Spanish declaration of war, much to Hitler’s outrage. Serrano Suñer apologized to Von Ribbentrop on his brother-in-law’s behalf, explaining vaguely that “Spain’s position had become unfavorable.” In his diary, Goebbels ranted about the “gutless little reactionary” Franco.

This brief reversal lasted until the spring, and Hitler’s conquest of the Balkans. The invincibility of German arms seemed again confirmed, and upon the fall of Athens Franco prepared to declare war immediately. But once again he backed out at the last moment.

It was not until the Summer of 1941, and the opening of the Soviet front, that the fate of not only Germany, but of Spain, was sealed.

While Franco’s sympathies had very much been with the Axis from the start, and he wished for Spain to wind up on the winning side, he had little personal quarrel with France or the Anglo-American countries, besides a generalized distrust towards the nations he viewed as corrupted by freemasonry and democracy. But the USSR was a different matter. As the citadel of world communism, Franco held Soviet Russia directly responsible for having instigated Spain's hideous civil war, and he viewed bolshevism as the premier threat to Europe in general and Iberia in particular.

The Caudillo was known for being cold and reserved, but this was in no small part an emotional response. On 28 June, 1941, Franco drafted a declaration of war upon the Soviet Union, and presented it to his cabinet. Later that day, he delivered a public address in the Plaza Monumental in Madrid, where he announced to the Spanish people and to the world Spain’s entry into this ‘noble crusade.’

Two days later, the United Kingdom declared war on Spain.

Excerpt from Even The Olives Bled: The Spanish People in War and Peace, by Ronald Fraser

…the declaration of war was greeted with dismay by the greater part of the Spaniards. Even Franco’s own security services had to admit in their internal reporting that, “the people are weary of war, and many of them say that the Caudillo has made a very bad decision.” In Madrid and Seville, men and women were reported weeping in the streets. While the mood in the traditionally conservative regions of the northwest was at least receptive, with little reported open dissent, it was still cautious, with especially monarchists of the old-style muttering that they were unsure about the “fascist war.”

The most ominous response was in Málaga, a traditional left-wing stronghold. When a young deputy from the FET gave a speech to a crowd in the old square, exhorting them to “rise up in defense of the Fatherland,” and urging young men in particular to rally to the colors, the response was less than enthusiastic. At first, the crowd ignored him, and when he urged them “not to be cowards,” they began to cry, “¡No más guerra! No more war!” Soon the chanting went from dissatisfied to seditious, and cries of “¡Viva la República!” and “¡Muerte al fascismo!” were heard. The young falangist activist barely escaped with his life, as the crowd mobbed his podium. The mood spread, and soon Málaga was in the grip of a full-blown riot, as masses of workers rampaged through the streets shouting, “No más guerra!” and “¡Pan! Bread!” Emblems of the regime, such as red-gold banners, Francoist eagles, and posters of the Caudillo were attacked and defaced. Falangists in uniform, and even some women of the Seccion Feminina, were beaten, at least one to death. The Policía Armada was unable to cope, and the riot took a battalion of troops to quell, with forty-five dead, almost all of them workers.

The only truly enthusiastic response to the war came from two diametrically opposed sectors of the Spanish population.

The first was the ideologically committed fascists of the Falange, such as Victor de la Serna, who published the Naziphile paper Informaciones, and exulted that “Europe’s time has come at last.” In Valladolid, youth from the FET roistered drunkenly in the streets, crying “¡Arriba Hitler!” and attacked passersby who did not share their glee.

The other was that hardcore of Republican dissidents who had never given up the fight against Franco, and who saw before most the massive blunder the Caudillo had made. Manuel Cortés, a socialist, had spent the three years since the end of the Civil War in hiding, literally concealed in the walls and floorboards of his own home, cared for by his wife and daughter, who insisted to the authorities they did not know what had become of him. Cortés emerged only at night, when the curtains were drawn, and the lights were off. When he came out the evening of the 28th to eat, he found the women crying. “They told me, ‘Spain is in the war now.’” I said to them, ‘why are you crying? You should be dancing!’ They thought it would mean fascism for a century, but I knew Germany would lose the war, and Franco would lose with her.”

[1] – the POD is that France falls even quicker, and a slightly smaller portion of the BEF is successfully evacuated from Dunkirk. The difference isn't big enough to significantly alter the trajectory of the war, but it's just enough to alter Franco's psychology to the point where he's willing to bring Spain into it.

[2] - information here is taken almost verbatim from "El Ejército Español en 1940" https://web.archive.org/web/2016030...oads/tx_iugm/COMUNICACIONES_LOS_EJERCITOS.pdf

 

[Iggies]

"I will not be the Napoleon to his Joseph"
- Adolf Hitler, on Francisco Franco, autumn of 1941

Excerpt from A World at Arms, by Gerald Weinberg

...Immediately upon Franco’s declaration of war against the USSR, Churchill gave the go ahead for ‘Operation Puma,’ the occupation of the Spanish Canary Islands. The war ministry had long maintained plans for such an amphibious operation, fearful that otherwise the Canaries would serve as a base for the German interdiction of Transatlantic shipping.

Franco appears to have had great faith in the ability of the Canaries garrison to resist invasion at least long enough to bloody the British and establish the formidability of Spanish military. It was a faith that was not entirely unjustified, as over the course of the last year the islands’ paltry garrison had almost doubled in size to more than 20,000 men, and the shore batteries had been augmented with new 152.4mm guns.

Churchill and the war ministry, in particular First Sea Lord Dudley Pound, had been less than optimistic about Operation Puma. The Royal Navy insisted it could spare nothing for the invasion, engaged as it was against the German U-boat fleets and supplying British troops in North Africa.

But on 4 August, Puma commenced. A British strike force centered around the aircraft carrier Ark Royal, augmented by three cruisers and six destroyers, along with the minesweeper Marte, sailed for Gran Canaria. 8,000 men, a mixture of Royal Marines and regular troops, were detailed for the invasion, significantly fewer than the 10,000 men that the War Ministry had insisted were necessary for success, and barely a third the size of the Canaries garrison.

But both Franco and the British had severely overestimated the morale of the Canary troops. The British expedition came within sight of Santa Cruz de Tenerife on the night of 5 August, and a squadron of Hurricane fighters from the Royal Ark attacked Spanish positions on shore. After a bombardment by the HMS Dragon, the Royal Marines staged a landing.

The Spaniards put up a feeble resistance for only a few hours, and by dawn Captain General Ricardo Serrador Santés had surrendered his command. About 230 Spaniards died in the assault, mostly by bombing. The British lost eight, two to friendly fire, and one drowned.

The loss of the Canaries was a heavy blow, not only in material terms, for the British had now secured another Atlantic base for use in their naval war against the Germans, but also a psychological one. The Canaries held a special place in the mythology of Franco’s regime, for it had been from Tenerife that Franco had flown in the summer of 1936, to take command of the Moroccan colonial troops that had ultimately won him the civil war. Franco took the opportunity to sack Vigón from his position as Chief of Staff, though the Canaries disaster was hardly his fault. He was replaced with Major General Juan Yagüe, whose pro-Nazi views were well known, and who had made a name for himself as a bold and daring commander during the civil war. Yagüe and Franco had butted heads often in recent years, but now his politics had become convenient, and prior disagreements were forgotten.

In Berlin, Hitler was furious. He referred to Franco as an “idiot general,” and seethed that he had entered the war at just the wrong time, when the Wehrmacht was entirely engaged battling the Red Army in the east, and could hardly spare men or materiel for the capture of Gibraltar. Nevertheless, in early August, the Führer discussed Operation Felix with Jodl, who told him that if the Kiev-Leningrad line was reached by mid-September, some forces could be detached for action in Spain.

Franco, on the other hand, was not disposed to wait. The Caudillo was determined to demonstrate that, even if a junior partner, Spain could hold her own in battle. Gibraltar had to fall, but the glory had to go to Spanish arms, not German...

Excerpt from Spain in Flames: 1936 - 1944, by E.R Hooton

…Over the course of 1940 and the first months of 1941, the British had feverishly built up the Gibraltar garrison in anticipation of an attack, whether German, Spanish, Italian, Vichy, or any combination thereof. By 1939, the 2nd Kings and the 2nd Somerset Light Infantry had been posted to the ‘rock,’ and by the summer of 1941 alone these had been augmented by the 4th Devonshire and the 4th Black Watch, bringing the total strength to four infantry battalions, along with the 3rd Heavy Regiment, Royal Artillery, which disposed of the three Batteries with 8 x 9.2-inch guns, 7 x 6-inch guns, and 6 x twin 6-pounders. There were also two AA regiments, the HQ 10th and the 82nd Heavy. The garrison maintained 16 x 3.7 inch guns, 6 x 6-pounders, 7 x 6 inch guns, 8 x 9.2 inch guns, and 8 x 40mm Bofors guns. [1]

The Spanish 22nd Division, along with the 16th Mountain Regiment, were to spearhead the assault, under military governor of Algeciras Agustîn Muñoz Grandes, a decorated veteran of the civil war. Muñoz Grandes had reported to Franco and Yagüe that he expected he could take the rock within the space of an afternoon, and all of the men concerned were eager to wipe away the shame of the Canaries and restore a long-separated and ‘integral’ part of the Fatherland to Spain. Across the country, falangist radicals daubed walls with the slogan, ‘¡Gibraltar Español!’ and crowds in Madrid, Salamanca, Barcelona, Seville, and the other great cities of Spain were whipped into a nationalistic frenzy by regime agitators, chanting ‘¡Inglaterra, muérete!’

The Spanish plan was to begin with an artillery bombardment, to be immediately followed by an assault across the arfield by the II/3 Battalion, which would in fact be a diversion, fixing the British defenders to allow for an amphibious landing in Gibraltar Harbour by the I/3 battalion, and another at Europa Point by III/3. Finally, the 1st and 2nd battalions from the 16th Mountain Regiment were to scale the sheer rock cliffs on the western face of the peninsula. The British would be squeezed between these two pincers, and forced to surrender.

On 25 August, Muñoz Grandes issued his official demand for surrender to Mason-MacFarlane. The British commander icily declined, with the comment that “that is not what I was sent here to do.”

Before combat operations even began, the Battle of Gibraltar began to devolve into a fiasco for the Spaniards.

The evening of the 25th, Captain G.L Galloway of the Royal Engineers, stationed near the customs house at the northwestern corner of the peninsula, sighted a small fishing skiff approaching the island. It held a single occupant. When the skiff was not deterred by shouted warnings, the 4th Devons opened fire. Nevertheless, they missed their quarry, and the ‘captain’ of the little boat stumbled ashore with his hands in the air. Galloway later recalled, “he cried, ‘Comrades! Comrades! No shoot! No shoot! ¡Viva England! ¡Viva la República!’ He was summarily taken prisoner, and brought to Mason-Mac. It developed that the young sergeant hated Franco, because his brother had been arrested in 1939 and was still in prison.” The deserter told all that he knew of the Spanish plan, and Mason-MacFarlane ascertained that he could be trusted because “he seemed too simple a sort” to be lying.

The next evening, the attack commenced, and immediately things began to go wrong.

The artillery barrage, carried out mostly by old 75mm guns from the civil war, and one 88mm German piece, failed to smash the garrison as expected, thanks to the thorough tunneling operations of the previous months, the extent of which Muñoz Grandes had failed to appreciate.

Two of the boats meant to carry the assault forces to Gibraltar Harbor, crashed into each other upon launch. One was irreparably damaged, and sank within minutes, drowning nearly a hundred Spanish soldiers from the III/3 Battalion. The bulk of the men managed to reach the detached mole, where they were met by withering machine gun fire from A Company of the Black Watch. A Spanish veteran recalled playing dead in the ‘red water,’ while the corpses of his comrades bobbed around him. The south mole was stormed by soldiers from the I/3 Battalion, who engaged the Black Watch hand to hand.

Meanwhile, the 16th Regiment on the other side of the peninsula was doing little better. When the 1st Battalion landed at Sandy Bay, not only was it stymied by the moat network the Royal Engineers had dug there, but also by their own artillery, when misdirected fire from the mainland fell among the Spaniards, killing dozens.
The frontal assault over the North Front Airfield fared even worse, with the II/3 Battalion suffering nearly 70% casualties in the teeth of the British defenses, in particular the six-pounder guns sighted on the neutral zone.

By the morning of the 30th, Muñoz Grandes was forced to admit the operation had been a failure. He withdrew what men he could from the beaches, leaving almost 560 wounded and otherwise incapacitated to be taken prisoner.

He reluctantly reported the terrible news to Franco and Yagüe, and insisted that he needed more men.

In Germany, Hitler nearly went mad with rage. He had expressly asked Franco to await the arrival of German troops before any attempt was made against Gibraltar, and now, just as he had done with Mussolini, he was going to have to haul the Generalissimo’s chestnuts out of the fire.

With the Battle of Kiev still raging, and Army Group North advancing on Leningrad, ‘Operation Felix’ was dusted off and reworked for the present moment. Two regiments, the 13th and 94th from the 4th Mountain Division were pulled out of the line in Ukraine, to be rested and refitted for deployment to Spain. Also seconded for the operation was Infantry Regiment "Großdeutschland," as well as the "Der Führer" Regiment of the 2nd SS Panzer Division “Das Reich” under Otto Kumm, with one tank company attached, and a smattering of signals, sapper, and artillery battalions.

The whole Kampfgruppe was under the command of General Ludwig Kübler, and departed the Eastern Front on September 7th. Kampfgruppe Kübler reached the Pyrenees on the 12th, and crossed into Spain the same day.

Meanwhile, Muñoz Grandes made a second effort to smash Gibraltar. He did this against his better judgment, but at the insistence of Franco, who was desperate that Gibraltar be seen as a Spanish victory, and not a German one. Over the past week, the Spanish complement at Gibraltar had been strengthened by the arrival of the 21st Division from Seville and some Algeciras regiments, adding another 10,000-odd men to his forces. With this fresh infusion of troops Muñoz Grandes decided to dispense with complex maneuvering and amphibious landings, and decided instead on a full frontal push over the airfield, overwhelming the British by sheer weight of numbers. The second assault was preceded by an aerial bombardment, carried out by old German Junkers and Heinkels, which failed to penetrate the heavy shell of ‘the Rock.’ The attack over the airfield again fell short, despite the support of three old Soviet T-26 tanks and one German Panzer Mk.I. The men were cut apart by Vickers machine guns and the artillery of the ‘Princess Caroline’ battery. The Mk.I and one of the T-26 tanks were destroyed by shellfire. For three grueling days, the Spaniard struggled to advance through the ‘dragon’s teeth’ and barbed wire ahead of the airfield, all while British artillery and machine gun fire rained on their heads. A particularly terrible blow was suffered by the 7th Regiment from Algeciras, which suffered nearly 80% casualties. On the 2nd of September, Muñoz Grande went to the front line, hoping to inspire his men by personal example. He stood up in front of the stunned soldiers, waving his cap and crying “¡Arriba España!” He was prompt shot in the left arm, shattering his elbow and permanently crippling him.

By September 4th, the Spaniards had lost more than 4,000 killed and wounded, against 382 on the British side, bringing their total losses in two weeks of battle to nearly 8,000. From his hospital bed, Muñoz Grandes ordered another withdrawal.

Out of 10,000 men under Mason-Macfarlane, some 1,000 had become casualties by September 6th, but morale remained high. Mason-MacFarlane organized impromptu stage shows for the troops, with the aid of Lieutenant Anthony Quayle of the Second Artillery, an actor in civilian life. They ranged from apolitical slapstick comedy routines to numbers lampooning their enemies, including a skit wherein a nervous Franco fretted that Hitler was ‘stepping out on him’ with Mussolini.

In Britain, the newspapers thrilled to the ordeal of ‘brave little Gibraltar,’ stoutly resisting in the face of overwhelming odds. A Punch cartoon depicted a tiny, dwarfish General Fanco struggling to lift a massive rock labeled, ‘Gibraltar.’ A disgusted-looking Adolf Hitler observes from the other end of the panel. “Adolf!” Franco squeals. “Help!”

In the still-neutral United States, Louis B. Mayer of MGM was said to be shopping around for a screenplay based on the ‘Gibraltar epic.’

Even in Spain itself, people sniggered that it was taking Franco as long to capture Gibraltar as it took Hitler to capture France.

On the 9th of September, Muñoz Grandes, who refused to relinquish command despite having lost an arm, made one final effort to crack Gibraltar before the Germans arrived. Again, the ‘rock’ was deluged by artillery and warplanes. Massive coastal pieces were brought in from Málaga, Cadíz, and Algeciras to join in the barrage. It lasted nearly four hours, the British defenders ensconced in their dark network of tunnels and bunkers while the Spanish ordnance “hammered down on [their] heads like God’s right fist,” as Lt. Quayle later put it. By the time the storm of fire ended, most everything above ground on Gibraltar had been ruined. Major Robin-Thompson recalled that, “everything was reduced to cinders and ash. The governor’s house, the old ‘Moorish castle,’ the gardens. Everything.”

The onslaught was followed by yet another attack into the British defenses. This time, Muñoz Grandes’ men managed to break the British lines, and they surged past the airfield, reaching Forbes Quarry by the afternoon of the 10th. The British surged forward to repel them with desperate rifle volleys, bayonet thrusts, and even hand to hand combat.

The fighting lasted the better part of four days, until Muñoz Grandes was forced to order yet another retreat on the evening of the 13th. This time the losses on both sides were about equal, some 2,000 killed, wounded, or captured. But this number weighed far heavier on the British, reduced now to some 6,500 effectives, than for the Spaniards, whose numbers were augmented yet again by the arrivals of the 51st and 62nd Mountain Regiments, from Gerona and Tarragona.

With this fresh reinforcement of mountain troops, it appeared Muñoz Grandes was contemplating another attempt on the eastern cliff faces, even with the Germans only two days away.

As for the British, dwindling as their number was, they still found the time and good cheer to taunt their foe. Few if any of the men in the Gibraltar garrison were politically committed leftists, but the Spanish Civil War had occupied Britain’s newspapers for nearly three full years not so long ago. So the men of the Black Watch knew just how to push their foe’s buttons when they made up a massive banner and draped it over the northern face of the bomb-shattered Victoria Sports Center, directly facing the Spanish lines. The banner read “¡NO PASARÁN!”

Excerpt from A Nation Tormented: Terror, Famine, and Slaughter in Twentieth Century Spain by Paul Preston

….Conditions in many parts of the country, especially the rural and underdeveloped south, but including even the capital of Madrid, had verged on famine since the end of the civil war. The regime blamed this on the damage caused by the war, which in turn was of course blamed on the ‘reds.’ But in fact, the crisis was largely the fault of Franco’s policies. Arbitrary tariffs drove up prices far beyond what ordinary Spaniards could afford, while more than doubling the profits of industrial and agricultural magnates close to Franco, such as the Altos Hornos de Vizcaya steel company.

Housing was unaffordable, with tens of thousands of workers and their families crammed into filthy shantytowns around the outskirts of Madrid, Seville, and Barcelona. In these slums, where waste was disposed of in the streets, diseases like tuberculosis long in abeyance came roaring back, claiming tens of thousands per year.
The dictatorship’s clumsy efforts to increase wheat yield, including by the reduction of profitable cash crops which might have provided much-needed infusions of cash into Spain’s coffers, and the creation of a state monopoly (the ‘Servicio Nacional de Trigo) on wheat, had little impact and often had the opposite of the intended effect. Probably 200,000 people a year, perhaps more, died of starvation and preventable diseases brought on by malnutrition.

But with the end of British trade, and the implementation of the Royal Navy blockade, Spain spiraled into full blown economic catastrophe. In the summer of 1941 alone, Spain imported more than 70,000 metric tons of petroleum products, almost entirely from Britain and the increasingly Allied-friendly United States. As soon as Spain entered the war, this line of supply was shut off. Trucks, aircraft, and even private motorcars across the country ground to a halt. Rolling blackouts afflicted Madrid, Barcelona, and Seville. Franco’s ministers warned him that this year’s harvest might be affected by as much as 20%, and this without taking into account the shortfall of several hundred thousands’ worth of tons of wheat itself, of which Canada had been a major supplier.

Franco had gambled on a very near-term German victory over Soviet Russia and Great Britain, probably within weeks, upon which Spain would be amply supplied by the ‘new Europe’ under Nazi guidance. He remarked to Serrano Suñer that “we will get our wheat from the Ukraine.” As for liquid fuels, Spain asked Germany for an outrageous 500,000 tons, something which the Führer was in no position to grant, even if he had been disposed.

But as 1941 went on, and it became clear that the Wehrmacht had failed to defeat the Red Army, the regime realized it was entering a period of serious crisis. Bread was strictly rationed from August. In September, as the fight for Gibraltar thundered on, Minister of Agriculture Joaquín Benjumea warned the Generalissimo that more than 100,000 Spaniards might starve to death by the summer of 1942. For this observation, Benjumea was sacked and replaced with the more pliant, and utterly incompetent, Miguel Primo de Rivera, brother of the martyred Falangist chief.

In December of 1941, two days before the attack on Pearl Harbor and the United States entry into the war, Franco issued a decree establishing the death penalty for black marketeers and ‘hoarders of grain.’

In Andalusia and Estremadura, which had long been the poorest regions of Spain, conditions were not far removed from those which prevailed in the Soviet Ukraine in 1932 and ‘33. On New Year’s day, 1942, diarist Miguel Ramírez wrote of his ‘encounter’ with a derelict in an alley. “At first I think he is sleeping, and then I see he is dead. His shirt is torn. His ribs can be seen clearly through the rents, with the skin pulled tight over them. He is the fifth I have seen this week. I almost wanted to toss his pitiful corpse a few pesetas.” That January, a wag was shot in Badajoz for responding to a FET delegate’s cries of ‘Franco, Franco, Franco!’ with ‘Hambre, Hambre, Hambre!’ (‘Hunger, Hunger, Hunger!’)...

[1] taken mostly from here

 

[Iggies]

“¡Cálzame las alpargatas, dame la boina, dame el fusil,
Que voy a matar mas rusos que flores tienen mayo y abril!”

- Marching song of Spanish troops on the eastern front, adapted from a Carlist melody popular through the 19th century and the civil war

“¡Si mi hermano se levanta, estando yo en el cuartel
Cojo el fusil y la manta y me hecho al monte con el!”

- Popular song of the Spanish guerrillas during the Second World War

“Thank God, Gibraltar is Spanish again.”

- Francisco Franco, 24 September 1941

“If we are to set Europe ablaze, let Spain be the tinder.”

- Brigadier Colin Gubbins, SOE Director of Operations, autumn of 1941

Excerpt from Behind the Lines: An Oral History of Special Operations in World War II by Russell Miller

Lieutenant Oliver Howard Brown, East Kent Regiment
Just about as soon as I was done training at Beaulieu I was introduced to Juan. They just said to me “this is Juan Oyarzabál, and you’re going into Spain together.” Obviously I didn’t know a lick of Spanish, and I didn’t know anything about the country, so I was going to need a guide.

Juan had been in the Loyalist navy in the civil war. He’d crossed the border to France after the fascists took Catalonia, and he ended up in Mexico. But then he’d found his way to England, and since Franco came into the war he’d been milling around London hoping for some kind of assignment, and now he had it, just like I did.

At this point we were not supposed to shoot anybody or blow anything up. Our only goal was to make contact with the resistance in Spain, because the British government knew nothing at all about the anti-Franco networks in the country, or if they even existed. Juan was a good fellow, very educated and handsome-looking, and he spoke pretty good English. He told me his aunt was Scottish.

We crossed the Portuguese border at night in the middle of September, while the boys in Gibraltar were still holding out. They gave us false papers to get past the border guards, but when we reached Badajoz Juan said, “no, too dangerous. We won’t do it.”

So instead we slipped over the Guadiana River on a little raft, in the dead of night. It was utterly miserable and by the time we got to the other side we were pretty soaked. We spent about three hours lying in this little gulley by the riverbank because a patrol of Civil Guards went by. I thought they looked pretty goofy in their hats but Juan said, “they’ll shoot you for looking at them wrong.”

The next morning we dusted ourselves off and went into Badajoz, and I was shocked. I guess I always thought of Spain as a very pretty and romantic country and in a lot of ways it was, but my first sights were miserable. This was when the famine was just beginning. The streets were dirty, there was trash piled up on the alleys. The people were the hungriest people you ever saw. I don’t think I saw anybody with fat cheeks the whole time I was there. At every corner there was a line for rations, and everywhere you had the posters of Franco and the slogans on the walls, “ARRIBA ESPAÑA!”

I remember seeing one line of women waiting for milk rations, and right overhead there was a big poster of Franco, like he was looking down on them making sure nobody took more than they were supposed to.

I was supposed to just keep my mouth shut and let Juan do the talking, and if I absolutely had to open my mouth my cover was that I was an Irishman. My Irish accent was godawful but the hope was the Spaniards wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.

We stayed in this shabby little hotel. I didn’t leave much. Juan would go out every day and come back. He scared the Hell out of me, telling me how back when the civil war started, Colonel Yagüe who I think was the minister of war now*, rounded up all the loyalists in Badajoz and machine-gunned them in the bullring. He said the fascists made a party out of it, even had a band playing and refreshments.

Finally about a week after we showed up, Juan comes into this hotel room and he tells me, “let’s go.”

We walked the length of Badajoz which was alright because the city wasn’t very big, but every block it seemed like we’d pass some police or some soldiers or some falangists and I’d think we were going to be arrested.

But at the Triana Gate there was a truck waiting for us, and this old peasant was driving it, with a younger fellow in the passenger’s seat, I guess maybe his son. We got in, and Juan said something to him, and we were off. We ended up driving for almost three hours, across pretty much the whole of Estremadura. The countryside was even worse off than the towns. I saw dead people lying starved by the side of the road. People would just walk and drive around them.

We got to this little town called Villarta de los Montes. It was a tiny little town, couldn’t have been more than two-hundred, three-hundred people. It was picturesque. The roofs were all red and the walls were white.

But we stopped just outside the town, and it was about getting dark. The driver’s son told us to get out, and then he blindfolded us. We walked blindfolded for maybe twenty minutes, then we heard men chattering, and when they took off the blindfolds we were in this little hill gully, and there were about thirty men sitting around these little fires.

They were a rough-looking crew. Like bandidos in an American cowboy picture. They all had pistols in their belts or rifles leaned up against the rocks and some of them had bandoliers over their chests.

The driver started talking to them in this jabbering Spanish, even if I was fluent I doubt I would have gotten a word. I guess he was vouching for us.

Finally they sat me down with the leader, they called him ‘Chavito.’ He’d been a lieutenant in the Loyalist Army, and he still wore his old uniform, or what was left of it. It was really just the jacket and the ratty old cap, with the red star on it.

So with Juan interpreting I tried to tell him what they’d told me to tell him, that Great Britain was friend to anyone resisting the Axis tyranny, that we wanted to provide aid, all that. But Chavito just kept shaking his head and asking for guns and ammunition. “Armas, armas, fusiles, armas, pistolas, fusiles. balas, armas, fusiles, balas.”

I kept on trying to tell him we were just here to establish contact, that before anything else we wanted to set him and his men up with wireless so they could communicate with London, but he just kept on, “armas, balas, fusiles.”

At one point Chavito stuck his pistol – I’m quite sure it was loaded – into my chest. Juan said to me, “he says he does not like men who are not straightforward with him.”

I am sure I was doing my best to be straightforward, but that was that.

Finally I said, “yes, you’re going to have armas and balas and fusiles, as much as you want, a whole army’s worth.”

Of course I was in no position to make such a guarantee, and I very much doubted His Majesty’s government would be willing to spend too much on this uncouth bandit chief crouching up in the Spanish hill country, but it mollified him for the moment. Chavito smiled and clapped my shoulder and asked if we wanted a drink.

He told us that his numbers had already swollen by half since Spain had entered the war, and he expected even more in the coming weeks. Then it would be about time to “free Spain.”

Juan and I said perhaps he was getting ahead of himself, and he and his men just smiled and laughed.

As far as I’m aware, that was the first contact established between the Spanish guerrilla fighters and the SOE in the Second World War.

*Yagüe was chief of staff


Excerpt from Vernichtungskrieg: The Eastern Front, 1941 - 1945, by Stephen G. Fritz

…It would not have been a great exaggeration in the early 1940s to say that the Spanish state existed for the sake of the Spanish Army, rather than vice versa. Over 50% of government expenditures in 1939, went to the upkeep of the armed forces and the various police agencies of Spain.

The army itself numbered 350,000 on the eve of the war, easily the largest standing army in western Europe. Upon Franco’s adherence to the Tripartite Pact, the army was enlarged further still, with an immediate order issued by the Caudillo to raise a new army corps of four divisions for action in Soviet Russia.

Recruitment offices could hardly cope with the influx of enthusiastic volunteers in the first weeks, as committed falangists and other anti-communists flocked to the banner. In Pamplona, the Plaza de Castillo was filled by ‘red berets’ chanting “A Moscú!” In Madrid, ten-thousand volunteers in blue shirts promenaded down the ‘Gran Vía’ singing the “Cara al Sol.”

Already by mid-July, Franco had his new corps, appropriately titled “Cuerpo del Ejercito Ruso,” or else the “XI Corps.” Two of the four divisions were considered ‘falangist’ ones, commanded by General José Antonio Girón de Velasco, who had never held a military command before, and General Eugenio Espinosa de los Monteros, who spoke fluent German. A third was of more ‘traditional’ bent, commanded by General José Monasterio, a cavalry commander of some renown. The fourth was organized around a core of two ‘tercios’ of the Legion and two ‘tabores’ of Moors, and thus was generally referred to as the ‘African’ division.

In overall command of the Russian Corps, Franco placed General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano. It was an interesting decision. Queipo had won much fame for himself by his audacious capture of Seville in the early days of the civil war (though the capture grew more audacious each time he told the story), but he was getting on in years, 66 years old in 1941. Moreover, he and Franco had always despised each other, and lately he had been posted on mission to Rome, where he could not make trouble. It was whispered that the Caudillo hoped Queipo would catch a stray bullet in Russia. In any case, most of the heavy lifting was expected to fall onto the shoulders of the capable General Fernando Barrón, who would serve as Queipo’s chief of staff.

The first units of the XI Corps set out for Russia on July 10th, and by the middle of August nearly the entire force had reached the Ukrainian front.

The Spaniards first saw action in the Kiev encirclement on the 2nd of September, where Monasterio’s division stormed over the Dnieper River alongside the German Sixth Army. Monasterio’s cavalry in particular distinguished themselves for courage, with a force of 2,500 cutting off and capturing 18,000 men worth of Soviet prisoners in the woods south of Kremenchug, though Monasterio reported that “1 out of 3 of my men is dead or wounded.” Nevertheless, there was cheering in the streets of Madrid and Burgos, and General Franco publicly praised the gallantry of his troops in an address from the balcony of the National Palace. A Soviet banner was dispatched back to Spain as a trophy. With Gibraltar continuing its embarrassing resistance, the good news was very welcome.

Higher up the chain of command, things did not run so smoothly. Queipo clashed often with his ostensible superior Von Reichenau, routinely ignoring orders and suggestions, and on at least one occasion insulting the shocked field marshal to his face. By November, Von Reichenau was requesting Queipo’s removal and replacement, which Franco refused.

In the Soviet Union, the Spaniards also came face to face with the unfolding Final Solution. Queipo reported to Madrid in October, “the Germans shoot every single Jew they get their hands on, regardless of age or sex. The race is being completely exterminated here. I doubt whether a single Jew will remain in the whole Ukraine by the new year.”...

Excerpt from Spain in Flames: 1936 - 1944, by E.R Hooton

Kampfgruppe Kübler reached Gibraltar on the morning of the 15th, to find the place “in absolute chaos,” as he reported to Berlin. The water surrounding the peninsula was thick with bobbing corpses, and the ground ahead of the airfield directly in front of the Spanish lines was strewn with the same. The bodies, hundreds of them, had begun to bloat in the late summer heat, and the smell was unbearable, as were the swarming flies. Muñoz Grandes explained to Kübler that multiple attempts to make a truce in order to retrieve and bury the dead had come to nought (failures which he of course blamed on the British).

The Germans were disgusted by what they regarded as the indiscipline and incompetence of their new allies. Soldiers often abandoned their posts to get something to eat or speak to a friend, and returned at their leisure. Others brought girlfriends in from Algeciras, and allowed these women to handle firearms or even listen in on highly sensitive conversation.

The Landers and the SS men were, however, forced to respect the Spaniards’ bravery, even if it sometimes bordered on stupidity. Obersturmführer Heinz Werner, in command of the 10th Company of the “Der Führer” regiment, recalled, “Two Spaniards quarrel. The first accuses the second of cowardice. To preserve his reputation, the second gets up and strolls down the line with a cigarette in his mouth, in full view of the English. Unsurprisingly, he is shot and killed. Occurrences like this aren’t rare.”

The Spaniards in turn received the Germans with some ambivalence. It was impossible to avoid the feeling that they had failed in their task, and it was now being turned over to someone else. Muños Grandes organized a small parade to welcome the Germans, and noted the unenthusiastic demeanor of his men. When they were enjoined to cry, “¡Viva Hitler!” the men of the 7th Regiment complied, but pointedly amended the slogan to “¡Viva Hitler y España!”

For the British, the arrival of the Germans precipitated much gloom. While they might have held out against Franco’s underpaid, demoralized, poorly organized troops, few doubted they could resist Hitler’s legions for long. Nevertheless, when Kübler and Muñoz Grandes tendered another offer to surrender, acknowledging the ‘great gallantry’ of the defense, it was declined.

Besides his ground complement, Kübler had also brought with him Luftwaffe wing StG2, composed of Stuka dive-bombers. The German attack opened with yet another bombardment, and for nearly three hours the Stukas screamed down over Gibraltar, while Kübler’s nearly thirty artillery companies relentlessly pounded the ‘rock’ from ground.

The next attack commenced at dawn on the 17th. Even while the guns were still going, Kübler loaded the 94th Mountain Regiment and the 10th Company of the “Der Führer” SS Regiment onto boats and sent them towards the eastern shore of Gibraltar, just as Muñoz Grandes had done weeks before.

The Germans acquitted themselves rather better than the Spaniards. They fought their way past the trenches, and successfully scaled the sheer cliffs in the face of withering enemy fire, clambering over the Water Catchment to throw the exhausted British back and ultimately capture St. Michael’s cave, on the leeward side. After six hours of combat, the Germans were ultimately thrown back down, with a loss of nearly 200 men, though not before disabling a number of the batteries situated on the beach below. The British were unable to dislodge them from the beach itself, and this position was maintained.

As this battle raged, the rest of the “Der Führer” Regiment charged over the neutral ground, augmented by a few Spanish battalions. This force pushed all the way to Gibraltar Harbor, and even after losing this position held onto Gibraltar’s Main Street, and swept the harbor with artillery and machine guns.

As evening fell, the first real progress in almost a month had been made.

The evening of the 17th also played host to one of the more dramatic episodes of the siege. Since Franco’s declaration of war, the Spanish guns at Tarifa and Ceuta had made passage through the straits a dire prospect for the Royal Navy. Nevertheless, public opinion and a sense of obligation pressured Churchill’s War Council to make some show in support of the beleaguered Gibraltar garrison, even if the ultimate fall of the peninsula was a foregone conclusion. So on the 17th, the cruiser Sheffield and the carrier Hermes, escorted by two destroyers, steamed east in the darkness, running the gauntlet of the Spanish guns and reaching ‘the rock’ a few hours before dawn, just as Kübler and Muñoz Grandes ordered operations to commence again against the Gibraltar garrison.

The British expedition had slipped through unnoticed, and the Spaniards and Germans were caught totally by surprise when they came under attack by Hurricanes from the Hermes, and the big guns of the Sheffield. Four of Kübler’s Stukas were at that time in the air, and two of these were shot down by British fighters to the great delight of Mason-MacFarlane and his men. Another was downed by the Sheffield’s AA guns, while the 112 pounders on deck caused great havoc among the Axis forces on shore.

Muñoz Grandes and Kübler were forced to postpone their attack for almost five hours, as the coastal pieces and the Axis aircraft instead focused their fire on the ships. Before morning broke over the straits, the British force retired. Off the coast of Tarifa, a few miles to the south and west, the Sheffield was struck six times along its right flank by artillery fire. Though most of the men on board abandoned ship safely, the vessel was lost.

The stunt was not repeated.

Not until the morning of the 19th did the Axis assault again get underway. The “Der Führer” Regiment pushed further south, but was stymied by ferocious resistance. Indeed, it took three days of fighting to at last throw back the exhausted British defenders, and capt5ure the whole of Gibraltar Harbor. Kübler’s mountain troops again scaled the cliff faces on the eastern side of the island, once more taking heavy losses, but ultimately capturing the peaks on the 22nd. This time also securing the reverse slope, making contact with the SS men at Parson’s Lodge Battery, which was cleared of British defenders in close-quarters fighting over the course of four hours.

Now only the very southern tip of the peninsula – and the tunnel network beneath ‘the Rock’ – remained in British hands. Mason-MacFarlane and the bulk of the soldiers who were not yet corpses or prisoners were now holed up in the tunnels underneath the cliffs, and cut off from the 1,000 men, mostly of the Royal Highlanders, dug in around the lighthouse at Europa Point.

On the afternoon of the 23rd, “Der Führer,” augmented by three Spanish battalions, made one last advance southwards. 234 British were killed and nearly 400 wounded in the ensuing firefight, which ranged over the open beaches just below ‘Little Bay,’ but not before exacting a greater toll from their enemy of 201 dead Germans and 87 dead Spaniards.

At dawn on the 24th of September, the Swastika and the red-gold Spanish banner were raised over the lighthouse. There had still been no official surrender from Mason-MacFarlane and his men hunkered under the rock, but for the first time in two centuries, Gibraltar was in Spanish hands.

 

[Iggies]

“¡En esta España fascista,
gobernada por Franco el cabrón
Pedimos a Dios que nos manda,
Un Borbón, un Borbón, un Borbón!”

- Sung clandestinely by Spanish monarchists during the Second World War, adapted from an anti-laicist song popular under the Republic

“Ya se fue el verano, ya vino el invierno
Dentro de muy poco, caerá el gobierno.”

- Sung clandestinely by Spanish dissidents of all stripes in the winter of 1941

“We must fight with these people as much as we fight with any enemy who has a rifle or a pistol, because they are just as dangerous. We cannot forget they threw open the gates of Toledo.”

- Fr. Juan Tusquets Terrats, Winter of 1941

“Goodbye, mama!
I’m off to Yokohama!
For my country, my flag, and you!”

- “Goodbye Mama (I'm off to Yokohama),” J. Fred Coots, December 1941


Excerpt from A Brief History of Modern Spain, by Hugh Thomas


…With the adherence of Spain to the Tripartite Pact, the seizure of Gibraltar, and the dispatch of Spanish troops to Russia, the ‘fascistization’ of the country went into overdrive. Ever since the outbreak of the civil war, Franco had cautiously balanced the various factions of his ‘national movement’ between one another, using the Falangists to keep the monarchists in line, and the Alfonsines as a brake on the ambitions of the Carlists.

But now the balance was shattered, and the Falange catapulted to a position of undisputed preeminence. Juan Yagüe, whose ardent falangist convictions predated 1936, was made Chief of the General Staff in place of the less reliably fascist old soldier Juan Vigón. The already falangist-leaning Director General of Security José Finat y Escrivá de Romaní was replaced by Raimundo Fernandéz-Cuesta, a camisa vieja and close friend of José Antonio. The Carlist Minister of Justice, Esteban de Bilbao Aguía, was replaced by another camisa vieja, Agustin Aznar. This was an especially surprising appointment, since Aznar had been at the center of not one, but two anti-Francoist conspiracies during the civil war, aimed at preserving the ideological and practical independence of the Falange.

All in all, in positions of responsibility, there was a general ‘cleaning out’ of Carlists and other monarchists in favor of falangists.

But the most significant change was Franco’s decree of 20 November 1941, which created a system of “district leaders” and “block chiefs” modeled after those of Nazi Germany, and granted these provincial FET delegates powers equal to those of the civil servants. For example, the provincial leader of the Seville FET now had veto power over the decisions of Seville’s civil governor, and could issue similarly binding orders. Officially this power was to be held in reserve and employed only ‘prudentially,’ but this would be less and less the case as the war went on.

The ‘fascistization’ reached beyond the government, and into the daily life of the populace. Many Spaniards noticed that the “Royal March,” once a mainstay of every public event from bullfights to football games, was played less and less, supplanted by the “Cara al Sol.” In Spain’s schools, emphasis was placed on Ferdinand and Isabela as “the first to build up the totalitarian state.”

The grand imperial dreams that had always been the preserve of the Falange were now fanned by the regime, rather than being restrained as they once had been. In one classroom in Albacete, a priest unfurled a map of the new world, and swept his pointer from California down to Tierra del Fuego. “Once this all belonged to Spain,” he said. “And soon it will again.”

Perhaps the most ominous development was Franco’s creation of a new sub-office in the Dirección General de Seguridad. It was called the “Divisíon de Judería,” (“Jewry Division”) and in charge of it Franco placed the Catalan priest Juan Tusquets, a long-time conspiracist and producer of anti-Masonic, anti-semitic literature. A list of all Jews resident in Spain had already been prepared by the last Director General of Security, and now Tusquets feverishly built on it. He compiled and delivered to Franco a list of Jews in Spain’s Moroccan territories and in the recently-occupied city of Tangier, which numbered together about 25,000 in 1941.

Moreover, in the two years of Franco’s neutrality, many tens of thousands of refugees, most of them Jews, had escaped German-occupied Europe through Spain. Nearly ten thousand Jews were caught in Spain when Franco entered the war, and very few of these were able to cross the Portuguese border, so that nearly all of them were still in the country when Tusquets was appointed to his new office.

Tusquets scrupulously registered these Jewish refugees and prepared a report on their “activities” for the Caudillo. Just before New Year’s, 1942, Tusquets presented his report to Franco. Drawn mostly from his own imagination, it painted the picture of a vast Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy at work in Iberia, with each Jew an operative.

Tusquets feverishly recommended that all Jews under Spanish control, about 40,000 inclusive of Morocco, Tangier, and the Peninsula, be interned immediately.

The Caudillo, ever circumspect, was not so hasty. But on the 15th of January, Franco promulgated the “Law on Nationality and Origins.” The first explicitly anti-semitic piece of Spanish legislation in centuries, it rescinded the 1924 law of Primo de Rivera, which had granted Spanish citizenship to Sephardic Jews abroad if they could prove descent from those expelled in 1492. It also barred Jews from holding office in Spain, and defined them as “a race apart” from the Spaniards, stopping just short of laws in France and other countries which barred Jews from public life almost entirely.

The law also provided for the internment of all Jewish refugees in the country, though this was not yet extended to Jews with Spanish citizenship, nor Jews in Morocco and Tangier. Finally, taking a cue from measures already implemented by Axis nations from Vichy France, to Croatia, to Romania, to Germany itself, Franco ordered that all Jews in Spain and its territories wear the identifying ‘yellow star.’

Jews in North Africa, especially, were stunned by the law. A handful were old enough to have cheered arriving Spanish troops as liberators from the Moroccan Sultan in 1860. In the decades since, they had lived unmolested by the Spanish authorities, and indeed often protected by Spanish arms from their Muslim neighbors...

...The ‘fascistization’ deeply frustrated the many monarchists and traditional conservatives who had been a mainstay of Franco’s regime since 1936. When Juan Borbón grumbled from abroad that “Franco would be nothing without [my supporters],” he was quite right.

In Spain itself, this growing discontent began to coalesce around the figure of Alfredo Kindelán, the venerable old monarchist general who, along with Yagüe, had in fact been crucial to Franco’s elevation to head of state in 1936. In the years since, he had increasingly fallen out with the Caudillo for refusal to moderate his staunch royalism and his antipathy to fascism. By 1941, he was in virtual exile as Captain General of the Balearics.

But Franco more than anyone should have understood the dangers of posting a troublesome rival to a distant island where he could plot in peace.

Soon, Kindelán was hosting a veritable monarchist salon in Palma where he received figures as prominent as José Varela, still Minister of War although increasingly dissatisfied with Franco’s obsequiousness in regards to the Axis and Juan Vigón, the former Foreign Minister who was still seething over his sack. Palma was not yet a center of conspiracy, not even sedition. At this stage, it was just grumbling and venting…

Excerpt from Así Fue, by Juan García

García’s book was a fictionalized account of his experience in the Spanish resistance, between the years of 1942 and 1943, when he was fifteen and sixteen years old. In this section, he recounts the December 1941 assassination of Falangist dignitary Gerardo Salvador Merino in Seville, while he gave a speech. By Spring of 1942, acts of terror and killing such as this were increasingly common, egged on and often directly abetted by the SOE and OSS, and would only grow moreso as the war progressed.

He stands up in his blue shirt and he thrusts his fist in the air and he speaks about labor. The strength of labor, the glory of labor, the splendor of work. This man who wears the Yoke and Arrow, the slave brand on the brow of the Spanish worker. There is a crowd around, and they are listening, because they can be forced to listen, and they can even be forced to cheer, but they cannot be forced to believe.

“¡Arriba España, Arriba España, Arriba España!”

Enough times in one’s mouth and it ceases to sound like Spanish at all, not even like human speech.

My pistol is English, a Browning. It is snug in my belt, hard against my hip, and the bones of my hips are just as hard against the gun. But I am skinny. We are all skinny. Spain is skinny.

“Franco, Franco, Franco!”

He says that Germany is great, Germany will win the war, and Spain will win with her. The Russians are apes, the Americans and the English are queers. A woman in the front of the crowd is chewing something. Probably it is lint, but when you chew you can pretend you are eating.

He thrusts his fist again, and then his hand is out, straight out, flat as a blade.

This is the salute I was made to perform when they shot my father, shot my brother, raped my sister. This is the salute I was made to perform day after day in the orphanage, before the portraits of the Leader and the ‘Absent One.’ Again and again. My arm was trained like a dog. When I heard the words ‘¡Arriba!’ or ‘¡España!’ just like that my arm began to rise. They made my arm into a fascist. They made my arm into a traitor.

But today, my arm has recovered its loyalty. It rises, but so does my Browning. The sights sweep over his chest, over his blue shirt. The Yoke and Arrows is a target now.

He sees me. His big eyes get bigger and his long face gets longer. He is terrified in these last seconds. The woman chewing sees the pistol and gasps. What she was chewing falls wetly at her feet. It is a hunk of leather.

I fire. Again. And again. And again. He jerks on his feet, like he is dancing. His feet sweep this way and that while he tries to right himself. He falls down gasping and choking. He tries to call, “help, help!” but I’ve got him in the lung. His hand scratches at his blue shirt, but it is not blue anymore. It is red. Red. Wet and red.

I was going to shout, “¡Viva la República!” I even practiced in the mirror. But now I cannot do it.

What I shout instead: “take that to José Antonio in Hell!”

Excerpt from Speech delivered by U.S President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the United States Congress on 8 December, 1941

…Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan…

 

[Iggies]

Partial transcript of Spain Betrayed, one of seven films in Frank Capra’s Why We Fight series, narrated by Walter Huston

This is the original transcript for the film, as was shown to US troops prior to Operation Longsword in 1943. Though the script went to lengths to distinguish the Spanish clergy from Christianity, Catholicism and the message of Jesus itself, the depiction of 'the bishops' as one of the pillars of Franco's regime still ultimately drew complaints from Catholic organizations when later screened for civilian audiences, and was accordingly removed from later cuts.

In the previous films, we’ve seen how the peoples of Germany, Italy, and Japan willingly surrendered their democracies and their rights to leaders who swore to solve all of their problems. We have seen how these leaders together plotted the conquest of the whole world. We’ve seen how Hitler, through treachery and force, enslaved Europe. We’ve seen how the Japanese warlords, through fanaticism and terror, subjugated Asia.

[Stock footage from previous films in the series; German tanks in Paris, German soldiers in Russia, the bombing of Rotterdam]

But what about Spain? Why are we fighting Spain? What’s the story there?

Maybe you think you know about Spain.

Guitar! Olive groves! Matadors! Rich wine! Pretty señoritas!

[Stock footage of flamenco dancers, bullfights, religious processions, peaceful olive groves]

Spain is all that, but Spain is more than that, too. And there is a darker side to sunny Spain.

Spain is one of the poorest countries in western Europe. In 1935, a quarter of the population was illiterate. Tuberculosis, rickets, rheumatism, diseases rarer and rarer in prosperous countries like ours, still plague the Spanish people.

Since time immemorial, Spain had been governed by a grim trio–the grandees, the bishops, and the generals. There was a king, sure, but these were the guys who were really in charge.

The grandees were the great lords of Spain, some tracing their ancestry back to the days of Ferdinand and Isabella. On their massive estates spanning millions of acres, thousands of illiterate, poor peasants toiled from long before sunup to long after sundown for starvation wages. It was not uncommon for a man to drop dead from exhaustion. In the summer, when there was no work, the laborers would hunt the field for roots, or leaves, or even bugs–anything to feed their wives and children. Later, when industry and commerce came to Spain, the industrialists and the financiers joined the ranks of the grandees. These modern grandees didn’t own great estates, but they owned factories. Dim places where just like in the countryside, workers toiled in the greasy gloom for just enough bread to fill their bellies. They lost arms to machines, they lost their health to fumes and exertion. The grandees didn’t care. Spain was their country, not the people’s.

[Footage of dire Spanish poverty, taken mostly from Luis Buñuel’s 1935 Las Hurdes: Tierra Sin Pan]

The bishops were the masters of the Catholic Church in Spain. But they had long ago put aside any notion of serving God. Instead, they served the grandees. They directed their priests to preach docility and submission. The people were told to keep their heads down and mouths shut. “If you’re hungry, if your children are hungry, it’s because God wants it that way!” The bishops also ran Spain’s schools–those lucky enough to go to school, the sons of the grandees, were taught that the present order was holy, and any attempt to change it was from the devil. The bishops were compensated handsomely for these services. Jesus Christ went barefoot. He had nowhere to lay his head. He preached love and humility. He preached compassion for the poor and the brotherhood of man. He said that he who gave away all his wealth was holy. But these men who dared to call themselves His representatives grew fat on the largesse of the grandees. They occupied palaces, where they feasted nightly while their flock starved outside. They wore gold rings and necklaces. They even violated their vows of chastity.

[Footage of masses, well-fed clergy, footage from the civil war of a priest haranguing a crowd before the Yoke and Arrows]

But if the sweet words of the bishops were not enough to keep the people in their place, well, that was where the generals came in. The Spanish Army was far removed from the glorious days of Cortés. By the turn of the century it was a poorly equipped, poorly trained, poorly motivated force. But that was alright, because the job of the Spanish Army wasn’t to protect the Spanish people from foreign enemies. The Spanish people were the enemy. If the Spaniards got too big for their britches, if they demanded trade unions, or free speech, or representative government, the army would be there to put them back in their place. In 1909, the people of Barcelona came out in protest of the unpopular war in Morocco, a war that was taking away their sons to die in a parched desert for the glory of the grandees and the generals. The army was there to put a stop to all that. In the ensuing slaughter, 100 unarmed men, women, and children were shot down. That was the glory of Spanish arms. The generals liked their job. They liked being the strong arm of the grandees and the bishops. As far as they were concerned, they were Spain, not that filthy rabble called ‘the people.’

[Footage of the Spanish army marching, battle in Morocco]

In 1931, the last king, a playboy called Alfonso, was forced to abdicate. A Republic was formed. This was a shock to the bishops, the grandees, and the generals. But they could adapt. They simply set up massive, well-financed political parties to launder their will as the will of the people. Thanks to lying propaganda, suppression of the opposition, and outright fraud, the old rulers of Spain were able to keep themselves in power even under the new Republic.

[Footage of celebrations in the streets of Madrid after the proclamation of the Republic]

But the people saw a promise in the Republic, even if it was yet unfulfilled. And in the spring of 1936, they elected a new government. It was called the People’s Front, and its mandate was to smash the power of the old trio forever. The Spaniards had voted for no more than those basic rights we Americans take for granted. The right to speak and print whatever you please, without fear of arrest. The right to work for a living, and form a trade union. The right to worship in whatever church one pleases, or no church at all.

In the streets of Barcelona, Madrid, and Seville, the Spaniards danced and sang. Here at last was hope! Here was freedom!

[Footage of celebration upon the election of the People’s Front]

The People’s Front promised to build schools for the nation’s children, schools that would give their pupils a modern education, teach them to think for themselves. Bad for the bishops, who would lose their stranglehold on the minds of the Spanish youth.

The People’s Front promised to cut down the bloated army budget, to redirect this money towards hospitals, libraries, tractors, and cultural development. Bad for the generals, who would no longer be able to command the people at the point of bayonets.

But worst of all, the People’s Front promised to break up the great estates and give land to the peasants who worked the fields, and to legalize trade unions. Bad for the grandees, who would no longer grow fat on the tireless toil of the people.

The bishops, the generals, and the grandees, saw power slipping out of their hands. And they weren’t going to take this lying down. They knew their only chance to preserve their positions was to throw out the People’s Government and if possible, smash the Republic entirely.

But what does this have to do with the war? With Hitler and Mussolini?

Well, Il Duce and Der Fuehrer had been watching Spain. They had long-planned the conquest of Europe. But France, always an obstacle, was in the way. If the fascist powers wanted to rule the continent, he had to get rid of the French Republic. France is bordered on one side by Germany, another by Italy, and a third by Spain. The last thing Hitler and Mussolini wanted was a democratic government in Spain, which might provide support to the French against Axis aggression. But a fascist Spain would instead be an ally to the dictators, and France would be surrounded.

[A map of Europe appears. Germany and Italy are black. Spain slowly turns black, as the encirclement is depicted.]

So Hitler and Mussolini got in touch with the sinister trio in Spain. Spanish officers and businessmen met with their German and Italian counterparts clandestinely, in Spain and abroad. And slowly, they worked out a plan.

The Spanish generals and their backers would be provided with planes, tanks, and whole regiments of troops. They would use this army, provided on credit, to destroy Spanish democracy, and force the people back into the hopeless poverty and ignorance they had just escaped. In exchange, Spain would become a Nazi colony in the Mediterranean.

On the 17th of July, 1936, the generals struck. In cities all over Spain, the army came out of its barracks and opened fire on the people. They arrested mayors, governors, city officials, school teachers, and union leaders, who were lucky if they got a five minute ‘trial’ in front of army officers, before they were led out and shot like criminals.

Who were the men who sought to strangle Spanish liberty in its cradle? For a front-man, Hitler and Mussolini picked a portly little general called Francisco Franco. He was a soldier of no great ability, but vicious, and a convinced hater of democracy. He would be Hitler’s ‘gauleiter’ in Spain, and when the Republic was smashed, he would rule the country for the benefit of himself and the old trio, and of course, for the benefit of Der Fuehrer.

[Footage of Franco waving from a balcony, discussing strategy with his officers.]

But there were others. There was the sadistic, drunken sex pervert General Gonzalo Queipo de Llano, who bragged over the radio of the ‘fun’ his men would have with the women of their enemies. Under his bloody rule in Seville, more than fifty thousand were ruthlessly murdered. There was General Emilio Mola, a humorless martinet who stated, “It is necessary to spread terror, eliminating without scruples or hesitation all those who do not think as we do. Anyone who helps or hides a democrat will be shot.”*

From Il Duce these traitors got a ‘volunteer’ corps, 70,000 strong, composed of Italian regular soldiers and filled out with Blackshirt fanatics. From Der Fuehrer they got dozens of the newest Nazi warplanes, and pilots to fly them. From the Spanish colony of Morocco, they recruited Moorish native volunteers. The Moors had a reputation as ferocious fighters, and only a decade earlier they had been fighting against the Spanish invaders of their homeland. But the Moors came from desperately poor little villages, and they were easily lured into the ranks by promises of loot and glory. Finally, there was the Legion. Though the Legion was composed mostly of Spaniards, they were the scum of the nation–psychopaths, common criminals, murderers, thieves, rapists, sadists. These atavists, unfit for any civilized society, found a place in this outfit. Turned loose in the savage colonial wars of Africa, they could inflict massacre, robbery, and torture upon the natives to their hearts’ content. Now they were coming home, to subject their fellow Spaniards to the same.

Franco and the traitor generals flung this mercenary horde at the gates of Madrid. With their terrible army, and with their shiny new tanks from Italy and fast new planes from Germany, the generals bet it would be easy to smash the Spanish people back into slavery.

They bet wrong.

[The CRASH of an artillery shell. A montage of battle footage–Madrid, Jarama, Guadalajara, the Ebro]

The Spaniards had tasted freedom for a little while, and they weren’t going to give it up without a fight.

But because their own military had betrayed them, they could not count on any army for protection. So through their unions and political parties, they organized militias, like the minutemen of our revolution. The great majority of these militiamen had never held a gun in their lives. They did not have the weeks of rigorous training you fighting men received before shipping overseas. They were farmers, mechanics, longshoremen, bricklayers, railwaymen, carpenters, shopkeepers, teachers, students, accountants, doctors, scientists, lawyers, poets. Even those pretty señoritas picked up rifles and went to the front alongside their brothers and husbands.

They weren’t soldiers, but they fought with the courage of epic heroes. As they marched to battle they sang, “¡No Pasarán!’--”So long as one militiaman remains, the traitors will not pass!”

All qualified military observers predicted Madrid would fall within a month. She held out for three years.

Like the Americans of 1776, the Spanish people showed the whole world how a free people defends its liberty against tyrants.

Oh, Franco and his buddies were furious! So were the grandees! And the bishops! How dare this rabble resist them? How dare these filthy commoners, this trash, defend themselves?

The traitors wrought a terrible vengeance.

Franco filled the sky with his new German planes. Bombs rained down on Madrid, on Barcelona, on Valencia, on Málaga. The traitors did not restrict themselves to military targets. They dropped bombs on men coming home from work. On women standing in lines for milk. On children playing in the streets.

[A violin wails as the camera pans slowly over the carnage left after a rebel bombing raid. Corpses of men, women, and children lined up solemnly at the edge of the street, with the rubble of ruined houses at their backs.]

The Republic painted red crosses on the roofs of hospitals and children’s shelters, hoping to deter the rebels from destroying these buildings. It was a heartbreaking display of naiveté, a sign of the Spanish people’s desperation to believe there was some glimmer of decency left in the hearts of their enemies. The German airmen used these crosses as targets.

In Seville, Granada, Salamanca, Burgos, all the cities where Franco and his generals ruled, the firing squads worked daily.

Ever been late to church? In Franco’s Spain, that meant you didn’t love the bishops enough.

[The crack of rifles.]

Ever groused about your boss? In Franco’s Spain, that meant you didn’t love the grandees enough.

[The crack of rifles. Footage of the Badajoz massacre]

This is the bullring of the city of Badajoz, in the southwestern corner of Spain. But no bulls have died here today. No, these are the bodies of the men of Badajoz who took up arms to defend their city against the traitors and their mercenary armies. And they weren’t killed in battle. They surrendered, expecting they would be treated as prisoners of war. Instead, they were stripped and beaten by the Legion. Finally they were herded into the bullring and machine-gunned by the hundreds. Their only crime was to defend their democratically elected government.

The generals, the true traitors, had the temerity to accuse them of “treason” against Spain. But it is plain to all that these brave militiamen were loyal. Loyal not only to their Republic and to their people, but loyal to the best sentiments of mankind that every American cherishes as his highest values, loyal to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. And it is plain to all that they died not like traitors, but like free men.

Franco’s terror was carefully organized with the aid of Gestapo advisors from Berlin, calculated to break the spirit of the Spanish people, according to the best ‘scientific’ techniques of the ‘master race.’

But it only stiffened the resolve of the stubborn Spaniards. Now the defenders of the Republic knew what they were fighting for, and just as important, what they were fighting against. Now they knew what defeat would mean for themselves and their loved ones.

And what about the rest of the world? What did the great powers, France and Great Britain, do, while Franco, Hitler, and Mussolini slaughtered the Spanish people by the hundreds of thousands? What did we do?

Well, France and Britain were tired of war. So were we. So Britain came up with a nice sounding idea, called the “Non-Intervention Committee.” The idea was that if no foreign power sold arms to either side in Spain, the sooner the war would be over, and the less people would die. It was a sound idea in theory. But it didn’t account for the fact that what was happening in Spain was not really a civil war at all. One of the ‘sides’ was the legitimate, elected government of the Spanish People, and the other side was an Axis invasion of Spain aided by a small minority of native traitors.

And it didn’t account for the fact that committees and treaties meant less than dirt to Hitler and his stooge Mussolini. While the democracies scrupulously adhered to the ‘Non-Intervention,’ the dictators happily went on supplying weapons and fuel to Franco and the generals, while publicly insisting they were doing no such thing.

For three years, abandoned by the democracies, the Spaniards fought alone against the overwhelming might of the Axis powers. They fought the same fight we are fighting today, and they fought it while the rest of the world preferred to pretend there was no fight going on at all.

But it was a fight they could not win. For every plane they shot out of the sky, Hitler would give Franco five more. For every tank they destroyed, Mussolini would supply a dozen.

By now you may be beginning to understand why Spain is different from the other powers we are fighting. Unlike the peoples of Germany, Italy, and Japan, the Spaniards did not willingly surrender their freedom. It had to be stolen from them, by terror and massacre.

In April of 1939, Franco marched into Madrid. Victorious.

[Footage of Franco’s victory parade in Madrid, with special emphasis on Italian and German troops participating]

But the end of the war did not mean peace. The firing squads kept working. The prisons filled to the bursting, so that by 1940, a full 2% of Spain’s population was in jail. For the Spaniards, the terror never ended. Spain descended into dire poverty, as the old trio reestablished themselves. More than 50% of Spain’s already meager national budget was allocated for guns, planes, and rifles. What was left went to fatten up the grandees and the bishops. Once again, the Spaniards were scrounging in the gutters for food. Once again they were working from sun-up to sun-down for not enough to feed themselves, let alone their families. Once again, they were slaves.

Nearly a million Spaniards crossed the French border ahead of the oncoming fascist armies, to escape Franco’s ‘justice.’ Most were not so lucky. SInce the ‘end’ of the war in Spain, more than 50,000 have been shot without trial.

Barely five months after Franco’s victory parade in Madrid, Germany unleashed its ‘blitzkrieg’ against Poland. France and Britain declared war on Germany. The great conflict had begun. Franco was thrilled. He expected a quick, tidy German victory, and that he would ride on Hitler’s coattails all the way to the prizes he had coveted for years.

What were they?

The first was Gibraltar. A little spit of land jutting out of Spain’s southern coast, Gibraltar had belonged to Britain for two-hundred years. The people of Gibraltar weren’t Spanish – they didn’t consider themselves Spanish, and they did not want to be part of Spain. But Franco wanted it anyway. His pride couldn’t bear the presence of foreigners on a strip of land he considered his by right.

Hitler wanted Franco to have Gibraltar, too. The reason for that was simple. Germany and Italy were fighting Britain in North Africa, and they were having trouble throwing the British back to Cairo as was their plan. Britain could supply her forces by one of two routes: one was through the Indian and Red Seas, and the Suez Canal. The other was through the Strait of Gibraltar. If Franco took Gibraltar, then he could close the straits to British shipping, and starve British forces in North Africa of the materiél they needed to resist the Axis.

[A map appears of the Mediterranean. The relevant countries and positions are indicated, and the Strait is presented as a large trap snapping shut.]

In July of 1941, Franco finally worked up the guts to jump in. He declared war on Russia, which Hitler had just attacked despite his treaty of non-aggression with that country, and shortly thereafter was at war with Britain as well.

Immediately, his armies assaulted the tiny British garrison at Gibraltar. But Franco’s soldiers had gotten used to brutalizing defenseless civilians. They weren’t ready for a real fight.

[Footage of the Battle of Gibraltar.]

After weeks of throwing themselves onto the British defenses, Franco went crying to Hitler for help, just like he’d done in 1936. He got it.

[Footage of German troops on the march. Ominous music.]

After weeks more of fighting, the British were forced to surrender. Gibraltar was Franco’s. Which meant it was Hitler’s. He’d got one of the things he wanted out of the war.

But his other goal was a little loftier.

Franco and his crew had never really gotten over the old glory days of Columbus, Cortés, Ferdinand, Isabella, and the Emperor Charles, when Spain had ruled the world. They couldn’t get over the fact that Spain had lost her vast empire in the new world. And they wanted to fix all of that.

The ‘Phalanx’ party, Franco’s tool for manipulating opinion in Spain, had a theory not dissimilar to the Nazi theory of the blood, which stated that anybody anywhere in the world with a drop of German blood in his veins owed his first and last loyalty to the Fuehrer, no matter what country he happened to be born in or what political philosophy he subscribed to. Likewise, the Phalanxists believed that all of the republics of Latin America, from the Rio Grande down to the Tierra del Fuego, belonged to Spain by right, because Spain had once governed there, and because Spanish blood still runs in the veins of their people.

[A map of Latin America is shown. The borders of the old Spanish empire at its height dissolve into those of 1941.]

Franco fully expected that once the war was won, and Germany had become master of the world, Latin America would be turned over to him, and the empire reborn. To that end, Spanish propagandists were hard at work in the republics south of our border, through the ‘Exterior Service’ of the Phalanx. They spread Nazi lies among the peoples of Mexico, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Chile, Guatemala, Uruguay, and elsewhere, insisting that the states of Latin America were enslaved by American imperialism, that they would only truly be free when they had come back under the loving guidance of mother Spain, that the peoples of ‘Hispanic’ blood should rise up against the ‘Yankee oppressor,’ and ‘the lie of democracy,’ and take their place in the ‘New Order’ which Hitler was forging with the help of Franco, Mussolini, and the Japanese warlords.

But that was a dream for the future. Franco had another problem for the moment, a little closer to home. That problem was Portugal, and its stubborn leader, Antonio de Oliveira Salazar…

*In fact, Mola said, "anyone who helps or hides a communist will be shot." The OWI ordered the judicious alteration.

 

[Iggies]

"It is Portugal's honor to be the last bastion of Christian civilization on the European continent."
- Antonio Salazar, 1942

"Wir sind das Deutsche 'Iberia Korps,'
Der Führers verwegene Truppe!"
- Song of the 'Iberia Korps,' 1942 - '43

Excerpt from The Salazar Years, by Filip Ribeiro de Menses

…On the 23rd of January, Franco ‘invited’ Salazar to Spain to discuss the ‘developing situation’ and its ramifications for Iberia. In his first foray out of Portugal in many years, the two dictators met in Seville, in the company of both Mario de Figueiredo and Franco’s brother in law and foreign minister, Serrano Suñer. For almost four hours, Franco harangued Salazar on the inevitably of Axis victory, insisting that the Allies were spent and that even the entry of the Americans into the war could not save England and the Soviet Union. Figueiredo recalled that Serrano Suñer – who, slender, silver-tongued, and impeccably dressed in his dark suit, cut a rather more sinister figure than his dumpy brother-in-law – regularly interrupted to insist, over and over, that it was time for Portugal to repudiate her centuries old “English error” and turn back to Iberia. Figueiredo would later remark that it sometimes seemed “they were trying to convince themselves as much as us.”

As the ‘meeting’ continued, Franco came very near issuing outright threats when he warned that it would be “very dire” for Portugal to find herself in the cold after the victory, when the time came to consolidate the “New European Order.”

Salazar said very little, except to remind Franco that in the summer of 1940 he had pushed for a renewal of Spain and Portugal’s 1939 non-aggression and mutual assistance treaty, an offer which Franco, riding on the high of German victories in the west, had rebuffed. [1]

He left for Lisbon without having made any commitments, much to Franco’s chagrin. Moreover, as soon as he returned, Salazar summoned to his offices Captain Roque de Aguiar, director of Legionary intelligence, to discuss an immediate increase in the Legion’s manpower, to almost 40,000 men. An raft of orders to Captain Lourenço also saw the PVDE reoriented, from its traditional focus on leftist and liberal dissidents to extreme-rightists like the syndicalists of Rolão Preto, who was back in Portugal and was steadfastly advocating for a break with Britain and a new alliance with Spain. Finally, Salazar reconciled with the General Abílio Passos e Sousa. Flattering the general’s ego, Salazar frankly said that he had been wrong and Passos e Sousa had been right, and that it was time to discuss greatly enlarging Portugal’s little three-division army, just as Passos e Sousa had pushed for some years earlier. Though in his heart, Salazar still hoped at this stage that war could be averted, he was unmistakably preparing for it…

Excerpt from A World at Arms, by Gerhard Weinberg

…Almost from the moment of Spain’s entry into the war, the Iberian peninsula featured prominently in the thinking of British, and then American, war planners. Besides the fact that the country was, quite literally, the utmost western extremity of the European continent, Spain differed from the other Axis Powers in that it had just come through a devastating civil war, and huge swathes of the population could be assumed hostile to the ruling Franco clique. Moreover, the German-Spanish capture of Gibraltar had nearly locked the Royal Navy out of the Mediterranean, and made supplying Malta and especially Montgomery’s troops battling Rommel in Africa, a thornier prospect. The Admiralty in particular was keen to recapture Gibraltar and reopen the path between the Pillars of Hercules. For all of these reasons, Spain was increasingly seen by the Allies as “the key to Axis Europe"...

Excerpt from Whitney H. Shepardson’s report to William Donovan on Spain, late 1942

The Spaniards can be thought of as roughly divided into the following subcategories:

1. The workers.
2. The farmers.
3. The middle class.
4. The church.
5. The monarchists.
6. The fascists.
7. The military. [2]

1. The Spanish working-class is broadly opposed to the Franco regime. During the civil war, it was the working-class that provided the base of support for the Loyalist government, and filled out its armies. Under the present government, and especially since the start of the war, this class has seen its already low standard of living collapse further. Starvation is now widespread in many regions of the country, especially in the south. Socialist and anarchist philosophies found fertile ground among the Spanish laborers under the old Republic, and Franco has not beaten these tendencies out of them. He greatly fears an uprising of this class. The primary task of the Spanish Army is in fact to keep the laboring classes pacified, especially now that this can no longer be done by assurances of bread and political stability. To the present day, armed resistance has sprung almost entirely from the workers.
2. The small and big farmers of the country are mostly supportive of Franco, who they view as a bulwark against communism. They fervently opposed the Loyalist government in the civil war, and also tend towards a fanatic religiosity which breeds a distaste for democracy and modernism in general. Some of this class is dissatisfied by Franco’s increasing subservience to the fascist powers, and they have been hit by the unfolding economic catastrophe, but they are much more insulated than the workers, and by and large remain loyal to the regime. Franco knows the support of this class is crucial, and goes to great lengths to keep them happy, including the artificial inflation of grain prices, which tends to worsen famine conditions in the south.
3. The middle class is largely quiescent. During the civil war, they were split between liberals in the French mold who supported the Republic and conservatives who sided with Franco. Whatever liberal or democratic sentiments remain among this class are dormant today. There is little to no sign of active resistance, though this may change as Franco’s fortunes worsen.
4. The church has been critical to the functioning of Franco’s regime since the beginning, for they feared the intense ant-Church feeling of the Loyalist faction. The clergy is heavily integrated into the machinery of government, and most education is in their hands. They have a very medieval mindset, seeing little distinction between ‘Anglo-American’ democracy and Soviet communism. They have been fully behind Franco, but lately there has been dissatisfaction, as the bishops and priests are generally opposed to German-style Nazism, which they view as pagan. The Cardinal Gomá, Primate of Spain, is said to have come under police surveillance after several sermons critical of Hitler and Mussolini.
5. The monarchists strongly supported Franco in the civil war, expecting that his victory would see the restoration of the king. When this did not happen, many began to sour. Many of the finest generals in Franco’s army are committed monarchists. Their support for the regime is conditional on the approval of the exiled heir to the throne. If it was to be withdrawn, they would no longer bear up Franco as they do. Franco has taken an increasingly hard line with many of them. Nevertheless, efforts to establish contacts with Juan Borbón have to date been mostly unsuccessful. In any case, a monarchist restoration is not likely to be well-received by the masses of the population.
6. The fascists are evermore the core of the Franco state. Though earlier marginalized , more and more power has accrued to the ‘Phalanx’ as of late, as a show of deference to Germany and Italy. The fascist salute has become universal, and the ‘National Syndicates’ omnipotent. This is without a doubt the most dangerous sector of the population, not only for their fanaticism, but also for their imperial viewpoint, which sees them look across the Atlantic towards Latin America. Many cherish dreams of a rebirth of the old Spanish Empire, and their desire is to detach the Latin American republics from their traditional friendships with the United States. The fascists are diehards, and will probably keep faith in an Axis victory to the very end. More and more, they will be the only ones Franco can truly count on.
7. The military is the lynchpin of the whole system. More than half the state budget goes to the Army. They serve not only for national defense, but also for police and increasingly even for the maintenance of services and infrastructure. Of course, Franco himself came out of the army. Without the army, the regime cannot survive. However, many officers have increasingly become disgruntled as a result of Franco’s concessions to the ‘Phalanx.’ Moreover, many consider the presence of German divisions on Spanish soil an insult to the honor of the army.

In a very real sense, it can be said that Spain is not really an ‘enemy country’ in the sense that Germany or Japan is. It is better thought of as an occupied one, similar to Poland or France. A very large part of the population, likely an outright majority, is at least passively opposed to the Franco regime, and would be glad to see it overthrown. Tens of thousands of Spaniards are already thought to be active in the armed ‘partisan’ movement, and hundreds of thousands more are sympathetic to its aims. The cores of the resistance movement are in Catalonia and in particular Barcelona, in the mining country of the north, and in the desperately poor regions of western Andalusia and Estremadura. In these regions, over the past year, it is believed more than 500 regime, party, and military officials have been assassinated. Travel between large cities has become increasingly dangerous for columns of the Spanish Army or the Civil Guard, as partisan ambushes have become more common. Franco has been forced to significantly increase military presence in these regions, and to import experienced Nazi ‘partisan fighters’ to deal with these ‘disturbances.’ Coupled with military disasters in the east, it is believed the foundations of Franco’s state are quickly eroding. Spain’s armed forces can almost certainly not survive contact with the armies of any Allied power for more than a few days or weeks...

Excerpt from Vernichtungskrieg: The Eastern Front, 1941 - 1945, by Stephen G. Fritz

…Hitler was, again, troubled by Spain. By the start of 1942, the Führer was coming to deeply regret Franco’s entry into the war. Spain’s ‘contribution’ of an army corps to the eastern front was strongly outweighed by the dead weight of twenty-five million people on the brink of starvation, and a country increasingly ablaze with partisan activity, problems which could only be ameliorated by the attentions of an already significantly overstretched Germany.

But most of all, Hitler worried about Spain as a potential beachhead for an Allied invasion of the continent. With the Red Army’s failure to collapse, the threat of a two-front war loomed again, and he was willing to do whatever was necessary to avert that nightmare. Hitler’s first hope was to cajole Portugal into repudiating its English alliance and signing onto the Tripartite Pact. At his urging, in January of 1942, Franco made an attempt to ‘persuade’ Portugal’s dictator, Antonio de Oliveira de Salazar, into doing just that. This effort was totally unsuccessful. Besides Salazar’s personal distaste for German Nazism, he was also farsighted enough to realize that hitching himself to the Axis wagon at this stage would end in disaster.

That meant that the massive, Portugal-sized breach in the walls of fortress Europe could only be closed by force. In the spring of 1942, even as OKW laid the groundwork for the offensive towards the Caucasus which would culminate in the titanic struggle for Stalingrad, Hitler decided to peel away four Wehrmacht divisions, as well as the 1st SS Panzer ‘Leibstandarte.’ They were organized into a new ‘Iberia Korps,’ under Model, for immediate service in Spain...

Excerpt from ‘Everybody’s Favorite Dictator,’ article for The Nation by Jon Lee Anderson, 1995

I stand face to face with Salazar. He looks down on me from his granite pedestal before the São Bento Palace. His face is serene, sleek, handsome, his iron suit neatly pressed. His right hand is raised in a wave, perhaps a fatherly gesture, perhaps – if one squints – almost a fascist salute.

Next to me is Ana Carvalho. She is a schoolteacher, twenty-seven years old, short, bespectacled. Besides the two of us, the square is practically empty. “He arrested my grandfather,” Ana says. “Because he was a union organizer. They kept him in jail for two months and they beat him every night. He was almost blind in one eye when they finally let him go, and he never slept right for the rest of his life.” She shakes her head. “They say, ‘oh, well, he wasn’t like Franco, he wasn’t like Hitler.’ Maybe not, but that doesn’t make him a hero.”

Antonio Oliveira de Salazar ruled Portugal for only ten years. Perhaps eleven or twelve, depending on how exactly one reckons, for in characteristic fashion, there was never one great seizure of power, no Reichstag Fire or March on Rome. Salazar conquered Portugal by degrees.

But no matter how his reign is reckoned, it was a short one. And yet the shadow of that time looms large over Portugal even forty years later.

For decades after the end of the Second World War, criticism of Salazar was absolutely beyond the pale in the country’s political mainstream, even among the far-left groupings like the Communist Party. He soon came to occupy a position comparable to that of George Washington in the United States, a figure above politics. Up until the last decade, six-year-old children in Portugal’s schools were given a writing exercise which asked them to answer the question, “who was Salazar?” The ‘right’ answer was “he who saved our Fatherland.” Only this year a national poll saw him voted “greatest Portuguese of all time” with overwhelming margins.

The statue before the São Bento Palace is only one of many that dot the country, and there are even more streets, city squares, and parks that bear his name. He is routinely invoked in parliamentary debates, with the suggestion that he would strongly approve or disapprove of this or that proposal.

The myth of Salazar reaches even beyond the borders of Portugal. A British secondary school history textbook printed in 1975 describes him as a “national leader” whose “humanitarian instincts kept him from being seduced by Hitlerism, as was Franco.”

In the United States, he is best known through Franklin J. Schaffner’s Salazar (1979), which netted actor Roy Scheider an Oscar for his thoroughly sympathetic portrayal of the dictator.

With the exception of some royalty, Salazar is the only European head of state to be honored as “Righteous Among the Nations” by Yad Vashem.

But in recent years, some Portuguese, like Ana, are seeking a reappraisal. It is certainly true that Salazar was not in the same moral universe as butchers of millions like Stalin or Hitler. He is not even comparable to his neighbor Franco, who massacred hundreds of thousands of Spaniards. Salazar’s leadership of Portugal during the war years was undeniably capable and courageous, and it is perhaps true that the Allied victory might have been significantly delayed had it been otherwise. His decision to remain in Lisbon while German bombs fell and Spanish divisions advanced on the capital perhaps outshines Churchill’s own defiance of the Blitz in London. It is to Salazar’s eternal credit that he sheltered Jewish refugees, while Franco delivered them to the gas chambers of Auschwitz and Treblinka.

But it remains a fact that Salazar was a dictator, and like all dictators, he ruled by corruption, terror, and intimidation. If his death toll does not compare to his contemporaries, it remains a fact that a number of his political opponents were murdered, dozens more died in his prisons, and thousands more were beaten, deported, denied employment and harassed endlessly by the secret police. For many, like Ana’s grandfather, Salazar’s regime was a nightmare that never seemed to end, even long after the dictator’s death. His policies of stark austerity kept millions of Portuguese into poverty in the name of ‘economic sobriety.’ While he is remembered for his courageous stand against Hitler and Franco, it is often forgotten that Franco’s own victory in the Spanish Civil War might not have been possible without the generous material and moral support of Salazar’s regime…

[1] OTL, this pact was indeed reaffirmed. ITTL, a more confident Franco repudiated it.
[2] organizing the population in this way might seem a little weird ("the military" is certainly not a category of the same type as "the middle class" or "the working class") but it's based on this OTL report on occupied Greece.

 

[Iggies]

“Once, half of Spain was white, and the other half was red. The whites won, so now both halves are red.”
- Anonymous Republican soldier in exile

"Madrid is the Valley Forge of the Spanish people!"
- Pro-Republican leaflet distributed in the United States during the Spanish Civil War


Excerpt from Antifascism, by Michael Seidman

…Two months after the Nazi invasion of the USSR and Franco’s entry into the war, the Central Committee of the PCE announced the formation of the Spanish Democratic Union (Unión Democrática Española - UDE). The UDE proposed a common front for the overthrow of the regime, extending a hand to all anti-Franco forces in Spain and abroad, including the “civilized” right. Few among the non-Communist exiles were eager to sign-off. The internecine rifts of the civil war had not remotely healed, and for many among the ‘bourgeois’ Left-Republicans, the anarchists, and the prietistas, the lesson of the civil war had been that the Communists could not be trusted. Entirely ignoring the very existence of the UDE as well as Juan Negrín, in December of 1941, Prieto and Martínez Barrio announced in Mexico City the formation of the “Spanish Liberation Front” (Frente de Liberación Española – FLE).

The FLE’s founding congress was scheduled for 12 December, which as fate would have it was only five days after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and one day after Germany’s declaration of war on the United States.

Spirits were high among the delegates that afternoon, and it was on this occasion that Socialist lawyer Fernando de los Ríos is supposed to have remarked to Indalecio Prieto that “this time, we shall pass.”

Like the UDE, the FLE was to be a big-tent movement of all “who strugglle for a free and sovereign Spain,” spanning from moderate conservatives to anarchists – though implicitly excluding the PCE. It’s charter, promulgated in February of 1942, committed its members to work, “by all available means,” for “the overthrow of the criminal regime of Francisco Franco, maintained by terror and the lavish support of the Axis powers” and for “the establishment of a sovereign and democratic Spain, respectful of the human rights and dignities of all of its citizens, and absolutely inviolable in its territorial integrity.” A proviso also declared the “full and unconditional support of the Spanish people for the war effort of the United Nations, pledged until the total military defeat of the Axis Powers.”

The form of government of this future Spain was left vague, except for stipulating that it be “democratic.” By this vagary, Martínez Barrio and his collaborators hoped to attract even the support of disgruntled Spanish monarchists, at least the less hidebound ones who might be amenable to a constitutional monarchy.

The FLE’s executive committee apparently expected the immediate recognition of the Allied leadership, and a guarantee that upon the overthrow of the Franco regime it would become the provisional government of Spain. This was not forthcoming, and for months none of the Allied powers formally acknowledged the existence of the FLE.

Martínez Barrio and his comrades were deeply annoyed by the snub, and decided to make themselves unignorable. In April of 1942, the FLE leadership embarked on a tour of the United States to drum up support for their cause. The organizing spirit of the tour was Margarita Nelken, the PSOE deputy from Badajoz whose oratory had made her beloved of the Spanish left and a hate figure of the right. She had once belonged to the caballerista faction, and ultimately joined the PCE, but in 1941 mounting disagreements led to her expulsion and she moved towards the FLE’s position.

Accompanying her were De Los Ríos and Martínez Barrio, as well as Left-Republican Antonio Lara (who had traveled the US once before on a propaganda tour for the Republic in 1937), and Basque Nationalist Jesús María de Leizaola.

The delegation’s first stop was in Los Angeles, where they met a rapturous reception. During the Spanish Civil War, the Loyalist cause had been the cause celebre of left-liberal opinion in the United States, and inspired affection far beyond the sectors of the extreme left. Labor Unions, liberally-minded Protestant groups, women’s organizations, and artists’ leagues had all passed resolutions, held rallies, and raised funds in support of the Spanish Republic. In Hollywood, stars from Edward G. Robinson to Shirley Temple to Gypsy Rose Lee (who once gave a speech at a benefit in which she declared, ‘I’ve come not to lift my skirts, but to lift the embargo on Spain!’) had raised funds, signed petitions, and attended rallies in support of the Spanish Republic.

‘La causa’ had never shed its pink tinge, and drawn much derision from the conservative public, in particular American Catholics, who if they were not outright pro-Franco, tended to take a position of ‘a pox on both their houses.’ But now in a time of war-inspired national unity, and with Franco a declared enemy of the United States, those who had marched, written, and protested for the Popular Front and against fascism felt themselves thoroughly vindicated.

When Nelken, Martínez Barrio, and the rest spoke to a packed stadium at the LA Coliseum, in attendance were not only president of the ILWU Harry Bridges (currently fighting the federal government’s attempts to deport him), and almost-governor of California Upton Sinclair, but also Los Angeles’ Republican mayor Fletcher Brown (who good-naturedly weathered a joke about having ‘all sorts of republicans in attendance here today’).

Nelken spoke for an hour, regaling the audience with lurid stories of rebel atrocities during the civil war, and finishing with the insistence that “a free Spain is the first step to a free Europe.”

When Martínez Barrio spoke, his much less fiery address seemed to be directed less to the audience than towards governing circles in Washington, as he stressed his own moderate democratic credentials and those of his allies, and said that “the question of Spain’s government cannot be put off.” The New York Times opined that ‘Señor Martínez is doing his best to outmaneuver rivals on both left and right, and ensure for himself and his allies the lion’s share of the governance in the Spain that is to come.”

Also in attendance were at least two veterans of the XV International Brigade’s ‘Abraham Lincoln Battalion’: the German-born Hermann Bottcher, who within the month would ship out for Australia with the rank of private in the US Army and make a name for himself as ‘the One Man Army of Burma,’ and Alvah Bessie, one of the oldest men to have fought with the American contingent in Spain, a standby of New York City’s leftist literary scene and an aspiring screenwriter.

Bessie delivered a speech describing battle at Brunete and on the Ebro, and promised that “we Americans who have already fought the fascist Axis once are ready to do so again.”

(Bessie and Bottcher’s appearances had been taken on their own initiative and never cleared by the VALB, and both were severely upbraided later, since Moscow and by extension the CPUSA were at the time in bitter schism with the FLE)

Finally, Nelken led the crowd in chanting, “¡No Pasarán!” after which Bottcher led them in a recital of the pledge of allegiance.

The Trotskyist Bertram Wolfe, a bitter opponent of the USSR, ‘Popular Frontism,’ and this ‘new imperialist war,’ sarcastically remarked that the “the glaring absences from this beautiful panoply of wartime unity were two: the Catholics and ‘The Internationale’.”...

…When the tour at last reached the east coast and the vicinity of Washington D.C, Martínez Barrio became more vocal about his hopes for an audience with President Roosevelt, sending several unanswered letters to the White House, including one in which he unsubtly attempted to guilt-trip the president by reference to the “tragic and misguided embargo” which “denied the legal government of the Spanish people the arms needed to resist the invasion.”

He did not get his talk with Roosevelt, but in the last weeks of May, 1942, he was granted an audience with Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Hull, who had been a staunch advocate of the embargo during the civil war, was skeptical of the Spanish exile movement in general, and deeply unimpressed with Martínez Barrio himself. The latter ultimately regretted the meeting, as not only was he unable to extract any promises regarding the FLE's role in Spain’s post-war development, but Hull posed several questions and raised several challenges he was not eager to answer.

When Hull asked pointedly about the massacres of clergy in 1936, Martínez Barrio could only deflect blame from the Republican government and insist it had all been down to a few “anarchist maniacs,” (‘locos anarquistas’) who had been “duly punished.” Hull also asked why Martínez Barrio believed Franco had been victorious, indicating that he himself believed Communist skulduggery, as well as incompetence and corruption on the part of the Loyalists had been responsible for their defeat, rather than the irresistible force of Axis arms. In return, Martínez Barrio unleashed his own vituperation against the Communists, and swore that the PCE would be absolutely excluded from any democratic government in Spain…

Excerpt from A World at Arms, by Gerhard Weinberg

…The question of Spain’s post-war government was not at the top of anyone’s agenda, subordinated as it was not only to the far more important questions of the post-war governments of Germany and Italy, but to the all-important consideration of winning the war before all.

Nevertheless, as early as the Atlantic Conference in August of 1941, prior to the United States entry into the war, Churchill and Roosevelt had discussed the future of Spain. Churchill in particular was apprehensive. During the country’s civil war, he had been heard to comment that had he been a Spaniard, he would surely have supported Franco over his opponents. He expressed concerns that the downfall of the regime might ‘stir revolution’ that would end with Communist domination of the Iberian peninsula.

Roosevelt was more sanguine, assuring Churchill that the Spanish people did not want ‘Communism after the Russian fashion’ and that the Soviet Union would in any case be unable to impose it by force.

Both were agreed on the ‘inevitable’ deposition of Franco, but Churchill insisted that the hot-bloodedness and instability of the Spaniards would require their post-war government be ‘guided’ by the Allied powers for some time, until both fascist and communist influence could be thoroughly purged from the body politic.

Over the next year, the ‘Spanish policy’ of the Allies would evolve in fits and starts, never codified or consistent. Stalin, still somewhat embittered over ‘his horse’ having lost the race in 1939, was particularly eager to settle accounts with Franco, and in private hoped that a left-tinged ‘People’s Government composed of all the democratic forces’ could be established amid the wreckage of his regime which, while not communist or even socialist, would be a friend to the USSR in Western Europe. For the time being he pinned his hopes on the PCE’s (Communist Party of Spain) so-far moribund ‘UDE’ (an organization meant to unify disparate anti-Franco factions under Communist leadership), and in Moscow, he hosted the party’s top brass until the day came on which they could return to Spain.

Churchill was generally desirous of a monarchist restoration, and especially during 1942 British intelligence went to some lengths to establish contacts with Juan Borbón, with the ultimate aim of establishing him as king of a parliamentary monarchy with a conservative tilt. These efforts, for the time being, were largely unsuccessful. The Spanish monarchists, though increasingly dissatisfied with Franco, the Falange, and the war, were not yet ready for open sedition, and Juan feared to openly seek the backing of countries at war with Spain. Still, there was definite sympathy for Britain among many sectors of monarchist opinion, and as the war wound on this would only become more the case.

As for Roosevelt, he would increasingly gravitate towards the “Spanish Liberation Front” (FLE) of Diego Martínez Barrio, which unified most shades of the Spanish republican exile movement. Initial attempts by Martínez to affirm American backing for his movement had not been fruitful, but eventually, Roosevelt would warm to the FLE (though never really to Martínez Barrio himself), and various figures from its ranks would serve as advisors and assistants to American policy makers in Spanish matters, and to American forces fighting in Iberia.

The upshot was that, over the course of 1941 and 1942, each of the three ‘blocs’ of the Spanish opposition found their own patrons among the three Allied powers…


Excerpt from Hollywood At War, by Christian Blauvelt

…With the exception of the campaigns in France and Germany itself, the Spanish front has probably been the best served by Hollywood. 2015’s Brad Pitt vehicle Fury, following the exploits of a Sherman tank crew in Andalusia, is the only the latest in a long succession of pictures which include classics such as Six Weeks to Seville (1944) as well as duds like Michael Bay’s Our Open Eyes (2004).

Despite – or because of – the emotional response of American artists to the Spanish Civil War, Hollywood was notoriously averse to the subject during the war itself. A small number of pictures were released, most notably 1937’s The Last Train from Madrid from Paramount Pictures and 1938’s The Blockade from United Artists starring Henry Fonda. But this small wave produced no classics. The heads of the big studios feared to offend both the powerful American Catholic political bloc, which deplored the anti-clerical Loyalists, and the strong left-wing ‘Popular Front’ movement which extolled the Republic as the champion of liberty in Europe. Hollywood thus declined to make any movies clearly favoring one or the other side. The Last Train from Madrid is tepidly pro-Nationalist (or at least anti-Loyalist), depicting a Madrid under the austere rule of grim-faced Republican officers who arrest at the drop of a hat, but even this film ran with a disclaimer that the producers did not intend any political statement. The Blockade is tepidly pro-Republican, with Fonda’s hard-working son of the soil and blockade runner clearly meant to be a partisan of the Loyalists. But both films are so timid that they become cowardly. Characters are always at pains to avoid any frank discussion on the causes, aims, or meaning of the conflict, to the extent that even the two contending factions are rarely named. One gets the sense that the Spanish Civil War is being fought for no particular reason.

This neutral stance chagrined many screenwriters and actors, most of whom were firmly pro-Loyalist, including the writer of Blockade John H. Lawson, who felt his script had been neutered.

With the attack on Pearl Harbor, and soon after, the Spanish declaration of war that followed in the wake of Germany’s, all this would change.

As Alvah Bessie, a screenwriter and a veteran of the ‘Abraham Lincoln Brigade’ which had fought for the Republic, gleefully recalled, “it was like a dam broke open.”

Suddenly, the studios could not get enough “Spanish screenplays,” and writers could not churn them out fast enough. Well before the first American boots hit the ground in Iberia, Hollywood was in a death grapple with Francisco Franco.

The first of this new wave of pictures was probably Twentieth Century Fox’s Gibraltar! (1942), starring Tyrone Power. The film had been in production since before Pearl Harbor, and in fact Karl Tunberg’s first draft screenplay had been finished while the siege of Gibraltar was still ongoing. Though long overshadowed by the 1952 classic starring David Niven [1], Gibraltar! was a hit in the spring and summer of 1942.

Power plays the fictional British Corporal Henry Milton, a fun-loving and carefree sort who must quickly rediscover his masculinity and sense of duty when he finds himself posted to the Gibraltar garrison just ahead of the Spanish-German siege. It is a fairly typical and unexceptional adventure story, with the gallant British playing off of incompetent, blustering Spaniards and sneering, heel-clicking Nazi officers. Of course, a love story is even worked in, between Milton and a pretty Gibraltarian nurse (Betty Grable). The film ends on a somber note, with the fall of Gibraltar, and Milton and his comrades led off into captivity. But as Milton is marched away at bayonet point, he assures a gloating German captain that “you can only cage free men for so long,” and a rousing rendition of “Rule Britannia” plays over the credits.

That summer also saw the release of Columbia Pictures’ mostly-forgotten Midnight in Andalusia (1942). Written by avowed communist Lillian Hellman well before Pearl Harbor, the film was based on Memoirs of a Nationalist, published in 1937 by Antonio Bahamonde who had served as an attaché to Nationalist general Gonzalo Queipo de Llano in Seville before defecting to the Republican side. Set in the summer of 1936, the film follows Marcela Jurado, a Sevillan girl who finds herself forced to serve as a maid in the headquarters of Queipo de Llano (Boris Karloff) after her brothers are executed as labor union activists.

Reception to Midnight in Andalusia was mixed. Bosley Crowther, writing in the New York Times, praised the performances of Hayworth and Karloff, but also referred to the movie as “a cavalcade of atrocities.” Hellman's screenplay severely tested the censorship regime of the time (and her early drafts were even bloodier). In one scene, a truckload of Republican prisoners is mown down by drunken fascist soldiers, the survivors gruesomely dispatched by means of bayonets and gunshots to the head (Crowther, in his review, wryly remarked, “you can almost see the bayonet going in”) In another, a young boy is beaten to death by falangists for refusing to give the fascist salute and cry “¡Viva Franco!” Karloff’s Queipo de Llano spends the film delivering hideously violent, drunken rants over the radio, when he is not leering at Marcela or jovially issuing death sentences.

One scene in particular, in which it is implied that Hayworth’s heroine suffered rape at the hands of Franco’s Moroccan troops after the murder of her brothers, proved too much. It drew objections not only over its ‘obscenity,’ but also from the NAACP, which protested that it would "tend to increase prejudices towards colored persons,” and was excised from the film before general release.

Midnight in Andalusia ends with Marcela fleeing Seville to the Republican lines, and hoping aloud that the day will come when “the murderers of my country will be called to account.” (There is a – probably apocryphal – story that one of the GIs who arrested the real Queipo de Llano in 1943 punched the general in the gut and exclaimed, “that’s for Rita!”).

Less controversial and more enduring was winter 1942's Even The Olives Bled from Warner Brothers, written by Alvah Bessie and based on his own experiences with the International Brigades in Spain. Starring Gary Cooper as Lawrence Wilson, an American stevedore and soldier in the ‘Abraham Lincoln Battalion,’ it follows the ordeal of the American volunteers in Spain, from first blood at Jarama to the withdrawal of the International Brigades following the Battle of the Ebro. It is an altogether more serious film than Gibraltar! There is no obligatory love story, and the fascists are generally not portrayed as two-dimensional ‘heavies.’ There is even a scene where a captured rebel officer gets to ‘make his case,’ insisting he is fighting not for fascism or totalitarianism for his faith and his country against anarchy. Bessie tried his best to convey the radical convictions that animated him and most of his comrades in Spain, and there is some simplified leftist political discourse placed in the mouths of Wilson and his comrades (“In Spain,” says a Spanish loyalist soldier towards the end of the film, “a handful had everything and the rest of us had nothing. We asked for our fair share, and they answered with bombs.”) But the film’s heroes talk only of “democracy,” “liberty,” and “independence,” all words calculated to strike sympathetic cords in the hearts of American viewers. A climactic scene in which the Lincoln volunteers sing “The Star Spangled Banner” while under heavy fascist artillery fire on the Ebro was greeted with cheering at the film’s New York premier. The word “worker” is scarcely heard throughout the 150 minute runtime of Even The Olives Bled, let alone “revolution” or “socialism.”

Bessie took the standard line of the time that the civil war was not really a ‘civil war’ but simply an Axis invasion of Spain, with Franco as a puppet of the foreign dictators. This is conveyed by one scene in particular at about the midpoint of the film, where Franco is portrayed as being meekly ordered around by a German ‘advisor,’ who stops to pontificate on how Spain really means nothing at all to Germany, except as a ‘practice course’ for blitzkrieg.

Even The Olives Bled ends with a scene that Bessie deplored for its cloying sentimentality, but which higher-ups insisted upon. One of the Lincoln volunteers – killed earlier in the film – wordlessly advances into frame, with the Stars and Stripes flying behind him. As rousing music plays, he is wordlessly joined by a Minuteman with his musket right out of 1776, a Union soldier in blue, and finally a contemporary GI. The four men stand to attention before the national flag as the film closes out. Bessie may have hated it, but the party stalwarts at The Daily Worker loved it, gushing that “this picture makes clear that the Americans who gave their lives in Spain did so according to the best traditions of our nation, and have earned their hallowed place of honor alongside those who fell at Lexington and Gettysburg in defense of sacred liberty.”

[1] thanks to @theg*ddam*hoi2fan for the suggestion of a post-war film about the Siege of Gibraltar starring David Niven