The battle for Spain: the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939 (29 page)

Many Spanish republicans maintained a naive belief that Great Britain would act as the champion of the underdog in its nineteenth-century tradition. Indeed, the belief that the democracies would eventually deliver them from dictatorship persisted until 1946, seven years after the end of the civil war. Certainly, in 1938 there was a conviction in Spain that even British conservatives would be forced to recognize the necessity of ‘joining the fight against fascism’. But they underestimated the deep prejudice of certain governing circles.

The only circumstance likely to influence British foreign policy was a direct threat to traditional interests, the most sensitive of which was still the route to India. It was the threat of a permanent Italian occupation of Majorca and Mussolini’s immediate breaking of their ‘Gentleman’s Agreement’ which brought Eden to reconsider his position only on 7 January 1937.
¹⁴
Meanwhile, the actions of the Royal Navy were astonishing for a non-interventionist power. Not only were communications facilities provided for General Kindelán in Gibraltar to speak directly to Rome, Berlin and Lisbon, but the battleship HMS
Queen Elizabeth
was moved in front of Algeciras bay to prevent republican warships shelling the port.

At the same time as the republican government was appealing to France for military aid, the nationalists were turning to their natural allies, Germany and Italy. After delivering Franco to Tetuán on 19 July, Luis Bolín flew to Lisbon. There, just before his fatal crash, Sanjurjo had countersigned the authorization to purchase aircraft and supplies for the ‘Spanish non-Marxist army’. Bolín flew on to Rome on 21 July, where he was joined by the Marquis de Viana, the private secretary of ex-King Alfonso. Together they saw Count Galeazzo Ciano, the Italian foreign minister and Mussolini’s son-in-law. According to Bolín, ‘his reaction was enthusiastic and spontaneous. Without hesitating an instant he promised us the necessary aid. “We must put an end to the communist threat in the Mediterranean,” he cried.’
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But the real decision lay with Mussolini, who was persuaded to help after Italian representatives in Tangier, including the military attaché and the consul general, had a meeting with Franco.
¹⁶

On 30 July, Mussolini sent Franco twelve Savoia-Marchetti 81 bombers bound for Morocco, two transport planes and a ship loaded with fuel and ammunition. Three of the aircraft crashed on the way, one of them coming down in Algeria, providing documentary proof of Italian military aid. The rest were used as aerial cover for the first nationalist convoy across the straits on 5 August.

Mussolini looked forward to the establishment of another fascist state in the Mediterranean, particularly one which would be indebted to him. His great ambition was to rival British naval power and challenge the French in North Africa.
¹⁷
A Spanish ally could control the straits by seizing Gibraltar and offered the possibility of bases in the Balearics, yet her fleet was not likely to be a rival. Mussolini’s conquest of Abyssinia had greatly increased his delusions of Italian power and Ciano’s main task was to obtain recognition of the ‘Italian Empire’. The Savoias were soon followed on 7 August by consignments of 27 Fiat fighters, five Fiat Ansaldo light tanks, twelve field guns, all with ammunition and trained personnel. Six days later three seaplanes were sent and on 19 August another six fighters.
¹⁸

Republican propaganda later tried to prove–with Nazi documents seized from the German consulate in Barcelona–that fascist intervention was pre-arranged and that the generals would not have launched the rebellion without this guarantee. (The nationalists, for their part, pretended to have found papers in Seville which revealed advance planning for a communist
coup d’état
.) In fact, the military plotters had not received any such guarantee. Relations between Italy and Germany had been strained in the early summer of 1936 primarily because of their rivalry over Austria. Nevertheless, their aid to nationalist Spain was to prove the forging of ‘the Rome–Berlin axis’, a phrase first used by Mussolini on 1 November 1936.

The Nazi government had better information on the situation in Spain, both through unofficial contacts and through their own sources within the German business community. At the beginning of the war their diplomats, led by the foreign minister, Neurath, were opposed to aiding Franco from fear of provoking a British reaction. Hitler despised this traditional branch of the German government and kept his diplomatic staff almost totally uninformed of his actions. He worked instead with German Military Intelligence, headed by Admiral Canaris, who had met Franco in Spain on several occasions and was keen to support his forces in particular.

On 22 July, as already mentioned, Franco told Colonel Beigbeder to ask the German government for transport aircraft. He had visited Berlin in March with General Sanjurjo to obtain German help in establishing a Spanish air force. (Lufthansa had had much to do with the setting up of Iberia in 1927.) Beigbeder made the first approach, using his friendship with General Kühlental. Then Franco’s other emissaries, Bernhardt and Langenheim, two Nazi businessmen living in Morocco, arrived in Berlin on 25 July, in a Lufthansa plane which the nationalists had commandeered.
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They first saw officials from the Wilhelmstrasse, but the German foreign service was extremely nervous about intervening on Franco’s side.
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They tried to prevent the two men from gaining access to senior members of the Nazi Party in Berlin. But one of them, through his contacts, managed to get a message to Rudolf Hess.
²¹
Hitler saw them in Bayreuth after a performance of
Siegfried
when they handed over a personal letter from Franco. The meeting went on until 1.30 in the morning. Hitler gave orders to Göring and General von Blomberg to expedite the request. Within 24 hours the special staff set up in the air ministry organized the despatch of Junkers 52s (twice the number that Franco had asked for), six Heinkel 51 fighter-bombers, twenty antiaircraft guns and other equipment.
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Hitler, having been convinced that Franco was the most competent and ruthless of the Spanish generals, insisted that military aid would be sent only to his troops. Göring, in a typically theatrical touch, gave the plan the codename, Operation
Feuerzauber
, or ‘Magic Fire’, which occurs in the last act of
Siegfried
.

The special staff in the air ministry also selected ‘volunteer’ pilots. Göring was thrilled at the idea of testing his ‘young Luftwaffe in this or that technical respect’. The Germans were far more hard-headed about the whole enterprise than the Italians. They were offering the best machines and experts available and, although Franco was an ideological ally, they wanted payment in copper and iron ore.
²³
Dealings between Franco and Nazi Germany were channelled through a company called Hispano-Marroquí de Transportes (HISMA). Its counterpart in Germany was Rohstoffe und Waren Einkaufgesellschaft (ROWAK).

The first delivery of weaponry reached Spain on 1 August and the rhythm was maintained, either directly to Cádiz or via Lisbon. They included Panzer Mark I tanks, as well as 20mm and 88mm anti-aircraft guns. Nevertheless, German intervention became fully established only in November with the creation of the Condor Legion after Franco’s failure to seize Madrid.

Hitler’s real reasons for helping Franco were strategic. A fascist Spain would present a threat to France’s rear as well as to the British route to the Suez Canal. There was even the tempting possibility of U-boat bases on the Atlantic coast. (The Spanish ports of Vigo, El Ferrol, Cádiz and Las Palmas were used on an occasional basis during the Second World War.) The civil war also served to divert attention away from his central European strategy, while offering an opportunity to train men and to test equipment and tactics.

Within a fortnight of the rebellion it had become evident that the nationalists would receive military aid from Germany and Italy, while the democracies refused arms to the Republic. This imbalance was increased by financial support to the nationalists, as vital in a drawn-out war as military aid. In the early days the republican government controlled the country’s 635 tons of gold, the equivalent of 715 million dollars, as backing for its peseta, while the nationalists could offer only the probability of victory as collateral for their currency.
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Nevertheless, Prieto was wrong to claim on 8 August that the gold gave the Spanish government an unlimited resistance, while the financial capacity of the enemy was negligible.

The nationalists immediately looked to foreign financial institutions for help as well as to Spanish supporters. The principal backing for the conspiracy came originally from the huge resources of the former tobacco smuggler Juan March, who apparently contributed £15 million. Ex-King Alfonso’s immense generosity to the nationalist movement, giving $10 million, was only possible as a result of the vast fortune he had reputedly managed to transfer abroad. Much of the capital that had been smuggled out of Spain during the Republic, especially in the first half of the year, was soon transferred back to nationalist territory. The nationalist movement demanded the gold of private citizens, in particular wedding rings, to help pay for the war.

American and British business interests were to make a great contribution to the final nationalist victory, either through active assistance, such as that given by the oil magnate Henry Deterding, or through boycotting the Republic, disrupting its trade with legal action and delaying credits in the banking system.
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Oil had now become almost as vital a commodity in war as ammunition. The US Neutrality Act of 1935 did not, however, reflect this change, thus allowing Franco to receive 3,500,000 tons of oil on credit during the course of the war, well over double the total oil imports of the Republic. The president of the Texas Oil Company was an admirer of the fascists, and on receiving news of the rising he diverted five tankers en route for Spain to the nationalist port of Tenerife, which had a large refinery. Since Texaco had been the principal supplier to the government, his decision was a severe blow to the Republic. Standard Oil of New Jersey was another supplier, though on a smaller scale. The Duchess of Atholl, one of the few British conservatives to support the Republic from the beginning, claimed that the Rio Tinto Zinc company helped finance Franco by supplying foreign exchange at over double the official rate. Later on Ford, Studebaker and General Motors supplied 12,000 trucks to the nationalists, nearly three times as many as the Axis powers, and the chemical giant, Dupont of Nemours, provided 40,000 bombs, sending them via Germany so as to circumvent the Neutrality Act.
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In 1945 the under-secretary at the Spanish foreign ministry, José Maria Doussinague, admitted that ‘without American petroleum and American trucks and American credit, we could never have won the civil war’.
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Shunned by the democratic powers and the international business community, the Republic could count only on the support of Mexico and the USSR. As a result, the nationalists’ warnings of an ‘international communist conspiracy’ carried some conviction, even though Soviet policy was hardly consistent. After Lenin’s death Trotsky’s policy of worldwide revolution had been based on the premise that Russian communism could not prosper so long as it was surrounded by a hostile capitalist world. The opposing Stalinist policy of ‘socialism in one country’, which triumphed in 1927, implied an abstention from involvement in revolutions abroad. The Chinese communists, for example, were sacrificed to Chiang Kai-Shek’s Kuomintang to further Russian interests, and Stalin gained recognition from the United States government in 1933 by promising not to indulge in subversive activities there.

On 25 July Giral sent a message to Stalin’s government via the Soviet ambassador in Paris requesting modern armaments and ammunition ‘of all types and in large quantities’. But the Soviet Union was fearful of the international situation and the possible consequences. This did not, however, stop the Kremlin from authorizing less controversial help, with the instruction: ‘To order NKVT [People’s Commissariat on Foreign Trade of the USSR] to sell fuel oil immediately to the Spaniards, at reduced prices, on most favourable conditions, any amount that they need.’
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Giral’s request for arms received no reply. For the first two weeks of the Spanish Civil War the lack of comment on events from Moscow raised alarm in foreign communist circles. Stalin was about to purge the Red Army, Trotsky’s creation, and he was deeply concerned at the prospect of a foreign adventure which might provoke Hitler at such a time of Soviet weakness. But the exiled Trotsky made use of this silence to accuse Stalin of betraying the Spanish revolution and aiding the fascists. Whether or not it was Trotsky who goaded him into action, Stalin must have realized that Soviet communism would lose all credibility, and probably the loyalty of European parties, if nothing was done to help the Republic. Stalin therefore decided to send aid to the Spanish government, but little more than the necessary minimum. In this way he would neither frighten the British government, which he needed as a potential ally, nor provoke the Germans.

On 3 August ‘popular demonstrations’ and ‘spontaneous indignation meetings’ took place all over Russia. Factory workers made ‘voluntary contributions’ to help the Republic and the government sent its first nonmilitary supplies. Comintern officials, using false names, were also sent to Spain to make sure that the young Spanish Communist Party should not step out of line. Only at the end of September did Stalin decide to provide military help.
²⁹
The first shipment left the Crimea on 26 September and did not reach Cartagena until 4 October.