When Spain’s left-wing Republican government collapsed in 1938 after losing a three-year-long civil war with Francisco Franco’s Falangist insurgency, anti-fascist Americans were worried that the new regime would soon be joining Adolf Hitler’s Axis. They would have been even more alarmed had they suspected their own country would be at war with the Falangists just over two years later as Franco, in an effort to prove he could be of use to the Axis cause and avenge his country’s defeat in the 1898 conflict with the United States, launched an assault on the American eastern seaboard that would accomplish very little in the end except to bring the United States into World War II sooner than Franco’s brother fascists in Germany and Italy would have liked.

   Besides wanting to ingratiate himself with the rest of the Axis and avenge Spain’s loss in the first Spanish-American war, Franco was also responding to encouragement from several of his top generals to reclaim some of the territories which had been lost by Spain in the treaty which ended the 1898 war; in a sort of Hispanic variation on the Nazis’ concept of Lebensraum, these generals aspired to restore as many as possible of their country’s former holdings in the Americas to the bosom of Madrid. They were particularly anxious to recapture Florida and Cuba, two of the richest territories in the Caribbean and potential jumping-off points for possible future military expeditions to South and Central America.

   The Roosevelt Administration didn’t yet have all the pieces of the puzzle regarding Franco’s expansionist plans for Florida and Cuba, but U.S military intelligence officials had picked up enough hints about said plans to draft a confidential memo to Navy Secretary Frank Knox recommending an increase in patrols off the coast of the southeastern United States. They also sent a report to U.S. Army Air Corps chief of staff General Henry H. Arnold warning that air defenses in Florida and other southern states were potentially vulnerable to surprise attack; this suggestion was viewed with considerable skepticism by most of the general’s peers, since there were then no bombers capable of crossing the Atlantic and the Spanish navy had done little if anything in the way of developing a maritime air capability. Arnold himself, however, was of the opinion that where there was smoke there was fire-- or at least a few glowing embers.

   When Spanish troops invaded the British colony of Gibraltar in July of 1940, the task of bolstering America’s southeastern coastal defenses took on even greater urgency for the White House. Many of Roosevelt’s most senior military advisors rightly suspected that the Gibraltar offensive was in some ways a dress rehearsal for mounting an attack on Florida or Cuba. The British, whose army in France had left behind nearly all their heavy equipment in the evacuation from Dunkirk a month earlier, did their best to try and hold off the invasion force, but after two weeks of desperate fighting they lost control of the colony to Franco’s troops-- and within a matter of days after Gibraltar fell Britain itself faced the possibility of invasion. Panicked civilians all up and down the East Coast of the United States sold their houses at a fraction of what those houses were worth as fears of an Axis attack on American soil mounted; the phenomenon would repeat itself on the West Coast in the face of the growing rift between the U.S. and Japan.

Even before Spain officially declared war on the United States, the tensions between Madrid and Washington would claim one extremely important casualty: the career of Roosevelt’s ambassador in London, Joseph P. Kennedy Sr. Kennedy’s pro-appeasement attitudes toward the Axis powers in general and Germany in particular had been appalling enough to Roosevelt in the first place, but with Franco and Hitler double-teaming a beleaguered England and beginning to threaten the very existence of the United States those attitudes now bordered on outright treason. When Kennedy made the mistake of telling a Chicago Tribune reporter he felt Washington should “accommodate” the Third Reich rather than confront it, that comment was the last straw for FDR-- within 48 hours after the offending words went to print, the President sacked Kennedy and recalled him to Washington. Upon his return to the United States Kennedy found himself a pariah even in the eyes of his old cronies back in Boston; his spirit broken by the perception that he was collaborating with fascism in word if not in deed, he went into a swift and steady physical decline and would die in 1946 following a series of incapacitating strokes.

In mid-August of 1940 the last pockets of British resistance in southern England were overwhelmed by a joint German-Spanish assault force, compelling the royal family and British prime minister Winston Churchill to flee into exile to continue the war against Hitler from abroad as the core of a Free British government based in Canada. The U.S. Atlantic fleet became more aggressive in challenging U-boats that dared venture into American waters; U.S. intelligence officials took a closer look at their European agents’ data on Spanish war-fighting capabilities. The U.S. Army Air Corps, which for years had been the stepchild of the American armed services, was now being accorded high priority as the Roosevelt Administration sought to bolster U.S. air defenses against possible enemy bombing raids.

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The last hopes for peace between Spain and the United States were dashed on October 13th, 1940 when a U.S. Navy submarine on its daily patrol off the Virginia coast spotted a contingent of Spanish warships traveling at full speed on what appeared to be a course for the U.S. Atlantic fleet’s central base at Norfolk. A coded dispatch was sent to Fleet Operations to warn them of the possible impending attack, and within hours a hastily organized task force was steaming out from Norfolk Harbor to challenge the Spanish squadron. The next twelve hours saw Spanish and American warships trade barrages in one of the most ferocious naval battles fought by Western navies since Trafalgar; before it was all over five American warships and eight Spanish vessels had been sunk, with a dozen more severely damaged and three scuttled by their own crews.

The expeditionary brigade which had accompanied the Spanish warships on their transatlantic journey, and was to have been landed on the Virginia coast to occupy Norfolk as well as the city’s naval and commercial maritime facilities, was all but wiped out when U.S. Navy dive bombers and torpedo planes sank the transport vessels being used to carry them to their designated landing zones. The few soldiers who survived these air attacks were soon captured by detachments of Marine Corps guards, becoming the first Axis POWs in what was already shaping up to be a do-or-die conflict between the Hitler-Mussolini- Franco alliance and the one remaining major power on earth other than the Soviet Union capable of resisting their expansionist agenda.

The Spanish battle plan, badly flawed in both conception and execution, had been to seize Norfolk along with its naval base and essentially hold it for ransom with the goal of forcing President Roosevelt to agree to whatever peace terms Franco demanded. Even if the expeditionary force had managed to establish a beachhead on U.S. soil, it’s unlikely that they could have succeeded in their assigned mission; they were thousands of miles from home and operating at the end of supply lines which were-- at best-- tenuous. Furthermore, they were facing a people with a long history of making successful use of unconventional combat tactics against foreign foes, a people led by a president who in eight years in the White House had changed from being a cautious neutral to being a committed anti-fascist. Within just two hours after the first exchange of gunfire between American and Spanish naval forces, Roosevelt had convened a joint session of Congress to ask for a declaration of war against Spain; Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy declared war on the United States the next day. Publicly Adolf Hitler lauded the Falangist attempt to strike at Virginia as a “daring act of resist against the Judeo-Bolshevist conspiracy”, but in private he was furious with Franco-- and more than a little worried.

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