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No Pasaran!:
The Second Spanish-American War, 1940-43

 

By Chris Oakley

Part 5

 

adapted from material previously posted at Othertimelines.com

 

Summary: In the first four chapters of this series, we analyzed the events leading to the outbreak of war between the United States and Franco’s Spain in 1940; the start of hostilities between the United States and Japan the following year; and the catastrophic defeat the Spanish and their German allies suffered at the hands of the U.S. Navy Atlantic fleet off the Greenland coast in the spring of 1942. In this segment, we’ll review how the Franco regime’s fortunes declined still further in late 1942 and early 1943.

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Modern historians have compared the destruction of the Operation Tiburon invasion force to the toppling of the first domino in a row of dominoes, and there’s certainly a great deal of truth in that analogy. Not only did Germany’s fortunes in the Second World War take a decided turn for the worse in the aftermath of Tiburon’s failure, but relations between Germany and her Falangist ally Spain went on the decline in the wake of the invasion attempt’s collapse. No sooner had what was left of the invasion armada staggered home to Spain than high-level diplomatic contacts between Berlin and Madrid began to steadily and swiftly decline in the face of Hitler’s anger towards Franco following the defeat of the invasion. When asked by Joachim von Ribbentrop at the end of his final meeting with Franco when he planned to have another one with the Spanish ruler, the Führer rather memorably replied: “I’d rather have four of my teeth taken out.”

     This estrangement came just as Franco was beginning to find himself more in need of German military support than at any other time since the first days of the Spanish Civil War. While most of Franco's intelligence agents in North America were by then in prison or dead, a number of them were still at large sending what information they could back to Madrid; included among that information were some ominous hints that the United States and its Canadian and Free British allies were staring to prepare for a future assault on Spanish-occupied territories overseas-- or worse yet, an invasion of Spain itself. There was even a rumor the OSS had put together a hit squad of Spanish Republican exile to infiltrate Madrid in order to assassinate Franco.

     Franco didn't concern himself much with those rumors-- the facts of his regime's increasingly dire strategic situation were alarming enough. The Axis, once seemingly at the cusp of world domination, was now on the defensive not just in Europe but in the Pacific too as the U.S. Navy had steadily chipped away at Japanese naval power and turned back German and Spanish attempts to cut off shipping through the Panama Canal. Italy had never been much of an Axis partner in the first place and was displaying signs of becoming even less so as King Victor Emmanuel III grew more and more disenchanted with the direction in which Benito Mussolini had taken his country. Hitler's other European partners-- Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria --were reeling after the heavy blows they'd taken individually and collectively from the Red Army. Even ostensibly neutral Sweden was starting to exhibit signs of becoming more antagonistic towards Madrid and Berlin; just after the Allies defeated the Operation Tiburon attack force three junior attachés with the Spanish embassy in Stockholm were unceremoniously arrested and expelled from Swedish territory after they were caught with papers in their possession linking them to a thwarted Falangist plot to attack the American consulate in Malmo.

     The early summer of 1942 saw two of the Franco regime's worst fears realized in quick succession. On June 16th anti-Axis elements within the Portuguese military staged a coup and toppled Portugal's pro-Axis regime; the new government promptly broke off relations with the Axis powers and signed an alliance pact with the United States and the Soviet Union. Even as Madrid was trying to absorb this shock a still greater one was on the way-- less than three weeks after the coup in Portugal British nationals in Spanish-occupied Gibraltar launched an uprising against the occupation forces. Aided by teams of U.S. intelligence agents and by veterans of the anti-Nazi guerrilla war back in England, this new partisan army inflicted heavy blows not only on the Spanish garrison in Gibraltar but also on the Axis powers' hopes of maintaining control of the Mediterranean. With each new success by the anti-Falangist guerrillas Franco was compelled to send more and more troops to the island and recall Blue Division soldiers from the Russian front in order to meet the threat that these insurgents posed to the security of Spain's southern frontier.

     Emboldened by the success of their first attacks against the Spanish occupation forces, the Free British partisans on Gibraltar began steadily escalating the frequency and severity of their raids on Franco’s military and civil installations on the island; when Gibraltar’s main airfield was wrecked in a nighttime bombing attack, a desperate Franco telegraphed the German embassy in Madrid pleading for Berlin’s aid in squashing the ever- growing revolt. Hitler at first declined to answer Franco's pleas, which only made the Spanish Falangist ruler even more agitated as the partisans continued to chip away at his regime's hold on Gibraltar; it wasn't until a German cargo vessel was sunk by Free British saboteurs off the mouth of the island's main harbor that the Führer reluctantly agreed to assist his Spanish counterpart in dealing with the insurgents, and even then the aid was only a fraction of what Madrid needed to get the situation in hand.

     Making an already horrendous situation for Axis forces on Gibraltar that much worse was the continuing harassment of Spanish convoys by U.S. and Canadian submarines, which attacked the convoys at every opportunity and also delivered vital supplies to the partisans. Franco contemptuously described them as "leeches" and ordered his navy to sink them everywhere and anywhere they were found-- a job which, in the navy's perilous post- Operation Tiburon condition, was easier said than done. Rarely, if ever, did Spanish anti-submarine patrols manage to find an American sub before it had done its damage; even when they were able to detect one their odds of sinking it were rather slim(especially if an Allied escort carrier was in the vicinity). For every U.S. submarine Franco's navy managed to sink, seven escaped to reach the safety of friendly ports either back home or in the newly pro-Allied Portugal. For every U.S. carrier plane downed by Spanish air defenses, five Spanish aircraft fell victim to U.S. fighters or AA guns.

     And the Spanish navy's own submarine force, or more accurately what was left of it, was little more than a glorified coastal flotilla by the time the new Portuguese government came into power. Despite the Germans' copious military aid to the Franco regime and Spanish maritime industry's own frantic efforts to keep Madrid's submarine fleet adequately stocked, Allied naval strength had effectively neutered Franco's sub forces; there were fewer than twenty submarines left in the entire Spanish navy by July of 1942, and that already slender inventory would dwindle even further in the months to come...

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     While Japan fought to regain the initiative in the Pacific after the Battle of Midway and Germany tried to turn back the surging Red Army, the Falangists in Spain had their hands full with a multitude of threats from all directions. On Gibraltar Free British partisans continued eating away at Spanish strength like termites chewing on a fallen log. On the Eastern Front the Blue Division was losing men left and right to the Soviets. Out on the open sea the combined power of U.S. and Canadian naval task forces was hammering the last nails in the Spanish navy's coffin. From airfields in Portugal American and Canadian bombers attacked Spanish industrial and military targets with increasing frequent(not to mention greater accuracy thanks to the Norden bombsight).

     By September of 1942 Madrid had been bombed by American warplanes for the first time and Allied bombers were hitting Barcelona on a nearly hourly basis. One such bombing nearly led to the death of Franco: while on an inspection tour of anti-aircraft defenses in and around Barcelona, the Spanish dictator was caught in a particularly fierce American bombing raid and came within an eyelash of being a casualty of that raid when two 500-lb. bombs exploded less than a foot from the AA gun position where he and two of his aides had taken shelter. When the bombing was over and the all-clear had sounded Franco, visibly enraged that the flak crews had (as he saw it)let him down by allowing the bombers to get through Barcelona's air defenses, had both the crews and their officers arrested. The luckier men among them were merely court-martialed and dishonorably discharged on Franco's direct order-- the not-so-lucky ones were shot by firing squads. Indeed, statistical research by the present-day Spanish defense ministry indicates that for every man killed by enemy action Falangist air defense units lost seven men to execution squads.

      Despite Falangist propaganda officials' best efforts to keep up the illusion of a monolithic unified Spanish state, it was steadily becoming apparent to any objective observer that the people of Spain were getting fed up with Franco's totalitarian rule. After a particularly devastating American air raid on Barcelona in mid-October of 1942, Catalan separatist demonstrators held a rally in the heart of the ruined city to demand that Franco immediately grant Catalonia its independence from Spain to spare it from what the chief organizer of the rally called "utter annihilation" in a war the Axis was clearly losing. Inspired by these demonstrations, a leading Basque pro-independence party which had been viciously suppressed by the Falangists since the end of the Spanish Civil War resumed its push for a separate Basque homeland; as OSS archival documents declassified by the U.S. government in the 1970s would subsequently reveal, their efforts were partly supported by the Roosevelt Administration.

      An ample and growing number of Franco's fellow Castilians were also becoming disenchanted with his iron-fisted rule. In Madrid the mothers of young soldiers killed fighting the Red Army on the Eastern Front marched through the streets demanding an end to Spain's participation in the Nazi war against Russia. Spain's Catholic Church, only a few years earlier one of Franco's most devout allies in his battle to overthrow the old leftist government, was increasingly becoming critical of both Franco's policies and Franco himself; the Spanish navy saw its already badly shaken morale decline even further as sailors who voiced discontent with the Falangist regime were arrested and often executed on what were at best questionable charges of conspiracy to mutiny.

      Even in the ranks of Franco's own party elite there were noticeable signs of discord. A cache of secret Falangist documents unearthed by U.S. troops following the invasion of Spain in 1943 and released to the public by Spain's first postwar democratic government in the early 1950s reveal that during one late night emergency meeting of Franco's war cabinet, the Falangist dictator nearly came to blows with his own counterintelligence chief after he made a somewhat critical remark about Franco's handling of the two botched Spanish attempts to invade North America. Early the next morning Franco, still in a rage over what he perceived as an intentional slight on the counterintelligence chief's part, ordered the man arrested and shot for treason; although he later countermanded that order, Franco never quite trusted the main again after that confrontation, and within a matter of weeks the counterintelligence chief had resigned from his post under what modern military historians describe as “odd” circumstances(to say the least).

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      With the exception of a brief hiatus around the Christmas holidays, the U.S. Army Air Corps continued daylight bombing raids against Madrid and Barcelona throughout the rest of 1942 and well into the first months of 1943. Nor was the rest of Spain immune from Allied air raids; U.S. and Free British planes bombed Gibraltar daily in support of the anti-Franco partisans there, and after New Year's Day 1943 Valencia became a popular target for B-17 attacks thanks to the city's expanded railroad depot from which troop trains carried men and equipment to the Eastern Front to bulk up the Blue Division's increasingly fragile battle lines. With every bomb that hit one of Franco's military bases or industrial plants, his already slim hopes of continuing to hold out against the Allies-- never mind Axis victory –were fading to zero.

      Not even the Spanish Mediterranean islands of Majorca and Minorca were safe from Allied bombs by this time. Thanks to the alliance with the new Portuguese government, American and Free British aircraft carriers could now operate from the Portuguese coast to hit Spanish targets in the Mediterranean almost at will. And to really rub salt into the wound, some former Spanish air force officers who had fled the country at the end of the Spanish Civil War rather than serve under a Falangist regime were now supporting the Allied cause not only by giving information to the Allies about Spanish air force squadron numbers and deployments but also by way of radio broadcasts calling on their fellow Spanish citizens to overthrow Franco's regime; despite Madrid's best efforts to prevent such broadcasts from getting through or being heard by the Spanish public, many Spanish civilians tuned into them nightly, considering the information in them to be far more reliable than what one could get from the official Falangist radio network. These broadcasts were also a useful means of sending coded messages to the anti-Franco underground in Gibraltar.

      That underground would find itself busier than ever as the spring of 1943 began. Just after Christmas 1942, the Roosevelt Administration had made up its mind to launch an invasion of Spain no later than July of 1943; Roosevelt correctly deduced it would be necessary to soften up the Axis forces guarding the Spanish home front, and accordingly he signed an executive order in February of 1943 dramatically increasing U.S. material and financial aid to the anti-Franco insurgents in Spain and Gibraltar. A month later U.S. Army chief of staff General George C. Marshall met with Canadian Chief of the General Staff Lt. General Kenneth Stuart and Free British Forces commander-in-chief Marshal Bernard Montgomery to put the finishing touches on the Allied plan for the invasion of Spain, formally code-named Operation Armada.

       Operation Armada was, to say the least, the riskiest strategic operation the Allies had attempted so far since the Second World War began. Thousands of American, Canadian, and Free British troops were about to be sent on a trans-Atlantic journey to fight for a foothold on the Spanish coast with no guarantee they’d be able to gain such a foothold or even that they would make it to the Spanish coast in the first place. But as General Marshall himself pointed out to skeptics in his own command, the risk of doing nothing and letting the Axis get further entrenched in Europe was ten times greater....

 

 

 

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To Be Continued

 

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