The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939

When the Allies launched Operation Torch, their landings in North Africa, in November 1942, Gibraltar was used as their main base. Roosevelt sent Franco a letter to reassure him about Allied intentions towards Spain and its possessions in Morocco. Meanwhile the British encouraged Kindelán to put pressure on Franco to restore the monarchy, but without success. Franco, under pressure abroad and at home, could only contemplate the collapse of his imperial dreams and of the hopes of the Axis. After the Allied success in North Africa, which completely changed the balance of power in the western Mediterranean, Field Marshal Paulus capitulated at Stalingrad at the end of January 1943. Then, in July, the Red Army during the Battle of Kursk smashed the Wehrmacht’s armoured strength and the Allies landed in Sicily, which soon led to the fall of Mussolini. The following summer saw the Allied invasion of Normandy and the destruction of the Wehrmacht’s Army Group Centre in Belorussia. France was liberated by the end of August, and at the end of the year the last major German offensive was crushed in the Ardennes. In May 1945, the Third Reich finally collapsed.

Franco had adapted to these dramatic geopolitical changes by modifying his policy towards the Allies, using Gómez-Jordana. On 16 March 1943 he had opened the Franquist version of the Cortes with a speech calling for an agreement with the Allies to defend ‘Western civilization’ from the Soviets and in November his withdrawal of the Blue Division was accompanied by a return to neutrality from his position of ‘nonbelligerency’. In May 1944 he closed the German consulate in Tangier and halted exports of wolfram to Germany. In August, following the death of Jordana, he appointed José Felix de Lequerica as foreign minister, who showed the same obsequious approach to the Allies that Serrano Suñer had adopted towards the Axis.

At home, he adopted a tougher policy. Following the pressure to restore the monarchy in June 1943, he declared to his senior generals that this was a Masonic conspiracy designed to subvert the regime of 18 July 1936. And in September of that year he dismissed a group of monarchist generals, afraid that he might face the same downfall as Mussolini at the hands of the Fascist Grand Council. On 4 November 1944 he gave an interview to United Press in which he declared that nationalist Spain had never been fascist or national socialist and had never been allied to the Axis powers. When Hitler heard of this he said that ‘the nerve of señor Franco’ had no limits.¹⁹

Once the Second World War was over, Franco on 17 July 1945 issued a decree on the Rights of Spaniards, which conceded a general pardon for political prisoners from the civil war. He calmed the large landowners and senior generals alike, and turned once more to the Church. On 18 July 1945 he formed a new government, giving key posts to Catholic politicians, thus achieving a transition to national Catholicism which sidelined the Movement. On 13 December 1946, the United Nations Organization recommended the withdrawal of ambassadors from Spain, yet the start of the Cold War, which was to last over forty years, would prove the salvation of his regime. On 17 April 1948 General Franco ended the state of war in Spain. It was nearly twelve years after the beginning of the civil war.

The Unfinished War

For many Spanish republicans, especially those in France, the Second World War had been an equally tough continuation of the civil war. Once the war began, many republican refugees enlisted to fight against the common enemy. One of the formations which contained the highest proportion of Spanish republicans (1,000 out of 2,500) was the 13th Half-Brigade of the French Foreign Legion. Many other units, French and British, had Spaniards fighting in their ranks, in North Africa and elsewhere. A company of Spanish republicans fought with Colonel Robert Laycock’s commandos in the final phase of the battle of Crete.

Perhaps the best-known contingent with the 3rd March Battalion of Chad, fought in General Leclerc’s 2nd Armoured Division all the way to Paris. The 9th Company–known as ‘La Nueve’, even by the French–under the command of Captain Raymond Dronne, were the first to enter the French capital to the sound of pealing bells on the night of 23 August 1944. Their tanks bore such names as Madrid, Teruel, Ebro, Guernica and Don Quixote.¹

Their less fortunate companions in France were either sent to camps in Germany or used as forced labour by the Organisation Todt. In Mauthausen the 7,200 Spaniards were made to wear a triangle of Falangist blue on their striped uniforms, even though they were ‘reds’. Some 5,000 of them died there. Dachau, Buchenwald, Bergen-Belsen, Sachsenhausen-Oranienburg and Auschwitz also held many Spanish republican prisoners.²