The World’s series is only named so as it was sponsored by a newspaper called The World. For once it’s not due to the US being (in their eyes) the centre of the universe.
España No Ha Muerto: If Franco brought Spain into the Second World War
- Thread starter Iggies
- Start date
In Spain? Probably - OTL, Germany kept their championship going until their territory was being invaded, Italy only stopped when fighting within their territory became too heavy, and Hungary didn't stop at all, so it's likely that things won't stop until the war really enters Spanish territory, but even without direct invasions, just being involved in the war will bring enough logistic problems that you might see the championship regionalizing to cut down on length and travel costs - that's what happened in the Salò Republic during the 1943-44 season, for example.
Though lets be real on the (in their eyes) part, the reason everyone is so salty about it is deep down it feels dangerously plausible they're right. . Same reason so many Dutch I think hate being called Holland or Brits English besides it being technically wrong, because they sometimes wonder if maybe the UK really *is* England and the Netherlands Holland.
On a more germane note, obviously this is going to be a horrible short-term disaster for Spain with serious death toll. But may also push forward a bit the economic boom by improving integration with the rest of the world, sort of like Italy. Italy started their economic rise pretty much right after WWII while more like 1960 for Spain.
Yeah of course, I meant specifically in Spain!
Well, coincidentally I have a scenario in mind in which this exactly happen, with help from the Out of the Park videogame. But even from earlier times: somehow the Spanish-American war doesn't develop the same way and it's baseball, and not football, the game that becomes popular in Spain. And the way I see it, I see bullfighting rings being adapted to baseball matches and even the orchestra plays a significant role, marking the time between innings (so, instead of the organ as in America, we have pasodobles). I've played around with OOTP and I would love to create a TL around that, but we'll see.The Allied (American) troops spreading baseball in Spain...
...and Spain, like Japan in Asia, becomes the ONLY European country where baseball is popular.
This world will become a dystopia just for this
Makes sense. Same thing happened in Spain at the dawn of the Civil War.
Garrison
Donor
It's a little surprising that anyone still believes this myth, I'm British and i knew it had long been discredited.
Was the World Series Named for a Newspaper?
Was baseball's annual championship contest, the World Series, named for the New York World newspaper?
www.snopes.com
but it is amusing to see the venting that goes on in the US when a Canadian team does well
Winter and Spring of 1942: The Land of the Free
“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
- 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
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A small detail, but the phrase "No Pasarán (They will not pass)" was in reference to the REPUBLICANS wanting to prevent the FRANCOISTS from entering Madrid.
So it is quite inappropriate for the Republicans to be the ones to say "this time we will pass" when those who wanted to pass were their enemies.
He's just flipping it around, saying, "well, they passed that time, but now it's our turn." Inverting your enemies slogans is a time-honored tradition, so I think it's reasonable he might say that. During 1937, high tide of the Republic around the time of Brunete, a common extension of the slogan was "¡No Pasarán! Pasaremos!" like in this poster:
Beautiful, apart from the small detail I pointed out. I didn't think they'd really succeed in convincing the would-be king to stop licking Hitler's boots and accept British patronage, really. At least it seems that they will be interesting times for Spain. Regarding the movies, the truth is that I didn't expect that but it doesn't surprise me: I've seen other examples of Hollywood making that kind of twists...
A great chapter, and very well thought out. And some of these movies look great...
And yeah. I've always liked David Niven, both as an actor and given how he returned to Britain to serve when he could've stayed in Hollywood.
You're more than welcome!
And yeah. I've always liked David Niven, both as an actor and given how he returned to Britain to serve when he could've stayed in Hollywood.
the last can happen only if ITTL the italian surrender is a clusterfuck as OTL and there is a total collapse of the state with a nazi takeover. Germany look already overstreched and with the need to fight in Iberia they will need to really work hard to find troops for ITTL Operation Alaric or even Case Anton if the allies try the equivalent of Torch but without Gibraltar it will be much more difficult.
Average Spanish Republican 0.5 seconds after Franco sided with the Axis
Counterpoint: the King and Badoglio are probably as competent as their OTL selves ITTL. The quicker collapse of Germany in the East may actually quicken their disastrous attempts to remove Mussolini
The attempt to remove Benny was succesfull, it was the attempt to organize the surrender behind Germany back (or really fools them) that failed spectaculary and lead to the OTL disaster the 8 of september. While i don't have that great faith in VEIII and Badoglio competence, if the Germans are unable to send enough troops not only is more probable that Hitler will accept that the best is to occupy North Italy and leave the rest as originally planned but there is the serious possibility to a more coordinated effort and more importantly close the Brennero and other points before the nazist reinforcement enter Italy, buying precious time for the arrival of the allies.
With the fight in the Iberian penisula and the worse in the East many of the division send in Italy in July 1943 to 'help' the italian in case of allied invasion of the mainland will be sent in other places