Thank you. Navy stuff is absolutely not my strong suit. Will change in a bit.
España No Ha Muerto: If Franco brought Spain into the Second World War
- Thread starter Iggies
- Start date
Garrison
Donor
You could have it be a battleship, a parting shot so too speak before departing for Alexandria.
Autumn and Winter of 1941: Turning Point
“¡En esta España fascista,
gobernada por Franco el cabrón
Pedimos a Dios que nos manda,
Un Borbón, un Borbón, un Borbón!”
- Sung clandestinely by Spanish monarchists during the Second World War, adapted from an anti-laicist song popular under the Republic
“Ya se fue el verano, ya vino el invierno
Dentro de muy poco, caerá el gobierno.”
- Sung clandestinely by Spanish dissidents of all stripes in the winter of 1941
“We must fight with these people as much as we fight with any enemy who has a rifle or a pistol, because they are just as dangerous. We cannot forget they threw open the gates of Toledo.”
- Fr. Juan Tusquets Terrats, Winter of 1941
“Goodbye, mama!
I’m off to Yokohama!
For my country, my flag, and you!”
- “Goodbye Mama (I'm off to Yokohama),” J. Fred Coots, December 1941
Excerpt from A Brief History of Modern Spain, by Hugh Thomas
…With the adherence of Spain to the Tripartite Pact, the seizure of Gibraltar, and the dispatch of Spanish troops to Russia, the ‘fascistization’ of the country went into overdrive. Ever since the outbreak of the civil war, Franco had cautiously balanced the various factions of his ‘national movement’ between one another, using the Falangists to keep the monarchists in line, and the Alfonsines as a brake on the ambitions of the Carlists.
But now the balance was shattered, and the Falange catapulted to a position of undisputed preeminence. Juan Yagüe, whose ardent falangist convictions predated 1936, was made Chief of the General Staff in place of the less reliably fascist old soldier Juan Vigón. The already falangist-leaning Director General of Security José Finat y Escrivá de Romaní was replaced by Raimundo Fernandéz-Cuesta, a camisa vieja and close friend of José Antonio. The Carlist Minister of Justice, Esteban de Bilbao Aguía, was replaced by another camisa vieja, Agustin Aznar. This was an especially surprising appointment, since Aznar had been at the center of not one, but two anti-Francoist conspiracies during the civil war, aimed at preserving the ideological and practical independence of the Falange.
All in all, in positions of responsibility, there was a general ‘cleaning out’ of Carlists and other monarchists in favor of falangists.
But the most significant change was Franco’s decree of 20 November 1941, which created a system of “district leaders” and “block chiefs” modeled after those of Nazi Germany, and granted these provincial FET delegates powers equal to those of the civil servants. For example, the provincial leader of the Seville FET now had veto power over the decisions of Seville’s civil governor, and could issue similarly binding orders. Officially this power was to be held in reserve and employed only ‘prudentially,’ but this would be less and less the case as the war went on.
The ‘fascistization’ reached beyond the government, and into the daily life of the populace. Many Spaniards noticed that the “Royal March,” once a mainstay of every public event from bullfights to football games, was played less and less, supplanted by the “Cara al Sol.” In Spain’s schools, emphasis was placed on Ferdinand and Isabela as “the first to build up the totalitarian state.”
The grand imperial dreams that had always been the preserve of the Falange were now fanned by the regime, rather than being restrained as they once had been. In one classroom in Albacete, a priest unfurled a map of the new world, and swept his pointer from California down to Tierra del Fuego. “Once this all belonged to Spain,” he said. “And soon it will again.”
Perhaps the most ominous development was Franco’s creation of a new sub-office in the Dirección General de Seguridad. It was called the “Divisíon de Judería,” (“Jewry Division”) and in charge of it Franco placed the Catalan priest Juan Tusquets, a long-time conspiracist and producer of anti-Masonic, anti-semitic literature. A list of all Jews resident in Spain had already been prepared by the last Director General of Security, and now Tusquets feverishly built on it. He compiled and delivered to Franco a list of Jews in Spain’s Moroccan territories and in the recently-occupied city of Tangier, which numbered together about 25,000 in 1941.
Moreover, in the two years of Franco’s neutrality, many tens of thousands of refugees, most of them Jews, had escaped German-occupied Europe through Spain. Nearly ten thousand Jews were caught in Spain when Franco entered the war, and very few of these were able to cross the Portuguese border, so that nearly all of them were still in the country when Tusquets was appointed to his new office.
Tusquets scrupulously registered these Jewish refugees and prepared a report on their “activities” for the Caudillo. Just before New Year’s, 1942, Tusquets presented his report to Franco. Drawn mostly from his own imagination, it painted the picture of a vast Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy at work in Iberia, with each Jew an operative.
Tusquets feverishly recommended that all Jews under Spanish control, about 40,000 inclusive of Morocco, Tangier, and the Peninsula, be interned immediately.
The Caudillo, ever circumspect, was not so hasty. But on the 15th of January, Franco promulgated the “Law on Nationality and Origins.” The first explicitly anti-semitic piece of Spanish legislation in centuries, it rescinded the 1924 law of Primo de Rivera, which had granted Spanish citizenship to Sephardic Jews abroad if they could prove descent from those expelled in 1492. It also barred Jews from holding office in Spain, and defined them as “a race apart” from the Spaniards, stopping just short of laws in France and other countries which barred Jews from public life almost entirely.
The law also provided for the internment of all Jewish refugees in the country, though this was not yet extended to Jews with Spanish citizenship, nor Jews in Morocco and Tangier. Finally, taking a cue from measures already implemented by Axis nations from Vichy France, to Croatia, to Romania, to Germany itself, Franco ordered that all Jews in Spain and its territories wear the identifying ‘yellow star.’
Jews in North Africa, especially, were stunned by the law. A handful were old enough to have cheered arriving Spanish troops as liberators from the Moroccan Sultan in 1860. In the decades since, they had lived unmolested by the Spanish authorities, and indeed often protected by Spanish arms from their Muslim neighbors...
...The ‘fascistization’ deeply frustrated the many monarchists and traditional conservatives who had been a mainstay of Franco’s regime since 1936. When Juan Borbón grumbled from abroad that “Franco would be nothing without [my supporters],” he was quite right.
In Spain itself, this growing discontent began to coalesce around the figure of Alfredo Kindelán, the venerable old monarchist general who, along with Yagüe, had in fact been crucial to Franco’s elevation to head of state in 1936. In the years since, he had increasingly fallen out with the Caudillo for refusal to moderate his staunch royalism and his antipathy to fascism. By 1941, he was in virtual exile as Captain General of the Balearics.
But Franco more than anyone should have understood the dangers of posting a troublesome rival to a distant island where he could plot in peace.
Soon, Kindelán was hosting a veritable monarchist salon in Palma where he received figures as prominent as José Varela, still Minister of War although increasingly dissatisfied with Franco’s obsequiousness in regards to the Axis and Juan Vigón, the former Foreign Minister who was still seething over his sack. Palma was not yet a center of conspiracy, not even sedition. At this stage, it was just grumbling and venting…
Excerpt from Así Fue, by Juan García
García’s book was a fictionalized account of his experience in the Spanish resistance, between the years of 1942 and 1943, when he was fifteen and sixteen years old. In this section, he recounts the December 1941 assassination of Falangist dignitary Gerardo Salvador Merino in Seville, while he gave a speech. By Spring of 1942, acts of terror and killing such as this were increasingly common, egged on and often directly abetted by the SOE and OSS, and would only grow moreso as the war progressed.
He stands up in his blue shirt and he thrusts his fist in the air and he speaks about labor. The strength of labor, the glory of labor, the splendor of work. This man who wears the Yoke and Arrow, the slave brand on the brow of the Spanish worker. There is a crowd around, and they are listening, because they can be forced to listen, and they can even be forced to cheer, but they cannot be forced to believe.
“¡Arriba España, Arriba España, Arriba España!”
Enough times in one’s mouth and it ceases to sound like Spanish at all, not even like human speech.
My pistol is English, a Browning. It is snug in my belt, hard against my hip, and the bones of my hips are just as hard against the gun. But I am skinny. We are all skinny. Spain is skinny.
“Franco, Franco, Franco!”
He says that Germany is great, Germany will win the war, and Spain will win with her. The Russians are apes, the Americans and the English are queers. A woman in the front of the crowd is chewing something. Probably it is lint, but when you chew you can pretend you are eating.
He thrusts his fist again, and then his hand is out, straight out, flat as a blade.
This is the salute I was made to perform when they shot my father, shot my brother, raped my sister. This is the salute I was made to perform day after day in the orphanage, before the portraits of the Leader and the ‘Absent One.’ Again and again. My arm was trained like a dog. When I heard the words ‘¡Arriba!’ or ‘¡España!’ just like that my arm began to rise. They made my arm into a fascist. They made my arm into a traitor.
But today, my arm has recovered its loyalty. It rises, but so does my Browning. The sights sweep over his chest, over his blue shirt. The Yoke and Arrows is a target now.
He sees me. His big eyes get bigger and his long face gets longer. He is terrified in these last seconds. The woman chewing sees the pistol and gasps. What she was chewing falls wetly at her feet. It is a hunk of leather.
I fire. Again. And again. And again. He jerks on his feet, like he is dancing. His feet sweep this way and that while he tries to right himself. He falls down gasping and choking. He tries to call, “help, help!” but I’ve got him in the lung. His hand scratches at his blue shirt, but it is not blue anymore. It is red. Red. Wet and red.
I was going to shout, “¡Viva la República!” I even practiced in the mirror. But now I cannot do it.
What I shout instead: “take that to José Antonio in Hell!”
Excerpt from Speech delivered by U.S President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the United States Congress on 8 December, 1941
…Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan…
gobernada por Franco el cabrón
Pedimos a Dios que nos manda,
Un Borbón, un Borbón, un Borbón!”
- Sung clandestinely by Spanish monarchists during the Second World War, adapted from an anti-laicist song popular under the Republic
“Ya se fue el verano, ya vino el invierno
Dentro de muy poco, caerá el gobierno.”
- Sung clandestinely by Spanish dissidents of all stripes in the winter of 1941
“We must fight with these people as much as we fight with any enemy who has a rifle or a pistol, because they are just as dangerous. We cannot forget they threw open the gates of Toledo.”
- Fr. Juan Tusquets Terrats, Winter of 1941
“Goodbye, mama!
I’m off to Yokohama!
For my country, my flag, and you!”
- “Goodbye Mama (I'm off to Yokohama),” J. Fred Coots, December 1941
Excerpt from A Brief History of Modern Spain, by Hugh Thomas
…With the adherence of Spain to the Tripartite Pact, the seizure of Gibraltar, and the dispatch of Spanish troops to Russia, the ‘fascistization’ of the country went into overdrive. Ever since the outbreak of the civil war, Franco had cautiously balanced the various factions of his ‘national movement’ between one another, using the Falangists to keep the monarchists in line, and the Alfonsines as a brake on the ambitions of the Carlists.
But now the balance was shattered, and the Falange catapulted to a position of undisputed preeminence. Juan Yagüe, whose ardent falangist convictions predated 1936, was made Chief of the General Staff in place of the less reliably fascist old soldier Juan Vigón. The already falangist-leaning Director General of Security José Finat y Escrivá de Romaní was replaced by Raimundo Fernandéz-Cuesta, a camisa vieja and close friend of José Antonio. The Carlist Minister of Justice, Esteban de Bilbao Aguía, was replaced by another camisa vieja, Agustin Aznar. This was an especially surprising appointment, since Aznar had been at the center of not one, but two anti-Francoist conspiracies during the civil war, aimed at preserving the ideological and practical independence of the Falange.
All in all, in positions of responsibility, there was a general ‘cleaning out’ of Carlists and other monarchists in favor of falangists.
But the most significant change was Franco’s decree of 20 November 1941, which created a system of “district leaders” and “block chiefs” modeled after those of Nazi Germany, and granted these provincial FET delegates powers equal to those of the civil servants. For example, the provincial leader of the Seville FET now had veto power over the decisions of Seville’s civil governor, and could issue similarly binding orders. Officially this power was to be held in reserve and employed only ‘prudentially,’ but this would be less and less the case as the war went on.
The ‘fascistization’ reached beyond the government, and into the daily life of the populace. Many Spaniards noticed that the “Royal March,” once a mainstay of every public event from bullfights to football games, was played less and less, supplanted by the “Cara al Sol.” In Spain’s schools, emphasis was placed on Ferdinand and Isabela as “the first to build up the totalitarian state.”
The grand imperial dreams that had always been the preserve of the Falange were now fanned by the regime, rather than being restrained as they once had been. In one classroom in Albacete, a priest unfurled a map of the new world, and swept his pointer from California down to Tierra del Fuego. “Once this all belonged to Spain,” he said. “And soon it will again.”
Perhaps the most ominous development was Franco’s creation of a new sub-office in the Dirección General de Seguridad. It was called the “Divisíon de Judería,” (“Jewry Division”) and in charge of it Franco placed the Catalan priest Juan Tusquets, a long-time conspiracist and producer of anti-Masonic, anti-semitic literature. A list of all Jews resident in Spain had already been prepared by the last Director General of Security, and now Tusquets feverishly built on it. He compiled and delivered to Franco a list of Jews in Spain’s Moroccan territories and in the recently-occupied city of Tangier, which numbered together about 25,000 in 1941.
Moreover, in the two years of Franco’s neutrality, many tens of thousands of refugees, most of them Jews, had escaped German-occupied Europe through Spain. Nearly ten thousand Jews were caught in Spain when Franco entered the war, and very few of these were able to cross the Portuguese border, so that nearly all of them were still in the country when Tusquets was appointed to his new office.
Tusquets scrupulously registered these Jewish refugees and prepared a report on their “activities” for the Caudillo. Just before New Year’s, 1942, Tusquets presented his report to Franco. Drawn mostly from his own imagination, it painted the picture of a vast Jewish-Bolshevik-Masonic conspiracy at work in Iberia, with each Jew an operative.
Tusquets feverishly recommended that all Jews under Spanish control, about 40,000 inclusive of Morocco, Tangier, and the Peninsula, be interned immediately.
The Caudillo, ever circumspect, was not so hasty. But on the 15th of January, Franco promulgated the “Law on Nationality and Origins.” The first explicitly anti-semitic piece of Spanish legislation in centuries, it rescinded the 1924 law of Primo de Rivera, which had granted Spanish citizenship to Sephardic Jews abroad if they could prove descent from those expelled in 1492. It also barred Jews from holding office in Spain, and defined them as “a race apart” from the Spaniards, stopping just short of laws in France and other countries which barred Jews from public life almost entirely.
The law also provided for the internment of all Jewish refugees in the country, though this was not yet extended to Jews with Spanish citizenship, nor Jews in Morocco and Tangier. Finally, taking a cue from measures already implemented by Axis nations from Vichy France, to Croatia, to Romania, to Germany itself, Franco ordered that all Jews in Spain and its territories wear the identifying ‘yellow star.’
Jews in North Africa, especially, were stunned by the law. A handful were old enough to have cheered arriving Spanish troops as liberators from the Moroccan Sultan in 1860. In the decades since, they had lived unmolested by the Spanish authorities, and indeed often protected by Spanish arms from their Muslim neighbors...
...The ‘fascistization’ deeply frustrated the many monarchists and traditional conservatives who had been a mainstay of Franco’s regime since 1936. When Juan Borbón grumbled from abroad that “Franco would be nothing without [my supporters],” he was quite right.
In Spain itself, this growing discontent began to coalesce around the figure of Alfredo Kindelán, the venerable old monarchist general who, along with Yagüe, had in fact been crucial to Franco’s elevation to head of state in 1936. In the years since, he had increasingly fallen out with the Caudillo for refusal to moderate his staunch royalism and his antipathy to fascism. By 1941, he was in virtual exile as Captain General of the Balearics.
But Franco more than anyone should have understood the dangers of posting a troublesome rival to a distant island where he could plot in peace.
Soon, Kindelán was hosting a veritable monarchist salon in Palma where he received figures as prominent as José Varela, still Minister of War although increasingly dissatisfied with Franco’s obsequiousness in regards to the Axis and Juan Vigón, the former Foreign Minister who was still seething over his sack. Palma was not yet a center of conspiracy, not even sedition. At this stage, it was just grumbling and venting…
Excerpt from Así Fue, by Juan García
García’s book was a fictionalized account of his experience in the Spanish resistance, between the years of 1942 and 1943, when he was fifteen and sixteen years old. In this section, he recounts the December 1941 assassination of Falangist dignitary Gerardo Salvador Merino in Seville, while he gave a speech. By Spring of 1942, acts of terror and killing such as this were increasingly common, egged on and often directly abetted by the SOE and OSS, and would only grow moreso as the war progressed.
He stands up in his blue shirt and he thrusts his fist in the air and he speaks about labor. The strength of labor, the glory of labor, the splendor of work. This man who wears the Yoke and Arrow, the slave brand on the brow of the Spanish worker. There is a crowd around, and they are listening, because they can be forced to listen, and they can even be forced to cheer, but they cannot be forced to believe.
“¡Arriba España, Arriba España, Arriba España!”
Enough times in one’s mouth and it ceases to sound like Spanish at all, not even like human speech.
My pistol is English, a Browning. It is snug in my belt, hard against my hip, and the bones of my hips are just as hard against the gun. But I am skinny. We are all skinny. Spain is skinny.
“Franco, Franco, Franco!”
He says that Germany is great, Germany will win the war, and Spain will win with her. The Russians are apes, the Americans and the English are queers. A woman in the front of the crowd is chewing something. Probably it is lint, but when you chew you can pretend you are eating.
He thrusts his fist again, and then his hand is out, straight out, flat as a blade.
This is the salute I was made to perform when they shot my father, shot my brother, raped my sister. This is the salute I was made to perform day after day in the orphanage, before the portraits of the Leader and the ‘Absent One.’ Again and again. My arm was trained like a dog. When I heard the words ‘¡Arriba!’ or ‘¡España!’ just like that my arm began to rise. They made my arm into a fascist. They made my arm into a traitor.
But today, my arm has recovered its loyalty. It rises, but so does my Browning. The sights sweep over his chest, over his blue shirt. The Yoke and Arrows is a target now.
He sees me. His big eyes get bigger and his long face gets longer. He is terrified in these last seconds. The woman chewing sees the pistol and gasps. What she was chewing falls wetly at her feet. It is a hunk of leather.
I fire. Again. And again. And again. He jerks on his feet, like he is dancing. His feet sweep this way and that while he tries to right himself. He falls down gasping and choking. He tries to call, “help, help!” but I’ve got him in the lung. His hand scratches at his blue shirt, but it is not blue anymore. It is red. Red. Wet and red.
I was going to shout, “¡Viva la República!” I even practiced in the mirror. But now I cannot do it.
What I shout instead: “take that to José Antonio in Hell!”
Excerpt from Speech delivered by U.S President Franklin D. Roosevelt to the United States Congress on 8 December, 1941
…Yesterday, December 7th, 1941 – a date which will live in infamy – the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan…
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From Wikipedia: Cuba during WWII
"Later, fear of any possible sympathy for Franco was also dispelled when he suggested to the United States that it launch a joint US-Latin American invasion of Spain to overthrow Franco and his regime, but the plan did not materialize."
So possible Latin American intervention in Europe?
"Later, fear of any possible sympathy for Franco was also dispelled when he suggested to the United States that it launch a joint US-Latin American invasion of Spain to overthrow Franco and his regime, but the plan did not materialize."
So possible Latin American intervention in Europe?
Nick P
Donor
Brazil gained independence from Portugal in 1822, and their main language is Portuguese. If Spain attacks Portugal would Brazil send their Expeditionary Force to Lisbon?
Would this force be raised faster than OTL due to the historical situation?
Would they be trained better (couldn't have been much worse)?
Would Brazil be happy for their army to serve under a Portuguese flag/command or would they prefer the US?
Unless a trench style warfare happens, it is unlikely that Brazil would send forces in time to reach Portugal; and it is unlikely an nation that fought an independence war against its colonial power would allow its troops to be under command of said power
Really enjoying this. Original, well written and clearly well researched. Spain fully joining the war on the Axis side is often discussed and occasionaly features but I can't think of there ever being a TL where it is the focus of the work. I would argue it's particularly important such a work do have the focus on Spain as it's often framed in how it would benefit Germany of the Axis as a whole rather than the disaster it would have been for the Spanish people. Love the scrapbook style as well, particularly how it examines the fragility of Franco's dictatorship and how the delicate balance of nationalists factions appears to be unravelling.
I assume the Inquisition is played up as the "first roots of totalitarianism", on that note?
Yagüe at least happened to be a good soldier as well as a fascist, but the other guys...
Thank you. I was a bit surprised that no one seems to have done a full "Axis Spain" TL prior to this, or if they did I haven't come across it.
Among other things. The idea of totalitarianism as having "native" Spanish roots in the old Catholic monarchy was actually a common one in falangist propaganda IOTL.
Considering that one of the main reasons why in OTL Franco did not join the Axis was that the generals around him were being bribed by the British to support the neutral position, as well as that in 1940 Admiral Carrero Blanco made a report military about "feasibility of Spain joining the Axis" that could be summarized in "Caudillo, this is stupid and we shouldn't do it", what happened to all those people? Did the SOE forget to pay them? Or did the report never reach Franco's desk?
Also I agree in that people tends to treat "Axis Spain" as a later occurrence, source of memes and that's all.
Also I agree in that people tends to treat "Axis Spain" as a later occurrence, source of memes and that's all.
Watched.
This is a concept that gets discussed quite a bit but AFAIK no one has done it in a full TL. Certainly not with this much of a look into the internal Spanish situation.
This is a concept that gets discussed quite a bit but AFAIK no one has done it in a full TL. Certainly not with this much of a look into the internal Spanish situation.
Even IOTL, Franco was quite close to jumping in at a few points, especially in summer 1940 and spring 1941. I think with a pretty minor POD the Caudillo having a flash of confidence would have been enough to push him over the edge, as happens ITTL, even with said bribed officers and ministers whispering into his ear. Now that Spain is in the war, of course all officials with pro-Allied records will be sidelined and perhaps worse, as things develop.
So, basically the neutralist “old conservatives” have been purged and are being replaced by Falangist radicals?
Not a dramatic purge as that would shake things up too much and too quickly, but the state is moving in that direction. A reappointment here, a snub there. Franco was always adaptable and if he was convinced the Nazis and Italian fascists were the wave of the future (and of course if Spain is in the Axis he has to thin that) he would certainly move in that direction.
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Also the guy sent by Hitler to convince Franco to join the Axis straight told him not too and they'd probably lose the war.
Garrison
Donor
That was Admiral Canaris, head of the Abwehr, which says a lot about the situation among the senior ranks of the Wehrmacht.