Franco join the axis in early June 1940

Wasn't one of the provisions that the buyer had to move the equipment with their own merchant fleet rather than US flagged ships? ...

I'd have to check. IIRC US flagged ships had some restrictions. It was not a serious obstacle since the US flagged cargo fleet was relatively small. Large US cargo ship owners preferred to flag the ships in low tax, low regulation nation's like Panama.

At the start the biggest obstacle was poor credit. Later in early 1940 as the Nav Cert system was stood up it became difficult for German purchasing agents to find ship owners willing to contract German purchased war material to nuetral ports. There were always smugglers, but as 1940 spun into 1941 those became increasingly rare & expensive. As the US became fully integrated with the Nav Certs system it became yet more expensive to falsely document and ship a war cargo to a German friendly nuetral.
 
Cruisers of the Spanish Navy

Spanish Cruisers.png


The Sociedad Española de Construcción Naval (SECN) was formed in 1909 (according to Wikipaedia) and a British consortium of Sir W.G. Armstrong, Whitworth Ltd, John Brown & Co and Vickers Ltd was the managing authority holding 40% of the capital and providing initially 5% of the workforce (according to Conway's 1906-21).

All eight of the cruisers in the list were based on British designs. Navarra was based on the World War One Town class. The Núñes class was based on the C class. The Alfonso class was based on the E class. The Canarias class was based on the County class.

Two of the eight cruisers in the list above had been wrecked or sunk by June 1940. I don't know what condition the other six were in, but they were the only effective contribution that Spain could have made to the Axis war effort.

I'm going to stick my neck out and say that they aught to have been effective commerce raiders. This is because they were based on British designs: they aught to have been decent sea boats; they should have had reliable machinery; and they should have had a decent radius of action. They would be operating from Cadiz and Ferrol, which were closer to the British trade routes than the French Atlantic ports and because they were further away from the British Isles Cadiz and Ferrol would have been harder for the Royal Navy to blockade and harder for the RAF to bomb.

I'm not saying that they would have tipped the scales in the Battle of the Atlantic. However, if the performances of Admiral Scheer, Hipper and the Twins in 1940-41 are a guide they should sink or capture a few dozen merchant ships in the second half of 1940.
 
Spain gets to starve very quickly and they have crap for resources given they’ve just been through a nasty civil war. So instead of being a war profiteer they help someone else’s war profiteering.
Unlikely. If Spain joins right away, this inertia might be enough for an English surrender, though unjustified. Especially if Gibraltar then Malta falls. By Greece, England can be done, if not sooner.
 
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