HeavyWeaponsGuy
Banned
Like the title says, what if in early 1940, Spain actively joins the Axis powers?
How much would this have helped the Axis war efforts? Would this have allowed the Axis to rule the med? How would this have affected America's approach if they join the war as per OTL?
General consensus on here is pretty much that Spain has nothing to gain and everything to lose from entering the war shortly after being absolutely trashed by the meatgrinder of the Spanish Civil War. Spain was for all intents and purposes a broken country before the Civil War, and the civil war only showed the fractures that had been in Spanish society for a long time. Franco stayed out because he realized the need to consolidate the country: rebuild from war, deal with the remnants of the Republicans as well as isolate and purge ideologically incompatible parts of the Nationalist coalition (Both sides of the Spanish Civil War were coalitions of deeply-incompatible ideologies who only banded together because they found the other side less desirable, it was only Franco's leadership that papered over this, the Republicans had no such figure, and consequently lost the war because of failure to unify against their common enemy of the Nationalists).
Franco purposefully asked for absolutely ridiculous concessions (enormous material aid from the Germans, in addition to enormous chunks of Vichy French colonial territories in North Africa) as a condition for entering the Axis Powers because he himself wasn't particularly interested in a war he knew would have dubious value for Spain.
So if he disregards common sense and throws in with Germany, Spain immediately finds itself the subject of British commerce raids that take out its merchant marine and promptly force an import-dependent country lacking in farm machinery to begin starving. The Franco regime is lucky if it makes it to the point where the Allies liberate Spain and ingloriously depose the evil tyrant as opposed to seeing another uprising by fellow Nationalists, Republicans, or some combination of the two. Spain would gain nothing, Franco would lose everything, but in the long-term, the Spanish people are awarded a democracy courtesy of your local Anglo-American divisions in Europe, so not an entirely bad ending.