Why, whatever the Alien Space Bats want next, of course.
Not to be glib, but this has been done a million times on this site.
1. How does Hitler get control of Gibraltar?
That's enormous question.
It's not: the same way Wehrmacht + Luftwaffe of 1939-1942 took Poland, Netherlands, Belgium, France, Yugoslavia (rather difficult terrain) and Greece (a few mountains are known to be there too).
Americans), and Spain's Civil-War ravaged infrastructure was in no shape to support large numbers German troops.
Not even leaving just soil and sky by retreating Russians somehow stopped the Germans around Smolensk or near Moscow (or later Soviets going in the opposite direction). Spain would have been much easier, just as southern countries that Nazies historically took over quickly were.
To me it seems like you're milling over plausible impressions instead of technical and counter-intuitive facts that history has demonstrated.
Seaborne invasion is also right out - in point of fact, the Italians and Germans never took Malta, which is 90 miles from Sicily - how do they take Gibraltar which has no Axis territory for hundreds of miles?
The same way they have actually taken Crete?
But not even taking Malta would have been necessary. All that they would have to do would be the same thing that Americans in the Pacific did by skipping some islands held by Japanese: deny them supplies first by making sure supply ships are not around and, pound their airfields and then you render them powerless in way other than local defense so they can be just left there starving. Americans in the Pacific had it harder for obvious reasons, all that Germans had to do was corking up Gibraltar first, weakening flow of supplies to the British in the Mediterranean, then corking up Suez Canal.
'By basing in Vichy North Africa, which after Oran was pissed at the British' is the usual answer. Again, this doesn't hold water. Even if the French allowed this (dubious at best), the Italian Navy (presumably carrying some kind of Axis amphibious unit) was vastly overmatched by the RN.
Screw Italian navy - remember what happened to RN under Stuka attacks around Crete? Same thing.
In conditions of either aerial superiority or lack of effective fighter opposition even obsolete biplanes could massacre powerful navy at will - see Swordfish at Taranto or disabling Bismarck (or not all that much more capable Nakajima BN-5 over Pearl Harbor). When Swordfish planes attacked Tirpitz in transit in the Atlantic later, not a single plane survived, all were shot down by fighter cover. An the Nazies in early stages of WWII had just that: air superiority, which cost RN in Mediterranean so dearly.
Again, you're going for plausible hunches. Plausible hunches sometimes work but very often they don't, the same way most generals before WWI thought "oh it would be just another bar brawl lasting several months".
2. What happens he does?
Well, the British are hurting, no doubt. But how does taking Gibraltar either A) improve the quality of the Italian Army or B) increase the port capacity of either Tobruk or Benghazi?
Nope. But that would render both near irrelevant: it's all about relative power. British weakened by say 50% in effective combat capacity by reduced logistics makes Axis twice more powerful in relation to the British, with Axis staying precisely as it were before.
Those were the limitations on taking Suez, not Gibraltar. Additionally, how does this impact the power of the United States or the Soviet Union? Apart from increasing convoy line length, the Germans are still vastly overmatched economically.
In the long run yes. In the short run, had Nazies managed to get to Baku from the south and at least destroy it if not take it over for their own benefit, this would have denied SU 70% of domestic oil. A similar thing could have happened that happened later to Germans: perfectly good tanks and self-propelled guns abandoned or easily killed bc of lack of fuel.
Furthermore, by making Spain Axis, there is now that much more coastline to defend from the Anglo-Americans.
Please. Defending coastline requires implicit or explicit assumption of defensive stance and enemy having strategic initiative. As long as Nazies had the initiative, defending coastline was no issue, and when they went on the defensive, adding Spanish coastline to the sum of coastline in France to Netherlands to Germany to Denmark would not be increasing much the trouble they already had, had they?
Yes, Hitler has the Spanish Army on his side now. That makes it worse - more for the Germans to defend.
Screw defense. If you can't be on the offensive until you get the enemy demolished, you're screwed anyway.
The Italians were better equipped that the Spanish - and got the daylights kicked out them by the British.
And so the contest between Germans and the Allies in North Africa was not that one-sided in favor of Allies. Had they not had support of RN or severely weakened RN and above all, supply ships in the Mediterranean, in all likelihood the British would have been defeated.
The Spanish are good for garrison duty and nothing else.
Still valuable if you can get that: use them to keep North Africa, or say France, pinned down, freeing up some Germans to do the fighting or production?
The point is this: The United States, the United Kingdom and the Soviet Union were fundamentally stronger than Germany and whatever allies Germany could conceivably (or, in this case, inconceivably) recruit.
Of course. Which is why the only shot at winning that Nazies ever had were limited to the time when they still had relative advantage: 1938-1942.
Gibraltar is a vast annoyance, but no more than that.
Mike Turcotte
Nope. This would have changed lots of other variables, see e.g. here:
http://web.archive.org/web/20110801014241/http://www.johnreilly.info/spain.htm
That was different (pre-1938) configuration of course, still pivotal.