A new attempt by the Francoists to ingratiate themselves with Gibraltar began on Thursday 23 July 1936 with another telephone message from Colonel March in Algeciras to the Colonial Secretary on the Rock, to say ‘General Kinderlin [sic] requests permission to call on the General and Governor of Gibraltar and says he has a motorboat to cross over.’ The Colonial Secretary sent back a cautious request for more information.
General Alfredo Kindelán Duany was the founder of the Spanish air force, a tall, incorruptible monarchist who had gone into exile in 1931 rather than live under a republic. A key figure in the 1936 military conspiracy, he had come down to Cádiz to act as General Mola’s liaison with the naval command whose help they needed to ship the rebel army over from Africa. Now Kindelán had linked up with the ground forces in Algeciras, where his two sons, Ultano and Alfredo, were staying with the Larios family. After Franco arrived in Spanish Morocco, he spoke by telephone across the strait with Kindelán and appointed him the head of his fledgling air force, which both men agreed was vital to the success of the rebellion.
At 2.30 p.m., siesta time, on Thursday 23 July, Colonial Secretary Alex Beattie had an unexpected and glamorous visitor at his house, Pablo Larios’s eldest daughter Natalia (more usually called Talia), bearing a message from General Franco about the purpose of General Kindelán’s visit. Talia was married to the aristocrat Fernando Povar, who had been wounded by the Republicans in the shooting at La Línea on 19 July and was now in the Colonial Hospital in Gibraltar. The Marquesa de Povar was an attractive woman, and she and her sister Mercedes had ‘countless admirers’ on the Rock, according to the overexcited historian of the Royal Calpe Hunt: ‘They were vivacious, happy, exquisitely beautiful, and polished horsewomen.’ Talia, who was now living in a flat in Gibraltar during her husband’s treatment, told Colonel Beattie that General Kindelán wanted to convey in person to the British authorities General Franco’s own explanation of the bombing incidents.
Beattie telephoned the acting governor, Brigadier Brooks, who said he was prepared to see General Kindelán at 5 p.m. at Government House, on the understanding that their talk was in connection with recent ‘incidents of contravention by Spanish aeroplanes of the International Air Convention’. The Gibraltar Port Launch was sent over to Algeciras to pick him up.
The visit was a diplomatic ploy, for Kindelán had plans elsewhere. On the same day he crossed over to Gibraltar, his chief of staff, Captain Francisco Arranz Monasterio, was aboard a commandeered German Deutsche-Lufthansa Junkers Ju 52 passenger plane, the Max von Müller, together with a German businessman, Johannes Bernhardt, and the Nazi Party ‘group leader’ in Morocco, Adolf Langenheim, flying to Nazi Germany to chase up Franco’s request for German transport planes.
Meanwhile, Kindelán arrived in Gibraltar accompanied by a laughing group of upper-class Spanish ladies and gentlemen. Brigadier Brooks and Colonel Beattie started their meeting with Kindelán at 5.30, with the honorary ADC, Captain F. J. W ‘Paco’ Porral, acting as their interpreter. The ex-cavalryman Porral, the father of twelve-year-old John Porral, was, with his friend Bobby Capurro, a long-serving aide-de-camp to several governors. Being Gibraltarians, they were fluent in Spanish, which most senior British officers never managed to master.
General Kindelán said he had come to express General Franco’s great regret at his aeroplanes flying over Gibraltar and dropping bombs in the vicinity, but of course some of the fliers were inexperienced. As for the shrapnel which fell on the Rock, the general said that the blame for that lay entirely with the Spanish government warships. Since their crews had murdered or imprisoned their officers, the Gibraltar authorities should have interned them all when they entered Gibraltarian waters. No Spanish Republican ships should be allowed to operate freely in the Strait.
The real nub of the meeting was the threat posed by the ‘pirate’ Republican navy to Franco’s urgent plans to get his army across the water. Beattie made two further cryptic notes at the bottom left of his handwritten summary of the meeting. One read: ‘Three requests: searchlights, ship patrol, British transport ship.’ Presumably this means Kindelán asked for the Republican ships to be illuminated with searchlights and kept under observation, and for some kind of direct help from the British to transport Francoist troops and supplies across the strait.
Beattie’s second cryptic note, scribbled at the bottom of the page, is interesting: ‘T. Povar saw B & myself re Br w’ships convoying Franco’s transports.’
My reading of this is ‘Talia Povar saw Brooks and myself to ask about British warships convoying Franco’s transports.’ Franco was deploying a charm offensive, using an alluring and confident woman to get what he wanted. Talia, Marquesa de Povar, was zealous in his cause. She was the eldest sister of José Larios, who later became a pilot in Franco’s air force. In his memoir Combat over Spain he wrote that Talia ‘remained at Gibraltar for the remainder of the war, working with our [Francoist] Intelligence Service and relaying much useful information concerning the movement of the Red fleet and the passage of war material for unloading at Red ports’.
Both Beattie and Brooks resisted her seductions, however. Would British warships escort the vessels transporting Franco’s troops across the Strait of Gibraltar? ‘Nothing doing’, wrote tight-lipped Beattie in his notes. (German warships and German and Italian aircraft would eventually escort Franco’s ‘convoy of victory’ over from Africa on 5 August.)
It was after 7 p.m. when General Kindelán left Government House and went with his upper-class pals up to the Rock Hotel to join the Spanish monarchists and aristocrats who had flooded there in recent months. One of the reasons why Kindelán came to Gibraltar was so he could use the Gibraltar telephone exchange to place three international calls: to Franco’s Morocco, to Fascist Rome and, crucially, to Arranz at the embassy in Berlin, where his emissaries had flown on their urgent quest for transport planes from Nazi Germany.
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Two of the Francoist delegation – Bernhardt and Langenheim – eventually met Adolf Hitler on Saturday night, 25 July, at the Villa Wahnfried in Bayreuth, where the German chancellor was attending the Wagner festival. They found the Führer in a state of ecstatic elation after a performance of the third opera in Der Ring des Nibelungen cycle, Siegfried, conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler. They asked Hitler to supply ten transport aircraft, with pilots and crew, in order to help Franco’s army get across the Strait of Gibraltar. Hitler summoned Hermann Göring, the head of the air force, and Werner von Blomberg, the Minister of War, for a conference. Göring was initially reluctant, then, seeing Hitler’s excitement, changed tack and joined in the romantic fantasy. An unnamed German admiral was also present at the meeting. Was he Wilhelm Canaris, the head of the Abwehr, the foreign intelligence service? Paul Preston thinks it ‘unlikely’, Ian Colvin ‘probable’. Spain was Canaris’s old stamping ground, and he would become a key link between Germany and Iberia. At gone one in the morning, Hitler agreed to supply double the number of planes asked for, and Göring came up with the theatrical code-name Unternehmen Feuerzauber, ‘Operation Magic Fire’, after the flames that the Germanic hero Siegfried has to pass through in order to free the fair maiden Brünnhilde. In a week’s time, at the opening of the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, Hitler would be publicly accepting an olive branch from a Greek marathon runner while thirty-five thousand white doves of peace whooshed up into the air. But now, in secret joy, he was brandishing Siegfried’s sword.
*
Franco and Kindelán used what aircraft they had to harry Republican forces at sea and on land, but found they could not rely on all their pilots. On 25 July, two days after Kindelán’s visit to Gibraltar, the Basque-born Sergeant Félix Urtubi was flying a Breguet Bre-19 from Tetuán to bomb and strafe a column of Republican government soldiers approaching La Línea when he changed sides in mid-air. ‘At an altitude of 1000 feet over the Strait of Gibraltar I turned to the lieutenant and shot him four times – in the forehead, in the chest and through the mouth. I didn’t give the traitor time to look at me in dismay and cry “No! No!”’
With the corpse of Lieutenant Juan Miguel de Castro Gutiérrez beside him, Sergeant Urtubi flew halfway across Spain to land at Getafe airfield, Madrid. He then pointed his pistol at his own head and asked the men surrounding his plane if the capital was in Republican hands. ‘If not, I’d have shot myself rather than surrender,’ he later told journalists. Urtubi did sacrifice himself not long afterwards, by deliberately crashing his plane headlong into a Francoist aircraft when he ran out of ammunition defending the skies above Madrid.
The enterprising American journalist Jay Allen made his way to Spanish Morocco, where, on 27 July 1936, he became the first foreign correspondent to interview Francisco Franco, ensconced in the Spanish High Commissioner’s house in Tetuán. One of Franco’s first actions there had been to set up a concentration camp outside the city at El Mogote, the first of four Francoist camps in the Protectorate to hold leftists, Republicans, Freemasons and other subversives in appalling conditions, with regular executions by firing squad. Allen noticed several copies of the ultra right-wing, anti-Semitic and anti-Bolshevik Bulletin de L’Entente Internationale contre la Troisième Internationale on the general’s desk. Franco said he found the journal ‘valuable’.
‘There can be no compromise, no truce,’ Franco declared to Allen. ‘I shall go on preparing my advance to Madrid. I shall advance. I shall take the capital. I shall save Spain from Marxism at whatever cost … Shortly, very shortly, my troops will have pacified the country and all of this will soon seem like a nightmare.’
‘This means that you will have to shoot half Spain?’
‘I said whatever the cost.’
In La Línea, a stone’s throw from Gibraltar, Franco’s repression soon started, with the local Falange and other right-wingers helping to hunt down anarchists, communists, leftists, liberals, socialists, and troublemaking freethinkers of the Republican persuasion. Interrogated and convicted of ‘military rebellion’ by those who were the real military rebels, they were shot in batches by the bullring. One man was condemned to death because a pair of shoes on their way to the cobbler’s was wrapped in an old sheet of the pro-Republican newspaper El Calpense. Among the many Freemasons executed in La Línea were señores Cayo, Moya, Ruíz and Troyano, the bookseller Gamboa, the chemist Autor and Dr Juan García Rodríguez, a much-loved paediatrician at the Municipal Hospital, who was killed on 27 July 1936. He was known as ‘Don Juanito el Médico’ to his poorer patients, whom, communistically, he often omitted to charge.
On 28 July, General Sir Charles Harington finally returned to his post, travelling with his wife, Gladys, on the P&O liner SS Narkunda. A fellow passenger on the four-day voyage was José Larios, Talia’s brother and son of the Joint Master of the Royal Calpe Hunt. Young Larios was hurrying back to join Franco’s rebellion. Answering General Kindelán’s appeal for volunteers, he crossed the strait from Algeciras in an old Dornier flying boat and started training as a pilot at Tetuán. When José Larios came back to Gibraltar to visit pals in the army, his good friend from the Royal Calpe Hunt, Lieutenant Hector Lorenzo Christie of the Gordon Highlanders, ‘drowned’ him in whisky toasts, and a British officers’ mess drank to ‘a quick victory’ by Franco’s forces.
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The Francoist emissaries to Germany, Bernhardt, Langenheim and Arranz, returned to Morocco in the same stripped-down commandeered Junkers Ju 52 passenger plane in which they had flown to Nazi Germany. They landed at Tetuán on 28 July and reported that more aeroplanes were on their way from Hermann Göring. Flight Captain Alfred Henke, their pilot, also co-opted from Lufthansa, was now ardent for the cause. After removing its German identification, he and his crew readied the aircraft to fly a larger contingent of Franco’s African Army across the Strait of Gibraltar to Seville. With the seats stripped out and no heavy cargo, a Ju 52 could carry a platoon of Moors at a time, twenty-five men with their personal weapons, on the one-hour flight. The following day, a second Lufthansa plane arrived to speed up the shuttle. In the last days of July 1936, over a hundred flights of small planes and transports carried barely nine hundred men over; but in August, with the help of the planes that Hitler had promised, more than three times the number of flights airlifted 4800 soldiers together with their heavy weapons and kit.
Meanwhile, Benito Mussolini was also responding to Franco’s appeal for help. On 30 July he sent a dozen Savoia-Marchetti SM.81 Pipistrello or ‘Bat’ bomber/ transport planes with crews and technicians from Sardinia to Spanish Morocco. Three planes crashed on the way, but the surviving crew members were enrolled in the Spanish Foreign Legion. A dozen Italian Fiat CR.32 fighter biplanes arrived by sea in mid-August, and a dozen more by 3 September.
In Nazi Germany, Sonderstab (Special Staff) W worked fast inside Göring’s Air Ministry, acquiring, sometimes straight off the production line, twenty new Junkers Ju 52 bomber or transport planes, half a dozen Heinkel He 51 fighter biplanes with maintenance kit and spare parts, and twenty 20 mm anti-aircraft cannons plus munitions. The Junkers firm at Dessau was instructed to remove the German markings from the six fighters and from ten bombers, and to dismantle and pack them in camouflaged crates for shipping to Spain from Hamburg. The Gestapo handled security. Sonderstab W also organised a full complement of air and ground crews, all single men, compulsorily ‘volunteered’ from their units and sworn to secrecy: twenty-five officers and sixty-six NCOs, soldiers and technicians who were capable pilots, navigators, gunners, engineers, mechanics and instructors. In civilian clothes, with identical cheap suitcases, posing as ‘Tourist Group Union’, they boarded the Woermann Line cargo ship Usaramo in Hamburg, and with 773 heavy crates of dismantled aeroplanes stowed safely on board, sailed for Spain around midnight on 31 July.
Naval support for Franco’s rebellion was proceeding. A week earlier, two modern German Panzerschiffen or pocket battleships, the Deutschland and the Admiral Scheer, had sailed from Wilhelmshaven for Spanish waters, followed not long after by the cruiser Köln and four German destroyers. The Germans were very gung-ho, but did not get it all their own way. Captain Thomas Aubrey of HMS Veteran went to greet the Deutschland early on Sunday morning, 26 July, at San Sebastián in the Basque province of Guipuzcoa and managed to stop the captain marching fifty fully armed Nazi marines into what was now a very left-wing city. He suggested that the Republicans might well misinterpret any big-gun salutes as a hostile bombardment. Deutschland eventually put into Ceuta in Spanish Morocco on 3 August. There, German Vice Admiral Rolf Carls dined with Langenheim and Bernhardt, the two German emissaries from Morocco who had gone to meet Hitler, together with General Franco and Juan Beigbeder Atienza, a Spanish colonel who spoke fluent Arabic and good German. Beigbeder had been the military attaché in Berlin who acted as interpreter for General Sanjurjo on his visit to Nazi Germany’s arms factories in February 1936.
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At the beginning of August, British Rear Admiral James Somerville arrived in the port of Tangier aboard his flagship, the light cruiser HMS Galatea. Somerville, a son of Somerset squires, was a remarkable sailor. When he first entered Britannia Royal Naval College at Dartmouth in January 1897, an officer remarked of the slight-looking cadet: ‘Poor little blighter. He won’t last long!’ But on VE Day 1945, that shrimp reached Admiral of the Fleet, the highest rank in the Royal Navy. HMS Galatea in 1936 carried an Osprey seaplane which the vigorous admiral liked to go up in, acting as his own radio operator because he was schooled in signals. Like his friend Vice Admiral Andrew Cunningham who had led the Mediterranean destroyer flotillas before him, Somerville was a no-nonsense, decisive admiral and an uncomplicated political thinker: ‘The trouble is that the Spanish Navy – Communists – are using Tangier as a base and preventing Franco from taking troops across to Spain.’
Nevertheless, if General Franco did open hostilities, Somerville was prepared to defend the neutrality of Tangier and uphold international law. ‘We are getting the anti-aircraft guns ready in case any of the Spanish aircraft attack us or ships in the vicinity,’ Somerville wrote to his wife Mollie. ‘I wish they would as we would learn them a lesson all right but I’m afraid they won’t.’ The consuls of the six nations who ran neutral Interzone Tangier struck Somerville as a ‘weak-kneed lot of rats’, dithering unnecessarily. ‘It’s high time we took a strong line with these bloody Spaniards. If anyone drops a brick near me, he’ll certainly know about it …’
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Franco wanted to get men and munitions across the Strait of Gibraltar from Morocco to Spain to prove that the rebels were capable of breaking the Republican government blockade. The eventual ‘Convoy of Victory’ was as much a propaganda exercise as a practical operation. Franco chose a day of religious significance – 5 August, the feast day of Our Lady of Africa in Ceuta – a stormy day when much of the Republican fleet was refuelling. The convoy crossed by daylight because his twenty-six aircraft needed to see enough to chase off any Republican warship trying to block their passage. From early in the day they maintained constant patrols of aggressive aircraft.
At 7 a.m., three Francoist aeroplanes attacked the Republican destroyer Lepanto and a bomb exploded on the port side, killing one man and wounding five more. The ship limped into Gibraltar to unload the wounded, and Franco telephoned the British Fortress to demand its immediate expulsion. Lepanto left for Málaga to bury the dead man, escorted by Churruca; both destroyers exhausted their anti-aircraft ammunition shooting back wildly at more Francoist planes. (Most ammunition used by the Republican navy throughout the civil war was fired against aeroplanes.) The Republican destroyer Almirante Valdés was hit by a 100 kg bomb dropped by an Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.81. British, Dutch and Italian vessels were also bombed, but without great harm.
The Spanish Republic’s failure to use all its available ships and aircraft to stop the rebels crossing the Strait of Gibraltar to establish their bridgehead in southern Spain was the strategic error that probably cost them the war. The initial tactic of taking command of navy vessels before Francoist insurgents could use them for their ends was a good move, but purging most of the officers was not so wise, because the fleet was then deprived of the drive, skills and experience of several hundred executives and engineers. Just as the French may have lost the battle of Trafalgar because the toll the Revolution had taken on the higher ranks crippled the fleet’s effectiveness, so the officerless ships of la armada española may have doomed the Spanish Republic. Orders that needed the approval of a democratic ‘soviet’ of the crew (what Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island pirates called a ‘fo’c’sle council’) slowed proceedings. Those on the bridge did not always know what was best. Aeroplanes in particular caused them to panic.
The Francoist armada that eventually set sail from Ceuta to Algeciras through a heavy sea and faint mist at 4.30 on the afternoon of Wednesday 5 August was not large. There were two medium-sized cargo ships belonging to Juan March, Ciudad de Cádiz and Ciudad de Algeciras, a sea-going tug, Benot, the auxiliary ship Araujo, escorted by the gunboat Eduardo Dato, the torpedo-ship T-19 and the coastguard cutter Uad-Kert. But the convoy was carrying three thousand soldiers with their transport vehicles, six 105 mm howitzers plus shells, four mortars, twelve hundred grenades and two million rounds of rifle ammunition. Stopping them would have been a devastating coup, and Admiral Somerville thought the Republican failure to do so ‘just shows what a feeble lot they are, as they ought to have made mincemeat of Franco’s party’.
The rebel flotilla had almost reached the Bay of Algeciras when the Republican destroyer Alcalá Galiano appeared from the west at high speed with her forward guns firing. Eduardo Dato peeled off to port to engage her and the rebel big guns at Carnero Point also opened up on the Republican destroyer. Then Italian aircraft arrived to bomb the ship: Alcalá Galiano suffered eighteen dead and twenty-eight badly wounded. Anti-aircraft shrapnel from the battle rained down on the playing fields at Gibraltar’s North Front and the batters and bowlers were forced to pull stumps. War was not cricket.
*
In Berlin, the Eleventh Olympiad was under way. Jesse Owens was winning the third of his four gold medals and African Americans were triumphing in track and field, infuriating the Nazis. However, German athletes did top the final medal league, which prompted them to claim Aryan racial supremacy. In the Olympic village at Döberitz (afterwards turned into a giant infantry barracks), the German hosts showed films of athletes blending into warriors: ‘the long jumper was transformed in mid-air into a soldier leaping over barbed-wire, the hammer became a stick grenade …’ International sportspeople watched the martial propaganda in silence.
The next day, Thursday 6 August, the German cargo ship Usaramo, escorted from Portuguese waters by the heavy cruiser Deutschland, docked at Cádiz to unload German aircrews in mufti and their many aeroplanes in crates. In Gibraltar, Governor Harington called a meeting of the civil and military authorities to compose a letter to the Secretary of State for the Colonies about what needed to be done. Rear Admiral Pipon of the Royal Navy, the man who had entertained Haile Selassie to tea in Gibraltar, wrote a revealing draft memo, asking for ‘this so-called rebellion to be classed as a civil war and both sides be declared to be belligerents by the Powers’.
This was exactly the status that the rebel Franco craved, because until proper war was declared he had no legal right to object to Spanish government ships using Tangier as a base and preventing his troops being shipped across the strait. The British government did not want to award Franco belligerent rights because that would give him the right to stop and search neutral British merchant ships. Belligerent rights were never, in the end, awarded, but Admiral Pipon, who feared that Gibraltar was becoming ‘the sanctuary … of … Spanish government Communist refugees and agents’, parroted the line of the right-wing English press:
The so-called Spanish Government is being over-ridden by Communists whose avowed object is the establishment of an extreme Soviet State. The anti-Government forces are not Monarchists or extreme Fascists … and the provinces they now occupy are being governed in an orderly manner.
On Friday 7 August, the Republicans brought the war back to the Bay of Gibraltar. Having failed to stop Franco’s convoy of victory, they arrived to punish the ships that had participated and Algeciras itself. At 6.30 a.m. Algeciras was bombed from the air and at 8.30 the battleship Jaime I, the cruiser Libertad and two destroyers arrived to shell its coastal batteries at Punto Carnero. The rebel gunboat Eduardo Dato was hit and caught fire, the cutter Uad-Kert was incapacitated, and the town was battered for three hours. From their rooftops and windows, Gibraltarians watched the shelling across the bay.
John Porral was a month short of his thirteenth birthday when he stood with his father on Europa Road, just across from the Casino, a couple of hundred yards south of the Rock Hotel, looking out over the South Mole and the waters of Gibraltar Bay towards Spain. The grey Republican battleship Jaime I was broadside on, a mile and a half away. They could see the flash of its big guns before they heard the boom. In the shelling of Algeciras, the British-owned Reina Cristina Hotel was badly damaged, as was the Larios town house nearby. Two shells hit the home of the British vice consul, Mr E. G. Beckinsale, bringing down half the roof and forcing Mrs Beckinsale to take shelter in a cell at the police station. Many public buildings were damaged and one eyewitness told The Times’s stringer that Algeciras looked like a town ‘devastated by earthquake’.
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On 3 August, Governor Harington had banned the civilian ownership of firearms in Gibraltar. A week later, on 10 August, he issued a Special Warning, the first ‘Impartiality Ordinance’, intended to quell political arguments among the population of Gibraltar. It ordered people ‘to refrain from either acting or speaking publicly in such a manner as to display marked partiality or partisanship to either of the contending parties to the present Spanish dispute’, or risk expulsion from the Fortress. This was rich, coming from an establishment that refused to sell coal or fuel to the Republican navy serving the legitimate government, while complying, or so German sources alleged, with formal requests from the Francoist military commandant at Algeciras for items including ammunition. After an HM Dockyard painter called Juan Villa was detained for twenty-one days for saying ‘Franco will never take Madrid’ while drinking in a Calle Gibraltar bar, all British subjects living in La Línea were warned against ‘disloyal and disobedient indiscretions’ concerning the ‘Junta authorities’. Villa was lucky to be British: if Spanish, he would have got six months digging trenches.
No ‘Impartiality Ordinance’ was going to stop Gibraltarians of different classes having different beliefs. Generally speaking, the bourgeoisie supported Franco’s rebels and the working class were for the Republican government. Already there were divisions in the social life of the street; pro-Republicans gathered at Café Imperial, Petit Bar and Amar’s Bakery, while the pro-Francoists, who were going to call themselves ‘Nationalists’, met at a tobacconist’s shop in Market Lane and at the Café Universal, situated at 153 Main Street. The Café was a large, hot, high room with a stage at one side and a long bar at the end; upstairs was the Embassy nightclub. Both businesses were run by two brothers from Malta, Angelo and Biagio D’Amato, a pair of entrepreneurs who were soon supplying Franco’s forces. Many prominent Gibraltarians were ardent for Franco, and some even wore Carlist or Falangist uniforms when they were across the frontier in Spain. Other partisans might sport the five-arrow Falangist symbol or a hammer-and-sickle communist brooch.
The Gibraltar City Council election in late 1936 showed the polarisation: two councillors were elected from the pro-Republican left – Agustín Huart and Anthony Baldorino – and two from the pro-Francoist right – Peter Russo and Carlos Pou. The Catholic Church split the sheep from the goats too. The better-off Gibraltarian families sent their boys to Roman Catholic schools in England, such as Ampleforth, Downside and Stonyhurst, where they thought Franco was saintly and the Republic satanic. But not everybody well-to-do was like that. Joshua Hassan, for example, the son of a Jewish cloth merchant, was descended from Sephardi families established on the Rock since the 1720s. Although he went to the bullfights in Spain with the other young Gibraltarians, the young Hassan – known as Salvador – was not sent abroad to school and the inequalities and injustices that he saw closer to home made him left-wing politically, and an ardent supporter of the Republican cause.
A punch-up between a monarchist and a syndicalist was small beer; uglier scenes marked Gibraltar’s divisions. Five men got six months in jail for unlawful wounding after they beat up the right-wing cousin of Pablo Larios, Carlos Crooke Larios. On the day they assaulted him, there had been a fresh round of Francoist executions in La Línea; one of those shot was a child. In their defence, the five men said that Carlos Crooke Larios was the man who had signed the death warrants. That may or may not have been correct; it was an unpleasant Gibraltarian named Emilio Griffiths who usually enforced General Queipo de Llano’s edicts in La Línea. But Carlos Crooke Larios was certainly working for Nationalist intelligence. He told Gerald Brenan, approvingly, that three Carlist soldiers were following the reporter Jay Allen, hoping to bump him off in some lonely street in Gibraltar or Tangier, and that Allen was a target because his reporting of the massacre at Badajoz had embarrassed Franco’s side. (Allen escaped his pursuers.)
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Another US reporter, Frank L. Kluckhohn from Minnesota (a cousin of Clyde Kluckhohn, the anthropologist of the Navaho), got the scoop on German activities in Spain. Frank happened to be sitting in the lobby of the Cristina Hotel in Seville when the first contingent of German aviators arrived, so he could start putting together the story he eventually sent by courier to Gibraltar for dispatch by wireless across the Atlantic. ‘FOREIGN PLANES AT SEVILLE’ appeared on the front page of the New York Times on 12 August 1936.
Twenty heavy German Junker bombing planes and five German pursuit planes manned by German military pilots arrived at Rebel headquarters in Seville today. The airplanes had been landed from a ship at the Rebel port of Cadiz and were then flown here.
With these and seven Italian Caproni bombers, which arrived during the past few days piloted by Italians, the Rebels are in a position … to bomb strategic points, the Loyalist fleet or anything else they wish to attack …
General Francisco Franco, leader of the revolt, conferred until a late hour tonight with the chief of the Rebel aviation service, working out details of campaign plans.
The writer saw some of the new German planes. The German Consul here privately admits they were flown by German military aviators.
GERMANS TO BE INSTRUCTORS
The Italian and German aviators are living at the Hotel Cristina here. Neither group is in military uniforms. The Germans are wearing white caps. According to official German sources here, the Nazi aviators will not fly the planes, but will instruct Spanish aviators how to use them.
That initial reticence did not last long. The German air force was going into action, testing its wings. By 13 August, a pair of Ju 52s had been converted into bombers, each carrying six 250 kg bombs in three double magazines. With Flight Captain Henke flying one of the planes, his bombardier Oberleutnant Graf Hoyos managed to land a bomb on the bow of the dreadnought battleship Jaime I off Málaga. Then they dropped some aluminium chests of supplies with a message of encouragement from Franco into the Alcázar fortress and military academy at Toledo, then in the midst of a heroic two-month siege.
Meanwhile, on the ground, the Army of Africa, headed by Lieutenant Colonel Juan Yagüe Blanco, became the column of death. Once they had been flown across the Strait of Gibraltar, the thousands of regulars and mercenaries headed north through Spain, killing, mutilating, raping and robbing. When a town or village was taken, the Moorish soldiers were given two hours’ licence to do whatever they wanted. The Army of Africa massacred hundreds after Badajoz resisted on 14 August. ‘The blood was supposed to be palm deep on the far side of the lane,’ Jay Allen reported ten days later. His story of what happened in the bullring – ‘It was a hot night. There was a smell. I can’t describe and won’t describe it’ – was so horrific the Chicago Daily Tribune would not print it; they later sacked him for being too left-wing.
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The German military operation in Spain was camouflaged as a commercial enterprise. Bernhardt, one of the three original emissaries, set up a private Spanish–German company which Franco named HISMA (Compañía Hispano-Marroquí de Transportes SA), with offices in Ceuta and Sevilla, to monopolise the import of ‘goods’ and the export of raw materials to Germany. With Hermann Göring’s assistance, a second holding company, ROWAK (Rohstoffe und Waren Einkaufsgesellschaft) was set up as cover at the German end. Later, other businesses with the same aim were grouped into a new holding company, SOFINDUS (Sociedad Financiera Industrial).
The rearmament of Nazi Germany required ‘raw stuff and stock’ from Spain and its protectorate in Morocco. Minerals like copper, iron ore and tungsten (then often called wolfram) were vital for military industries. Since Roman times, the colony of Hispania, later España or Spain, had been a source of gold and other valuable metals. The Basque mountains are made of iron; Catalonia holds potash; Almadén in central Spain has a huge mercury mine.
In 1873, during the Second Carlist War, a largely British consortium had bought the freehold to the richest ancient mines in Spain from a desperate government at the bargain price of £3.5 million sterling. These mines were thirty miles from the Gulf of Cádiz at a place called Río Tinto, so named because the copper leachings had stained the local river wine-dark. The Rio Tinto Company went on to create a British enclave, a kind of mini-Gibraltar, in their corner of Andalusia, investing millions to develop a port and jetty at Huelva and build a three-foot-six-inch narrow-gauge railway up to the mines in the hills. About a fifth of all foreign investment in Spain was British, and that mainly in mining. After the Francoist military uprising in July 1936, the Royal Navy destroyer HMS Boreas evacuated 130 British women and children from Huelva, taking them the 175 miles to Gibraltar. Some fifty British men stayed behind.
At that time, Rio Tinto employed 8500 Spanish people as miners, digging out pyrites, the valuable ore made of sulphur, iron and copper, or as processors, extracting from the rock sulphuric acid (useful for high explosives) or the iron and copper derivatives that industry so needed. These Spanish miners armed themselves to defend their communities. In late August they were crushed by General Queipo de Llano, commanding Franco’s Army of the South, who called the miners ‘savages’ and ‘Marxist scum’ and treated them atrociously. He sent the Tercio – the Spanish Foreign Legion – into Huelva, where they left hundreds of slaughtered bodies in the gutters. Other small mining villages were attacked. In Nerva, 288 people were summarily shot after they surrendered; in Aroche, 143 men and women were executed.
On 28 August 1936, Franco’s headquarters at Burgos in northern Spain requisitioned all the products of the Rio Tinto mines, under ‘Nationalist Decree No. 70’. (The anti-Republicans were now calling themselves Nationalists.) A colonel from Sevilla informed the mine manager, Mr Alexander Hall, that ‘the tremendous amount of help from Germany had to be paid partly in Rio Tinto copper and pyrites’. The company also had ‘to hand over the sterling proceeds of its deliveries to other countries’, in return for pesetas of unpredictable value. The April 1938 Report stated that by this means more than £1,750,000 had passed from the Rio Tinto Company to General Franco’s administration.
From late August 1936, Germany was supplying guns and ammunition to Franco’s Spain in return for ore. Having unloaded eight thousand rifles, eight million rounds of ammunition and ten thousand stick grenades at La Coruña for General Mola, the German ship Girgenti proceeded to Huelva to load up with Rio Tinto copper. In 1937, Nazi Germany got 2.58 million tons of iron ore, pyrites and other minerals from Spain. Speaking in Würzburg in June that year, Adolf Hitler said, ‘Germany needs to import ore. That is why we want a Nationalist government in Spain.’
From the beginning, the Germans wanted their support of Franco to be clandestine. Frank Kluckhohn, who had broken the story of the German aircraft for the New York Times, had rather better luck than the writer Arthur Koestler, then thirty years old, who found himself on 28 August having a lonely lunch in Seville’s Cristina Hotel. Through Franco’s brother Nicolás, Koestler had arranged to interview General Queipo de Llano, who had recently issued an edict saying that anyone in the Campo de Gibraltar indulging in ‘economic crimes’ like smuggling would be shot ‘without trial’. When Koestler asked Queipo where he got his foreign war planes, the drunken old general veered off to describe in spittle-flecked detail the atrocities which he claimed were committed by government troops – disembowelling pregnant women, violating children in front of their fathers and then setting them on fire with petrol – which Koestler diagnosed as ‘a perfect clinical demonstration in sexual psychopathology’.
The reporter now sat quietly observing the winged swastikas (the Nazi ‘Emblem of Distinction’) embroidered on the snowy breasts of four German pilots at a nearby table. Their white uniforms and caps – which had also been worn by the security staff at the Berlin Olympics – made the Germans stand out in Seville. Then Koestler was recognised by the Nazi journalist Hans Strindberg (son of the playwright August), who knew him of old in Berlin as a communist. There was a noisy and dramatic row, and Koestler only just managed to bluff his way out and escape to Gibraltar.*
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That day, 28 August, in Berlin, Adolf Hitler gave permission for German military personnel in Spain to engage in active combat. (They had already started: Hannes Trautloft in a Heinkel He 51 shot down his first Republican plane, a Breguet XIX, on 25 August.) Lieutenant Colonel Walter Warlimont, a brilliant staff officer from the German Ministry of War, was sent to Spain to take charge of military operations, supporting and advising Franco’s Nationalists and co-operating with the Italians. Having visited Franco’s headquarters in early September 1936, Warlimont (code-named ‘Guido’) asked for a force of German ground troops with artillery and armoured vehicles, who arrived by sea in Cádiz on 7 October.
The German ground forces in Spain were code-named Imker or ‘beekeeper’. The initial Gruppe Drohne of ten officers and 225 men arrived with forty-one Krupp-manufactured Panzer Mark I tanks, the first of 122 German tanks eventually deployed in Spain. The Imker team wore black berets with a silver death’s-head badge to which some added the Nazi swastika, and their leader was the Bavarian tank pioneer Major Wilhelm Ritter von Thoma, who would later lead Panzer tanks in Poland and Russia. After the Second World War, von Thoma told the military commentator Basil Liddell Hart that he had always seen Spain as a training ground, ‘the European Aldershot’, and the ideal place to field-test new weapons.
In 1937, the most versatile of these was the 8.8 cm FlaK 18 Flugabwehrkanone or anti-aircraft gun, later to be feared by experienced Allied infantry more than any other Axis weapon. Originally, the ‘88’ was secretly designed and built by Krupp engineers who had evaded the restrictions of the Treaty of Versailles by working for Bofors in Sweden before returning to Essen in Germany in 1931. The ‘88’ had an ingenious sliding breech mechanism and with a good crew could fire fifteen high explosive shells per minute; the gun rested on a pedestal, supported by a four-legged stabilising platform, which gave it a 360-degree traverse. Most important of all, the barrel could be elevated to +85 degrees and lowered to –3 degrees, which widened its capacities. What the Germans discovered in Spain, early in 1937, was the importance of thinking laterally. ‘Anti-aircraft gun’ was only a category; the ‘88’ could also be an anti-tank weapon of great precision, range and power. By the final Spanish Civil War campaigns in 1939, only 7 per cent of the ammunition used by the ‘88s’ was expended on air targets, 93 per cent on ground targets. Only German personnel handled these guns – no Spaniards were allowed near them.
British military intelligence should have been paying more attention; although a sub-committee’s report to the Joint Intelligence Committee in October 1937 gave the German anti-aircraft gun high marks, they seemed unaware of its field artillery role. It came as a shock, when the British Army first clashed with the German Afrika Korps in June 1941, to find that the ‘88’ could penetrate a Matilda tank at two thousand yards. And early in 1943 the Americans found that the ‘88’ easily outranged their Sherman tanks’ 75 mm guns.
Nazi Germany additionally supplied Spain with thirty-nine more fighter planes, forty-five trucks, twelve thousand cannon shells, twenty thousand 2 cm grenades, eighty million rounds of rifle and machine-gun ammunition, eighty-six thousand kilos of bombs and battlefield communications kit, including radios, telephones, switch-boards, five hundred kilometres of field wire and twenty-seven electromechanical Enigma enciphering machines. The secretive Imker Horch-Kompanie or ‘beekeeper listening company’ not only encrypted communications but intercepted the radio transmissions of the Republican army. (The Republic would fight back: in September 1939 a seven-man team of exiled Spanish Republican cryptologists were working on Enigma machines with Polish and French intelligence.)
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Right-wing commentators assert that the Francoist uprising was to foil a Communist International plot to take over Spain. But it is clear that German and Italian military personnel were in Spain first, helping the rebel generals soon after the military coup d’état in July 1936. Soviet Russia did not start supplying tanks, guns and planes to help the Spanish Republic until three months later, in October 1936. Joseph Stalin got the opportunity to supply weapons and take Spain’s gold reserves in return because the democratic countries – hostile Britain, reluctant France and, crucially, the misinformed USA – refused to help arm the elected government of a sister democracy in case it was ‘Red’.
In August 1935 an isolationist US Congress had passed the first Neutrality Act, prohibiting the export of ‘arms, ammunition, and implements of war’ from the USA to foreign nations at war, but that did not prevent American companies like Texaco, Standard Oil and Socony supplying Franco’s rebels with 3.5 million tons of oil on credit. Meanwhile, Ford, Studebaker and General Motors were exporting twelve thousand trucks to the Nationalists, while Dupont evaded the law by cleverly rerouting forty thousand bombs for Spain via Germany. Some of these foodstuffs, fuel and other supplies came through Gibraltar: the Bland Line ships Gibel Dersa, Gibel Zerjon and Gibel Kebir frequently carried goods to and from Seville, Ceuta and Melilla for the Francoists. The M. H. Bland & Co. bicentennial history glides silently over this very profitable period.
In vain did the Spanish Republic’s ambassador in London, Pablo de Azcárate, explain that the best way to stop a liberal and democratic regime falling into disorder was to offer moral help to the Republic, as Britain had in the nineteenth century, when it had supported the constitutionalists against the absolutists.
‘No British statesman can rise to office without knowing that our Empire safety must always depend on the existence of a friendly Spain,’ wrote Henry Buckley in The Life and Death of the Spanish Republic:
At the bottom, the question for them to decide was not as to whether Sr. Giral was a ‘nice person’ or a ‘red hooligan’, or whether the Duke of This had been murdered and the Countess of That tortured and imprisoned. No, the sacred duty of Mr Baldwin and of Mr Eden was to decide which Spain better served the needs of our Empire, that of Sr. Giral or that of the Junta of Generals.
And Buckley thought that ‘Mr Baldwin and his Ministers’ were not paying nearly enough attention to ‘the active intervention of Berlin in affairs in Spain’ on the side of the junta.
* The Nationalists caught Koestler in Málaga in February 1937. Imprisoned in Seville, he lived under daily threat of execution for three months, before being exchanged in a prisoner swap. Released in La Línea, the French-and-German-speaking Hungarian Jew wrote in his first book in English, Spanish Testament: ‘On May 14th I trod British soil as a free man.’