In Parliament in June and July 1937, the Labour opposition, as well as asking awkward questions about the bombing of Gernika, pressed the national government about what the newspapers were calling ‘Guns over Gibraltar’, the heavy artillery trained on the Rock and seen by Noel Monks and Randolph Churchill. Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, who had earlier stated that ‘the existence of German heavy guns at Ceuta has not been confirmed’, gave a guarded response:

I understand that it is the case that General Franco has installed batteries on the coast between Algeciras and Tarifa. My information does not, however, bear out the Press reports to the effect that German experts have assisted in mounting these batteries. The position is naturally being kept under close review …

The next day, Leslie Hore-Belisha (the man who got ‘Belisha beacons’ placed at pedestrian crossings, and now the Secretary of State for War) stonewalled all technical military queries.

Mr Seymour Cocks (Broxtowe, Lab): Can the Minister say whether these guns include 16-inch Krupp guns and 12-inch howitzers; and is it not a fact that we have always had a friendly understanding with the Spanish government that these heights facing Gibraltar shall not be fortified?

Mr Leslie Hore-Belisha (Plymouth, Devonport, L. Nat): That may or may not be the case. (Laughter.)

On Monday 19 July Winston Churchill reiterated that the heavy howitzers mounted near Gibraltar represented a genuine threat.

A 12-inch howitzer properly mounted could hurl a projectile 10 or 12 miles, and within range they could quickly destroy the dockyard at Gibraltar and render the bay untenable to His Majesty’s ships … Could they obstruct or close the Straits? Where were they sited and at whose instigation had they been erected? (‘Hear, hear’ said the MPs.) … [N]o such guns existed before the outbreak of the civil war. Where, then, had they come from? Were they from the [German] foundries of Krupp or [the Italian foundries] of Ansaldo? … Were these weapons the price which General Franco had to pay to certain Powers for their assistance?

Then David Lloyd George weighed in:

Why were these very astute rulers, Mussolini and Hitler, throwing themselves with such energy into this contest? It was not their sympathies with the political principles of General Franco that had made them send 80,000 troops, hundreds of aeroplanes, and heavy guns to Spain … Spain was in the most vital strategic position for us of almost any country in Europe … [Hitler and Mussolini] wanted Spain with its great population, natural resources of copper and iron, and with its immense strategic opportunities.

Finally, the Foreign Office sent Viscount Cranborne, its parliamentary under-secretary, out to bat. He played the Harington defence, that the guns in the neighbourhood of Gibraltar were only mounted to fend off future bombardments:

VISCOUNT CRANBORNE – That is all I have to say.

Mr. CHURCHILL – It is not nearly enough. Are they 12-inch guns or howitzers?

VISCOUNT CRANBORNE – It would not be in the public interest to give the information. They are of smallish calibre, and we are confident they constitute no menace to Gibraltar. There is no truth in the story of any 12-inch howitzers dominating the fort of Gibraltar or the harbour …

Mr. ATTLEE – Do these guns dominate the passage of the Mediterranean by ships? Are they endangered by these guns?

VISCOUNT CRANBORNE – These guns fire from Spain across the Straits, but in the view of the military experts they do not constitute a military menace.

In fact, between March and June 1937 Whitehall had requested three reports about Nationalist gun emplacements facing Gibraltar. The reports stated the awkward facts: ‘German and Italian artillery experts have … advise[d] and assist[ed] in mounting the Spanish defences of the Straits’, and ‘the 12-inch guns being mounted near Mount Bujeo are howitzers not ordinarily designed for use against warships … it is quite possible that they be so placed as to be invulnerable from the 9.2-inch guns on the Rock and at the same time be able to throw their projectiles onto the Dockyard.’

Churchill returned to the theme on 6 August:

Large howitzers and many secondary guns have been mounted on both sides of the Straits of Gibraltar at Algeciras and Ceuta. The fire of these guns interlaces across the waterway … It is one thing for a fortress to fire at a gun and quite another for a gun to fire at a harbour. The anchorage of Gibraltar might at any time be rendered unusable by the British fleet.

The threat to Gibraltar even entered popular fiction. J. M. Walsh, a prolific Australian author of middlebrow espionage novels, published Spies in Spain, set during the Spanish Civil War, in 1937. Four intrepid heroes, led by Colonel Ormiston of the Secret Service, discover a tunnel, started by the Republic and continued by the Francoist rebels, being excavated from Algeciras to Ceuta under the Strait of Gibraltar, infiltrate the workings and blow up the spur leading off towards Gibraltar. The moral of the book seems to be that though the civil war is a Spanish matter, they touch anything British at their peril.

In reality, the ‘Guns over Gibraltar’ issue would divide opinion for the rest of the Spanish Civil War. Pro-Francoists pooh-poohed their very existence; pro-Republicans stressed the danger to British strategic interests. The Spanish-language newspaper Madrid, published in Paris, splashed a big story on Thursday 17 March 1938, ‘A SECRET GERMAN PLAN to capture Gibraltar in six hours’. Accompanied by a dramatic black-and-white map of the Strait of Gibraltar showing a swarm of planes and ships and arrows targeting the Rock, the story said the coast from Tarifa to Algeciras was armed with long-range German guns, and Ceuta, Málaga and Mallorca would act as bases for German and Italian submarines. A German colonel was quoted as saying that ‘When the war starts, not a British, French or allied ship will get through the strait of Gibraltar.’ The unnamed author of the article says he does not know when the surprise attack will take place, but draws attention to the recent arrival of a German general ‘que se llama Zander o Zanner’. (‘Sander’ was the code-name of the first commandant of the Condor Legion in Spain, General Hugo Sperrle.)

The September 1938 edition of the fourth ‘Penguin Special’, Searchlight on Spain, written by the so-called ‘Red Duchess’, Katharine Stewart-Murray, Duchess of Atholl, an elected MP, carried a dramatic new map opposite the title page ‘giving a general idea of the guns threatening Gibraltar and the Straits’. And in March 1939, Jonathan Cape published Gibraltar and the Mediterranean, a polemic by G. T. Garratt. Geoffrey Garratt had covered the Abyssinian War for the Manchester Guardian and spent much of 1937 and 1938 working in eastern Spain with Eleanor Rathbone’s National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief. In 1938 he had published two books: Mussolini’s Roman Empire, a ‘Penguin Special’ which sold an astonishing three hundred thousand copies, and The Shadow of the Swastika, dedicated to ‘the Englishmen of the International Brigade, who died in what may well be the last fight for English freedom’, a bracingly partisan study of how fascism was infecting English society while its people hid their heads in the sand.

In the third part of Gibraltar and the Mediterranean, ‘The Era of Imperial Decline’, Garratt argued that the democracies were trying to placate the totalitarians at the cost of their principles. Gibraltar and the Mediterranean was a slashing argument designed to embarrass the British government for its policy of appeasement and neglect of defence. It was so widely reviewed and discussed that in The Rock, Warren Tute’s novel of wartime Gibraltar, it could be referred to simply as ‘that book’.

Gibraltar and the Mediterranean’s last chapters argued that Germany was not only the dominant Axis partner but also the greatest threat to British interests, because it had managed to encircle Gibraltar in both northern Morocco and southern Spain. A conservative naval officer writing under the pseudonym ‘Holdfast’ in the Naval Review in May 1939 considered the book’s ‘political bias’ typical of ‘that ideological medley of professors, duchesses, young intellectuals and “experts in foreign affairs” whose politics range from faint pink to crimson red’. The reviewer continued, ‘Those who believe that Lord Baldwin, Lord Halifax and Mr Chamberlain, for instance, are incapable of chicanery and double-dealing will find these latter chapters very irritating’ – which rings hollow in retrospect.

Major Geoffrey Garratt died in the Second World War. Aged more than fifty, he had joined the Pioneer Corps and was commanding 87 (Alien) Company, which had Austrians, Germans and German Jews in its ranks (including Private Walter Freud, the grandson of the psychiatrist), tasked with clearing landmines. On 28 April 1942, he was in Wales, attending a demonstration at Pembroke Dock Defensible Barracks of how to defuse a German-made Teller anti-tank mine. In theory, it needed about 200 lb of direct pressure to set off its stone of TNT, but the Teller was also fitted with anti-handling devices which made it dangerous to unscrew the pressure plate. When this example exploded, it killed all nineteen soldiers in the basement room, including G. T. Garratt.

Like the arguments over the destruction of Gernika, the ‘Guns over Gibraltar’ polemic continued for decades. In 1974, for example, George Hills (author of the 1967 hagiography Franco: the Man and His Nation) published a history of Gibraltar called Rock of Contention which concluded that Britain should negotiate the return of the peninsula to Spain; buried in the book’s 510 pages is an extraordinarily vitriolic attack on Geoffrey Garratt, by then long dead, whom he smears as a perniciously anti-Catholic, Communist stooge seeking ‘to convince British journalists that Gibraltar was surrounded by heavy guns and howitzers manned by Germans and ready to fire at a moment’s notice’. Hills concludes: ‘There were no howitzers, guns or Germans.’

*

On Tuesday 17 August 1937, the Panzerschiff Admiral Scheer came into Gibraltar harbour carrying Fleet Commander Admiral Rolf Carls, whom Admiral Erich Raeder hoped would succeed him as head of the German navy. Carls was bringing medals and thanks from the Führer for the help that Gibraltar had given to Germany’s sailors on the Deutschland, and was welcomed with Gibraltar’s finest ceremonial. At eleven o’clock sharp, Brigadier Curry invited Carls to inspect the King’s Own Yorkshire Light Infantry parade outside Government House, to the music of a military band and the distant booms of a seventeen-gun salute in the bay. At a governor’s reception in the Convent, the German admiral thanked the Executive Council and the gathered civic and military dignitaries, and at noon, Governor Harington, booted and spurred, in his beribboned parade tunic with polished Sam Browne belt and khaki barathea jodhpurs, was piped aboard the Admiral Scheer for a quick tour by German naval officers in double-breasted dark blue frock-coats. Then it was off to Governor’s Cottage for luncheon. That evening, Rear Admiral Alfred Evans, the Rear Admiral-in-Charge and Admiral Superintendent HM Dockyard Gibraltar, gave a dinner at his residence, the Mount. The following day, Admiral Carls reciprocated with a luncheon aboard his battleship, and the visit ended with a cocktail party hosted by the German consul, George Imossi, at the Rock Hotel. From its terrace, Franco’s followers could smile approvingly on the Admiral Scheer, bathed in evening sunlight, congratulating themselves on how it had punished the ‘Reds’ of Almería.

In his memoir, Harington rather oddly chooses to reprint the fulsome letter he wrote to Admiral Carls before he left:

Admiral Carls had awarded Governor Harington and Admiral Evans the Star of the Order of the German Red Cross. Lesser medals went to a dozen others, and twenty-one women were awarded the Damenkreuz or Ladies’ Cross. Each medal came with a Gothic black-letter certificate whose largest typeface was reserved for the name of Adolf Hitler.

Just over a year later, in September 1938, Admiral Rolf Carls would be contributing to the German ‘Draft Study of Naval Warfare against England’: ‘War against England means at the same time war against the [British] Empire, against France, probably against Russia as well, and a large number of countries overseas; in fact, against one half to one third of the whole world.’

*

In September 1937, fifty-seven-year-old General Sir Edmund Ironside, the burly Scottish soldier who would succeed Harington as Governor of Gibraltar, got a closer look at der Führer. Ironside was nicknamed ‘Tiny’ because he was six foot four inches tall and weighed fifteen and a half stone, but he was more than just a bruiser, having a working knowledge of fourteen languages. Once the youngest major general in the British army, he was widely credited as the model for John Buchan’s tenacious fictional character Richard Hannay. Ironside’s real-life adventures included one as a young lieutenant when he disguised himself as an Afrikaner and, using his fluent taal or Cape Dutch, went to southwest Africa to spy on the Germans in their war on the Herero people. Ironside served bravely on the Western Front all through the First World War, commanded the Allied expedition to Archangel to support the White Russians against the Bolsheviks or ‘Bolos’, and then undertook missions to Hungary, Turkey, Persia and Iraq, where he specialised in extricating British troops from tight corners. As commandant of the Staff College from 1922 to 1926, he had been a moderniser, embracing new ideas of creating a mechanised army with close air support to fight global ‘small wars’.

Invited to witness the Reichswehr’s autumn manoeuvres at Mecklenburg in the north German plain, Ironside took the ferry across the North Sea on 21 September 1937. Earlier that month, at the annual congress and rally of the Nazi Party at Nuremberg, Adolf Hitler had loudly stated three facts: the Treaty of Versailles was dead; Germany was free; the guarantor of that freedom was the German army.

On his first night in Germany Ironside dined with the enthusiastic Nazi General Walter von Reichenau, organiser of the 1936 Olympic Games, and Marshal Pietro Badoglio of Italy, conqueror of Libya and instigator of poison gas attacks in Ethiopia. The next day he met Field Marshal von Blomberg, in overall command of all three German fighting services, and General von Fritsch, commander-in-chief of the army. Ironside reckoned the Germans were going fast but were not yet ready for war. ‘If I were to hazard a guess’, he wrote in his contemporaneous diary, ‘I might say 1940 …’ On the Friday night before the manoeuvres, Ironside fed the same three German generals a lot of whisky. ‘They were silly to think that they, who had never tasted it, could compete with an old Scotsman like me.’ General von Reichenau – who would boast in a lecture that ‘two years’ real war experience’ in Spain was of more use to the still ‘immature’ German armed forces than ‘ten years of peaceful training’, and who, as commander of the German Sixth Army in Russia in 1941, would order the extermination of ‘Jewish sub-humanity’ – drank a toast to ‘brotherhood with England, but only for two years’.

Nursing their hangovers the next day, the generals and other guests watched the German navy go through their paces – deploying submarines, smoke-screens, aeroplane torpedo attacks, the shelling and bombing of convoys. Around midday, Ironside saw a column of twenty cars come up the road:

Mussolini, the junior partner in the Rome–Berlin alliance that he christened ‘the Axis’, was on a five-day state visit to Nazi Germany, and Hitler had laid on several spectacular shows designed to impress and overawe him. The two dictators awarded each other grandiose medals. The foreign visitors gaped at a jaw-dropping demonstration of Teutonic firepower at Mecklenburg. Aeroplanes were already part of many national displays – 460 British aircraft at the Hendon Air Parade in June, five hundred French planes over Paris on Bastille Day – but now hundreds of German bombers and fighters were swarming in close support of six hundred tanks on the ground, attacking in co-ordinated waves, refuelling and returning in the shuttle tactics evolved on the battlefields of Spain. And for the first time ever in public, German parachutists dropped from the sky.

The elephantine Hermann Göring arrived, late, in his air force uniform, ‘a youngish but immensely fat man,’ wrote Ironside, ‘with simply enormous legs, a fair unlined face and a few longish hairs hanging down under his cap’, who panted badly coming up the hill. Ironside watched the crowd of toadies around him, ‘all frightfully enthusiastic at being in the train of such a great man’. The British delegation were ushered into a tent to meet the Führer, who made a poor impression on Ironside:

I was at once struck by his vacuous-looking grin – one could hardly call it a smile – and his watery, weak-looking eye … Reichenau told Hitler that I could speak German, and I chatted for a minute with him in German. He complimented me and told me I spoke it like a German. The man struck me not at all. His voice was soft and his German of the south.

To Ironside, Hitler seemed like a mild professor with a drink problem. In fact, Hitler had simply not switched on his charisma. This was not the pumped-up, red-faced orator who had ranted about ‘Jewish Bolshevism’ at the closing of the Nuremberg rally two weeks before, furiously scorning ‘the claim of an uncivilised Jewish-Bolshevik guild of criminals to rule Germany from Moscow’.

But the Mecklenburg military show greatly impressed Ironside, especially in the co-operation it demonstrated between the German armed forces, so unlike Britain where the air force saw supporting army or navy operations as ‘prostitution’. ‘The German Army, Navy and Air Force are all united … They have one direction and as far as I could see no jealousies … no watertight compartments. They have thus a great advantage over us.’

*

Colonel Noel Mason-MacFarlane, like Ironside a future Governor of Gibraltar, soon got a closer look at the armed forces of Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich. Mason-MacFarlane arrived in Berlin as the British military attaché in January 1938. He was an energetic regular gunner who had won three Military Crosses and the Croix de Guerre in the First World War. His father had been a fanatical Scottish Territorial colonel and his younger brother was killed on active service with the Imperial Camel Corps in Libya. ‘Mason-Mac’ (as he was commonly known) spoke fluent French and German, wrote sharp satirical verses, enjoyed theatre and had a sense of humour, in his case a mark of intelligence. At the same time, Mason-MacFarlane ‘did not suffer fools gladly’. His forthrightness was often rudeness and his irascibility was not helped by pain from sporting and motoring injuries. But according to MI3, the European section of military intelligence at the War Office, he combined ‘a first-class brain with a remarkable flair for intelligence work … Full of mental and physical energy and with great initiative … he should go far.’

The idea of the military attaché – a uniformed serviceman working in an embassy or with a diplomatic mission abroad – was an early nineteenth-century Prussian invention. An attaché’s role was not espionage as generally understood but the gathering of ‘open source’ intelligence through contacts with the host nation’s military, observing their exercises and manoeuvres, studying their manuals and organisation, mingling with other countries’ attachés, reading the press and keeping his eyes and ears open. An attaché had to be up to speed on all the latest military technology, have a grasp of economics and politics, and understand the changes a country might be going through. A major British embassy like the one in Berlin had three military attachés, one from each service. As Ironside had noted, there was little co-ordination between them, because the sailor (Captain Tom Troubridge RN), the soldier (Colonel Mason-MacFarlane) and the airman (Group Captain J. L. Vachell) each reported to his own separate director of intelligence back in Whitehall.

A military attaché had a dual allegiance: he was both a serviceman and a member of the ambassador’s staff whose views and rules he was supposed to respect.* This was difficult for the attachés in Nazi Germany from 1937 to 1939. On his arrival in Berlin at the start of 1938, Mason-MacFarlane was glad to find an able assistant military attaché, the ‘eager beaver’ Major Kenneth Strong. In his own post-war memoirs, Strong wrote, with suave understatement: ‘The policy of the British Embassy under [Ambassador] Sir Nevile Henderson did not always seem to the attachés to be consistent with the available military information.’

The trouble was that sixty-nine-year-old Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain was now in the driving seat of foreign policy, and still believed in the sunlit uplands of a pan-European settlement that would bring peace to the entire continent. He took to foreign affairs, said Malcolm Muggeridge, ‘with a beginner’s passion and recklessness, though not luck’. The somewhat prim, vain and unworldly prime minister could not see through the ruthless lies of the European dictators and was, as the diplomat Ivone Kirkpatrick said, ‘determined to tame Hitler by kindness’.

It was Chamberlain who selected Sir Nevile Henderson as ambassador to Berlin, and Henderson took up his post on 1 May 1937 ‘resolved’, in his own words, ‘to do my utmost to see the good side of the Nazi régime as well as the bad’ and ‘to labour for an honourable peace’. Henderson, who described the ‘superb’ Nuremberg rally he attended as ‘a triumph of mass organisation combined with beauty’, replaced a far more cynical ambassador, Sir Eric Phipps. (When Hermann Göring once explained he was late because he had been out shooting, Phipps remarked acidly, ‘Animals, I trust’; by contrast, Henderson, hearing Göring criticised as ‘a butcher’, defended him by saying, ‘Absolute rubbish! He’s a charming man. I went shooting with him only last week.’)

General Hermann Göring, a man of gargantuan appetite and ambition (and a secret morphine addict), carried more medals on his capacious chest than anyone else in the Third Reich, and the full list of his posts – Head of the Air Force, Prime Minister of Prussia, Supreme Head of the Ministry of Economy and Commissioner of the Four-Year Plan, etc., etc. – took minutes to read aloud. As Game Warden of the Third Reich, Göring had prohibited snares and steel traps and was trying to restore the European bison and the original wild horse. He had introduced elk onto his ten-thousand-acre estate in East Prussia for sporting purposes and he invited Sir Nevile Henderson to come stag shooting. Henderson was proud to drop a fourteen-pointer with a single shot through the heart. Göring loved all shooting. When Homes & Gardens profiled ‘Hitler’s Mountain Home’ in 1938, the reporter saw the archery butts behind the Bavarian chalet. ‘It is strange to watch the burly Field-Marshal Göring, as chief of the most formidable air force in Europe, taking a turn with the bow and arrow at straw targets of twenty-five yards range. There is as much to-do about those scarlet bulls’-eyes as though the fate of nations depended on a full score.’

It was Henderson who arranged British participation in the huge hunting exhibition that Göring organised in Berlin in November 1937, where a selection of stuffed animals (including a giant panda) that had enjoyed the honour of being shot dead in every corner of the empire by British royalty and aristocracy duly won first prize for ‘Overseas Collection’. Neville Chamberlain used the bizarre event as a way of establishing personal contact with the Nazis. He arranged that his ally Lord Halifax, then Lord President of the (Privy) Council, be privately invited to the exhibition in his capacity as Joint Master of Fox Hounds of the Middleton Hunt in Yorkshire. Afterwards, Halifax went south by special train to meet Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden. The whole mission almost collapsed when tall and patrician Halifax got out of the car and was on the point of handing his bowler hat and overcoat to a nondescript little man with greasy hair. Von Neurath, the German Foreign Minister, hissed urgently, ‘Der Führer! der Führer!’

Hitler got the message from Halifax that parts of the Versailles Treaty could be peacefully renegotiated in his favour, including Danzig, Austria and Czechoslovakia, and in return offered a solution for the British Empire’s troubles in India: ‘Shoot Gandhi, and if that does not suffice, shoot a dozen leading members of Congress; and if that does not suffice, shoot two hundred and so on until order is restored.’

The next day, Halifax travelled to Karinhall and was deceived by the charm of fat Hermann Göring in his big-feathered hat – ‘frankly attractive, like a great schoolboy … a composite personality – film star, great landowner interested in his estate, Prime Minister, party manager, head gamekeeper at Chatsworth’.

Early in 1938, the top army men whom Ironside had met were framed for sexual deviancy by the Gestapo and swept away. Adolf Hitler took complete command of the German armed forces and elevated Göring to field marshal. The Ministry of War was abolished on 4 February and the Oberkommando der Wehrmacht (OKW), the High Command of the Armed Forces, was set up as Hitler’s personal staff. In his memoir Lost Victories, Field Marshal Erich von Manstein said that reducing OKW to a mere military secretariat meant that there was no proper chief of staff to think about grand strategy. Unlike Roosevelt or Churchill, Hitler had no strong figure to stand up and wrestle with his ideas. He relied on his own instinct, his genius for opportunism and his absolute power to issue directives from the Führer.

Meanwhile, Neville Chamberlain, an inveterate intriguer, by-passed his Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden and set up back-channels to the Italian Fascist regime, conducting ‘unofficial diplomacy’ with the Duce himself in Rome through Dame Ivy Chamberlain, the widow of his half-brother Sir Austen Chamberlain.† The appeasing Chamberlain wanted legal recognition of the Italian conquest of Ethiopia, whereas Anthony Eden pressed for a quid pro quo in the Mediterranean: he wanted Italy to withdraw four thousand ‘volunteers’ fighting for Franco in Spain and an end to Italian submarine attacks. But Eden was squeezed out, and on 20 February 1938, Chamberlain replaced him as Foreign Secretary with Lord Halifax.

The day that Eden resigned, Hitler made a raging speech to the Reichstag, presenting territorial aggression as self-defence. He promised to protect the ten million Germans living outside Germany’s borders, seven million of them in Austria, and three million in Czechoslovakia. They had the right to what he called ‘racial self-determination’.

* ‘It is a commonplace of diplomatic observation that all military attachés are inclined to meddle with what does not concern their duties, and as long as military attachés are allowed to have their own cipher and communicate with the War Office they will be subject to this temptation.’ Compton Mackenzie, First Athenian Memories (Cassell, 1931), p. 57.

† Sir Austen Chamberlain (1863–1937) became a Knight of the Garter and won the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiating the Locarno Pact in 1925. The monocle-wearing Conservative exchanged Christmas cards and went on family holiday with Benito Mussolini.