On 7 December 1940, Adolf Hitler, Brauchitsch, Jodl, Keitel, Warlimont, Richthofen, Reichenau and General Kübler gathered round a large table for the final presentation of Operation Felix. The 1st Mountain Division’s intelligence Oberst Hans Roschmann had spent a week building a giant photogrammetric model of the Rock of Gibraltar at a scale of 1:1000, a thirteen-foot-long sculpture which showed every aspect of the defences: each barbette and bastion, every building, casemate, embrasure, gun emplacement, machine-gun nest, minefield, mortar point, platform, redoubt and tunnel mouth.

Meanwhile, on the same day, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris arrived in the Spanish capital, flying in from Bordeaux, where he had been briefing German military reconnaissance teams who were about to go into Spain in plain clothes. Hitler had sent him to Madrid because he thought at the moment of maximum pressure the white-haired old Spanish hand was the very best man to persuade General Franco to join the war. Spain seemed to be moving towards the Germans: the regime had just allowed German oil tankers to moor discreetly by night in out-of-the-way bays on the north Spanish coast in order to refuel German destroyers from the Atlantic, but this was not yet open alliance.

Admiral Canaris, who had been deeply involved in Operation Felix’s intelligence and planning, would have loved to take Gibraltar from the British. How often, on espionage missions to Algeciras, had he stared across at the Rock, eating paella in the dining-room of the Reina Cristina Hotel, so accommodatingly run by the Austrian Hans Lieb? In his heart of hearts, however, the Hispanophile German spymaster knew that Spain’s best interest did not lie in joining the war that had engulfed Europe. Some of Canaris’s biographers believe that the wily admiral worked hard to keep Spain out of the conflict, partly so he had a neutral bolt-hole to escape to. The Spain he loved was already war-wrecked and wretched: in Madrid, he had seen children and cripples begging in the street, queues at the Auxilio Social soup kitchens and people rootling through the embassy dustbins to gobble scraps from the diplomats’ garbage. Another war would not make this better.

At 7.30 p.m. on 7 December 1940, Canaris, accompanied by his two Abwehr aides and with General Juan Vigón, went to see Generalísimo Franco. To protect his own position with Hitler, Canaris made absolutely sure that Vigón took careful official notes, which were then sent to the German Embassy. On 12 December, Ambassador von Stohrer cabled the translation of General Vigón’s notes to Berlin.

Admiral Canaris told Franco that the Führer wanted his troops to march into Spain on 10 January 1941 and finish the Gibraltar business in early February. As soon as the march started, the doors of the German granaries would swing open.

Franco told Canaris point-blank that 10 January was impossible, and then rolled out the old arguments. Certainly Gibraltar would be taken quickly, but then Spanish Guinea or one of the Canary Islands would be taken in return. Britain’s Royal Navy was still a threat. The loss of Gibraltar could be a pretext for Britain or the USA to seize the Portuguese islands in the Atlantic. Spain was indeed trying to improve defences in its own islands and artillery positions in the Strait of Gibraltar, but everything was as yet unfinished. However, that was not his main reason for delaying, which was, of course, that Spain was still short of that million tons of grain. If Spain joined the war and sea transport was cut off, life in many provinces would become unbearable and ‘The islands would simply starve to death.’ The Generalísimo and his government were doing their best to remedy the situation: buying grain from Canada and South America, purchasing locomotives and railway cars to improve their transport network, fitting gas generators to trucks to make up for petrol shortages, but a weak Spain would really only be a burden to Germany.

Admiral Canaris asked Franco to set another date and, unsurprisingly, he did not, but he did say that the admiral was very welcome to see the progress being made in the Strait of Gibraltar. The Generalísimo proudly showed Canaris pictures of the 1940 model 240 mm Placencia heavy trench mortar that Spanish engineers had built and were testing. He wanted all Hispano-German joint military studies to continue, discreetly. His most cordial greetings to the Führer. Canaris immediately cabled this prevarication to Berlin; Generals Jodl and Keitel had the task of passing on the message to Hitler, who was furious.

Admiral Canaris went back down to Algeciras to join his local Abwehr team – Carbe, Kautschke, Keller and Kühne. Their Spanish contact man, Lieutenant Colonel Eleuterio Sánchez Rubio, had rented a waterfront house in Algeciras, Villa Isabel, telling the Gibraltarian owner, Lionel Imossi, that General Muñoz Grandes wanted it for an officers’ mess. It became a key German observation post for the next three years.

Canaris briefed the leader of the 1st Mountain Division who was going to spearhead the infantry assault. General Hubert Lanz, though a fine soldier, was appalled at what faced him once he was in La Línea and studying the Rock in solid reality – not a sketch or a map or a model, but the monstrous bluff of Devil’s Tower itself, with all the signs of vigorous tunnelling within it and defensive works going on night and day. Lanz thought a head-on attack from the north would be almost impossible. ‘What about the eastern side?’ he asked. ‘Can we look at it from the sea?’

At least one of three Spanish army officers accompanied the German reconnaissance team at all times. Staff officer Lieutenant Colonel Ramón Pardo Suárez had come down with them from Irún, and in the Campo de Gibraltar they met up with Lieutenant Colonel Eleuterio Sánchez Rubio and Lieutenant Colonel Fernando Cárcer Disdier. Sánchez Rubio was the soldier who arrested the Republican mayor of Seville during an abortive military coup in 1932. SIS had clocked him as a member of the very right-wing Unión Militar Española in April 1936. Sánchez Rubio had hunted down ‘Red’ miners early in the civil war and then established good relations with the Germans stationed at San Roque. Cárcer was a regular who would go on to serve with the División Azul Española that Franco sent to help Hitler on the Eastern Front. To answer Lanz’s question and survey the Rock from the sea, Pardo and Canaris arranged to go aboard a Spanish warship along with General Lanz and his chief gunner, General Walther Lucht, former Artillery Commander of the Condor Legion.

Early on 16 December the Spanish mine-layer Júpiter left Málaga and sailed south. Between 9 and 10 a.m. she was stationed less than two miles off the eastern side of the peninsula of Gibraltar. A small British spotter aircraft was circling overhead. It was like the old days for everyone: Júpiter had been in these waters before, having helped block the escape of the Republican destroyer José Luis Diez at the end of 1938, and Canaris had peered through a periscope here in his First World War U-boat. As the sun rose over the Mediterranean, it shone directly on the beaches of Sandy Bay and Catalan Bay and illuminated the slopes and cliffs above and behind them, enabling the Germans to study the landscape carefully through high-powered binoculars and scissor telescopes.

General Lanz thought that La Caleta, Catalan Bay, was the weak spot. There were new embrasures above the oil tanks at Sandy Bay, others covering the road from the northeast, but the few batteries overlooking the water catchment area on the eastern slopes could never survive the bombardments Lanz and Lucht intended to direct on them. Using ‘dead’ ground where they could not be spotted, Lanz reckoned that his experienced mountain troops could make the ascent in two hours. The Spanish officer Pardo reported:

Canaris travelled back to Germany via Lisbon, where he told the Abwehr Nest (station) in the Portuguese capital about his abortive meeting with Franco on 7 December in which the latter had refused to co-operate with a German attack on Gibraltar. This was overheard by a lighthearted young Yugoslav playboy whom the Abwehr thought they were sending to England as a spy, code-named ‘Ivan’. His real name was Dusan Popov and the news of the postponement of the German attack on Gibraltar was in fact a useful piece of information he intended to give his new masters in British Intelligence.

Popov, under his other, English code-name, ‘Tricycle’, was actually starting his career as a British double agent, under the new system supervised by the XX, ‘Double-Cross’ or Twenty Committee, which had its first formal weekly meeting on Thursday 2 January 1941. The committee was run by the Security Service and chaired by MI5’s man, the ‘capo of the Christ Church Mafia’, Oxford Professor J. C. Masterman. After Popov arrived in England, William Cavendish-Bentinck, Chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, closely questioned him about Canaris’s visit to Madrid, concluding that Spain would not at that moment ‘willingly enter the war on the Axis side’.

London’s understanding of the Spanish position was enhanced by the arrival of Captain Alan Hillgarth in early January 1941. The naval attaché from Madrid, already appreciated by Churchill, mounted a formidable charm offensive on the intelligence community. His excellent ten-page memo to Hugh Dalton persuaded the political head of SOE not only to back off from looking for ‘Reds’ to support in Spain, but also to allow Hillgarth himself to supervise all activities by SOE’s Iberia or H Section there.

At the start of 1941, Hillgarth thought, the game was moving beyond neutrality and the Spanish had to consider actual resistance if German invasion came. Their military contingency plans were already prepared: a series of delaying actions, coupled with sabotage, and a big stand if necessary on the Sierra Morena north of the Guadalquivir, with a final defensive position even further south covering Cádiz, Gibraltar and Málaga. Morocco would be the Spanish army’s supply base for men and materials; there would be both regular army tactics to delay the invader and guerrilla sabotage behind the lines, ‘cutting German communications and murdering Germans’.

Hillgarth had talked to the millionaire Juan March about the danger of a possible German thrust through Spain. ‘If that happened (and Juan March was very firm about this) the Spanish government would resist, and British aid in guerrilla and denial operations would be acceptable.’ But there could be no question of forestalling the Germans. ‘If we come in five minutes before the German, we turn the Spaniards against us.’ For now everything had to be covert and discreet.

Hillgarth discouraged any employment of Spaniards for special operations in Spain. ‘There are very few Spaniards who do not talk, and even fewer who will not talk when beaten up … When Spaniards, of all kinds, get hold of money and arms or explosives they are at once tempted to think of their private feuds.’ Hillgarth thought it better to have ‘a cadre of useful personnel waiting in Portugal’, to assist the expeditionary force that would be sent to help Spain if the Germans invaded. Hillgarth recommended that the military in Gibraltar should get in touch with the Spanish military HQ as soon as any Germans crossed the frontier.

The deceptions on both sides were always in danger of exposure. In late December 1940, three weeks after the Spanish government gave permission for German tankers to refuel German navy warships with ‘utmost discretion’ in remote Spanish bays, the German Embassy in Madrid somehow obtained the contents of a coded telegram from US Secretary of State Cordell Hull to the American ambassador in Madrid on 18 December which revealed that US President Roosevelt was authorising the American Red Cross shipment of grain and flour to Spain, ‘in consideration of the political assurances given by the Spanish Chief of State to the US Embassy on 28 November’. When Stohrer challenged the Spanish Foreign Minister, demanding to know if Franco had promised the USA neutrality in return for bread, Serrano shrugged his shoulders and said they had only made ‘vague, non-binding’ statements about not changing current policies.

*

By now, Hitler had lost patience with Spain. On 11 December 1940, der Führer said that although reconnaissances already under way should continue, actual preparations for Operation Felix should cease. At the end of the month Hitler wrote a long letter to Benito Mussolini, saying that by refusing to co-operate with the Axis, Franco was making ‘the greatest mistake of his life’. Hitler did not yet see that by not pressing onwards past Franco’s hesitations he too was making one of his greatest mistakes. By the time he wrote to Mussolini, the action was already in the past tense.

I regret [Franco’s hesitation], for we had made all the preparations for crossing the Spanish border on January 10 and attacking Gibraltar at the beginning of February. In my opinion the attack would have led to success in a relatively short time. The troops for this were excellently selected and trained, and the weapons were especially designated and readied for the purpose … I am very sad about this decision of Franco’s which does not take account of the help which we – you, Duce, and I – once gave him in his hour of need. I have only a faint hope left that possibly at the last minute he will become aware of the catastrophic nature of his own actions …

Yet on 9 January 1941, Hitler once again told a conference of German military leaders that ‘Although it seems scarcely promising, we shall try again to induce Spain to enter the war.’ Time was now pressing: just before Christmas 1940, Hitler had issued his War Directive No. 21, Operation Barbarossa, ‘to crush Soviet Russia in a quick campaign’. The troops currently committed to Spain would need to be deployed east in the summer of 1941, so this was their last chance to get the seizure of Gibraltar out of the way. After the meeting, Ribbentrop summoned Stohrer from Madrid to Salzburg and gave him detailed, strict instructions on what to say to Franco. On 20 January 1941, the German ambassador delivered ‘with ruthless candour’ his sternest démarche yet to the Generalísimo. There was a forty-eight-hour deadline to commit to entering the war, or he faced the end of Nationalist Spain.

But at the same time, the German and Italian leadership were gathering at the Berghof. The war was altering course again. In the longer term Nazi Germany was going to attack Soviet Russia, but right now it was about to commit its tougher troops and leaders – von Rundstedt in the Balkans, Rommel in North Africa – to help Fascist Italy win the battles it was so signally losing in those theatres.

In return, Hitler urged Mussolini to appeal once again, in person, to the exasperating Franco, someone he considered ‘not a sovereign but a subaltern in temperament’, a man malignly influenced by Serrano and the sinister Catholic Church.

Mussolini said, ‘I will speak, but I will not apply pressure.’

Hitler declared, ‘I only ask that the German troops should be enabled to take Gibraltar.’ Did he still really believe it was possible?

*

Count Ciano arranged for Franco and Mussolini to meet at Bordighera in Italy. Now it was Mussolini’s turn to try and persuade the Spaniards. On 11 February 1941, Serrano and Franco crossed from Spain into France at Le Perthus, where Spanish Ambassador Lequerica was waiting to meet them. They travelled eastward through France in a seventeen-car convoy, escorted by Vichy’s motorcycle outriders. A pleasant journey through towns like Arles where respectful crowds watched their passing was only marred by a group of Spanish exiles who shouted and raised clenched left fists. They reached the Ligurian Riviera at nightfall and met Mussolini the next day.

Ciano was away, so Il Duce held two conversations with Franco and Serrano on his own. Mussolini was looking a lot older. The Italian dictator emphasised Hitler’s great personal sympathy for the Caudillo, great sympathy for Spain, but also his very great desire that Spain should join their military plans and allow German troops to pass through Gibraltar into Morocco and French North Africa.

Franco said the most important question was Gibraltar itself, an age-old problem that had to be solved, and began another disquisition on how well the Spanish were doing, siting big guns and heavy mortars around the peninsula. The Germans were wrong to think the stronghold could be taken by air attack from above: what was needed against the caves of the Rock was continuous mortar bombardment.

All these preparations Spain is making because she is absolutely convinced of the necessity of taking Gibraltar with her own resources … A few months ago, Admiral Canaris came to Spain to persuade the Spanish to allow German troops to pass through as far as Algeciras … Now, the Gibraltar operation is a Spanish operation, and we Spaniards will never allow other troops to replace us.

Then it was time to recite the usual shopping list. People were starving – the hundred thousand tons of grain on offer would only last twenty days. Coal and oil; ships and trains; seeds, manure, mules and tractors for the next harvest. And also, by the way, they wanted all their colonial aspirations in Africa met. Il Duce politely promised to inform der Führer.

On 13 February 1941, on the route home, Francisco Franco and Ramón Serrano Suñer met Marshal Philippe Pétain and his new heir apparent, Admiral Darlan, over a banquet in Montpellier. Pétain had known Franco from the Moroccan wars in 1925 and recommended the Spaniard for the highest French order, the Légion d’honneur; from March 1939 to May 1940, he had been the French ambassador in Madrid. Serrano says that Franco and Pétain talked about how not to irritate the Germans and how to keep the war away from the west. Pétain later told his chef de cabinet that Franco ‘wanted me to support him with Hitler to prevent the passage of German troops through Spain … something which I cannot decently undertake’.

The US ambassador to Vichy, Admiral William Leahy, reported to President Roosevelt some time later that Marshal Pétain ‘expects an early advance of German troops through Spain with the purpose of either taking Gibraltar or occupying some place on the coast from which the Straits can be controlled by gunfire …’

*

‘But would the Germans have captured Gibraltar? The answer must surely be “Yes”.’

In their magisterial 1995 study of the military fortress, Strong as the Rock of Gibraltar, Quentin Hughes and Athananassios Migos reckon that Hitler could have won the day. Had Reichenau, Kübler and Richthofen managed to assemble their military and aviation forces in the Campo at the end of 1940, ‘it is difficult to see how the Germans could have failed to swamp the defences.’

At the end of his life, Adolf Hitler himself also decided that this was the moment when he had taken the wrong path and lost the war. His conclusion? ‘We ought to have attacked Gibraltar in the summer of 1940, immediately after the defeat of France.’

Field Marshal Hermann Göring agreed. In June 1945, by then a prisoner lying on his iron bedstead in a flowered dressing gown, Göring told the British diplomat Ivone Kirkpatrick that Hitler’s gravest mistake was the failure ‘to march through Spain, with or without Franco’s assent, [to] capture Gibraltar and spill into Africa. This could have very easily been done and it would have altered the whole course of the war.’ A month later, on 25 July 1945, interviewed by Major Kenneth Hechler, a US army historian, Göring repeated the charge: ‘The loss of Gibraltar might have induced England to sue for peace. Failure to carry out the plan was one of the major mistakes of the war.’ He said the same again on 9 August 1945, to Lieutenant Commander R. W. B. Izzard of British Naval Intelligence, who reported that ‘from Gibraltar the Germans would have occupied the Azores, the Cape Verde Islands and the Canary Islands by airborne invasion and would have established additional U-boat bases down the coast of Portugal and North Africa, particularly at Dakar … In [Göring’s] opinion, the establishment of these bases would have led to the downfall of England.’

The historian Hugh Trevor-Roper (1914–2003) backs their conclusion. Like Hermann Göring, Ulrich von Manstein and others, he thought that the failure to take Gibraltar in 1940 was one of Hitler’s greatest mistakes in the Second World War. As we have seen, Trevor-Roper was a wartime intelligence officer in the Radio Security Service and in SIS who studied the Abwehr traffic from Spain and Spanish Morocco and was an expert on the whole German intelligence set-up. It is worth looking again at his May 1980 valedictory lecture as Regius Professor of History at Oxford, ‘History and Imagination’.

History, said Trevor-Roper, was not just a march-past of the victorious, written by historians who were ‘in general, great toadies of power’. Nor was history inevitable, predictable and logically deducible. It was alive at every moment, contingent on chance and human character. History is read backwards, with hindsight, but it is lived forwards, in ignorance. The good historian imagines and portrays what people were thinking at a time when the future was unknown and events were still surprising and accidental. Trevor-Roper looked at the crucial summer of 1940 when Hitler had already won the war in western Europe: ‘Britain’s refusal to accept defeat was illogical, unrealistic, absurd. If only Britain had recognised this, and given up the struggle, Hitler would have been … free to concentrate his forces against the last enemy and, by its defeat in a third Blitzkrieg, to establish his new empire.’ He believed Hitler would have defeated Russia in 1941 if he had clinched the west by taking Gibraltar in 1940.

And how easily, in that year, the German victory in the West might … have been made final! … Had Franco agreed to allow an assault on Gibraltar, that assault – as the experiences of Crete and Singapore were to show – would probably have been successful. Then the Mediterranean sea would have been closed to Britain and a whole potential theatre of future war and victory would have been shut off.

This ‘counter-factual’ thought fascinated Trevor-Roper:

I cannot but think that if General Franco, at Hendaye on 23 October 1940, had effectively substituted one monosyllable for another – if instead of No he had said Yes – our world would have been quite different: the present, the future and the past would all have been changed. But once they had been changed, no one would have dwelt on that little episode. The German victory would then have been ascribed not to such trivial causes but to historical necessity.