Spain: A Unique History (36 page)

Meanwhile Franco never formally entered World War II. Some historians have therefore denied the Spanish conflict any significant effect on broader international affairs. Pierre Renouvin judged its consequences to be merely "modest," saying that "it would be an exaggeration to see in this war a 'prelude to a European war.'" 
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In his
Origins of the Second World War
(1961), A. J. P. Taylor calculated that the Spanish conflict had no "significant effect" on the great powers. The author of
The Origins of the Second World War in Europe
(1986), P. M. H. Bell, concluded that the Spanish war was simply "mucho ado about nothing" as far as broader events were concerned.
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This conclusion, however, is too simple and reductionist. For Hitler, the Spanish war in fact served several purposes, of which the two most important were the strategic and the diversionary. He intervened to avoid the development of a leftist Spanish regime that would be friendly to France and the Soviet Union, while weakening the strategic position of Italy. Victory by Franco would neatly reverse that situation, potentially catching France between two fires, while strengthening the position of Italy. Equally or more important, the Spanish war served as a major diversion or distraction, shifting the attention of the Western powers away from German rearmament and expansion. Thus by the end of 1936 Hitler was particularly concerned that the Spanish war continue for some time, serving this purpose of diversion through 1937 and even into 1938. In addition, it had the added advantage of dividing the French internally, and for a while Hitler even hoped that civil war might break out north of the Pyrenees. Finally, it brought Italy and Germany closer together, while worsening Italian relations with Britain and France.

Of the three dictators, the one most concerned with the Spanish conflict was not Hitler or Stalin but Mussolini. Of the three governments that intervened, only Italy was a Mediterranean power, so that the outcome in Spain vitally affected its strategic position. Only for Mussolini was victory in the Spanish war an absolutely vital interest. Thus Italy contributed significantly more than Germany to arming and assisting Franco's forces, and invested a much higher proportion of Italy's limited military resources in this endeavor than did either Germany or the Soviet Union on opposing sides. This continued to such an extent that it left Italy in a slightly weakened position militarily by 1939, even though that probably was not a major factor in the continuous military defeats it later suffered. Moreover, Mussolini's large-scale intervention began to bind him closer and closer to Hitler and generated increasing hostility with Britain and France (all of which benefited Germany more than Italy).
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After the fall of France, Franco was quite interested in entering the war on Hitler's side, provided that the latter was willing to concede the rather steep terms that Franco wished to exact. Moreover, in the following year Germany's invasion of the Soviet Union aroused great enthusiasm in Madrid. Whereas Franco had been taken aback by Hitler's destruction of a Catholic authoritarian regime in Warsaw, which had been somewhat similar to and also sympathetic to the new Spanish state, Hitler's war seemed to make perfect sense by mid-1941, since the Franco regime considered the Soviet Union its prime enemy. Franco agreed fully with his Republican foes, publicly declaring that the broader European war was simply a continuation of the counterrevolutionary, anti-Soviet struggle begun by the revolt of the Nacionales in Spain. From June 1940 to October 1943 — that is, for the greater part of the entire European war — the Franco regime was officially "non-belligerent," not "neutral," with an official tilt toward the Axis.

All of Hitler's major associates during the war in Europe sought to create their own "parallel empires" in the shadow of Hitler's conquests. The first was Stalin, who used the Nazi-Soviet Pact to conquer sizable new territories in eastern Europe during 1939-40. Next was Mussolini, who endeavored to wage his own "guerra parallela" to carve out a great new Italian empire in Africa, the Middle East, and Greece. Hitler then awarded Hungary a major expansion of its territory in 1940, and Romania sought compensation by conquering the southwest Ukraine as Germany's ally in 1941.

Ironically, Franco sought to emulate Stalin more than Mussolini or the rulers of Hungary and Romania, for he hoped to achieve significant territorial expansion with comparatively little fighting, as the Soviet Union had attempted to do in eastern Europe. He nonetheless insisted on stiff terms before Spain would formally enter the war, requiring massive military and economic assistance, and the cession to Spain of all Morocco, northwest Algeria, and a large chunk of French West Africa. For roughly two years, from August 1940 to the summer of 1942, Hitler sought to obtain Spain's entry into the war, but he always refused to grant Franco's terms, which would have had the effect of alienating the satellite Vichy regime in France, whose cooperation was very important to Germany, both strategically and economically. The Spanish Blue Division fought for two full years with the Wehrmacht on the eastern front, subsequently generating by far the most extensive literature of any division in any army in the entire Second World War.
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Franco, however, was never willing to run the risk of entering the war directly. From the middle of 1942, especially, he grew increasingly reluctant and apprehensive, though his return to neutrality came much too late to avoid tarring his regime with the "Axis stigma," leading to international ostracism for a number of years once the war was over.
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All the while Stalin had been too Machiavellian for his own good. By assisting Hitler during his war against France and Britain, he facilitated Germany's stunning victory over France, which then placed Hitler in a position the following year to launch a devastating one-front war that came very close to destroying the Soviet Union.

Stalin was saved by Hitler's gratuitous and self-destructive act of joining Japan's assault against the United States. By doing so, Hitler encouraged the conditions that enabled the Soviet Union eventually to achieve a complete victory in eastern Europe. This created a large new Soviet empire of "people's republics," which were much more totalitarian than anything that had existed in semipluralist Republican Spain of the war years, transforming the Soviet Union into a superpower. The war worked out almost as well for the USSR as Stalin had ever hoped, even though it was the most destructive in history, costing the lives of nearly 30 million Soviet citizens.

In December 1941 an international alliance was created, primarily through the recklessness of Japan and Germany, one that was politically much broader than the Popular Front in Spain, since it also included conservative capitalist society in the United States, Great Britain, and other countries. Did not the Spanish war foreshadow this development? Not really, for the Spanish Republic represented only the forces of the Left, whereas the broad alliance of 1941-45 included the equivalent of many of the forces on Franco's side during the Spanish war. If Hitler had only had to fight the forces of the Left, he would have won his war decisively. Neither the European war of 1939-41 nor the truly world war of 1941-45 merely replicated the Spanish conflict.

Even though the Spanish war was no mere "prelude" or "opening round" of World War II in Europe, it contributed significantly to the terms in which the European war developed. Without directly linking the Spanish war and World War II, historians often advance the argument that the Spanish conflict contributed significantly to the perceptions and psychology that precipitated the greater combat. Thus it has not infrequently been contended that the behavior of Britain and France vis-à-vis the Spanish war stimulated the false perception by Hitler and Mussolini that the Western democracies lacked the will to fight, and therefore would not respond to much bolder military actions by the fascist powers. In this interpretation, the Spanish war would not be a unique prelude but simply the longest in a series of crises in which those powers acted aggressively and the democracies passively: Ethiopia (1935), the Rhineland (1936), Spain (1936-39), Austria (1938), the Sudetenland (1938).

Hitler's policy of using and prolonging the Spanish conflict as a grand international distraction to deflect attention from his own rearmament and expansion was generally successful. On the one hand, he exploited the complications arising from the Spanish war as an excuse to avoid any broader understanding with Britain and France. On the other, he calculated successfully that the continuation of this war would serve to divide France internally and distract it from focusing exclusively on Germany during the period (1936-38) when German rearmament had still not proceeded far enough to achieve parity.

The Spanish war also provided immediate incentive for the beginning of the Italo-German entente that Hitler had always sought. Mussolini became primarily committed to the Spanish struggle, which deprived Italian policy of freedom of maneuver and tied it increasingly to a Germany that became the dominant partner and exercised the major new initiatives, all the time progressively burning Italy's bridges to Britain and France. It was this Italian realignment that made it possible for Hitler to incorporate Austria as early as March 1938, while also making it more feasible for Hitler to move rapidly against Czechoslovakia.

From this perspective it was not that Britain and France ignored the Spanish war but indeed sometimes dedicated almost as much attention to it as to Austria and Czechoslovakia. As Willard Frank has observed, "Even in 1938, the year of Munich, British MPs asked almost half again as many parliamentary questions about Spain and the Mediterranean as about Germany and central Europe.... The French Chamber of Deputies had to suspend its deliberations twice in one day for fear of a free-for-all fight over the Spanish question."
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The Spanish issue significantly divided France internally, while complicating and disorienting broader policy. One result was to bring France to defer more and more to British decision-making, so that British initiatives became dominant in the alliance of the two democracies.

The Italian and German intervention in Spain elicited a Soviet counterintervention that Stalin would not expand sufficiently to achieve Republican victory, partly for fear of the international consequences of too strong an intervention. For Germany this had the benefit of intensifying the democracies' suspicion of and alienation from the revolutionary Soviet Union. To the French general staff, this only confirmed its conviction that the goal of Soviet policy was to provoke war among the Western powers. The more Stalin intervened in Spain and the more active the role of the Soviet Union in the Non-Intervention Committee, the less likely was any rapprochement between Paris and Moscow against Berlin. Soviet policy proved counterproductive, except for the gains in espionage made by the NKVD. The Soviet Union was more isolated in April 1939 than in July 1936. Hitler largely outsmarted Stalin, as he would do the second time during 1939-41, until he made the absurdly fatal mistake of trying to make war on the two largest powers in the world at the same time.

The outbreak of the European war in no way depended on the Spanish conflict and would undoubtedly have taken place even if there had been no war in Spain, but the ramifications of the latter helped to determine the pace and timing of broader European affairs. Without the complications arising from Spain, the Western democracies might have taken a stronger stand against Hitler, and conceivably Mussolini might have delayed or even avoided an entente with the latter. Similarly, without these complications and distractions, Hitler would not have been able to move as rapidly as he did in 1938.

Yet this scenario can also to some extent be reversed. A Republic without civil war and dominated exclusively by the Left, functioning as the most leftist regime in western Europe, would also have been a complicating factor, but not to the same extent as the Civil War was.

Later, after the conclusion of World War II, the myth of the "Spanish national-revolutionary war" was sometimes invoked in the establishment of the new Soviet people's republics in Eastern Europe. It served as a beacon for the possibilities of revolution in the West, and Communist veterans of the International Brigades played important roles in the development of the new totalitarian regimes, particularly in military and security affairs. This myth achieved special importance in the German Democratic Republic, serving as a major reference for a Western revolutionary antifascism.
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The counterfactual question may be raised of the historical consequences had the Republic somehow won the Civil War. Such an outcome would not absolutely have been guaranteed by continuation of the war into September 1939, because French strategy had become so defensive that war with Germany might rather have dissuaded it from, rather than encouraging, any intervention in Spain. The outcome might simply have depended on the intrapeninsular balance of power at that time, presumably still quite unfavorable to the Republic.

On the one hand, had the Negrín government won the Civil War, it would have been strongly allied with the Soviet Union, as Negrín had promised Stalin. But on the other, Republican victory would also have posed the question of the future of the Republic itself, and that might have lessened dependency on the Soviet Union. Furthermore, the broader European war would have reduced Soviet assistance, thus limiting Communist influence. The same confrontation as in March 1939, though in a somewhat different form, might then have taken place following a Republican victory. A victorious Republic might have been crippled by its internal contradictions and its severe economic problems, which would have been as bad as those of the early Franco regime, or even worse. Its policy during the European war might have mirrored that of Franco in reverse: neutrality, though with a tilt toward Hitler's enemies.

Another possibility to be considered is that a victorious leftist Spain would have continued to play a role as a distraction and limitation on French policy. This might so have preoccupied the Western democracies in their concern about the expansion of Soviet influence that they would even have acquiesced in Hitler's conquest of Poland as a check on that influence. That in turn might have hastened conflict between Hitler and Stalin.
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