Goodbye Gibraltar, meet Gustav!
Wehrmacht had planed the take of Gibraltar in 1941
The „Sturmdivision“ consist out:
Divisionsstab: Staff of the 1. Mountain Division;
GebJgRegt 98 with 3 battalions each with 5 companies;
Grenadier-Regiment „Großdeutschland“ with each 5 Bataillonen, including 2 heavy battalions.
Gebirgs-Artillerie-Regiment 79 mit 2 cannon-, one 10,5 cm howitzer- and one 15 cm motorized howitzer-unit.;
Pionier-Regiment „Geiger“ with 3 battalions;
1 to 2 Nebelwerfer-Abteilungen; (no idea if this Rocket-launcher Nebelwerfer or smoke screen)
1 Intelligence agency Intelligence agency and one medical corps and supply unit.
What Hitler needed was Access to Gibraltar over Spain.
Lucky for the British, Dictator Franco was to be enough intelligent, to understanding that this would pull Spain into World War 2.
A Spain that slowly recovers from it brutal Civil War and was far weakly to join the Axis forces.
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.’” 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.
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).
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.6 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.
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.
