Churchill and Spain: The Survival of the Franco Regime 1940-1945 by Richard Wigg
Sussex Academic Press, £19.50
FOR those of us old lefties for whom the Spanish Civil War was utterly defining – even if we were born decades after it ended – this is a salutary lesson in the brutal realities of realpolitik and proof that countries have no allies – only interests.
The dictatorship of General Francisco Franco and the Falange Española de las JONS was vicious, incompetent and shameless in its appeal to anti-Communism, Roman Catholicism, populism and its personification in the cult of Franco and his right-wing generals.
Brutal to a degree that is still almost impossible to comprehend – hundreds were being condemned to death on political grounds even as the war ended – and incompetent to the extent that a nation starved while vast stocks of rice and salt codfish rotted in the warehouses; the Franco regime that whored itself between the Axis, the Allies and, ultimately, the United States of America has not a single redeeming feature that the author of this cool and meticulously researched book can identify.
Its central thesis is unchallengeable. Winston Churchill as Prime Minister of Great Britain allowed his very personal and pro-monarchist emotions to steer the Allies on a course that first bribed the Spanish generals – the “Dons” as he affectionately calls them – then imposed a total economic blockade through control of all the Spanish seaports and the issuance of “NavCerts” or permissions to enter harbour. This could be justified in that Allied interests clearly needed to avoid a situation in which a pro-Axis Spanish presence commanded the west of the Mediterranean from Spanish North Africa and Gibraltar.
The early stages of the Second World War saw British money poured into the bottomless pockets of an utterly charmless and venal crew of military and business figures who lacked even the decency to stay bribed. Sir Samuel Hoare, the Right Honourable Member for Chelsea and our ambassador to Spain, who appears once in this book as “Slippery Sam” and once as “Slimy Sam”, was the architect as Foreign Secretary in 1935 of the Hoare-Laval pact, the infamous plan to turn Abyssinia (Ethiopia) into an Italian colony.
That Hoare, the arch-appeaser of fascists and Nazis in the Chamberlain era, became so completely disgusted with the Falange is wonderfully well described in Richard Wigg’s book. He rightly urges the reader to track down a copy of Hoare’s book Ambassador on Special Mission which, while written in the hope that his political career was not over, still cannot conceal his horror at what was visited on Spain by a man who allowed Heinrich Himmler to define the future shape of his country and then distanced himself from the Axis with such success that his regime endured for decades after his fellow dictators, Hitler and Mussolini, were long gone.
Chillingly, the whole tone of Churchill’s statements on Spain change as the victories of the Eighth Army remove the risk of a Nazi North Africa. Although Britain still acted to prevent the flood of wolfram flowing from northern Spain and Portugal to the Axis armaments factories, the national interest moved away from the Iberian peninsula. The defining moment was Churchill’s statement to the House of Commons in May 1944: “Internal political problems in Spain are a matter for the Spaniards themselves. It is not for us to meddle in such affairs.” Wigg icily notes that Franco carried a copy of this speech in his pocket until the end of his days.
This really is a chilling book and the reader weeps for those who went to Spain to fight against fascism and for the Spanish republicans, anarchists and democrats who were executed out of existence.
Churchill and Spain contains so many small details that spotlight the crude brutality of the Franco years. Franco’s tour of Andalucia in May 1943 was orchestrated by the “sindicato” which replaced the trades unions and dominated rather than defended the workers. The crowds were issued with suits and boots in order to present a positive image for the Generalissimo. Once he had passed by, these were forcibly removed and probably rushed to the next stop on the progress.
I was also amazed to hear that the British Embassy in Madrid smuggled popular films into Spain to earn pesetas. Bizarrely, the actor Leslie Howard toured Spain in 1943 to promote Alexander Korda’s film The Scarlet Pimpernel. He was killed when his plane was shot down on its way back to Britain.
There is much more to say about this book – especially the flaccid failure of the Infante Don Juan and the complete inability of the Monarchists to challenge the Falange – but it stands as the defining text on the subject of cynicism in geopolitics and, while Churchill’s admirers will see his part in this blood-soaked history as an example of realism and the ruthless pursuit of national interests, others will see it as a cold-hearted betrayal of a great people whose misfortune was to be a small piece on the great European chessboard.
Franklin D Roosevelt, Joseph Stalin and Winston Churchill had a greater game to play and the Spaniards suffered and died while we looked away. That is the tragic story Richard Wigg tells so very well and it deserves to be widely read for its historical accuracy as well as for its contemporary relevance.
Stephen Pound
