Hitler, not Franco, kept Spain out of war

Press, 24 June 1978, Page 16

Hitler, not Franco, kept Spain out of war

MELANIE PFLALM, an American journalist, is well-known in Christchurch. She and her husband. Dr I. P. Pflaum, spent six months a year in New Zealand for several years before settling in Javea on the Spanish Mediterranean coast. Both were correspondents for American news sen ices during the Spanish Civil War. Melanie Pflaum lias wTitten 11 novels, the latest of which is “The Old Girls,” recently published by Pegasus Press.

For the last 30 years, in Spain and outside, in New Zealand (where we lived), England, the United States, and other countries we visited, whenever the question of Generalissimo Francisco Franco arose — was he good or bad for Spain — someone inevitably remarked: “But you must admit that he kept the Germans out of Spain and helped the Allied landings in North Africa.’’ Since the Act lifting the ban on the publication of officially secret documents in England, many revealing and some surprising documents that had been gathering dust in “The Most Secret Archives of Whitehall’’ are being revealed in the press. .Myths are falling like ninepins, and there is one in par-

ticular that I w’ould like to topple over. 1 am convinced that Franco did not prevent the German army from taking Spain, but that he nurtured belief in this theory so cleverly that even his opponents have come to accept it as a fact. A corollary thesis is that Franco kept Spain neutral and out of the Second World War. Toth are false. Franco did not keep the German Army out of Spain and he did not keep Spain out of the war. Since the Wehrmacht did not invade Spain, since Spain did not enter the War. and since Franco was the unquestioned master — the caudille — how do I explain my theories?

As chief of the Iberian section of the Board of Economic Warfare in the United States, during the war, I was deeply involved in Spanish affairs. Our job was twofold: the purchase of supplies for the Allied forces and for Great Britain (much easier than shipping them across the submarine-haunted waters of the Atlantic Ocean), and the acquisition of materials thought to be in short supply in German-held territory. The two were frequently identical — we needed the products and we wanted to keep them out of German hands. The latter type of operation is called “preclusive purchase.” We needed tungsten, tin (especially after the fall of Singapore, the tin heart of the world), titanium, quicksilver, cork, tar, turpentine (known as naval stores), ambligonite, and the coal from the north of Spain. So did the Ger* mans.

We also made purchases

of wool, leather goods, sardines, and such relatively arcane products as ergot of rye (source of ergotamine) and sharkskins (which we were told were used for the boots of German parachutists). We had agents. The British had agents. The Germans had agents. All of them were disguised as private buyers. In the case of tungsten (wolfram) and t : n, they were so well disguised that we sometimes discovered that we were bidding against the British as well as the Germans, so that the price of tin and tungsten rose, marginal sources became profitable, and there was r..ore for everyone. In deciding what our agents should buy in Spain and Portugal, we conferred with an agency called CRMB (Combined Raw Materials Board), and kept, or tried to keep, a close liaison with the British Board of Economic Warfare and the Blockade Commission (who had been in business off and one since Napoleonic times).

The Spanish economy, which had not recovered from the devastating Civil War and whose European sources of supplies were cut off by the Second World War, became increasingly dependent on the United States.

We supplied high test fuel, all the lubricating oils for their rickety railway system, spare parts for their buses and trucks without which the Spanish economy would have ground to a full stop.

We supplied grain, chickpeas, powdered milk, and dried cod to the urban centres, and seeds and certain agricultural implements to the farmers.

The tricky part of this operation was to supply enough to keep the Spanish economy from collapsing, but riot enough to pass on to the Germans. Besides, we had to keep France, if not happy, yet happy enough not to jeopardise the North African landings — always promising him anything he wanted but never quite fulfilling his demands. In a strange way, this arrangement worked. The Germans were getting supplies from a bomb-free, neutral country where there was a large labour force to pick crops, run the trains lubricated by United States lubricants, drive the trucks with United States-supplied fuel, and even (later) supply the Blue Division of

soldiers to fight against the Russians. Most of the goods the Germans received were free in payment for the help they had given to the Franco forces in the Spanish Civil War.

From the German point of view, this was far better than if Spain were an occupied country, subject to Allied bombing, sabotage, and a resistance movement. If they occupied Spain, they would have had to supply fuels, lubricants, spare parts, gauleiters, occupation forces, and guard the railroad tracks, factories, hydro-electric installations, and nines.

From our point of view, it was better to have an officially neutral, if not actually friendly power, than an enemy on the Straits of Gibraltar when we made our landings in North Africa and then had to supply ou" forces there. As for Franco himself, obviously he preferred remaining absolute dictator, to becoming another Gauleiter for the Third Reich. But the notion that he kept the Germans from invading Spain is a pathetic illusion.

Yet, even Spaniards who were anti-France would tell you with pride how Franco kept “der Fuhrer” waiting in Iran, and how he refused to allow German troops to enter Spain. Franco did keep the Fuhrer waiting, but he could not have prevented the Reichswehr from entering and occupying Spain however much he wanted to.

One day in Washington, D.C., I was working at my desk in Temporary T, an airless, overcrowded hut to which we “economic warriors” had been banished from our cool and cavernous quarters in the Commerce Building, when I was summoned to the office of Cass Canfield, peace-time publisher of Harper’s and then head of the Enemy Division of our outfit.

He explained my assignment. On a certain date the German Army would move into Spain. What was needed was a full, detailed report of what they would get — crops harvested, rolling stock, fuel, hydroelectric power, motor vehicles, manufacturing plants, current inventories, skilled labourers, farm workers, public utilities — everything. It was a rush job of the highest priority based on the report of a United States agent who had

penetrated into the upper echelons of Hitler’s associates. My secretary and I spent five days and nights compiling the report. I took it to Cass Canfield, and then waited, day after day, for news of the invasion of Spain by the German Army. Nothing happened, and I concluded that our intelligence was faulty. Instead of occupying Spain, the Germans attacked Russia and the war took on a new dimension. However, long afterwards, in their memoirs and dairies, both Goering and Count Ciano (The Italian Foreign Minister confirmed the plan and the date for the invasion of Spain, which had been changed by the decision of Hitler to invade the Soviet Union. So the United States Intelligence had been pretty good, after all. Romantic-minded Spaniards, thinking of the Goya drawings of Madrid housewives pouring teakettles of boiling water down on the Napoleonic troops, believe that the Germans would have had a tough time taking Spain against the will of the

Spanish people, not to mention the Spanish Army. This is errant nonsense. The Spanish people — the city workers — were a conquered people already. They had lost the Civil War; they were apathetic, hungry, bitter. And even if they had not been, the German panzer divisions would not have been halted by boiling water from teakettles poured from the rooftops and windows of Madrid. As for the Spanish Army, it had won a war against untrained, and poor! y-equipped, and internally-divided militia. Franco had been aided by German technicians, Italian pilots and planes, and the latest equipment (which was being tested in Spain). Assuming they would have fought against Hitler, the Spanish Army would have been swept away in a week. Still, Franco took credit for keeping the Germans out of Spain. Over the years everyone, against all reason, came to believe the myth. The Pyrenees became higher than Mount Everest, as though the Luftwaffe would have

found them a real stacle. The fact is that a ne tral Spain was more au vantageous to the Germans than a conquered one would have been. As it was, the neutrality of Spain was a most dubious sort of neutrality, an openly pre-German neutrality, an anti-Allied neutrality. All of the organs of public opinion — the press and the radio — ex:olled the Axis. The division of the country was exactly what it had been in the First World War when the nobility and upper classes, the rich landowners, and the rightist politicians, were pro-Central powers. The intellectuals, liberals, workingmen, students, and small shopkeepers were all hoping for an Allied victory. It i's ture that Franco played his cards cleverly — never provoking the Germans, providing them with whatever they wanted (and we did not keep them from getting), plus fulsome praise and apparent joy in their victories. But in the final analysis, it was not Franco who kept Germany out of Spain. It was Hitler.