Norman Ridley - Hitler’s Air War in Spain: The Rise of the Luftwaffe

HITLERS

AIR WAR

IN SPAIN

THE RISE OF THE LUFTWAFFE

HITLERS

AIR WAR

IN SPAIN

THE RISE OF THE LUFTWAFFE

NORMAN RIDLEY

HITLERS AIR WAR IN SPAIN

The Rise of the Luftwaffe

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by

Air World

An imprint of

Pen & Sword Books Ltd

Yorkshire Philadelphia

Copyright Norman Ridley, 2022

ISBN 978 1 39908 472 7

Epub ISBN 978 1 39908 473 4

Mobi ISBN 978 1 39908 473 4

The right of Norman Ridley to be identified as Author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

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In the wake of the Spanish Civil War, almost as much confusion existed over the role of aviation and armoured forces in battle as had existed before it began.

Richard P. Hallion

That the Spanish Civil War gave rise to significant changes in air doctrine, particularly in Germany and Russia, is axiomatic. This factor alone commends the Spanish conflict to the attention of the student of air power and its development.

John F. Guilmartin Jnr.

Almost since the advent of warfare, civilians have suffered collateral damage but the concept of Total War, a war without limits, had only surfaced in the early part of the twentieth century with the writings of theorists such as Gulio Douhet. Douhets fundamental ideas, involving huge numbers of aircraft raining death upon defenceless cities, were seen by many as not only barbaric but, in practical terms, quite unrealistic given the logistical challenges that would have to be overcome in order to put them into practice. Any complacency over the threat, however, was rudely shattered on 26 February 1935 by the eruption onto the European military landscape of the German Luftwaffe and its blustering claims of irrepressible air power sending waves of panic rippling through ministries of war throughout the world.

Framing a realistic response to Hitlers propaganda offensive proved to be problematic given the lack of detailed knowledge of not only the numbers, but also the true performance capabilities of his new generation of aircraft and the ways in which they had expanded the boundaries of war. It was, therefore, of huge interest to all modern military establishments when these machines were deployed during the Spanish Civil War which broke out in July 1936. Notwithstanding the limited scope of this conflict, it offered, for the participating nations, a testing ground for new machines and, for the interested observers, a window into the future of aerial warfare in particular, although ground operations were also revolutionised to some extent by the advent of mechanisation.

When the war was less than a year old it had already seen the Luftwaffe employ air power in most of the ways that it would be used in the Second World War; not just airlifting troops, reconnaissance, interdiction, close support and strategic bombing, but also the deliberate targeting of civilians as a means of achieving military objectives. In this regard, despite the limited involvement of belligerents, it might well be seen as a laboratory for total war in which air power becomes the dominant factor.

This book looks at the conflict from the inside, through the words of those involved. Pilots, journalists and observers tell what it was really like to endure the roasting heat of the Spanish summer and the freezing cold of its winter; to fly in combat as predator or prey; to wait in the silent streets listening for the first distant drone of aircraft engines and then to feel the earth shudder under the crunch of bombs. All the significant aerial engagements of the war are clearly analysed against the background of a wider context, thereby fixing the place of the Spanish Civil War in the evolution of air power and the way in which its lessons were learned, or ignored, in the context of the much greater conflagration that was to come.

The circumstances surrounding the start of the Spanish Civil War bring into focus just how important aviation was right from the start. The war itself was sparked by an attempted military coup dtat on 17 July 1936 when garrisons at Madrid, Barcelona, Seville. Salamanca, Burgos, Valencia, Bilbao, Oviedo, Valladolid and Avila revolted, but the rebels failed catastrophically to straightaway grasp the handles of power and so condemned the insurrection to a prolonged and bloody war. When government forces held the capital Madrid by crushing the rebel troops in the Montaa barracks, and held most other major cities across the country, the rebel Nationalists found their forces widely separated with the bulk of their most effective troops in Morocco, far from where they were most urgently needed.

The plan was for General Francisco Franco Bahamonde to fly to Morocco from the Canary Islands at which point the Army of Africa would rise up in revolt behind him. When the government got news that he had flown to Morocco without any specific order from Madrid it was greeted in the capital with equanimity and even when he called upon the Tetuan garrison to come out against the government, it was seen as little more than a ridiculous minor action, completely without significance.

It had been planned to get the Moroccan troops to the Spanish mainland by sea days before risings started in the main cities, but plans fell apart and naval ratings stayed loyal to the government by locking up their officers below decks. With the Straits of Gibraltar now patrolled by warships loyal to the government the only way to get those 50,000 troops onto the mainland was by air but Franco did not have anywhere near enough aircraft to do that. The vast majority of the aircraft available to either side at that time were little more than obsolete relics anyway and would not have lasted more than a few days before breaking down. It says much for the military ineptitude of the rebel generals that the isolation of the crack troops of Francos Army of Africa was a blunder of huge proportions and threatened to see the rebellion collapse in ignominious failure as others had done before it.