The Spanish Civil War and the British government's covert support for Franco.

 

General Francisco Franco

The catalyst for the Spanish Civil War 1936-39 was a military coup that Franco urged others to commit to. General Mola was the Director of the coup. The revolution that the military rebels claimed to be forestalling was itself precipitated by the coup. The coup provoked the collapse of the state apparatus and power was assumed by the workers.

General Mola planned to seize all garrisons in Spain's fifty provinces and to annihilate the organized working-class. Franco had said that he was prepared to kill up to 50 percent of the Spanish proletariat to attain a rebel nationalist victory. In a speech that Mola made at the beginning of the war, he declared: "It is necessary to spread terror. We have to create the impression of mastery, eliminating without scruples or hesitation all those who do not think as we do."

In a speech that he made in Lugo in August 1942, Franco said - "Our crusade is the only struggle in which the rich who took part in the war emerged richer." Franco died a rich man in November 1975, with a fortune in the region of 400 million euros in 2015 terms. Franco was convinced that Judaism was the ally of American capitalism and Russian Communism, but he saw freemasonry as the biggest enemy. The triple pillars of Franco's regime were the church, the army and the Falange.

Franco's Spain in the 1940's was marked by appalling living standards of the working-class and fat living and corruption for the elite. In 1950, per capita meat consumption was only half of what it had been in 1926 and bread consumption was only half of what it had been in 1936. In 1957, the 'technocrats' were brought in to integrate Spain into the world economy because the Franco regime faced political and economic bankruptcy. The technocrats knew that modernization required Franco to be marginalized.

The transition to democracy in Spain wasn't triggered by the assassination of Carrero Blanco, but because Francoism had been rendered obsolete by the economic reforms of the technocrats. Between 1814 and 1981, Spain witnessed more than 25 relatively serious military coups. The Spanish church opposed liberalism and modernization in Spain in the 19th and 20th centuries and allied itself with the powerful. At the turn of the 20th century, 75 percent of the population of Spain were illiterate. Progressive reform movements in Spain were crushed by General O'Donnell in 1856, by General Pavia in 1874, by General Primo de Rivera in 1923'and by General Franco between 1936-39.

The historian Paul Preston, says the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, can be seen as either a rehearsal for WWII, or as a location for its first battles. Although Britain was supposed to be neutral as regards the events in Spain, Preston points out that the British Ambassador to Madrid, Sir Henry Chilton, who was anti-Republican, wanted the military coup to succeed. The Italian charge in London, Leonardo Vitelti, reported that widespread sympathy for the Spanish rebels and for Italian fascism was to be found within the highest reaches of the British Conservative Party. The journalist Henry Buckley was told by a British diplomat that - "the essential thing to remember in the case of Spain, is that it is a civil conflict and that it is very necessary that we stand by our class."

Preston writes: "Franco never admitted in public that 'perfidious Albion' had made an enormous contribution to his eventual success." However, Franco did send a letter to Neville Chamberlain thanking him for his support which caused Chamberlain some embarrassment.