The Spanish Civil War at Sea

Dark and Dangerous Waters

Michael Alpert

• Publisher: Pen and Sword Maritime
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781526764362
• eBook ISBN: 9781526764379
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 20th Century History
• Index: History

The Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939 underlined the importance of the sea as the supply route to both General Franco's insurgents and the Spanish Republic. There were attempted blockades by Franco as well as attacks by his Italian and German allies against legitimate neutral, largely British, merchant shipping bound for Spanish Republican ports and challenges to the Royal Navy, which was obliged to maintain a heavy presence in the area. The conflict provoked splits in British public opinion. Events at sea both created and reflected the international tensions of the latter 1930s, when the policy of appeasement of Germany and Italy dissuaded Britain from taking action against those countries' activities in Spain, except to participate in a largely ineffective naval patrol to try to prevent the supply of war material to both sides. The book is based on original documentary sources in both Britain and Spain and is intended for the general reader as well as students and academics interested in the history of the 1930s, in naval matters and in the Spanish Civil War.

Chapter 1

Setting the Scene

I The Spanish Civil War in the Context of the Aims and Objectives of Modern Naval Warfare

Naval policy aims to construct a fleet balanced, in terms of the number and power of its ships, according to the tasks it is required to undertake. In a civil war, however, each side may control only part of the national fleet. In this case, the ships may have to carry out tasks for which they are not designed and either or both sides may have to acquire ships from other countries.

Nevertheless, the principles of naval warfare remain valid for civil wars. Eliminating the enemy may not be the main aim, which is rather to obstruct his sea routes and blockade his ports. The object is to prevent troop movements, arms traffic, the import of goods, specifically essential raw materials and food, and exports which provide international credit.1

During the Spanish Civil War of 1936–1939, in which the Insurgents under General Francisco Franco overthrew the Spanish Republic, most of the war material for both sides came by sea, especially so for the Insurgents or Nationalists as they came to be known in Britain. This brought to the forefront the question of blockade and of the protection by foreign navies of merchant shipping, especially the Royal Navy. General Franco’ s navy used blockade, with all its risks, to the utmost of its abilities and with ever-greater success, while the Republican Government gave up blockade after the first few weeks. How far each side achieved its aims and why the Republican navy failed to obstruct Insurgent sea routes is a fundamental question in investigating the result of the Spanish Civil War and answerable in terms of the international situation at the time.

Much of the international importance of the Spanish conflict lay in the roles of several foreign navies and merchant marines, as they brought material to one side and the other. German, Spanish and Italian merchant ships carried arms to Franco under the protection of warships. Soviet and Spanish merchant shipping arrived with weapons for the Republic, while the large numbers of British merchant ships sailing to Spain, mostly carrying non-military imports and exports, required protection from the Royal Navy.

II The Royal Navy

The heavy presence of warships around the coasts of Spain was liable, it was feared, to provoke a major European war. Britain in particular, tried hard to ensure that the Spanish war did not lead to a general conflict. In this, the role of the British Foreign Office and Royal Navy in trying to prevent arms shipments to Spain but to protect legitimate trade by sea was primordial.

In the Spanish war the activity of German warships and the participation of Italian submarines in particular created a heavy burden for the Royal Navy, which in the latter 1930s was competing for funds with the other armed services. After 1919 heavy financial cuts were imposed on the Royal Navy. To this were added the effects of the decisions of the 1921–1922 Washington conference. Faced with the threat of an arms race, pacifism at home and economic stringency, the Royal Navy was also to be limited in its parity with other navies.2 The British government adopted the so-called ‘Ten-Year Rule’, which assumed that Britain would not be faced by a major war over a self-perpetuating ten year period. This was seen as a correct policy in a decade which hoped that ‘the war to end wars’, as the 1914–1918 conflict became known, would indeed mean an epoch of international peace, in which disputes would be arbitrated by the League of Nations, German militarism had been vanquished, France’s security was guaranteed by the Locarno agreement of 1924 and the Great Powers had renounced war as an instrument of national policy.

However, the British Far East Empire remained the major concern of the Royal Navy. The Annual Report of the chiefs of staff for 1927 had laid down the principle that no anxieties in the Mediterranean could be allowed to interfere with the dispatch of a fleet to the Far East if required.3 Restated in 1929, the Royal Navy’s duty was established as to ensure freedom of passage to all parts of the empire.

The question of the role of the Royal Navy affected policy in Europe also. Ships sailing to the Far East steamed through the Strait of Gibraltar and via Malta and Alexandria and Suez. But the Far East was the greatest concern. In 1930, Ramsey MacDonald, the Prime Minister and Chairman of the International Naval Conference wrote to the King:

[…] Great Britain must not take on further responsibilities and must not be put in the position of having to act mechanically and without freedom of judgement should trouble arise in Europe.4

In 1931 the Admiralty complained that the Royal Navy had been seriously weakened, both relatively to other countries and in absolute terms.5 It was questionable whether the navy could provide cover against Japan while retaining a deterrent force sufficient to prevent the strongest European naval power (presumably Italy) from obtaining control over areas essential to British export and import trade, at a time when Britain imported half of its food. In early 1934, after Hitler’s takeover and Germany’s withdrawal from the Disarmament Conference, the Defence Requirements Committee gave as its view that Germany was now the greatest danger in Europe. While this stimulated the urgency of spending on the army and the air force, Neville Chamberlain, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, was unwilling to disburse the huge sums needed for capital ship construction.6

By the end of 1933, however, the Ten-Year Rule had been allowed to lapse. The Committee for Imperial Defence began to prepare a programme to meet the worst deficiencies. As the months passed the European threat increased, leading France and the Soviet Union to sign a treaty of mutual assistance in the face of Hitler’s repudiation of the Treaty of Versailles, his remilitarisation of the Rhineland in March 1936 and the establishment of the German-Italian Axis of November 1936, just at the moment when both countries were taking a major part on Franco’s side in Spain.

Rearmament was not a mere question of throwing money at shipbuilding yards. In the 1920s and during the Depression of the 1930s plant had been allowed to decay, skilled labour had been lost to areas which offered work to the unemployed, and firms had closed. Furthermore, the Labour Party had opposed the defence White Paper of 1 March 1935. The Axis threat was obvious. Germany had reintroduced conscription in February 1935. As one naval historian sums up pithily

The spectre of a hostile Germany, Italy and Japan […] was to condition all British naval thinking and planning for the next five years.7

Those years would include Mussolini’s campaign to take over the kingdom of Abyssinia and the Spanish Civil War. In the former, if effective sanctions, such as blocking the Suez Canal to Italian forces, were to be effective, Malta and Alexandria might well suffer attack and, while the Royal Navy was confident that it could deal with any threat from the Italian navy, Britain could not afford losses. As Sir Robert Vansittart, the Permanent Under Secretary at the Foreign Office, wrote to the Foreign Secretary, Sir Samuel Hoare and to Admiral Chatfield, the First Sea Lord and Chief of Naval Staff

This country has been so weakened of recent years that we are in no position to take a strong line in the Mediterranean […] we should be very cautious as to how far and in what manner we force the pace with an unreliable France and an unready England.8

Thus it is probable that Britain’s weak reaction to the Italian invasion of Abyssinia of 1935 encouraged Mussolini to involve Italy in aiding Franco in 1936, in particular at sea and with shipments of armaments and men.

III The Spanish Navy in the Twentieth Century

In 1898 two Spanish fleets had been destroyed during the war with the United States. Spain had not been a belligerent in the First World War.

Antonio Maura became Prime Minister in January 1907. His personal interest (he had founded the Liga Marítima Española or Spanish Navy League in 1900), and his majority in the Spanish parliament or Cortes opened the way for a national plan to re-equip the navy. The Navy Minister, José Ferrándiz, announced a plan to build a new fleet, with a budget of two hundred million pesetas (roughly six million pounds sterling) over the next eight years. Most of the sum would be spent on three battleships. The vessels would be built by the Sociedad Española de Constructores Navales (SECN), in which the British companies Vickers Armstrong and Brown and Thorneycroft had interests.

The three battleships were based on the Dreadnought model. With a displacement of 15,000 tons, with eight 305 mm and twenty 101 mm guns, they represented a huge increase in the firepower of the Spanish navy. The Alfonso XIII entered service in 1915 and the Jaime I in 1921. Nevertheless, Britain had already built the 25,000 ton super-Dreadnought with guns of 380 mm calibre, so that by the civil war of 1936–1939 the Spanish ships were completely outdated. The third battleship, the España, had ran aground off Chile and been abandoned in 1921. The Alfonso XIII, renamed España in 1931, and the Jaime I, would be lost during the civil war.9

Admiral Augusto Miranda, Navy Minister between 1913 and 1917, planned to bring the Ferrándiz project up to date. In February 1915 a decision was taken to build four fast cruisers, two of which, the Méndez Núñez and the Almirante Cervera, would serve in the civil war of 1936– 1939, together with six destroyers, the Alsedo, Lazaga, and Velasco, and three of the newer Churruca type. Nearly one-third of the Miranda budget was destined for twenty-eight submarines, of which there had been none in the Spanish navy. By the civil war there would be twelve in service. Miranda aimed to deliver the new warships by 1922, but inflation and delays in the purchase of essential material because of the First World War led to long extensions in delivery dates.

IV An Always Outdated Fleet

The cruisers, destroyers, and submarines planned by Miranda would be handed over between 1921 and 1925 but would often still await their artillery, torpedo tubes and other essential equipment. However, the new cruisers had doubled their horsepower and the destroyers had seen theirs increase by thirty per cent. The new cruisers Príncipe Alfonso, later renamed Libertad, and Almirante Cervera, could develop a speed of thirty three knots and carried guns of 152.4 mm and 101.6 mm calibre, but their armour was minimal. The Churruca type destroyers, which would characterise the Republican fleet in the civil war, displaced 1,650 tons, could develop 36 knots and were armed with five 120 mm guns and a 76 mm anti-aircraft weapon, as well as six torpedo tubes. The submarines were armed with four 450 mm torpedo tubes and could deliver 10.5 knots submerged.10

V The Spanish Navy and the Moroccan Wars

The only war experiences of the Spanish navy in the twentieth century until the civil war were those arising from the Riff wars against the Moroccan tribes between 1922 and 1926. The victorious landings at Alhucemas in September 1925 required the cooperation of the fleet and a great deal of detailed logistics, particularly in view of Spanish cooperation with the French navy in what was a major amphibious operation. Two Spanish battleships, three cruisers, three destroyers and six gunboats, as well as smaller ships and landing-craft, took part. Twenty ships acted as troop and material transports. The air force bombed the area heavily while the navy had to carry out manoeuvres new to it, such as feints of landings, approaches to the coast using smoke screens and diversionary shelling. Fortunately the sea was calm, but dense fog at night created difficulties. Fleet operations continued for twenty-six days. Nevertheless, the inferiority of the enemy and the absence of hostile submarines and mines meant that any lessons which could be derived and applied to the war of 1936–1939, apart from training and practice in shelling and observation from the sea, were of little value.

VI The Ships and Men who Fought the Civil War

The rapid international development of warships, the protection of the shipbuilding industry, Spain’s responsibilities in Morocco and rivalry with other navies in the Mediterranean, led the government of General Primo de Rivera, which came to power on 23 September 1923, to sign major contracts for warships. The ships would be the cruiser Miguel de Cervantes, which entered service in 1930, and three more destroyers of the Churruca class, the José Luis Díez, the Ferrándiz and the Lepanto, which would enter service between 1928 and 1930. However, these ships were only slightly advanced over those of the Miranda Plan. The Miguel de Cervantes, for example, was inadequately armoured and its 152 mm calibre artillery was below the standard 203 mm for cruisers. Nevertheless, Spain was coming close to possessing an up to date fleet when a new budget was approved in 1926 for three 10,000 ton cruisers, twelve type C submarines and a further three modern destroyers. Minelayers and minesweepers would also be acquired, and seaplane bases would ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Chapter 1 Setting the Scene
• Chapter 2 The Die is Cast
• Chapter 3 Tangiers and Gibraltar. Franco Crosses the Strait
• Chapter 4 Reorganisation
• Chapter 5 Off the Northern Coast
• Chapter 6 War Material Comes from Abroad. The Insurgents Try to Block Merchant Traffic
• Chapter 7 The War Against Traffic Continues as the Russians Send War Material to the Republic
• Chapter 8 Winter and Spring 1937 in the Mediterranean
• Chapter 9 The Naval Campaign in the Cantabrian Sea
• Chapter 10 Non-Intervention and the International Patrol
• Chapter 11 Two Spanish Navies in Contrast
• Chapter 12 1938, Testing the Limits of British Tolerance
• Chapter 13 Surrender, Evacuation and Flight
• Conclusion
• Appendix I: Technical Details of Spanish Warships
• Appendix II: Soviet Naval Officers in Republican Spain
• Notes
• Bibliography