The Spanish civil war was in many ways a tune-up for World War II. It shaped the way European armies thought that a modern war would unfold. It gave the Germans, Soviets, and Italians a chance to try out tactics and train leaders. Let’s try a little change to that war and see what impact that change could have.

What actually happened: The Spanish Civil War started in July1936. It lasted until March 1939. It was in many ways a preview of World War II. Every major army in the world tried to draw lessons from the war. It was the first conflict between reasonably modern armies since World War I, and the lessons that armies took away from that conflict shaped their doctrine and equipment in the early part of World War II.

The war drained Italy financially, while giving Germany, the Soviet Union, and to a lesser extent Poland financial bonanzas that helped them accelerate their rearmament programs. It divided the western democracies, while giving the Soviet Union an opportunity to portray itself as the only active opponent of fascism. That drew many opponents of fascism in the west toward communist parties.

The Spanish Civil War pitted two odd coalitions against each other. The split was essentially between the left and the right sides of the Spanish political spectrum, but many parties on each side of the conflict hated or feared other parts of their coalition. The Nationalist were a coalition of groups on the right side of the spectrum. That coalition contained Fascists, monarchists, old-line conservatives, many people who feared a communist or anarchist takeover of Spain, and many people who just happened to be in areas taken over by the Nationalists at the start of the revolt. The Republican side was primarily the left side of the political spectrum. It consisted of Socialists, Communists, Trotskyites, adherents of something called Anarcho-Syndicalism, and a lot of people who simply felt that the Republicans were the legitimately elected government of Spain.

The war started after the parties that became the core of the Republicans won a hotly contested election. The parties of the right never really accepted their defeat, and they became more and more radical in their opposition to the government as political violence spiraled out of control after the election.

The Nationalists tried a coup on July 17-18 of 1936. That coup succeeded in Spanish Morocco and several parts of Spain. It failed in Madrid and several other major cities. Spain divided into a set of untidy enclaves, with the Republic controlling Basque country in northern Spain, the eastern coast of Spain, and a large part of Central Spain. The Nationalists controlled northwestern Spain, part of Central Spain and an enclave in southern Spain. Little pockets of territory held by the ‘wrong’ side were sprinkled on both sides of the line.

With Spain in civil war, Germany and Italy rushed to help the Nationalists. German and Italian transport planes moved veteran troops from Spanish Morocco to southern Spain. Many of the troops from Morocco had fought in the Rif War and were the best formations in the Spanish army. The Germans and Italians sent rifles, artillery, planes, and light tanks to the Nationalists. The Spanish Republic initially had no similar source of help. Mexico sent 20,000 rifles. Poland sold the Republicans several thousand old rifles and other small arms, many of them near antiques with little ammunition. They also sold the Republic a few hundred old artillery pieces, a few planes, and possibly some World War I era tanks.

The Spanish Republicans didn’t initially have the kind of allies that the Nationalists did, but they had one advantage that should have been decisive. They controlled the Spanish treasury, which had the fifth the largest gold stockpile in the world, surprisingly enough. That should have allowed them to buy weapons from any one of the non-fascist countries of Europe. It didn’t. The Poles sold them old junk at exorbitant prices. Most other countries refused to sell them weapons at all, and tried to enforce an arms embargo on them. In some cases, Spanish Republican money was frozen when they tried to transfer it to other countries to buy arms.

Part of the problem was that many western countries feared a Bolshevik Spain more than they did a fascist one. Other countries were so deeply divided by the conflict that they couldn’t intervene without opening major domestic political wounds.

The Soviets initially did little to help the Spanish Republic. They did quietly set into motion the recruiting of volunteers for what would eventually become the International Brigades. They began to collect old, cast-off rifles and other small arms from the arsenals of the Soviet Union to sell to the Republic. Those rifles included over thirteen thousand Italian-made rifles that had probably been captured from the Turks during the Russo-Turkish War of 1877, and nearly twelve thousand French and Austrian rifles dating back to the 1880s..

The Nationalists advanced steadily toward Madrid through most of 1936. They connected their northern and southern enclaves, relieved several Nationalist pockets, and seemed well on their way to victory. Then, in mid-October 1936 two things happened. First, the Spanish Republic secretly transferred three-fourths of its gold—worth $518 million--to the Soviet Union on four Soviet freighters. Second, the Soviet Union intervened in a major way, sending a lot of old junk in the way of small arms and artillery, but also sending fairly large numbers of modern tanks and planes.

The Soviets also helped give International Brigade volunteers some training and equipped them relatively lavishly. The International Brigades and the Soviet tanks and planes stiffened Republican resistance. The Nationalists were stopped outside Madrid, and the Spanish Civil War lasted another two and a half years before the Nationalists finally won.

What might have happened: Stalin was not a man to give something for nothing. It probably can never be proven that Soviet aid was only given because the Spanish sent their gold reserve to the Soviet Union. At the same time, a pretty good case can be made that the Soviets only intervened on the scale that they did because the intervention paid for itself. Stalin was wary of being drained militarily and financially by that conflict. If something happened to prevent that gold shipment, chances are very good that any Soviet intervention would have been on a much smaller scale.

What might have happened to prevent that gold from being shipped? The fact that it was being shipped could have somehow leaked. Apparently few members of the Republican government were aware of the shipment—possibly as few as two. The shipment might well have not been possible if the news had leaked out to other members of the Republican coalition.

The shipment could have also been stopped by Nationalist action. A nationalist air raid actually hit a freighter not far from where the Soviet freighters were being loaded.

Let’s say that the Nationalists get lucky. They hit the Soviet freighters and maybe damage one badly and start fires on another one. Spanish harbor officials try to help, and in the confusion someone figures out what is aboard the freighters. News like that travels fast, and within hours the Spanish government is in turmoil. The freighters are blocked from leaving port by Spanish gunboats, while the Spanish Republican government tries to figure out what to do. The Nationalists figure out what is going on and take a hand again, launching a heavier raid that sinks one of the freighters and heavily damages another. Local Spanish officials demand that the gold be unloaded until a decision is made on what should happen to it.

In the middle of this chaos, the nationalists launch another air raid. Local Spanish officials later claim, correctly or not, that the undamaged Soviet ships attempted to flee during the air raid. Fighting breaks out between Soviet guards on the freighters and local Spanish naval forces. Several people on both sides are killed, and the freighters are seized by Spanish Republican forces.

Stalin is furious. He didn’t get the gold. Spanish Republican gunboats have attacked Soviet ships. The Soviet Union has been made to look somewhat greedy and somewhat foolish. At the same time, there is still money and prestige to be gained from the Spanish civil war. The Soviet Union does continue a flow of weapons to the Spanish Republicans, but those weapons are essentially in the same class as the ones the Poles are sending—mostly near museum-pieces with little ammunition. The Soviets charge exorbitant amounts for what they do send, just like everyone else is doing.

The time-frame during which Soviet intervention could save Madrid quickly passes. The Nationalists take Madrid in November 1936. The Republican government fights on, making increasingly desperate attempts to buy arms on world markets.

The Republicans continue to get a trickle of weapons. Poland is quite willing to overcharge them for older model artillery pieces and then use the money to buy newer ones. The Poles are even willing to sell the Republic worn-out Polish tankettes and older model fighter planes. Other small countries of Eastern Europe and Latin America get into that act. Estonia sells the Republic ancient bi-plane fighters, while Greece and Bolivia sell it small arms. The Republic even successfully smuggles in a few US made warplanes and a lot of civilian planes that can be converted to limited military use.

The Soviets continue low-level arms shipments, mostly of old arms which can’t be traced to the Soviet Union. None of this is enough to save the Spanish Republic. The Spanish Republican government is forced to flee to France, along with its remaining gold reserves, in mid-1937.

The French government recognizes the Nationalist government, seizes the bulk of the gold reserve, and returns it to the Nationalists. The Nationalists then use a portion of it to pay their dept to Germany and Italy—mainly Italy, for the arms they have supplied.

The Spanish Civil War is over, almost two years early. The Spanish Nationalist throw themselves into rebuilding their country. The rest of the world continues to gear up for World War II. They gear up for a very different World War II though.

Fallout from the shorter war: Germany emerges from the war somewhat weaker than in our time-line. In our time-line, Germany used the Spanish Civil War to train key personnel and refine tactics. They forced the Spanish Nationalists to pay for German help with strategic minerals that helped German rearmament. Both the training and the flow of strategic minerals are cut short in this time-line.

Italy emerges from the Spanish Civil War considerably stronger than in our time-line. According to Hugh Thomas in “The Spanish Civil War”, the Italians sent 763 airplanes, nearly two thousand artillery pieces, and over 7,500 motor vehicles to Spain. They also sent hundreds of thousands of rifles and over ten thousand automatic weapons, along with over 1,500 tons of bombs, nearly ten million rounds of small arms ammunition, and over 7.5 million rounds of artillery ammunition. The Italians did not demand payment in advance for any of that equipment, and the Spanish Civil War turned into a huge drain on an already weak Italian economy.

In our time-line the cost of the Spanish Civil War forced the Italians to postpone a planned and much-needed reorganization and retraining of the Italian army. It also forced them to institute a variety of cost-cutting measures that affected Italian military power. For example, as a cost-cutting move the Italians tried to switch their fighter planes from in-line to radial engine during the lead-up to World War II. In the long-term that might not have been a bad move, but in the short-term it left the Italians with bulky, underpowered engines that cut forty to sixty miles per hour from the speed of their otherwise very competitive fighters.

In this time-line, the Spanish Civil War drains far less Italian resources, and leaves the Spanish Nationalists in a position to pay for the equipment the Italians sent. As a result the Italian army and especially the Italian air force are considerably stronger in 1937 than they were in our time-line, and the difference in power grows as time goes on.

The Soviets are somewhat less powerful in some ways in this time-line and more powerful in others. The Spanish Civil War has given them somewhat of a windfall in Spanish gold, and that gold can be put to good use to buy machine tools to build up Soviet heavy industry. At the same time, that windfall is about one-tenth the size that it was in our time-line, and that translates to less hard currency available for the Soviets to invest in heavy industry than they had in our time-line. The Soviets do have about 340 T26 and BT-5 tanks available that were sent to Spain in our time-line, along with 600 to 650 planes and a large number of mostly obsolete artillery pieces and small arms. That is more than off-set by reduced production over the next few years.

Poland is slightly stronger because it has been in a position to gouge the Spanish Republic a bit more, but the difference is slight. The Poles still don’t have enough money to update their military at the increasingly costly pace that their potential enemies are setting.

The armies of Europe are trying very hard to find lessons from the Spanish civil war. The problem is that it wasn’t really a modern war in the same sense that it was in our time-line. It was still almost entirely a bi-plane war, at least for fighters. It does little to settle the ongoing dispute over whether the bi-plane’s superior maneuverability makes it a better fighter than the faster monoplanes. Most of the major air forces are moving toward monoplanes, but somewhat more slowly than in our time-line.

The Spanish civil war has not answered the question of whether or not lightning armored thrusts can win wars. Nationalist and Italian motorized infantry and tankettes were very effective, but the opposition was not very well armed or organized. Cavalry units were sometimes effective in that environment.

At least this time-line’s Spanish civil war doesn’t produce a fiasco like the Italian defeat at Guadalajara in our time-line. That battle convinced most of our time-line’s armies of Europe that armored thrusts were simply not a viable strategy against well-armed and organized opponents.

The French military is particularly interested in the potential lessons of the Spanish civil war. In our time-line, those lessons seemed clear. Fast-moving armor and motorized units could be useful in the early stages of a war to quickly seize positions before enemy opposition could solidify. At some point though, the war would settle down into a contest of firepower and slogging matches. That did seem very clear from the Spanish civil war experience, and it fit in with French doctrine.

In this time-line, the Spanish civil war experience is by no means as clear cut, and the French army is slightly more open to independent armor units, though most French armor is still tied to infantry units.

The crisis of spring 1938: In both time-lines, Germany rearmed considerably faster than its economy could sustain in 1937 and early 1938. The Germans had to import a lot of key raw materials for their economy. The pace of their re-armament drew down the foreign currency that they had to pay for those raw materials. In early 1938 it became clear that unless they found new sources of hard currency they would have to dramatically cut back the pace of rearmament—cutting military spending by 25 percent or so.

In our time-line, the German reunification with Austria gave the Germans the financial boost they needed. In this time-line, the Germans have some major problems getting their boost that way. First, the cash crunch comes several months earlier because the Germans don’t have the flow of raw materials from Nationalist Spain to bolster them. That puts the crunch time for Germany in the middle of winter, a horrible time to invade the mountains of Austria. Second, while Italy is not militarily a match for Germany in this time-line it is still a major power. Germany can’t afford to push Italy into the French and British camp by casually ignoring Mussolini’s public stance as protector of Austria.

Hitler sounds Mussolini out on his response to a German attack on Austria. Mussolini responds by pushing for a German/Italian division of Switzerland. The Germans aren’t totally uninterested in that, but they are wary of the Swiss ability to tie down an invading army and destroy key passes and tunnels. For the moment, they settle for grabbing and looting the area around Memel, a partly German area of Lithuania. That isn’t enough to stave off an economic crisis, and the Germans are forced to cut back on the pace of their rearmament.

The German cutback comes at a crucial time. The Germans are getting ready to dramatically increase production of the ME-109, and bring the much-improved Me-109D into production. They are also gearing up to produce large quantities of Panzer 3 and 4 tanks to augment the few dozen of each type that had been produced up until that point. Production of all of those weapons is cut back. The Luftwaffe is forced to keep obsolete bi-planes and early model ME-109s in frontline service a while longer, and the German army is forced to make do with a Panzer force composed almost entirely of light Panzer 1s and 2s.

That delay is crucial. In our time-line the Germans got a jump on most of the other major powers of Europe in terms of the switch from bi-planes to more modern monoplanes and from tankettes to real tanks. They then used that edge to take the resources that they needed to continue rearmament—first Sudetenland, then the rest of Czechoslovakia, then Poland. In this time-line the process never gets started.

French, British, and Czech rearmament efforts have erased any fleeting German advantage by mid-1939. The German economy limps along, hobbled by the costs incurred by previous rearmament. The Germans are forced to export much of their new military production to get hard currency.

Where does this lead? World War II is almost certainly delayed. Does Germany seize upon its edge in jet technology to stage a breakout and seize the countries of central and Eastern Europe in 1944 or 1945? Does Germany even have a lead in that technology in this time-line? What happens to Hitler? An increasingly erratic and unpopular dictatorship followed by death from Parkinson’s in the late 1940s? Who would succeed him? Another Nazi or a conservative German general would be the most likely candidates.

What happens in the Soviet Union? On the one hand, it would avoid the devastation of World War II. On the other hand, Stalin would be able to indulge his paranoia to a greater extent during what in our time-line were the war years. The Soviets would not get the long-term benefits of Lend-Lease helping them build factories and infrastructure, or of US experts teaching manufacturing techniques. They probably wouldn’t get the benefit of something like the Hitler/Stalin pseudo-alliance, with the flow of German machine-tools and even weapons during the 1939 to 1941 period. The Soviets would probably be somewhat better off physically in this time-line, but they wouldn’t have the experience of the “Great Patriotic War” to bring them together and legitimize the excesses of Stalin. The Nazis were in reality much like Soviet propaganda had painted the rest of the world, and that undoubtedly had a significant impact on any potential opposition to Stalin and his successors.

Who would get atomic weapons and when would they get them? The first atomic weapons might not come along until the early 1950s if not later. They probably would show up sometime in the 1950s. I would guess that Germany, the Soviet Union, France, and England would all be fairly close in the race for atomics. Japan and Italy would probably be in the race, but years behind. The US probably wouldn’t enter the race in a major way until someone else either had atomic weapons or was very close to getting them. In the absence of a European war, the US would not spend major money on the military unless there was a clear and immediate threat.

The question of who gets atomic weapons first is crucial of course. If it was France or England, chances are that you would see other powers quickly joining the ranks of the nuclear powers. If it was Germany or the Soviet Union, there is a fairly good chance that they would attempt to dominate Europe and stop other powers from getting nuclear weapons. In any case, a European atomic war in the mid-to-late 1950s is probably the most likely possibility in this time-line.

Problems with this scenario:

1) Would the Germans really back down from an attack on Austria because of the Italians? That’s a tough one. The balance of power between Germany and Italy would actually be surprisingly close in early 1938, at least in terms of hardware. The Germans would have had a little over four years of open rearmament, while the Italians had been free to arm themselves throughout the last 19 years. Both sides would still be armed primarily with tankettes (or light tanks armed with machine guns) and bi-planes, with a small sprinkling of more modern equipment. The Germans would have a shortage of trained pilots (something that made their airpower somewhat of a bluff even as late as the Sudetenland crisis in October 1938). They would have shortages of munitions and artillery too, in all likelihood. The Germans had done a lot since 1933, but much of it was still “store window” stuff in early 1938—impressive on paper but without the mundane things like sufficient munitions and trained men to back it up. That was far less true in our time-line’s late 1939 of course, but what they could have available in late 1939 would not help the Germans a year and a half or more earlier.

2) Haven’t you done something a lot like this scenario before? Yes, I did. This started out to go in a very different direction, but the logic of the situation pushed it in a direction very similar to a scenario I did a while ago on how World War II might have been avoided. Hopefully it does add some value that the earlier scenario doesn’t.