Several issues ago I started a scenario where somebody a little less patient than Franco was in charge of the Spanish Nationalists. As a result, Spain follows the path Italy did—joining the war on Germany's side in the hope of picking up booty when it became inevitable that France would fall.

 Spain becomes aware of the magnitude of the German victory early.  By May 18, 1940, Spanish leaders are making contingency plans to get into the war.  Spanish merchant ships are headed for relatively safe waters.  The Spanish military is trying to get key pieces of military equipment, especially tanks and aircraft, to threatened outposts such as Spanish Sahara and the Canary Islands.  The Spanish use what little gold and hard currency they have to try to stock up on items that will be hard to get once they join the war and are cut off from the world economy. 

 Spain is dependant on the rest of the world for oil and quite a bit of food.  The Spanish economy is in horrible shape after three years of civil war, so it will be dependent on its Axis partners for a lot of the inputs needed to keep the economy afloat.  Hasty stockpiling will help a little, but lack of cash limits that, as does lack of time.

 Spain declares war a few days later than Italy did historically.  The Spanish launch minor offensives across the Spanish French border and into French Morocco from Spanish Morocco.  These offensives are relatively minor affairs, and would have been in serious trouble in short order if the French weren't busy elsewhere.

 The British have contingency plans to seize the Canary Islands if Spain enters the war.  Those plans don't envision a situation where Britain is fighting alone with a much weakened army.  The forces necessary to take the Canary Islands compose a high percentage of Britain's usable military force post-Dunkirk.

 
Britain moves naval forces to blockade the Canary Islands, and raids naval bases and other strategic installations along the Atlantic Coast of Spain.  Britain needs to demonstrate that they can still fight and are still in the war, so a British task force sweeps along the Spanish Atlantic Coast with heavier ships, including a couple of battleships.  The Spanish don't have much of an answer for that, though their air force does go after the task force and do some minor damage.

Spain entry into the war complicates negotiations between the French and Germans.  The French are militarily helpless in mainland France, but they still have substantial naval forces and they have threatened to fight on from the French colonies with British help.  The Spanish entry to the war undercuts that threat, because Spain and Spanish Morocco offer Germany a relatively easy way to get at the French North African colonies if necessary.

 Also, the Canary Islands are very important strategically.  In Axis hands they are a major threat to Allied shipping.  In Allied hands, they would make fighting the U-Boats much easier.  Germany wants access to those islands.  The only way to get that is to gain control of a land route to Spanish Sahara through Morocco.  From Spanish Sahara, Axis planes could provide cover for shipping men and materials to the islands.  The Germans now have a major incentive to give Spain at least some territory in Morocco, but the French dig in their heels as much as they can.  They don't have a lot of choice given the situation on the ground in France though, and the Germans impose a peace treaty that gives Spain a coastal strip in the northern part of French Morocco, a port and airbase in the center of the country, and an extra-territorial strip the length of the colony giving access to Spanish Morocco.

 The Italians get Corsica and Chad as a face-saving gesture from the Germans.  The French are in a weaker bargaining position than they were historically and if the Germans are going to give the Spanish French territory the Italians will have to get at least something.

 
Spain entering the war puts the British in a very tough spot.  British ships entering the western Mediterranean now have to go through a gauntlet of Spanish air power and land-based artillery, probably soon to be augmented by German planes and artillery.  Gibraltar is threatened, and poorly defended, with only three British battalions, two anti-aircraft batteries, and no fighter airplanes there to defend it.

 
Getting arms and men to British forces in Egypt just got a lot more tricky because they have to force their way through the straits of Gibraltar with hostile forces on both sides.  Going around Africa is another option, but that is risky until Italian forces are eliminated from their positions in Somalia and Ethiopia.

 
One plus for the British is that they don't have the available battleships in the western Mediterranean to tangle with the French fleet shortly after the French drop out of the war.  That makes British/Vichy relations much less chilly in the next couple of years and makes Free French recruiting much easier.

 
The British bombardment of the Spanish coast and their blockade of the Canary Islands provokes a response from both the Italians and the Germans.  The Italians send essentially the air forces that they would have sent to fight in the Battle of Britain to Spain.  They also send a division of ground forces and a small amount of heavy artillery to help defend the coast.

 
The Germans send a more substantive force, partly to defend the Spanish Atlantic coast and partly to attack Gibraltar.  They also race to build up logistics to support a German presence in the Canary Islands.  That is tough because they have to send troops and supplies through Spain and then through Spanish and French Morocco to the coast of the Spanish Sahara, and then across a strip of the Atlantic to the islands.  The Spanish rail network is a mess, both because of the recent civil war and because it uses a different gauge of tracks than the rest of Western Europe.  Morocco and Spanish Sahara are both logistically difficult areas, and the Germans have to build up rail and road networks before they can support any major effort to help Spanish forces on the Canary Islands.

 
The Germans also have to divide their efforts between doing that buildup and getting ready to take the British base at Gibraltar.  Gibraltar is under siege, initially by the Spanish, but with Italian and German forces quickly moving in to join the attack.

 
The British are working to build up their forces to the point where they can spare troops to take the Canary Islands.  The US is planning to send over 500,000 nearly obsolete small arms, plus some artillery to partially replace the weapons lost at Dunkirk.  Once those weapons reach the troops and units are reorganized into fighting form it becomes less dangerous to send a British expedition against the Canary Islands.

 
The possibility of a German base in the Canary Islands has the US government very rattled.  That's entirely too close to Latin America for US tastes.  The US navy is formidable, but it is mostly in the Pacific, with the buildup of an Atlantic fleet still in its infancy.  The US army is nowhere near ready to fight the likes of the Germans.  In reality there is little to fear in terms of the Germans projecting power into Latin America, but the perception of that possibility is not comforting to the US military or to Roosevelt.  The US also has to worry about Latin American perception of power.

 
Meanwhile, the Germans have to cope with yet another ally that can't feed itself and doesn't have enough oil or manufacturing capacity to fight a war.  On the other hand, Spain does have some key resources that Germany needs.  It also gives Germany easy access to Portuguese Wolfram, a source of Tungsten.  With German troops on their border, the Portuguese are very willing to sell.  They sold to the Germans historically, but now they have added incentive.

 
Portugal is a problem for the Axis.  It could easily provide the Allies with a backdoor onto the continent.  On the other hand, taking it over would hand the Allies control of the Azores and make Allied efforts against the U-Boats much easier.  For now the Germans watch the border but don't invade.

 
I'm running out of time here, but it looks as though the potential is here for an interesting variation on World War II.  So where do we go from here?  Do Gibraltar and Malta fall to the Axis?  Who ends up in control of the Canary Islands?  How does the perceived German threat from those islands affect the buildup of the US military?  Britain has its hands even more full in this scenario than it did historically.  Does Spain's entry into the war start a chain reaction where the British Empire's enemies throughout the world decide to each grab a chunk of what they perceive as a dying empire?  There are plenty of those enemies, from the Japanese to Indian Nationalists, to Iraqi and Palestinian Nationalists, to the weak nominally independent Egyptian government, to a nationalistic Argentina that even back then wanted the Falkland Islands back, though they were no position just yet to do anything about it.   

 The perception of British weakness could translate into disaster, as enemy grew bolder and friends like the US decided to look to their own defenses rather than aiding the British.  Historically the British avoided that kind of perception, though just barely.  Would they in this scenario?

Posted on Feb 3, 2012.

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