What if Franco Had Entered the War?
Not much would have changed, according to Mark Grimsley. The Spanish would have seized Gibraltar with German assistance, which would have complicated the Allied war effort in the Mediterranean, but the impact on other fronts would have been limited. Post-civil war Spain simply lacked the resources and the political cohesion to make a critical difference in the war. Franco, who consistently resisted entreaties from Hitler and Mussolini, seems to have largely agreed with this analysis.
In Advanced Third Reich and its successor, World at War, Spanish entry can help put a nail in the coffin of a weak Britain in 1940 or 1941. Failing that it becomes a liability; Spanish control of Gibraltar tends to dissuade the Allies from wasting resources in the Mediterranean (this effect would likely have happened in the real world, as well), and the Axis simply lacks sufficient forces to defend the entire Atlantic seaboard from Allied amphibious assault. Since the game substantially understates Allied air and naval dominance from 1943-1945, I suspect that the overall net effect of Spanish entry would have been an extension of the war in Europe by a few months, and the end of Franco’s regime.
If you knock out Britain in ’40 or ’41 is very, very difficult to mount any sort of sizable landing. Even with total naval superiority, you just don’t have the turnaround time when sailing 3000 miles that you do when sailing just across the channel.
The real question is how many troops would occupation of Britain pull off the Russian front? The Russians won WWII while England and the US kept Germany’s attention divided.
A more important question is whether Franco would still be dead.
I still wonder what the real effect of Napoleon possessing a B-52 at the Battle of Waterloo would have been…
Well, playing Spain in the Civ 2 WWII simulation is pretty thankless. You end up getting pounded by somebody. Hitler eventually turns on you, too, the bastard.
In the real world, I don’t think it would have affected the outcome, except for Franco, who would have been gone at about the same time as Mussolini, instead of hanging around long enough to get mocked by Chevy Chase.
Portugal had an alliance with Britain, so there probably would have been more pressure on Portugal to participate in a more vigorous way if Spain had sided with Hitler. I think Spain would have ended up being where the Allies practiced some beat-down techniques. I don’t think it would have ended well for Franco. Now, after the war, would there have been an Occupied Spain? What would be the implications of that?
I think Spain would have ended up being where the Allies practiced some beat-down techniques.
Seems only fair; the Germans got to practice the Blitzkrieg during the Spanish Civil War. Everbody*’s a winner!
* for values of “everybody” that exclude all Spanish citizens
It would’ve ended with the British putting down an anarchist revolt to install a fascist lite government instead. I think they rather enjoyed the historical artifact that Franco provided.
Wait, are you saying that A3R and World at War don’t model reality? Kidding aside, I think your assessment of the effect of the fall of Gibralter in both games is correct. Last time I played A3R as the Germans, I got Spain to help me take Gibralter and all it got me was an overextended Festung Europa and a quickly deteriorating position in ’43/44 as the Western Allies successfully refought the Peninsular War before launching Overlord. While I haven’t found the time or energy to play World at War, my impression is that it pays more attention to late war Allied naval/air superiority than its predecessor.
Kind of interesting that Jonah Goldberg scarcely mentions Franco in “Liberal Fascism.”
Of course it would have blown his entire premise out of the water. It would have been hard to reconcile Franco, who the National Review adored, with the air support that Mussolini and Hitler gave to the Falangists, most notoriously in Guernica as well as the existence of the Division Azul.
But that should surprise no one who knows anything about the history of the era – unlike Jonah Goldberg.
Jonah won’t even admit that Mussolini founded the fascist party in Italy.
Not much would have changed
We beg to differ.
Yours, etc.,
Several hundred thousand murdered, tortured, imprisoned and exiled post-WWII Spaniards
I suspect that the overall net effect of Spanish entry would have been an extension of the war in Europe by a few months, and the end of Franco’s regime.
So did Franco, which is one of the reasons he stayed out of the war, at least officially.
Love the shout out to Advanced Third Reich, with which I wasted many a happy hour, back in the good old days when “gamer” meant a geek fascinated by (or at least willing to tolerate) massive rule books of small text organized like a technical manual (if you were lucky).
That being said, there are some biases inherent in wargames.
One is that they only model “interesting” conflicts: one where decisions of the two sides could have plausibly affected the outcome of the fighting. There is a reason we don’t see wargames based on the US invasion of Grenada. It could only be made balanced by basing the victory conditions on the defenders slightly slowing down the invaders or inflicting slightly higher casualties before the inevitable collapse. This makes for a boring game. In the cold hard light of day it is hard to see a realistic path to Axis victory in WWII, given the political decisions by the various parties to enter the war, so the bias is to fudge things a bit in its favor to make a game of it.
The second bias is to allow the players greater range of viable strategies than is realistic, again to make things interesting. My favorite from ATR was the German invasion of Russia via Turkey, either through alliance with or conquest of Turkey. The Russian forces available in 1941 are carefully balanced to make the Barbarossa campaign interesting. Open up that Turkey front, shove your panzers through it, and Russia is screwed. Is this realistic? Heck no! The logistics involved are ridiculous. The Ottoman Empire was a German ally in WWI, with the same southern front. It was an unimportant side show, because it was in the far end of beyond. Things were different in WWII, but not all that much different that the Germans could supply a significant force thousands of miles away, much of it with questionable rail resources.
So returning to the Spain question, the most surprising aspect is that the game designers didn’t make it a better option than they did.
By the way, whoever put on that board game geek site that a game of ATR takes two hours should be sharing whatever it is he is smoking. Keeping it to yourself is just rude.
Has either Advd3R or WaW been translated into a computer game?
The only grand-strategy WW2 game for PC that I know is Hearts of Iron, which I found too detailed to be entertaining.
No, but there is a program that allows you play against other opponents online (PBEM, I seem to recall).
Avalon Hill did put out a computer version of Third Reich, but it was reported to be pretty buggy. You can probably find it on abandonware sites. I saw it once along with the computer version of one of the Fleet games.
Have you played GMT’s Berlin to Barbarossa? There is a live play Java-based version of that (along with many other good games) at wargameroom.com. You have to find another player, but they have a way to do it.
[...] Farley discusses the counterfactual in which Franco’s Spain joins the second world war and concludes that it wouldn’t have [...]
Homage to Catalonia would have had a happy ending?
I took a history of Nazism and Fascism class while pursuing a BA in History at the University of Illinois in 1983. The professor (can’t remember his name) taught that British Intelligence had documentary evidence that Franco was part Jewish and threatened to embarass him with Hitler if Spain entered the war on the side of the Axis Powers…
Now that you’ve mentioned A3R, you’ve got me thinking about the “Spain AND Turkey” variant, where both Spain and Turkey join the war on the Axis side. In the real world, that would have made life a little more difficult for both Britain and Russia…much moreso for Britain if the German general staff successfully dissuaded Hitler from Barbarossa in 1941, and Turkey’s alliance with Germany was sufficiently confounding to similarly put Stalin off an offensive that year.
Seizing Gibraltar would have greatly complicated resupply of North African forces, and advancing a Turkish force south and east would have effectively carved the British Empire in two. Throw in a few more favors of fortune–successful capture/surrender of the BEF at Dunkirk; having a couple hundred viable heavy bombers(and maybe a couple hundred Fw190s and even some Italian planes flying out of Northern Spain while we’re throwing caution to the wind), focusing on destroying British fighter production first before turning to their surface naval assets; capturing a meaningful chunk of the French Fleet and having most of them re-crewed and ready to roll in mid-late ’41; Germany declaring war on Japan after they hit Pearl Harbor–and you wind up with Britain suing for peace sometime in late 1941, and a huge battle between East and West from 1942 to whenever. If America had no “in” to the European theater, a German-led alliance could even possibly overcome the USSR(since there’d be only one front while the Russians would have to shift troops from the east in order to buttress the Turkish flank).
Mind, now, that’s a scenario that alters 10 variables from the real history. There’s probably a parlor game for alt historians–figuring out the fewest variables necessary to reverse the ultimate outcome of WW2.
I play a wargame called Commander: Europe at War on a regular basis. The basic game is OK to not very good against the AI but fun to play against a human opponent (PBEM) and has since been modded up to an outstanding human vs. human game.
The virtue of it over other WWII strategy games is a good balance between a rich, flexible gaming experience and some measure of simplicity. In other words, you can have fun and try out lots of different strategies, but turns only take 10-30 minutes instead of hours.
You can check it out here if you’re so inclined.
[...] personal community on the internet. I’ve found mine, and now, I’ve found quasi-popular acknowledgement and validation: In Advanced Third Reich and its successor, World at War, Spanish entry can help put a nail in the [...]
Now that’s one interesting blog. The previous post on MLK and the civil rights movement being labeled an ‘insurgency’ was a damned interesting read.
http://warhistorian.org/wordpress/?p=2314
Who needs t.v. to waste time anymore?