The Rock
By Fascinating article on the BBC. Franco was neither an idiot nor an ideologue. He had two interests in World War II; staying alive and getting Gibraltar. Openly siding with the Axis might have accomplished the latter while putting the former in peril. However, it looks as if Churchill may have played Franco, making promises he wasn’t planning to keep. . .
Spanish dictator General Francisco Franco accused the UK of reneging on a promise to hand over the rock after World War II. Sir Winston Churchill denied the Spanish claim, made in August 1953, that they had been promised Gibraltar in return for staying neutral. The documents were released at the National Archives at Kew, London. In August 1953 a telegram from Madrid to the Foreign Office quoted the Generalissimo as telling the Arriba newspaper: “If the hopes of the restitution of the Rock held out to Spain during the war are not fulfilled, no one should doubt that we will use every means to put an end to this offensive situation.”