Michael Alpert. Franco and the Condor Legion: The Spanish Civil War in the Air. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Illustrations, maps. xi + 238 pp. $29.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-78831-118-2.
Reviewed by Christopher G. Marquis (Air University, Air Command and Staff College)
Published on H-War (April, 2020)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey (Air University)
Michael Alpert’s Franco and the Condor Legion is a military history of air operations during the Spanish Civil War, which concluded eight decades ago when Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s Nationalist forces defeated the divided and forsaken Republican government. Much credit, then and now, went to the assistance rendered to the Nationalists by Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, particularly in regard to airpower. The Republicans had their own patron in Soviet Russia, but Josef Stalin’s regime proved to be an inconstant ally.
Alpert, professor emeritus of history at the University of Westminster, is a noted Spanish Civil War historian whose previous works include A New International History of the Spanish Civil War (1994) and The Republican Army in the Spanish Civil War (2013). He has produced an informative book filled with facts and insight on the most important European conflict between the world wars. The primary sources for his work are culled from the military archives in Avila, Spain, as well as from French, British, and German government papers from the era. The secondary sources include books and articles spanning from the 1930s to the present, including a large number of Spanish-language texts. As noted in his preface, there is a shortage of full-length works on air operations in the Spanish Civil War. His contribution is thus a worthy and welcome one.
The book covers a lot of ground (or perhaps, air space), in spite of it only being a compact 210 pages of text. It not only concerns the Condor Legion—the name of the Nazi German expeditionary air force sent to Spain to support the Nationalists—but also the airpower contingents from Fascist Italy, Soviet Russia, and Republican France. The book is filled with facts of the aircraft, with stories of the pilots and commanders, and with results of the individual conflicts, from Franco’s flight aboard a British Dragon Rapide from the Canary Islands to Spanish Morocco on July 18, 1936, to the final flyover of the victorious air forces in the spring of 1939.
Alpert’s wit and eye for detail assist in keeping the narrative flowing. For instance, we learn that the designation of “88” for Condor Legion units was derived from the Nazi salutation “Heil Hitler,” “H” being the eighth letter of the alphabet. There is an amusing anecdote of an encounter between Nationalist Spanish pilot Captain Joaquín García Morato and Italian Colonel Ruggero Bonomi, which may remind one of an Abbott and Costello routine: “When García Morato saluted Bonomi and formally asked to be permitted to fly the CR-32 Chirri, he enquired the name of the squadron leader, to which Bonomi replied ‘Dequal’. García Morato understood this as the Spanish ‘¿De cuál?’ meaning ‘Of which one’. ‘I mean the leader of my squadron’, insisted the Spaniard. ‘Dequal’, replied the Italian colonel impatiently” (p. 62).
Most importantly, the book captures several of the lessons of the conflict regarding airpower: the vulnerability of bombers and the need for pursuit escort, the importance of aerial photography, and the value of air-ground coordination—all of which were made clear by the events of the Spanish Civil War. Alpert makes a keen observation about Franco’s relationship with his allies. While the Soviets came to dominate many aspects of the Republican war effort, “it was quite clear that the Condor Legion was in Spain to do what Franco wanted it to do and there was not a question of political interference on the German part” (p. 203). Franco’s arms-length relationship with his German and Italian benefactors not only explains how he was able to emerge victorious over his more conflicted adversaries in the civil war but also how he managed to avoid being drawn into the Second World War on behalf of the Axis Powers and thus survived into the Cold War while their regimes met with destruction.
Alpert has delivered a thorough, well-researched, and well-written product of an underappreciated event in twentieth-century Western history. Those interested in the aviation history and the interwar period, as well as those who would like to learn more about the development of what are now called joint operations (the coordinated efforts of land, air, and maritime forces toward a common objective), would benefit from reading this book.
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Citation:
Christopher G. Marquis. Review of Alpert, Michael, Franco and the Condor Legion: The Spanish Civil War in the Air.
H-War, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=54738
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