The Condor Legion

The Condor Legion was Nazi Germany’s most notable contribution to Francisco Franco’s Nationalist cause in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. Hitler also contributed weapons, natural resources etc. but the Condor Legion was the only significant military unit sent to Spain by Germany.

I was in high school when I first heard the term “Condor Legion”. It immediately conjured in my mind visions of a large, fierce and formidable air force. It was only later that I learned that a Condor is a vulture, albeit a distinctively large and spectacular  one.

And so it was with the Condor Legion. You might think of it as a decisive force in a campaign to promote fascist ascendancy and solidarity throughout Europe. Not quite. Hermann Goering testified at Nuremberg that Hitler was at first reluctant to commit significant forces to Spain but when Goering pointed out the learning opportunities the Fuehrer brightened at the prospect.

It has also been argued that Hitler was careful to make sure his intervention, quantitatively much less than was provided by Mussolini’s Italy, didn’t end the war too fast i.e. before Italy’s role in aiding Franco thoroughly destroyed any remaining good relations Italy had with Britain and France.

The first German intervention was a small unit of Junkers Ju-52 transport planes which were used to ferry troops and supplies of the Spanish Army of Africa across the Straits of Gibraltar to Spain past the Spanish navy which had by and large remained loyal to the government and was blocking transfer by sea. The Army of Africa was an elite force which possessed most of the recent combat experience in the Spanish army putting down rebellions both major and minor in Spain’s African possessions. It included Moroccans who fought fiercely for the  Nationalists.  (Although they had never flown  before and  suffered extensively from air sickness, the Germans had to post guards to prevent the Moroccans from sneaking onto and overloading the transport planes.) It also included the (at this time almost entirely Spanish and all volunteer) Spanish Foreign Legion whose motto was “Long Live Death” – Francisco Franco was the Legion’s first Deputy Commander at its founding in 1920. These troops were decisive in giving the Nationalist revolt a firm footing in 1936.

Very shortly thereafter the first German volunteers were sent to Spain posing as a tourist group of photographers, engineers and salesmen. Once in Spain this thin pretense was dropped and the volunteers were incorporated into the roles available under the Condor Legion organization which contained five major groupings.

These were (1) the bomber group – initially composed of Ju-52s which were considered suitable as bombers at the time; (2) the transport group – Ju52s in their air transport role ; (3) the fighter group  – Heinkel He51s a fighter design that was considered obsolete well before 1939;  (4) The flak group for antiaircraft defense and (5) a small ground force for airfield security. In keeping with the small German presence the Spanish provided some personnel. For example, the flak personnel were Spanish commanded by Spanish officers under overall German supervision. Aircraft maintenance was provided by Lufthansa civilians already working in Spain.

I won’t do a campaign history here. There are books for that. A good source is a book that I relied on heavily for this mini-essay i.e. Peter Elstob’s “Condor Legion” which is weapons book no. 35 in the Ballantine’s Illustrated History of the Violent Century series.

So what did the German’s learn at Spanish expense and for a relatively small fee in blood and treasure as these things go? First, they needed better planes. After the first encounters with Russia’s agile biplane fighter the Polikarpov I-15 out went the He-51s and the Ju-52’s were consigned exclusively to the transport role. The new German fighter was the very successful Messerschmidt Me-109B (later also the C and E series) and the bombing was taken over by He-111’s and Dornier Do -17’s.

The Germans practiced dive bombing, first with the Henschel Hs 123A and later with their world war II mainstay the Ju-87 Stuka. They practiced aerial bombing of cities, most infamously, thanks to Pablo Picasso, Guernica. More practically and frequently they bombed Madrid and other fiercely defended Spanish towns and cities. It was in Spain that they practiced the sequence of a first wave of attack with 2000 pound bombs aimed at the largest buildings, a second wave with 500 pound bombs to break up the rubble and smaller buildings and make them burn more readily, a third wave with incendiaries and, after an interval to let people come out to fight the fires, a fourth wave armed with anti-personnel fragmentation bombs.

Shortly after the initial formation of the Condor Legion, the Germans added a small but high tech ground force composed of tanks, machine gun units and flak in a ground role. This allowed the Germans to practice the employment of tanks, close air support techniques and the use of flak as an anti-tank weapon. (It always stuns me to recall that the first German General Staff paper on the anti-tank potential of the 88mm anti-aircraft gun was written in 1919.) The Germans also operated in cooperation with Spanish infantry and artillery.

Despite my snarky comments at the beginning of this essay (vultures etc.) the Condor Legion was helpful to the Nationalists all out of proportion to its small numbers. Once the Germans grasped the value of Spain as a learning laboratory for Blitzkrieg, the volunteer system was scrapped and Germany’s most promising military personnel, officers, pilots and others, were assigned to and rotated through the Condor Legion to hone their skills

The Spanish Civil War

For the most part I have ignored the Spanish Civil War in this blog. It started in 1936 before the period I am covering and does not involve direct participation by any of the World War II belligerents. To call it a proxy war between the Axis powers of Germany and Italy and the Soviet Union would be at best a gross oversimplification.

Still, it is probably worth mentioning that on April 15, 1938, Good Friday that year, Nationalist forces captured the town of Vinaroz on Spain’s eastern Mediterranean coast thus splitting off Catalonia from the rest of Republican Spain. You might compare this to the fall of Vicksburg or even Savannah in the American civil war. Thus split in two, the Spanish  loyalists never recovered and Francisco Franco’s path to power was advanced considerably.

Having given the events in Spain another look, I think it might be worth doing a mini-essay on the German Condor Legion. A surprising number of the weapons and methods that contributed to early German successes in World War II were tested and practiced by the Condor Legion in Spain. Expect the essay soon. I will probably have another chronological post or two on Spain as well.