29
area.”
In short, territorial rewards—at the expense of Vichy France—were a part, albeit a
vague and unofficial part, of the policy.
Despite some misgivings, Churchill also agreed to
let Hoare “give at least a tentative indication of Britain’s sympathy with Spain’s irredentist
claim” to Gibraltar, and a willingness to address them in post war talks.
All of this figured
in a more general message, communicated by Hoare to Franco, of supporting the elevation
of the “new Spain” to its “rightful part” in “the new world that will be reconstructed at the
end of the war.”
So there was more to British inducements than bread and money, beyond
those immediate rewards laid a distant and fuzzy prospect of territorial concessions.
Britain’s approach was not all give. Inducements were offered against a background
of unspoken threats—namely, coastline shelling by Her Majesty’s Fleet, conquest of the
Canary Islands, and most of all, economic strangulation.
The economic appeasement
policy was filtered through a tight blockade of the continent, which required special
certificates (navicerts) from London to permit entry of all regulated (i.e., important) imports.
The goal was to keep Spain’s economy and population buoyant, without allowing it to build
up surpluses which could be exploited by the Nazi war machine.
As Economic Warfare
Minister Dalton liked to stress, the idea was to keep “Spain so short that she cannot re-
export and is not worth pillaging.”
This “game of just so much” had a distinctly coercive
edge; it was “like a loosened tourniquet [which] could be twisted tight on a moment’s notice”
allowing Britain “to choke off the arteries of the Spanish economy almost at will.”
This
approach emerged most clearly in July 1940, when Britain imposed a temporary block on
petroleum shipments to Spain after signs of dangerous accumulation.
But Hoare kept
116
Paraphrase in Norman J. W. Goda, “Franco’s Bid for Empire: Spain, Germany, and the Western
Mediterranean in World War II,” in Raanan Rein, ed., Spain and the Mediterranean Since 1989 (London: Frank
Cass, 1999) p. 179, also see n. 79.
117
Interestingly, in late September, Suner informed Ribbentrop—undoubtedly to goad him to be more
generous, that Hoare had “intimated” to the Spanish Foreign Minister “that England would be prepared to see
to it that after the war French Morocco would be ceded to Spain.” DGFP,D, XI, 167
.
118
Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, p. 44.
119
Hoare to Franco, June 22, 1940, BDFA, p. 98..
120
We should not exaggerate the deterrence effect of the Naval threat to bombard the Spanish coastline
because, to put it simply, Her Majesty’s Navy had its hands full with other pressing missions, like stopping a
cross-channel invasion, and protecting Atlantic sea-lanes.
121
Churchill quoted in Feis, Spanish Story, p. 61.
122
Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, p. 59.
123
Puzzo, Spain and the Great Powers, p. 218; Detwiler, “Spain and the Axis,” p. 42.
124
It should be emphasized, the choke threat was largely implicit, and rarely flexed: “Britain’s economic policy
toward Spain,” notes the leading work on the subject, “only became really severe when there were serious
doubts about the continuance of Spanish neutrality, and a political decision that firmness might be needed, at
least temporarily, to consolidate such neutrality”: Smyth, Diplomacy and Strategy, p. 61.
Convention