During the Phony War prior to May 1940 the Dutch were the recipients of some truly remarkable military intelligence that emanated from a senior source at the very heart of the German Army Intelligence service, the Abwehr. The source was Colonel Hans Oster, a senior officer in the Abwehr headquarters in Berlin and a lead member of the German ‘resistance’. He was a very close friend of Colonel Sas, the Dutch military attaché in Berlin and had provided precise details of Hitler’s plans to attack west. At 9.30 pm Berlin time on the 9th of May, 1940, Oster confirmed to Sas that the invasion of Holland and the rest of Western Europe would commence the next morning at 5.35 am, six hours after their discussion, at 3am on the 10th of May, the Dutch blew up the bridges on their border with Germany.
The Abwehr had access to an enormous volume of information, not all of it purely of a military nature; German Foreign office files were open to them too. Between November ’39 and May 1940, Oster passed copies of several key diplomatic documents over to the Dutch*. One of these documents was the top secret foreign office report of a meeting held between General Franco and Benito Mussolini on the 28th of November 1936 and the resulting treaty between the two dictators. In return for military aid to win the Spanish Civil War, Franco agreed that in the event of war between Italy and France, Spain would allow the Italians access to Spanish air bases from which to attack southern France. The Dutch passed this diplomatic bombshell on to France, where it confirmed French fears that they faced an actively hostile Germany in the north and a potentially hostile Italy and Spain in the south; France was surrounded.
Following the German attack events moved rapidly; Italy declared war on France on the 10th of June and Paris fell on the 14th of June. Two days before Paris fell, Franco announced that Spain, up until then a neutral power, would from then on consider itself a non-belligerent supporter of the Axis Powers. Spanish colonial troops marched into the previously open city of Tangiers in North Africa on the same day and Franco met with the German ambassador, Von Stohrer to descuss the future course of the war.
For the French government, now having fled to Bordeaux and uncomfortably close to the Spanish border, the message was clear; Spain was preparing to live up to its treaty obligations with Italy, soon Italian aircraft would be attacking the south-west from bases in Nationalist Spain. This posed an immediate threat to the one part of the country not already within range of the Luftwaffe, but also threatened the convoys French forces were being evacuated from Marseilles and Toulon to North Africa, from where it was hoped a national redoubt could be established to continue the war against the Axis. If these convoys were to have any hope the Italian plan needed to be nipped in the bud; the Spanish air bases had to be bombed before the Italians could start operating from them.
On the 16th of June forty Amiot 354 bombers from the French GB I/21 and II/21 bomber groups took off from bases in southern France. Their mission was to bomb a string of targets in Catalonia, Aragon and on the island of Majorca before flying on to North Africa. In militarily terms the raids were ineffective and inconsequential, the Armiots only carried a 1200 kg bombload and few of the French aircraft dropped their bombs anywhere near their assigned targets, many of the inexperienced aircrew were unable to locate their intended targets while several crews chose to drop their bombs in the Mediterranean Sea before flying to Algeria. Politicly, the consequences were enormous; bombs had fallen on the outskirts of the cities of Barcelona and Palma, destroying several buildings and killing a number of civilians. Two of the bombers, after dropping their bombs on an airbase in Catalonia to no effect, were promptly shot down by Spanish fighters, He-45s and Bf-109s, scrambled from the base they’d just bombed.
On the 17th of June newspapers across Spain and Portugal had banner headlines denouncing the French aggression and crowds filled the centre of Madrid and Franco addressed them from a balcony, promising ‘that Spanish blood would be payed for in French blood.’ That afternoon the French ambassador was summoned to the Caudillo’s palace where, with his foreign minister and brother-in-law Serrano Suner at his side, Franco read out a statement denouncing the French aggression and declaring that Nationalist Spain had no choice but to consider itself at war with the French Republic. For Franco it wasn’t a gamble; he’d already been informed by de Lequerica, the Spanish ambassador to Paris, that Petain had taken over as Premier of France and had immediately asked the Spaniard to contact Germany regarding an armistice. The Spanish barely had time to send a few planes to bomb French towns in the Pyrenees and fire a few artillery rounds over the border before the ceasefire came into effect; the Franco-Franco War, as wags in the West End would refer to it, hadn't lasted a week.
*Point of departure.
