An uprising that was supposed to end in a few days turned Spain into a war that would soon swallow the entire continent
Afterward, Europe liked to imagine that the Spanish catastrophe was born from grand words: fascism, communism, republic, revolution. That’s not inaccurate, but it’s tidy to the point of being misleading. On July 17, 1936, the war did not begin in the Madrid parliament, in Barcelona’s union halls, or in some smoke-filled European cabinet. It began in Spanish Morocco, in colonial garrisons, in the very place where the metropole had for decades kept violence far enough away that it didn’t have to look at it as its own. It was a European war with an African fuse.
That’s not merely a geographical curiosity. We often remember the Spanish Civil War as a dress rehearsal for the Second World War, with German planes over Guernica, Italian troops, Soviet advisers, and idealistic foreigners who came to die for someone else’s — though morally recognizable — cause (quite a few of them from Yugoslavia too). But before the war became a grand European metaphor, it was the revolt of an army accustomed to settling politics with orders.
So as not to lose ourselves in the details that follow, it’s first necessary to give a somewhat broader context of the situation in which this drama unfolded. The Spanish Civil War was not a simple conflict between leftists and fascists, though over time it would take on exactly that kind of international meaning. On the republican side stood defenders of the existing state — socialists, communists, anarchists, labor unions, and advocates of Catalan and Basque autonomy. There was no unity among them — some wanted to preserve parliamentary democracy, others wanted to carry out a deep social revolution, and still others, of course, wanted to win greater autonomy for their regions.
Against them formed an equally diverse right-wing bloc, made up of conservative generals, monarchists, Falangists (Spain’s fascist party), Catholic traditionalists, large landowners, and a significant part of the church hierarchy. The name “Nationalists,” under which the rebels would present themselves, concealed the fact that they too had no shared vision of the future — what united them, above all, was the conviction that the social order was collapsing and could no longer be saved by elections. Between these two camps lay a country marked by poverty, uneven land distribution, violent strikes, political assassinations, and deep hatred toward one’s opponents. In short — the war did not break out between two clearly defined Spains. It merely created them, forcing millions of people to take sides in a conflict where neutrality soon ceased to be a safe place.
The Spanish Second Republic, proclaimed in 1931 after the departure of King Alfonso XIII, tried to modernize a country that had lived far too long as a compromise between the altar, the barracks, and the great estate. The reforms cut into the army, the church, education, and land. The left considered them overdue, the right considered them revolutionary, and a large part of the officer corps took them as a personal insult. After the victory of the Popular Front in the elections of February 1936, the conspiracy no longer seemed like the fantasy of nostalgic generals. It became a plan.
That “conspiracy” was not just vague discontent in the barracks. For months a secret network had been forming among officers, linking military garrisons, monarchist circles, Falangists, and other opponents of the Republic. The plan was to simultaneously raise a revolt in key cities, seize state institutions, arrest political opponents, and force the government into capitulation before it could organize resistance. The conspirators — and this is important to understand — did not intend to start a civil war. They expected a short, decisive strike that would once again make the army the supreme arbiter of Spanish politics.
It’s important here not to begin the story with Franco as though he were already, from day one, the inevitable Caudillo. Francisco Franco, the Spanish general who made his name in the Moroccan wars and in crushing the Asturias uprising of 1934, was in the summer of 1936 still a cautious participant in the conspiracy, stationed in the Canary Islands. The chief organizer was Emilio Mola, a Spanish general and cold technician of the coup, while the symbolic leader was meant to be José Sanjurjo, a general in exile.
Franco would not arrive in Morocco until July 19, aboard a Dragon Rapide plane chartered as part of the conspiratorial operation, organized with the help of monarchist circles and the banker Juan March. Sanjurjo died in a plane crash the following day. History, as we so often say, sometimes has a sense of irony, but rarely a sense of taste.
The general who was thrown out of history by his own luggage
José Sanjurjo was supposed to be the face of the victorious uprising. An experienced Spanish general, a monarchist, and a veteran of an earlier failed coup against the Republic, he was living in exile in Portugal, waiting for the moment of his return. While Emilio Mola organized the conspiracy, Sanjurjo, because of his rank and reputation, was intended for the role of supreme leader. On July 20, 1936, only three days after the revolt began in Morocco, he was supposed to fly from the area around Cascais toward territory already held by the rebels. He never arrived.
He was picked up by Juan Antonio Ansaldo, a Spanish monarchist and well-known pilot, in a small single-engine De Havilland DH.80 Puss Moth aircraft. The runway was short, the tanks full of fuel, and at its end stood trees. An additional problem was Sanjurjo’s heavy luggage. According to Ansaldo’s later testimony, the general insisted on bringing his ceremonial uniforms and decorations, since he did not intend to return to Spain as an ordinary passenger, but as the future victor. The precise statements may have been embellished in later retellings, but the plane’s being overloaded is considered an important factor in the crash.
The aircraft failed to gain enough altitude after takeoff. It clipped the treetops, crashed, and caught fire. Ansaldo, though injured, survived. Sanjurjo did not. The man who expected a triumphant return to the country from which he had been exiled died moments after takeoff, together with the uniforms meant for the victory ceremony. History thus acquired an almost perfect anecdote about vanity — a general who wanted to look like a ruler before he had won power, and who, because of the weight of his own future image, was left without a future.
His death did not immediately make Franco the sole leader of the uprising. Emilio Mola still carried enormous weight, and there was not yet full agreement among the generals about what kind of authority should emerge after victory. Still, with the disappearance of the man who was meant to stand above them, one of the greatest obstacles to Franco’s rise was removed. When Mola himself died in a plane crash the following year, Franco no longer had a serious rival within the rebel leadership. Dictatorships are sometimes built through political skill, terror, and military force. Franco’s, on top of all that, was helped by aviation statistics that proved exceptionally favorable to him regarding his rivals.
In the Spanish protectorate was stationed the Army of Africa, Ejército de África, the most experienced and most dangerous part of the Spanish armed forces. Its core consisted of the Spanish Foreign Legion and the Regulares, Moroccan units under Spanish command. These were units shaped in the wars in the Rif, in a brutal colonial experience in which the enemy was not viewed as a political opponent, but as an obstacle to be crushed. Historians Sebastian Balfour and Pablo La Porte describe the “Africanist” culture of these officers as authoritarian and steeped in a right-wing myth of patriotism. In other words, part of the Spanish army in Africa already possessed the ideological and psychological apparatus for civil war before the civil war even had a name.
Why did Moroccans fight for Franco?
At first glance, this is one of the greatest paradoxes of the Spanish Civil War. Why would inhabitants of a colony die for a Spanish general who represented precisely the power that ruled their country as a protectorate? The answer is far less ideological than the photographs of Moroccan soldiers entering Spanish towns under rebel flags might suggest. Most of them did not fight because they had embraced Falangism or Franco’s vision of a Catholic Spain. They fought because the colonial order had turned military service into one of the few opportunities for a regular wage.
Northern Morocco was an impoverished area where the Spanish authorities had for decades recruited men into the Regulares units. A soldier received food, pay, and the chance to send something back to his family, which was hard to refuse in times of scarcity. Many already had war experience, and service in the colonial army also carried a certain social status. It is estimated that around 80,000 Moroccans served on Franco’s side during the war. Still, it would be wrong to simply call them fascists in Moroccan uniforms. They were colonial subjects whose choices were shaped by a poverty that the very same colonial power had previously produced.
The rebels, naturally, knew how to dress up this economic relationship with propaganda. Franco presented himself as a protector of Islam, courted local dignitaries, and spoke of a historic brotherhood between Spaniards and Arabs against “godless communism.” Some Moroccan nationalists cooperated with him in hopes of political concessions, perhaps even future independence. The Republic, meanwhile, missed its chance. Certain leftists proposed recognizing Spanish Morocco’s right to independence, thereby stripping the rebels of their most important base. But the Republican government did not do this, partly because it did not want to provoke France, which controlled most of Morocco.
Moroccan units took part in brutal campaigns and committed real atrocities, but Republican propaganda often went further than condemning specific crimes. It reverted to old Spanish images of “Moors” as savage, sexually dangerous conquerors returning once again from Africa. In this way, part of the anti-fascist camp also spoke the language of colonial racism. The Moroccan soldier was portrayed as a monster, which was politically simpler than admitting that he had been brought to Spain by a combination of poverty, colonial policy, and Europe’s refusal to take the question of Moroccan freedom seriously.
The conspirators’ plan was for a swift coup d’état, a classic pronunciamiento, after which the country would wake up to a fait accompli. But the coup, one might say, succeeded too much to fail, and failed too much to succeed. The uprising spread from Morocco to mainland Spain, but Madrid, Barcelona, and other centers did not fall. In some cities the revolt was stopped by loyal officers, workers’ militias, and political organizations that understood that what was being defended was no longer just the government, but the very possibility of deciding on power by means other than the gun. Thus an attempt at a quick coup produced a long war.
The rebels’ biggest problem was the strait. The elite troops were in Morocco, while the war had to be won in the metropole. The Republican navy initially made it difficult for them to cross the Strait of Gibraltar, so Franco and his allies needed outside help. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy soon provided the airlift that carried members of the Army of Africa toward Andalusia. Already contained within this was the whole logic of the war to come—the European fascist powers officially spoke of non-intervention, while in practice they tested aircraft, tactics, and the limits of other people’s suffering.
Operation Magic Fire: The Airlift That Saved the Uprising
In the first days of the war, Franco had the best soldiers at his disposal but could not get them to where he needed them. The Army of Africa, as mentioned, was in Morocco, separated from mainland Spain by the Strait of Gibraltar. Most of the naval crews remained loyal to the Republic and blocked the rebels’ sea route to Andalusia. The coup thus found itself facing an almost absurd problem—its strongest weapon was trapped on the wrong continent.
Franco therefore turned to Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini. Hitler approved the request on the night of July 25–26, after which the German intervention was given the code name Feuerzauber, or “Magic Fire.” The name was borrowed from Wagner’s world, lending the operation an almost mythic air, even though its actual purpose was thoroughly practical. German Junkers Ju 52 transport planes, together with Italian Savoia-Marchetti SM.81 aircraft, were to ferry the legionnaires and the Moroccan Regulares units across the sea that the rebels could not safely cross by ship.
The operation was initially concealed behind an almost comically transparent facade. German aircraft flew without national markings, pilots traveled in civilian clothes, and a supposedly commercial transport company, HISMA, was even established. German soldiers were instructed, in case of capture, to pose as tourists! Europe thus got one of the first examples of a pattern that would become common in the following decades—a foreign military intervention large enough to change the course of a war, yet officially it did not exist at all.
Over the following weeks, tens of thousands of people were ferried across the strait, along with weapons and equipment. Estimates of the total number of soldiers transported vary, but the operation is considered the first major military airlift in history. It did not win the war by itself, but at the most critical moment it allowed the rebels to bring their most experienced units into Andalusia and continue their advance northward. Without this help, the coup might have remained divided between the African colony and disconnected rebel strongholds in Spain.
Operation “Magic Fire” marked the moment when Hitler and Mussolini helped turn a failed coup into a long civil war. The aircraft that carried Franco’s soldiers from Morocco were not just transporting people. Across the Strait of Gibraltar, they also carried over a European conflict that would soon spill beyond Spain’s borders.
That is why July 17, 1936, is not merely the date the Spanish Civil War began. It is the moment when a colonial method came home. What a European state had previously done at the edge of its empire, it now began doing to itself. Spain became a battleground of ideologies, but also the battleground of an older continuity: the habit of exporting violence first, and then forgetting who produced it.
The war would last nearly three years. It would be the bloodiest conflict in Western Europe since the First World War, with mass atrocities, reprisals, and columns of refugees that heralded a new European century of the displaced. In 1939, around half a million Spanish Republicans would flee to France, where many would end up in camps, and some later in Nazi concentration camps. Europe, of course, claimed to be surprised. The history of July 17 tells something less comfortable: the fire had been burning at the edge all along, it just long pretended not to illuminate the center. If this sounds somewhat uncomfortably familiar, you’re not wrong. Fires are burning again, but this time in the east. We can only hope that the dynamics of history do not repeat themselves literally.
The Allies defeated Nazism and Fascism—why didn’t they come for Franco?
When the Second World War ended in 1945, Francisco Franco looked like a man who had survived on the wrong side of history. Hitler was dead, Mussolini shot, and Nazi leaders were awaiting trial in Nuremberg. Franco’s regime had come into being with decisive help from Germany and Italy, had adopted much of their political aesthetic, and for years had openly sympathized with the Axis powers. The Spanish Blue Division had even fought alongside the German army against the Soviet Union. And yet, Allied tanks never rolled toward Madrid and its clerico-fascist regime. Why?
The first reason was uncomfortably simple—Spain formally never entered the war. Franco helped Hitler through intelligence, economic support, and by sending volunteers to the Eastern Front, but he carefully avoided declaring war on Britain and the United States. The country was exhausted after the civil war, dependent on food and fuel imports, and incapable of enduring another major conflict. Franco cheered ideologically for the Axis, but he was not prepared to sink his own regime along with it. Once it became clear Germany was losing, he again emphasized Spanish neutrality and began presenting his regime less as fascist and more as Catholic and anti-communist (the latter, naturally, immediately appealed to certain actors in London and Washington).
The Allies did try to isolate him after the war. Franco’s Spain was not invited among the founding members of the United Nations, and in 1946 the UN General Assembly recommended that member states withdraw their ambassadors from Madrid. The regime remained outside the major European reconstruction programs and for several years acted as a political outcast. But condemnation is not the same as invasion. Overthrowing Franco would have required opening a new war, occupying a large country, and taking responsibility for whatever followed. After six years of global bloodshed, few Western governments wanted another campaign, especially one that risked reopening the Spanish Civil War.
British Prime Minister Winston Churchill did not hide his distaste for Franco, but he opposed severing diplomatic relations. He believed that outside pressure might rally Spaniards around the regime and endanger British strategic interests. Behind such caution lay an older fear among Western elites—that Franco’s fall could open space for a powerful revolutionary left. A democratic restoration of Spain sounded desirable, but not if communists might shape its outcome. Already at that point it was becoming clear that the anti-fascist alliance was falling apart, and that yesterday’s partner, the Soviet Union, would soon become the main adversary.
The Cold War ultimately saved Franco from international isolation. Spain occupied an important position between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, close to Gibraltar and North Africa. The United States needed military bases, and Franco could offer them territory and reliable anti-communism. Under the 1953 Madrid Pacts, Washington gained the right to use Spanish military facilities, while the regime in return received economic and military aid. Two years later, Spain was admitted to the United Nations.
Franco survived because he stayed out of the war long enough, and then quickly enough found a place in the next one—the Cold War. His most important postwar virtue was not democratic credentials, repentance, or innocence—he had none of that. It was the simple fact that he was an anti-communist sitting on a very useful piece of land.
About the Author
Mario Hoffmann is an independent analyst and writer covering global economics, geopolitics, and international affairs. With a background in history and politics, he writes for EconoPuls to provide in-depth context on the stories shaping our world.
