The Condor Legion goes into action

In November 1936 the Condor Legion arrived in Spain: a German air corps sent by Hitler to help General Francisco Franco. Formally it was made up of “volunteers”; in reality its men were Luftwaffe personnel who travelled in civilian clothes as tourists and in Spain wore uniforms without German insignia. It was commanded by General Hugo Sperrle. War chronologies often give 15 November 1936 as the day on which the Legion first went into action. The sources, however, do not point to any single such day. German airmen had been fighting in Spain since August, and the Legion as a whole took shape over the whole of November. What is certain is that in the middle of the month, in the most intense days of the battle for Madrid, its bombers and fighters were taking part in the fighting for the capital, and at the end of November they carried out their first large raid on the naval port of Cartagena.

From airlift to Legion

German aid began in July, when Hitler decided in Bayreuth to send Franco transport aircraft. In August and September Junkers Ju 52s with Lufthansa and Luftwaffe crews flew some fifteen thousand soldiers of the Army of Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar. With them came a small group of Heinkel He 51 fighters and several dozen instructors, who were meant to train Spaniards but soon began flying combat missions themselves. In August Junkers converted into bombers attacked the Republican battleship Jaime I. For the first few weeks German involvement was modest and concealed, and in August Germany, like Italy and the Soviet Union, signed up to the non-intervention agreement, which it had no intention of observing.

In the autumn the situation changed. In October Franco’s columns reached the outskirts of Madrid, and it seemed that the capital would soon fall. Meanwhile, tanks and aircraft arrived from the USSR to help the Republic: T-26 tanks, I-15 biplane fighters, which the Spaniards called “Chatos”, and I-16 monoplanes, the “Moscas”, with Soviet pilots. The first International Brigades reached Madrid. The Soviet machines proved faster and better armed than the obsolete Heinkels and Junkers, and German observers in Spain warned that without substantial reinforcements the Nationalists would lose control of the air.

At the end of October Hitler decided to send an entire air formation to Spain. The operation was prepared in Berlin by a special staff under General Helmuth Wilberg in Hermann Göring’s Air Ministry. At the beginning of November all the German units already operating in Spain and those newly sent were combined into a single corps. According to most accounts, it was Göring who gave it the name Condor Legion. Its commander was General Sperrle, an experienced First World War airman who had moved from the Reichswehr to the secretly created Luftwaffe; from January 1937 his chief of staff was Lieutenant Colonel Wolfram von Richthofen. Formally Sperrle was subordinate to Franco, but in practice he made his own decisions, and his orders came from Berlin. Franco had to agree that the Legion would be a separate unit under German command.

The first weeks

From 7 November ships carrying men and equipment sailed from Germany, while aircraft were flown out. Within a couple of weeks there were about 4,500 Germans in Spain, and by the end of the year some 6,000–7,000. The Legion consisted of bomber group K/88 with three squadrons of Junkers Ju 52s, fighter group J/88 with three squadrons of He 51s, a reconnaissance squadron with Heinkel He 70 aircraft, a seaplane squadron, several anti-aircraft batteries – including the famous 88 mm guns – and signals, technical services and a hospital. Later a training group with Panzer I tanks was added, commanded by Lieutenant Colonel Wilhelm von Thoma. The main bases were at Seville and later at Salamanca, Burgos and Vitoria.

The Legion’s entry into combat coincided with the decisive phase of the battle of Madrid. On 15 November General José Enrique Varela’s troops launched an assault across the Manzanares towards University City, and the next day they pushed a bridgehead across to the far bank, where fighting for every building went on for weeks. The German bombers, usually flying in threes, attacked Republican positions and the city itself. The inhabitants called the Junkers “the three widows”. Bombs fell on residential districts, hospitals and museums, and on 16 November, according to German and Spanish studies, they repeatedly hit the Telefónica building on the Gran Vía, the tallest building in the city. German officers openly said that they wanted to see how the civilian population would bear up under bombing and fire. The Legion’s airmen, however, suffered heavy losses in clashes with Soviet fighters. As early as 13 November the commander of the German fighter group that soon became part of the Legion was killed over Madrid.

Madrid did not fall, and the bombing only stiffened the will to resist. At the end of November Franco called off the frontal assault. On 23 November a German reconnaissance aircraft photographed the port of Cartagena, the main base of the Republican fleet, through which supplies from the USSR arrived. On the evening of 25 November Junkers bombed the port and the lower town for several hours, in several waves of ten aircraft each. No ships were sunk, but at least several dozen civilians were killed. Some historians regard this raid as the Legion’s first major bombing operation.

The Luftwaffe’s laboratory

Hitler refused to send Franco ground troops, preferring Spain to absorb Europe’s attention for as long as possible, and left the burden of the fighting on land to Mussolini. The Condor Legion, on the other hand, became a testing ground for the young Luftwaffe. From December 1936 prototypes of new aircraft arrived in Spain, and in the spring of 1937 the first production Messerschmitt Bf 109 fighters, Heinkel He 111 and Dornier Do 17 bombers, and later Junkers Ju 87 dive-bombers. Crews were rotated every few months so that as many men as possible would gain combat experience; in all about 19,000 Germans passed through the Legion. Among them were the future fighter aces Adolf Galland and Werner Mölders, who in Spain developed the loose fighter formation later adopted by air forces all over the world.

In Spain Richthofen learned how to coordinate air power with ground forces, and the Legion also bombed towns to break the population’s resistance. In the spring of 1937 its aircraft supported Emilio Mola’s offensive in the Basque Country and destroyed Guernica, which made the Legion a symbol of ruthless air warfare. It went on to fight at Brunete, Teruel and on the Ebro and played a major part in Franco’s victory. In June 1939 its men marched past Hitler in Berlin.

Significance

A few months later the same men and the same aircraft struck at Poland. In September 1939 Richthofen commanded the close-support air units which, among other things, bombed Wieluń, while Sperrle, as commander of Luftflotte 3, led his airmen over France and in the Battle of Britain. At the Nuremberg trial Göring admitted that he had sent airmen to Spain to test his young Luftwaffe in combat. Spain gave the Germans experience that no other air force in Europe had, but also misleading lessons: easy victories over a weak opponent confirmed the Luftwaffe command in its belief that it did not need heavy strategic bombers. For the Western democracies, the German intervention, carried out under cover of non-intervention, was further proof that Hitler broke his commitments and that they were not ready to stop him.