Spain breaks off relations with Japan

In April 1945 the government of General Francisco Franco broke off diplomatic relations with the Empire of Japan. War chronologies record the date as 11 April; according to Spanish and Japanese accounts of relations between the two countries, and to the historian Florentino Rodao, who has studied the relations between Francoist Spain and Japan most closely, the break was announced in Madrid on 12 April 1945. The official reason was the crimes committed by Japanese soldiers and sailors against Spanish citizens during the fighting for Manila – among them the burning of the Spanish consulate together with the people who had sought shelter inside.

The decision was a belated, cautious and calculated gesture. Spain did not declare war on Japan, although it had considered doing so for several weeks. The main aim was to show the victorious powers, a few weeks before the end of the war in Europe, that a regime which had openly sympathised with the Axis in 1940–1943 was capable of taking the Allied side. That aim was not achieved.

Franco’s Spain and the Axis

Japan and Nationalist Spain drew closer during the Spanish Civil War. On 1 December 1937 Tokyo recognised Franco’s government, and a day later Franco recognised Manchukuo – the puppet state created by the Japanese in north-eastern China. In 1939 Spain joined the Anti-Comintern Pact, which linked Germany, Japan and Italy.

When war broke out in Europe, Franco declared neutrality, and in June 1940, after the fall of France, he changed it to “non-belligerence” – a formula signalling open sympathy for the Axis without taking part in the fighting. That autumn he met Hitler at Hendaye to discuss Spain’s entry into the war, but no agreement was reached. From the summer of 1941 the Spanish Blue Division fought on the Eastern Front, while Madrid explained that it was neutral in the war between the Axis and the Western powers, but not in the struggle against Communism. Until September 1942 the spokesman for this policy was Franco’s brother-in-law, the Foreign Minister Ramón Serrano Suñer.

Spain also performed an important function for Japan during the war: Tokyo chose it as its protecting power, representing Japanese interests in the United States and in the Latin American republics that had broken off relations with Japan after the attack on Pearl Harbor. Spanish diplomats looked after Japanese property, passed on correspondence and visited interned Japanese nationals. Historians, Rodao among them, also describe contacts between Spanish agents and Japanese intelligence, to which they passed information from the United States; the scale and value of this activity remain disputed.

Back to neutrality

From 1943, as the tide of war turned in the Allies’ favour, Madrid gradually changed course. Serrano Suñer’s successor, General Francisco Gómez-Jordana, restored the formula of strict neutrality on 1 October 1943, and that autumn Franco withdrew the Blue Division from the front; the volunteer Blue Legion was recalled in the spring of 1944.

Relations with Japan put this turn to the test as early as October 1943. When the Japanese proclaimed a formally independent Republic of the Philippines under President José P. Laurel, a telegram of congratulations was sent from Madrid to Manila. Washington protested, and the Spanish Foreign Ministry blamed a clerical error; the episode went down in history as the “Laurel incident”.

The Allies put increasingly heavy economic pressure on Spain. In January 1944 the United States halted oil deliveries in order to force Madrid to curb its exports to Germany of tungsten (wolfram) – a raw material essential for armour-piercing shells and tool steel. An agreement of 2 May 1944 drastically reduced these deliveries. In August 1944, after Jordana’s death, the Foreign Ministry passed to José Félix de Lequerica, previously ambassador to the Vichy government, whose task was to bring Spain closer to the Allies, above all to the United States.

Spaniards in Manila

In 1941 the Philippines, a Spanish colony for more than three centuries, had a Spanish community several thousand strong – according to Rodao, about 2,000 people with Spanish citizenship, not counting the far more numerous Filipinos of Spanish descent. It was concentrated in Manila, especially in the districts of Ermita and Malate and in the old walled city of Intramuros, home to the monasteries and colleges of the Spanish religious orders. Under the Japanese occupation the citizens of a neutral state, and one moreover linked to the Axis, were not interned like Americans or Britons. Many of them did not leave the city when the Americans approached in February 1945, counting on the Spanish flag to protect them.

Those hopes proved vain. When American troops entered Manila on 3 February 1945, some 16,000–17,000 Japanese sailors and soldiers under Rear Admiral Sanji Iwabuchi resolved to defend the city to the end. During a month of fighting they committed a series of mass crimes against the civilian population, known as the Manila massacre. Spaniards died like the city’s other inhabitants, and in some places they made up the majority of the victims. According to Rodao’s findings, on 12 February 26 of the roughly 40 people sheltering in the house of the businessman Carlos Pérez Rubio were killed, and on 17 February 35 people, including nine children, were killed in the house of the physician Emilio de Moreta.

The most widely described crime was the attack on the Spanish consulate on Colorado Street on 12 February. Several dozen people – Spaniards and Filipinos – had taken refuge in the building, convinced that the soldiers would respect the extraterritoriality of the mission of a state friendly to Japan. The first to die was a young guard who went out to meet the attackers to tell them that this was Spanish territory. The building was set on fire and the people inside were murdered, most of them with bayonets. According to Rodao, between 60 and 70 people were killed, 16 of them Spaniards; only a seven-year-old girl survived. On 18 February in Intramuros the Japanese led about a hundred men – Spaniards and mestizos, including members of religious orders – out of the buildings of the old university and slaughtered them in air-raid shelters with grenades and machine-gun fire; one missionary survived.

When the fighting in Manila ended on 3 March 1945, the city lay in ruins, and according to the most frequently cited estimates some 100,000 of its inhabitants had been killed. Rodao established that 238 Spanish citizens were killed, including about 50 clergy, and about 250 were wounded; several hundred more soon left for Spain for good.

From protest to rupture

News of the crimes reached Madrid in the second half of February. A regime that until recently had suppressed all criticism of Japan in the press suddenly relaxed its censorship: newspapers wrote of “Japanese barbarity”, the NO-DO newsreel showed harrowing footage from Manila, and Spanish correspondents in Washington stressed that Spaniards had died at the hands of the same enemy as Americans. Rodao observes that the deaths of their compatriots in Manila became Francoist diplomacy’s best argument that Spain had “always at heart” been on the Allied side – an argument all the more needed because Madrid feared that, once Germany was defeated, the regime would be left without allies or defenders.

On 17 March 1945 the Spanish government gave up representing Japanese interests abroad. Lequerica gave Allied diplomats to understand that Spain might go further; according to British reports, he told a military attaché that “it looks as if we shall declare war on Japan”. The foreign press speculated that Madrid hoped in this way to buy its way into the United Nations before the San Francisco Conference, convened for 25 April. The Allies showed no enthusiasm. On 11 April the British Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, asked whether Britain would discourage Spain from declaring war merely to win the Allies’ favour, replied that the decision was Spain’s and would not change London’s attitude to the Franco regime. The American ambassador in Madrid, Norman Armour, gave Lequerica to understand that Washington did not want Spain to take part in the war.

Madrid therefore confined itself to breaking off diplomatic relations, announced on 12 April 1945. In Tokyo the new government of Admiral Kantarō Suzuki had been in office for a few days and was grappling with the American invasion of Okinawa and the air raids on Japanese cities; the Spanish decision had no practical significance for it. That same day President Franklin Delano Roosevelt died at Warm Springs, and the news from Madrid was lost in the world’s press amid the flood of reports on his death and the swearing-in of Harry Truman.

Why the gesture did not help

The break with Japan did not change the Allies’ view of the Franco regime. For Washington and London, Spain remained a state that owed its victory in the Civil War to the help of Hitler and Mussolini, had sent a division of volunteers to the Eastern Front and had for years supplied Germany with raw materials. In a letter to Ambassador Armour of 10 March 1945 – published a few months later – Roosevelt wrote that there was no place among the United Nations for a government founded on fascist principles. His successor shared this view. Moscow, which had not forgotten the Blue Division, was even more implacable towards Franco.

For Japan, with four months of war left, Spain’s decision was one of many signs of its isolation. In the spring of 1945 almost all the states that had previously stayed neutral or manoeuvred between the warring sides came out against the Axis: in February and March Turkey, Egypt, the countries of Latin America and the states of the Middle East declared war on Germany, and often on Japan as well, and at the end of March Argentina followed. Spain never brought itself to declare war.

Place in the war

The break with Japan closed the wartime path of Francoist Spain – from “non-belligerence” and volunteers fighting alongside the Wehrmacht to ostentatious gestures towards the victors. Madrid’s calculation did not pay off. On 19 June 1945 the San Francisco Conference adopted, on Mexico’s initiative, the principle that states whose regimes had come to power with the help of the Axis powers could not belong to the United Nations Organisation – a provision aimed at Spain. On 2 August, in the communiqué of the Potsdam Conference, Truman, Stalin and Attlee declared that they would not support a Spanish application for membership. In December 1946 the General Assembly of the United Nations recommended that member states withdraw their ambassadors from Madrid.

The isolation, however, was short-lived. The Cold War turned Franco’s anti-Communist regime into a desirable partner for the United States: in 1953 the Pact of Madrid opened Spain to American military bases, and in 1955 the country was admitted to the UN. Diplomatic relations with Japan were restored in 1952, when Japan regained its sovereignty after years of American occupation. The crimes committed against Spaniards in Manila, briefly exploited by Francoist propaganda, later fell into oblivion; it was only at the end of the twentieth century that historians brought their victims back to memory.