Michael Alpert, Franco and the Condor Legion. The Spanish Civil War in the Air,
Bloomsbury, 2019.

Many aspects of the Spanish Civil War are still waiting to be researched and further
explored. This is amply reflected in recent military historiography on recruiting
mechanisms, the socio-cultural factors influencing the armies and the rearguard, the
rearguard itself, occupation policies or the ‘total’ war in Spain. Some more widely known
aspects, however, call for greater analysis. One of these is the war in the air, to which
Michael Alpert, one of the great experts on the military history of the Spanish conflict,
has dedicated his attention and his most recent book (2020, in Spanish).

Alpert’s work and his books on the ‘Azaña reform’ or the military and international
history of the Spanish Civil War are indisputable references, with their masterful
erudition, millimetric precision and irrefutable significance. For many historians, myself
included, his work on the Republican Army is the best available on the subject. While his
latest book on aerial warfare in Spain does not present new research from direct sources
or an especially innovative re-reading, it brilliantly opens up an incredibly timely topic
that was in dire need of revision from a trans-national conceptual perspective. All in all,
this could be the most complete and balanced synthesis you will find on the subject.

Alpert moves with ease in this terrain, though it implies methodological choices that
cannot always be shared. As the book deals with aerial warfare, the author sets out to
review every moment (which is easier said than done, as we will see) in which the ‘war
in the air’ was relevant in the context of the Spanish Civil War. The text covers everything
from Franco’s flight in the Dragon Rapide to the deaths of Sanjurjo and Mola in plane
crashes, to Italy sending planes to assist the uprising in Morocco, to aviation in the
Aragon and Catalonia campaigns and the Battle of the Ebro. Alpert is most at home with
a purely empirical deployment of information, which he uses as the basis for the
narrative architecture of his book. However, the book title points to a backdrop that can
be identified as interpretative by presenting the German Condor Legion as the central
element in the aerial war from decisive, technical and geostrategic points of view.

With utmost respect, I find I cannot agree with this choice of title. First, for all its
limitations and virtues, this is not a book about the Condor legion, but the aerial
dimension of the Spanish Civil War, which makes the choice of title incomprehensible.
Second and more importantly, this choice inevitably generates a bias that colours the
overall reading of the volume. No matter how much attention Alpert gives to the
participation of Soviet aviation, the meagre air capacity of nationals and republicans, or
to Italian intervention, the title underscores the centrality of Nazi Germany in an aerial
war where it in fact had to compete with Italy for prominence and relevance in combat.
Methodologically and interpretatively speaking, in my opinion the decision to call the
book Franco and the Condor Legion seems to substantially under-represent the
participation of their Italian allies/rivals in the conflict, among other things.

Admittedly, my own research and extensive work with Italian sources has informed my
views. If Alpert had spent more time there, he would have clearly seen how some of the
more frequently occurring interpretations in the extant literature – relating to aerial
support for the coup d’état, for example – should be placed in quarantine. The book
might be called Franco and the Condor Legion, but it was Mussolini, not Hitler, who sent
the planes that broke the tactical stalemate of July-August 1936, in a bid that clearly
exceeded the boundaries of limited risk for Italy. On several occasions, Alpert allows
himself to be carried along by some of the more prominent clichés of international
historiography concerning the Italian war in Spain, including his alleged rejection of
violence among Spaniards. If one looks beyond the diaries of Ciano or the declarations
of Ettore Muti, the future Secretary General of the Partito Nazionale Fascista, it is easy
to observe how the Italian command that was deployed in Spain did not question the
violence but its scope in strategic terms. Far from feeling sorry for the Spanish people
(as has so often been asserted) or criticizing the murders, they openly participated in it.
Muti prided himself on how they had completely devastated Madrid from the air in
1936. Meanwhile, Ciano boasted about the terror that the Aviazione Legionaria had
deployed on the civilian populations of Aragon, Catalonia and the Levant.

Alpert is not entirely responsible for this; much of it corresponds to Civil War narratives
from every quarter, antifascist to liberal to Christian democrat, which openly
underestimate and disregard Italian deployment in the Spanish conflict. I call it the
‘Guadalajara syndrome’: which has been used to mock them or to reduce expectations
by applying the cliché of valiant, good-natured Italians – brava gente, noi non sappiamo
odiare – who were lured over on the pretext of enjoying a little tourism (sexual tourism,
generally) in Spain. However, it is more responsible for those clichés causing omissions
that do not allow a better approach to the aerial performance of the different actors.
For example, he cites the bombing of Barcelona by General Giuseppe Valle in March
1938 but omits what Valle himself did on New Year’s Day 1938 to demonstrate that
Italian planes carrying a tonne of bombs could strike more than a thousand kilometres
away from Italy. It was in fact a technical experiment, or as Ciano would later call it, a
‘great lesson for the future’ (one that left dozens of children dead on the ground, if we
tell the whole story).

As a matter of fact, what one misses most in this book, on an interpretative plane, is a
treatment of Spain as the laboratory for total war. The Italians experimented with aerial
warfare and the Germans did too. In fact, Guernica is not the only township in Spain that
bears the historical scars of German air raids. The Condor Legion was responsible for the
bombing of the Levantine rearguard municipalities of Ares del Maestre, Benassal, Vilar
de Canes, and Albocàsser in May 1938. The unprotected civilians in those small towns
were massacred to test the dive-bombing reliability of German Stukas. None of those
places appear in Alpert’s book.

Some problems also arise concerning how the information is managed, which may be
linked to a desire for synthesis. Alpert’s dating is unfortunate, because he knows
perfectly well that though Franco was named supreme commander – Generalísimo – of
all the armed forces on 28 September, it became effective on 1 October 1936 (not 30
September). He also knows that the Basque Statute of Autonomy was approved on that
same 1 October (not 6 October). Certain issues, such as not including the Canary Islands
on the territorial map of Spain, may be attributable to editorial oversight. Others, such
as referring to the Basque city of Vitoria as ‘Navarrese’ or ‘the capital of Navarre’,
literally sear the reader´s retinas. Fortunately, most of the book is free from such errors,
which have been rectified in the Spanish edition. Though few, they were entirely
avoidable and overexpose the weaknesses of the book.

Stanley Payne presents this book as ‘the best one-volume account of the air war in Spain,
in English or Spanish’. This gives us an idea of the state of the literature concerning the
air war in Spain. The inexistence of comprehensive research, from new direct sources,
with brave hypotheses that allow us to nuance the fragmented state of the question on
this subject can undoubtedly be mitigated by Alpert’s book. It offers a good and
necessary synthesis to which interpretative texture can be added. This book seeks to
provide a comprehensive approach to the different aspects of air combat in the Spanish
Civil War and no one knows its potential and limitations better than the author. In my
opinion, however, the great history of the war in the air in Spain, one that incorporates
interpretation and original sources, has yet to be written.

Javier Rodrigo
Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona