The fierce maritime struggles of World War II saw much that was new to naval warfare. But many events in those titanic campaigns were prefigured in an earlier war.
The Spanish Civil War, which raged between Republicans and Nationalists from 1936 to 1939, had a significant naval component largely unsung in English-language histories of that conflict. Both sides relied on seaborne supplies to sustain their fighting forces; each side tried at one time or another to stop the ships bringing supplies to its opponent. These efforts in turn involved the major European navies as they sought to protect or disrupt trade with the Spanish ports. The maritime aspects of the war yielded a surprising number of firsts that most would associate with World War II. Here are some of them.
Enter the Graf Spee
The German pocket battleship Admiral Graf Spee had a short but spectacular career at the start of World War II. She ranged the seas for four months, preying on British merchant ships, before famously meeting her end off Montevideo harbor after the December 1939 Battle of the River Plate. Her captures had totaled nine—but these were not the first prizes she had ever taken.1 For her first prize, one must look to the Spanish Civil War.
The Republicans and Nationalists had been battling for six months when, in December 1936, a Basque auxiliary warship snapped up the German steamer Palos as she steamed for the Nationalist-controlled port of Pasajes, on the northeastern Spanish coast. While it had long been clear to the Republic that the Germans under Adolf Hitler were supporting its Nationalist opponents with arms and men, violent German protests forced the central Republican government to break off its early attempts to staunch this traffic. The Republic’s Basque allies were made of sterner stuff, however, and as the Palos steamed past the Basque stronghold of Bilbao, she made a target too tempting to ignore.
While the German ship carried no arms or “volunteers” destined for the Nationalist forces, her cargo of portable radio equipment, celluloid, and ship machinery looked to be military supplies. And so the Basques detained her. German outrage followed, with the head of the Kriegsmarine, Generaladmiral Erich Raeder, even considering direct action against Republican naval forces and the bombardment of Republican ports.2 The Basque government quickly released the steamer after German protests but retained the radios, celluloid, and machinery, as well as a Spanish passenger. Unsatisfied with this, the Germans decided to turn the screws by capturing Republican merchant ships.
The Graf Spee was in the Mediterranean at that time, showing the flag, protecting German citizens and interests, and aiding the Nationalists spying on Republican ports. She was therefore well placed to carry out new orders to capture Republican steamers. She took the steamer Aragon off the Republican port of Almería on 1 January 1937, marking the first capture of her career. This and another prize, taken off the northern Spanish coast on 4 January by the cruiser Königsberg, ultimately satisfied German honor and ended the Palos affair.3
Rocky Start for an Oft-Attacked Ship
The Graf Spee was not the only pocket battleship to experience a first during the Spanish Civil War. Her sister ship Deutschland would have a first of her own—although a much less propitious one. The Deutschland would have her name changed to Lützow in 1939 to avoid giving the Allies a propaganda victory by sinking “Germany.” It was well that she did because, while not sunk until a British air strike put her on the bottom of Swinemünde harbor in April 1945, she was much battered until then. Norwegian shore batteries hit her in April 1940, as did a torpedo from the British submarine Spearfish. The Royal Air Force took a turn in June 1941, hitting her with another torpedo. She damaged herself by running aground in July 1942, while the Royal Navy narrowly missed its chance to add to her woes during the January 1943 Battle of the Barents Sea. She compiled a dolorous record of damage throughout World War II—but that record had begun years earlier, in 1937.4
The Deutschland went to the Mediterranean to participate in nonintervention patrols, which the major European powers had undertaken to prevent foreign military aid from reaching either the Republicans or the Nationalists. The French and British navies cruised off Nationalist harbors while the Germans and Italians attended to Republican ports. None of the patrols succeeded in their avowed purpose, although German and Italian warships took the opportunity to keep their de facto Nationalist allies advised on the comings and goings from Republican harbors. The Deutschland’s posting became considerably livelier in late May 1937, when the Republican air force, which had previously focused almost entirely on the land war, devoted more resources to the maritime conflict. Republican Tupolev SB bombers attacked the harbor at Palma, in Mallorca, on 23 May, hitting the Nationalist cruiser Baleares and near-missing the Deutschland.
More attacks followed, with one hitting the Italian armed merchant cruiser Barletta and killing six of her crew. As Nationalist warships commonly used Palma as a base, the German ships assigned to the nonintervention patrol now sought refuge from the Republican attacks in Ibiza.
This proved a fateful choice on 29 May, when the Republicans mounted an operation against that port. Two destroyers bombarded the harbor while two SBs droned in for a level bombing attack. The Deutschland was anchored in the roadstead with the tanker Neptun when the bombers flew overhead and released their payloads. Two bombs hit the Deutschland. One torched her floatplane and damaged two of her guns; the other ignited severe fires in her crew spaces and workshops. The explosions and fires wounded 78 of her crew and killed 31. With the source of her damage at first unclear, she almost fired at the two Republican destroyers that had been bombarding the port.5
The Republicans exulted, thinking they had bombed the Nationalist cruiser Canarias. The furious German reaction quickly quenched their enthusiasm. Not content with protests or captures, Hitler first wanted to bombard the well-defended Republican naval base at Cartagena. Admiral Raeder ultimately convinced him to settle for a less well-defended target: the port of Almería. The old Republican battleship Jaime I had been moored at the port as a floating battery and would have been a suitable target for German guns, but air attacks had driven her back to Cartagena shortly before the bombardment operation was put in motion. The pocket battleship Admiral Scheer and the torpedo boats Albatross, Luchs, Leopard, and Seeadler appeared off Almería on the morning of 31 May and subjected it to a brisk and brutal bombardment—the first time Kriegsmarine guns had fired in earnest. They killed 20 and wounded 100. The Deutschland returned to Germany for repairs and her subsequent rugged career.6
Operation Ursula: Bring On the U-boats
Unlike the German army and air force, the Kriegsmarine usually forbore from taking an active role in the Spanish fighting. Usually, but not always, as the German reactions to the seizing of the Palos and the bombing of the Deutschland show. Operation Ursula provides another example of active intervention.
Despite the prohibitions of the Versailles Treaty, the Germans continued to stay abreast of submarine technology. These efforts, necessarily surreptitious at first, became open once the 1935 Anglo-German Naval Agreement tacitly removed the Versailles prohibition.7 But while German submarines had earned a fearsome reputation in World War I, the new boats, weapons, and submariners were untried. Why not use the Spanish Civil War as a proving ground, as the German army and air force were doing? And so Operation Ursula was born. Ursula provided for two submarines, U-33 and U-34, to slip into the Mediterranean and hunt Republican warships. The boats left Wilhelmshaven during the night of 20–21 November 1936 and began operations on the 30th.
Although specifically directed to attack the major warships of the Republican fleet, the boats struggled to strike any targets. The Republicans had become cautious in operating their major units since an Italian submarine had torpedoed the cruiser Miguel de Cervantes earlier in November, and the Republican destroyers that the two German U-boats did find proved to be elusive targets. By 11 December, both boats were headed home with no sinkings to show for their efforts. U-34 was on her way, cruising submerged off Málaga on the afternoon of 12 December, when her skipper, Kapitänleutnant Harald Grosse, spotted the surfaced Republican submarine C-3 through his periscope. Grosse already had attempted 11 attacks and launched three torpedoes, all without result. Now, although the target angle to C-3 was not ideal, frustration pushed him to try once more. He launched a single torpedo and, while he did not hear it detonate, his hydrophones did detect the characteristic breaking-up noises of a sinking vessel. And, in fact, C-3 had gone to the bottom, with only three of her crew surviving. The U-boat arm of the Kriegsmarine could claim its first kill.8
Republican submarines would have a difficult war, with five of the original 12 lost to various causes. The German boats would face a worse war, with U-33 lost in the Firth of Clyde in 1940 and U-34 sunk after being rammed by the tender Lech in 1943. Harald Grosse would perish in the North Sea in 1940 when in command of U-52, the victim of depth charges dropped by the British destroyer Gurkha.9
Antisubmarine Warfare’s Growing Pains
German submarines had posed an existential threat to Great Britain in the World War I. Means such as convoys managed to control the threat but did not eliminate it. Chief among the challenges of antisubmarine warfare was locating a submerged submarine. Underwater listening devices could at least alert ships to nearby subs, but they were awkward to use and did not locate the sub with any precision.
The Royal Navy began working on a superior system in 1916, one that projected sounds underwater and then located submarines based on the returning echoes. This the British dubbed ASDIC (sonar, to American readers). Rear Admiral Ernle Chatfield (later Admiral of the Fleet) heralded 1921 trials of the new device as an “epoch-making achievement.”10 In short, it seemed to be the answer to the submarine menace.
Not all in the Royal Navy believed ASDIC had sounded the death knell for submarines, but thinking tended in that direction as progressive improvements were made to the device. Hand in hand with this went a campaign to convince foreign powers of ASDIC’s potency while not revealing too much about its workings. This, the leaders of the Royal Navy hoped, would cramp other navies’ plans for undersea warfare while preserving Great Britain’s perceived advantage in the technology. The program had some effect, leading to a lively debate in some foreign navies over the continued viability of the submarine, although it also led Germany to develop new tactics as a means of preserving the effectiveness of its renewed undersea arm.11
So matters stood on the evening of 31 August 1937. The destroyer HMS Havock was on nonintervention patrol that night in the Balearic Sea when a lookout reported a torpedo passing astern. This had come from the Italian submarine Iride, cruising as part of a massive Italian effort to interdict a large shipment of military aid believed to be coming to the Republic from Russian Black Sea ports. The Havock’s captain could have made a quick counterattack “by eye,” as the destroyer’s lookouts had spotted the Iride when she briefly and unintentionally broached after the attack, but the Havock had only a few depth charges ready for use. Rather than attacking immediately, her skipper followed doctrine by conducting a methodical ASDIC search while readying more weapons. He believed his ASDIC had reacquired the Iride early the following morning and conducted “a deliberate attack with a full pattern of depth charges.”12
This had no effect. The Havock was then joined in the hunt by her sister ships Hotspur and Hereward and later by the Hardy and Hyperion. None had any success until shortly after noon on 1 September, when the Hardy reported a possible contact. Rear Admiral James Somerville, who had arrived to command the operation, ordered the destroyer to drop a single depth charge. This again was fruitless, and the hunt then ended after a signal from the Admiralty expressed concern that, given the more than 14 hours that had passed since the sighting of the torpedo, there was no guarantee that the latest contact was the culpable submarine.13
The first combat use of ASDIC had proved disappointing, and the Royal Navy would have to wait until 1940 to sink the Iride, when Swordfish torpedo bombers caught her off Tobruk.
The lack of results seemed to undercut the efficacy of ASDIC, but this first use in combat conditions did not kindle a British reexamination of the device’s effectiveness. As to the impression left on Italy’s Regia Marina, the British quickly mounted a propaganda campaign. Admiral Somerville first arrived at Palma on 4 September, where he met with Contrammiraglio Alberto Marenco di Moriondo, commander of the Italian naval forces in Spain. Marenco reported that, according to Somerville, the Havock could have sunk the attacking submarine but had no orders to do so. The British admiral went on to state that the submarine had been easily tracked by hydrophone.
Commander Denis Boyd, leader of the Havock’s destroyer flotilla, was next to arrive, 12 days later. He also assured Marenco that his force had maintained contact with the offending submersible for ten hours. When Marenco expressed doubt that hydrophones could be effective in a search at high speeds with ships close to each other, Boyd assured him that his ships could search effectively at 20 knots, using not hydrophones but “other types of devices.” Suitably impressed, Marenco recommended that this undersea search capability be further investigated as a matter of “great interest.”14 The British campaign to tout ASDIC remained intact.
Things to Come—and Lessons Unlearned
These firsts were not the only ones the Spanish Civil War would see. The Iride’s attack on the Havock was the first attack by an Italian submarine on a British warship, although in that case it was almost certainly a matter of mistaken identity. The operations of the Italian fleet in World War I had been largely confined to the Adriatic Sea, with some antisubmarine operations off the Italian west coast and in the Gulf of Sirte, but Regia Marina support for the Nationalists would reach from Spain’s southern Atlantic coast to the approaches to the Dardanelles, testing that navy as never before.
The Republicans and Nationalists would provide another first when, in March 1938, Republican destroyer torpedoes sank the Nationalist cruiser Baleares. The Baleares was an interwar “treaty cruiser,” designed and built to the requirements prompted by the Washington Naval Conference of 1920–21, and was the first of her type to be sunk by enemy action.15 More than 30 treaty cruisers would follow her to the bottom, but only after a two-year pause.
There were lessons to be learned from the Spanish Civil War’s naval firsts, but they mostly went unheeded. The hunt for the Iride did not blunt British faith in ASDIC.16 While the torpedo that hit C-3 either failed to detonate or exploded with a low order of detonation, German torpedo defects persisted into World War II. The bombing of the Deutschland did spark some discussion about aircraft attacking ships. But her being at anchor with her antiaircraft guns unready stifled debate about the vulnerability of armored ships to bombers.
Like armies and air forces, navies tended to learn their lessons best in the worst of times, when confronted directly and repeatedly with the realities of combat.
1. Stephen Roskill, The War at Sea, 1939–1945, vol. 1, The Defensive (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1954), 114–21.
2. Stephen Tanner, “German Naval Intervention in the Spanish Civil War as Reflected by the German Records, 1936–1939” (PhD diss., American University, 1976), 94.
3. Ricardo Cerezo, Armada Española Siglo XX, vol. 3, La Guerra Civil in la Mar (1.a parte) (Ediciones Poniente, 1983), 185; Francisco González Barredo, “La Aventura del Marta Junquera: Una Accion Singular de la Kriegsmarine en la Guerra Civil,” Revista de Historia Naval 6, no. 21 (1988): 98–105; and Fernando Moreno de Alborán y de Reyna and Salvador Moreno de Alborán y de Reyna, La Guerra Silenciosa y Silenciada: Historia de la Campaña Naval durante la Guerra de 1936–39, vol. 2 (Madrid: Gráficas Lormo, 1998), 992–96.
4. M. J. Whitley, Battleships of World War Two: An International Encyclopedia (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1998), 68–69.
5. Cerezo, 4:79–80; J. Llabres, trans., “El Bombardeo del Acorazado Aleman ‘Deutschland’, en Ibiza,” in Revista General de Marina 183, (July 1972): 57–58; Moreno and Moreno, La Guerra Silenciosa, 3:1671–72, 1704–10.
6. Cerezo, Armada Española, 4:81; Moreno and Moreno, La Guerra Silenciosa, 3:1710–11.
7. Eberhard Rössler, “U-boat Development and Planning,” in Stephen Howarth and Derek Law, eds., The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–1945: The 50th Anniversary International Naval Conference (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1994), 118–123.
8. Angel Díaz de Río y Jáudenes, “El Hundimento del Submarino C-3,” in Revista General de Marina 237 (August–September 1999): 345–56; Moreno and Moreno, La Guerra Silenciosa, 2:898–901; Tanner, “German Naval Intervention,” 226–27.
9. José Alcofar Nassaes, Las Fuerzas Navales en la Guerra Civil Española (Barcelona: Dopesa, 1971), 35–38; Díaz, “El Hundimento,” 351; and Eberhard Möller and Werner Brack, The Encyclopedia of U-Boats: From 1904 to the Present, trans. Andrea Battson and Roger Chesneau (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2004), 69.
10. Stephen Roskill, Naval Policy Between the Wars, vol. 1, The Period of Anglo-American Antagonism (Barnsley, UK: Seaforth, 2016), 346.
11. David Henry, “British Submarine Policy, 1918–1939,” in Bryan Ranft, ed., Technical Change and British Naval Policy, 1860–1939 (Sevenoaks, UK: Hodder and Stoughton Educational, 1977), 82–83, 107; Holger Herwig, “The Submarine Problem,” in Williamson Murray and Allan Millett, eds., Military Innovation in the Interwar Period (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 238–39, 245–47.
12. Peter Gretton, “The Forgotten Factor: A British View of the Effect of Sea Power on the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939,” (manuscript, Folder 4, GTN 14-5-11, Greenwich Maritime Museum), 194.
13. Gretton, “The Forgotten Factor,” 193–94.
14. Franco Bargoni, La Participación Naval Italiana en la Guerra Civil Española (1936–1939), trans. José Viega García (Madrid: Instituto de Historia y Cultura Naval, 1995), 359–60.
15. John Jordan, Warships After Washington: The Development of Five Major Fleets, 1922–1930 (Annapolis. MD: Naval Institute Press, 2011), 108–152; Moreno and Moreno, La Guerra Silenciosa, 3:2199–200.
16. Herwig, “The Submarine Problem,” 246.