In times of peace there is, as every soldier and sailor knows with regret, a tendency of democracies to neglect the fortresses and bastions which are essential to their own security. This neglect is partly due to enervating influences which frequently afflict armed forces during long periods without operational activity, and in that respect it must be guarded against within the services themselves; but it is due much more to a decline of interest on the part of the general public. Hence there come economy cuts and peacetime “strategic withdrawals” from places whose value in war is without price. Anti-imperialist sentiment, isolationism and similar emotions add potent force to the tendency to withdrawal and retraction. Furthermore, the whole process is often rationalised by arm-chair strategists who say in effect, “Such and such a place is no use any way. It would fall at the first puff of wind.”
Gibraltar is a case in point. During the last war it was the key to Anglo-American victory without which allied strategy would have had to be very different. Yet in the decades between the two world wars its value had been doubted by many who vociferously argued that it had had its day. And in the days to come there will no doubt be many who will argue with equal force that because a well-placed atomic bomb would probably destroy its effectiveness, its retention is not worth while.
The lesson of history, not merely of the recent war but over the course of centuries, is that the Rock has frequently been declared useless and has even been, on occasions, neglected by its owners, but that when war has come its possession has proved invaluable. Those wise-acres who would abandon strong points the world over in face of the atomic threat should reflect on both the recent and more remote past of this great fortress.
The British attacked Gibraltar in 1704 as an afterthought because two other objectives, Toulon and Barcelona, were unattainable. They captured it without a struggle because the Spaniards had neglected to garrison it adequately. They retained it at Utrecht in 1713, not because of its military value, but because they hoped to pry open the closed doors of Spanish trade.
Several times during the eighteenth century British leaders proposed to return the Rock to Spain; but public opinion, stirred by the romance of the fortress, demurred. In the wars at the close of the century British instinct was justified because Gibraltar withstood tremendous sieges and proved an invaluable Mediterranean base for Nelson’s campaigns.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century new long range artillery cast doubt on its future because the new dockyard, built to accommodate the larger ships of the steam age, could be commanded by Spanish guns.
During the first war with Germany, however, the Rock played a tremendous part, as great or perhaps even greater than any it had played in the time of Nelson. Modern fleets needed coal and Gibraltar had become an essential coaling and repair station. Moreover its convenient position, astride one of the most important seaways in the world, rendered it invaluable as a police-post in the system of contraband control set up by the Allies. It was the blockade of Germany, as much as any other single factor, which finally brought Germany to her knees. The building of the Gibraltar dockyard easily justified its expense.
Of course Spanish neutrality had made the use of Gibraltar possible. But if Gibraltar had been lightly abandoned or neglected because of the likely effects of Spanish hostility, Gibraltar’s great contribution to the war effort would have been lost.
However, the lesson learned in the First World War was soon forgotten by many who set themselves up as judges of the usefulness of the great fortress. And it had to be learned all over again when a second world conflict taught it once more.
Air power had made its appearance during the war of 1914-1918 and seemed to some to cast a shadow over the Rock. During the war, it is true, it had operated in its favour. A United States sea-plane base was set up in the new harbour in a building which many Americans during the recent war knew as the “Naval Cinema.” After the war the British established a permanent sea-plane base at the Rock.
But there were doubts whether, in the new air age, the Rock could be held against air attack. For one thing there was practically no flat land on which to build an air strip for land planes. Furthermore the sea-plane base, like the naval base, would be useless in the event of a war with Spain unless the Spaniards were dislodged from the neighbouring shore.
The first post-World War I attack on the value of Gibraltar did not, however, bring up the question of aerial warfare. Lieutenant- Commander Kenworthy, a British M.P., suggested in the House of Commons that artillery development had made Gibraltar indefensible and proposed that the Rock should be exchanged with Spain for Ceuta on the African shore. He repeated this again two years later. Mr. Amery, First Lord of the Admiralty, replied that the cost of the exchange would be enormous, that Ceuta would require a much larger garrison, and that, in any case, war against Spain was an “almost unimaginable contingency.” Why air power was not discussed is not clear. The omission is perhaps a revelation of the slowness with which the importance of the air arm was realised. Even if it had been raised, however, no doubt the arguments used on both sides of the parliamentary debate would have been the same.
At about the same time some American newspapers began to take an interest in the security of Gibraltar and there were rumours about discussions between Spain and Britain with a view to’ an exchange. The official version is not yet available but one would have thought that the Spaniards would not have been slow to release information of such talks if they actually took place. At any rate, it seems clear that by 1923 the British government had given up the idea if it ever held it. Gibraltar was to remain a British naval base.
In other quarters the matter was not immediately dropped. The whole question of the value of Gibraltar was widely explored in the world’s press during the early twenties. In 1922 a Spanish aviation magazine, Avear, had stated that Britain was planning to make Gibraltar into a great air base by “tunnelling the Rock in all directions” to construct hangars and repair depots. A French deputy demanded in the Paris Journal that France should press for League of Nations control of Gibraltar and the Straits. In 1923 the New York Times had an article headed, “Possibility that England will surrender Gibraltar to Spain.” Two years later a writer in the New York Aero Digest argued that “air power has shorn Gibraltar of its strength” and he prophesied its exchange for Ceuta, though “not without terrific uproar in England.” This article was later quoted at length in the Review of Reviews. In 1930 the Literary Digest quoted verbatim from a travel article in the London Observer and suggestively added a new title, “Gibraltar now a curiosity,” which gave the article a twist which the original writer had never intended. Finally the influential New York Times in 1933 discussed editorially the legend of the Gibraltar apes and drew conclusions which reflected a great deal of wishful thinking on the part of large groups in the United States. It alleged that the native-born inhabitants of the Rock were elated because the decline of the ape pack suggested that the end of British domination was in sight.
The legend of the apes is well known but may be worth repeating. The Barbary apes which live in the remote upper parts of the Rock are found nowhere else in Europe. It is not certain how they came to be there, and indeed their comings and goings led to unfounded stories about underground passages beneath the Straits to Africa where the species abounds. There is no certainty that the apes were on the Rock in the period when it was held by Spain; and during the nineteenth century a legend grew up that the apes came with the British and that if they left the Rock the British would leave also. Hence the decline of the pack seemed to portend the end of British rule.
Perhaps not unmindful of this tale, the British began to take good care of the pack during the early years of this century. The animals were wretched thieves and at times became greatly daring. They were frequently to be found in the town itself. But instead of destroying them the British built cages to house a part of the pack and placed the apes on the ration-strength of the Garrison. An officer was appointed to care for them, and their personal occurrences were duly recorded in “Fortress Orders.” Official care for the apes might have been due to a desire to attract the animals away from the town (for the remainder of the pack which was still at large had promptly stationed itself on the top of the cage in order to share in the hand-out); or it might have been based on utilitarian motives, since the apes were a great tourist attraction. But it served to attract attention to the old legend about the British leaving the Rock when the apes went.
However, although the Spaniards might have taken some hope from the decline in the pack, the Gibraltarians who lived on the Rock itself did not have the same sentiments. Because they are Spanish in speech and appearance, American travellers were often wont to regard them as Spaniards and to look on their relations with the British as another example of imperial domination. This error probably was the cause of the Times' mistake.
In actual fact the Gibraltarians are descended from people imported to the Rock by the British in the early eighteenth century when all the Spanish inhabitants left. They are as proud of being British subjects as any Londoner is, and they and the Spaniards have a mutual contempt which far exceeds any feeling existing between Briton and Gibraltarian. They have a natural desire for local autonomy which has grown out of the British heritage that they have absorbed during the last two and a half centuries.
But there is not, and never has been, a desire on the part of the inhabitants to see the British leave the Rock. Nor is there any irredentist movement for union with Spain, as there has been in Malta for union with Italy. The Gibraltarians are well aware that their prosperity depends on Britain retaining a great naval base and fortress on the Rock. The Spaniards would have no need to maintain as large an establishment if Gibraltar were in their possession.
But while the Gibraltarians were anxious for an increase of British military and naval strength on the Rock and were plunged into economic depression by economy cuts in the British defence budget, the rest of the world, sorrowing for their oppression, or sure that the Rock was no longer of any use, seemed to be convinced that its abandonment by Britain was only a matter of time. This feeling was especially strong in North America where the dismemberment of the British Empire was regarded in certain quarters, by some peculiar, perverted reasoning, to be likely to benefit the cause of world peace.
During the thirties, however, events gave a foretaste of the fact that the Rock still had a great part to play in the defence of freedom. When Mussolini invaded Ethiopia and a Mediterranean war seemed imminent, the British fleet was concentrated at Alexandria and Gibraltar rather than at the principal naval base, Malta. The Spanish Civil War broke out before the Ethiopian crisis had passed and the fleet remained at Gibraltar in order to protect British interests in Spain. War came very close to the Rock. Gibraltarians saw a Spanish government destroyer stoke up in their harbour until its stacks belched flame and then leap out into the Mediterranean only to be shelled by Franco’s navy until it was a burning hulk which drifted close to Gibraltar’s oil storage tanks. Franco’s shells fell uncomfortably close to the gasoline. On another occasion the Deutschland brought in for hospitalization the men who had been wounded when she was attacked in the Balearics. Although some of the members of the British parliamentary opposition were at this time making the taunt that the Royal Navy had been afraid to face Mussolini and that it was the first time it had run away, in actual fact the sailors and soldiers at Gibraltar were ready to do their duty and sought vainly for the arms with which to defend themselves.
When the Second World War broke out Gibraltar slipped easily and quickly into its wartime function based on the experience of the previous conflict and stimulated by the threat of war which had been at its door for the past four years. The machinery of contraband control was re-established and manned by men of the Royal Naval Reserve, operating from Nelson’s old base in Rosia Bay. During the “phony war” period Gibraltar operated much as it had done during the great conflict a generation earlier. Convoys on the high seas were assembled and directed from the Rock and naval and merchant ships made use of its docks for repairs.
But the problem of air power in relation to the Rock was still something of a mystery. The doubts which had been expressed during the between-war period appeared to be justified by the fact that no effective steps had been undertaken by the time war broke out to provide Gibraltar with adequate air- cover. Furthermore that second nightmare of those who had staunchly defended that maintenance of the Rock as a British fortress and naval base, namely the possibility of a war with Spain, was no longer the unimaginable thing which Mr. Amery had called it fifteen years earlier. The new rulers of Spain sympathized with the Germans and were undoubtedly watching for their chance to regain the Rock. Some of Franco’s supporters had loudly proclaimed the recovery of Gibraltar as a cardinal point in their foreign policy.
The aerial defence of Gibraltar had been given earnest consideration in the years immediately preceding 1939, but little had been achieved. The only flat land available for an air strip was on the isthmus, about a third of a mile on its longest diagonal. The isthmus was so-called “neutral ground,” divided between Spain and Britain for nearly half a century but still apparently subject to a longstanding unwritten agreement that the two powers would not “break ground” there. The British half had been used as a racecourse and playing fields since about 1900, but except for a grand-stand there were no permanent fixtures.
During the Spanish Civil War, Franco, with German help, had mounted great siege guns in the hills, across the bay from Gibraltar and at the same time had set up concrete machine-gun posts on the Spanish half of the isthmus. This gave some precedent for the British to make more permanent use of their portion of the “neutral ground.”
Even so few steps had been taken when war broke out. The race-course and sports- fields were considered an essential “lung” of the garrison in its cramped quarters on the Rock. Some of the army officers in authority therefore steadfastly opposed aerial development. The semi-official Gibraltar Chronicle carried articles which proved conclusively to its own satisfaction that the wind eddies around the Rock would endanger the lives of fool-hardy airmen. Although the Royal Air Force investigated the possibility of building an operational air station at Gibraltar it could make little headway in face of military opposition. Even the Navy, which already had a foothold there in its sea plane base, made little further progress. It had secured the use of an “emergency” landing strip on the race-course for its carrier-borne aircraft; but, in order that the race-course fences might be removed, a considerable period of warning had to be given of the imminence of the emergency!
When war broke out in 1939 all red-tape and blimpish blindness was at once swept away. The “emergency air-strip” was at once turned into a permanent landing field, and an operational air station was built with feverish haste. Conditions were not ideal. There was only a single runway; and to obtain length it had to be extended far into the shallow waters of the bay. Furthermore the wind frequently blew from the port at one end of the runway and from the starboard at the other end. Even so Gibraltar had few air-field fatalities, the first being that which cost the life of the Polish Leader, General Sikorski, whose aircraft, when taking off, plunged into the Mediterranean just off the end of the runway.
A second unusual feature of the Gibraltar air station was that it ran right along the boundary within a stone’s throw of Spanish sentries. The Germans established agents in La Linea, the Spanish town across the border, and they installed watchers with telescopes to report the movement of aircraft. Their information was then radioed to Berlin. It was, of course, intercepted by the British and was sometimes used to check the accuracy of their own daily returns of the movement of aircraft! The only snag was that the German agents frequently reported “One aircraft departing to the east and one arriving from the west” when it was actually only one plane circling the Rock! Gibraltar was the only operational air station run throughout the war in full view of the enemy.
When the French were defeated and the German armies reached the Pyrenees, Gibraltar’s importance was at once apparent. The Italians came in for the kill and the Mediterranean became unsafe for merchant shipping. The Rock became much more than the contraband post it had been hitherto. It was an advanced base in the entrance to a sea largely dominated by the enemy. With practically all of Europe in enemy hands it remained the only foothold held by the British on the continent. Moreover its value was even greater because it became an important stepping-stone in the air route to the Middle East where British armies were preparing to defend the Suez Canal against imminent attack. It was also the nodal point on air routes from Britain to India, the Far East, Africa, and Australasia. Air Traffic and High Brass poured through its hastily improvised facilities. Its airfield began to resemble a great London railway station with frequent comings and goings of all the important people, of the war.
With nine or ten thousand “neutral Spaniards” employed as daily labour in its dockyards and returning nightly to La Linea in Spain, much of this movement could not be withheld from the Germans. But there was no other quick route between Britain and her overseas armies, and the leakages of information had to be checked as best they could.
Furthermore the fortress was now itself in danger. Mr. Winston Churchill has shown that the place was only usable by the indulgence of the Spaniards. Much of the British shipping which crowded into the Bay when great convoys were assembling lay actually within Spanish territorial waters. The Spaniards, of course, matched this by their favour to the enemy. Through their laxity the Italians were able to make use of their freighters, which had sought refuge in Algejiras inner harbour on the outbreak of war, to launch midget submarine attacks against British shipping in Gibraltar harbour and in the bay. To counter these attacks British patrol craft dropped depth-charges at irregular intervals in the waters of the bay.
It is known now that Goering advised Hitler to make the plunge through Spain and seize the western gates to the Mediterranean and that Hitler vetoed the suggestion. The Spaniards possessed little with which they could have resisted such a move, even had they desired to do so. Gibraltar would, within a few hours of the crossing of the Pyrenees, have probably have had to face German attack. To meet such an eventuality the only possible defence would have been the securing of a large perimeter in southern Spain. Without an adequate perimeter the Rock would have become useless as a naval base and air station and the army would have had to retire into its subterranean caverns to deny the enemy the use of the Rock as long as possible. If the Germans had come through Spain, or if Spain had come into the war, the Rock would have stood siege for the eleventh time in the course of written history.
Preparation for such an eventuality had been made ever since the outbreak of war. There had long been a main headquarters tunnel under the rock—it is marked on Spanish maps. But the war brought a tremendous increase of activity in tunneling. Royal Engineers and hard-rock miners from Canada dug out storage places, hospitals, barracks, gun-emplacements, etc., in the limestone and created a secure base within which the garrison could live and work. To calm the civilian population deep air-raid shelters were built and when France fell women and children were evacuated to London. It is a peculiar twist of history that the Gibraltarian women endured far more bombing there than did their men-folk, left behind on the Rock. But of course such things as these cannot be foreseen, and evacuation, with all the problems which it entailed, was an inevitable policy.
For a time it seemed as if the pessimists might be right and Gibraltar might be lost to the enemy. The superstitious noted with alarm that the ape-pack was declining. It was possibly about this time that Churchill sent a signal which has been repeated by a London journalist and which ought to become famous. “The ape-pack will be maintained. . . .” Requests were sent to North Africa and new apes were flown in to replenish the pack. Superstition was vindicated. The threat to Gibraltar gradually lifted.
During this period Gibraltar played another very important part. It was a link in one of the escape routes from the continent. Europeans anxious to fight Hitler, and many American and English airmen who had fallen into enemy territory, flocked through Spain in huge numbers and were brought out by way of Gibraltar by a service which operated with a remarkable efficiency. There were other escape routes, of course. But without Gibraltar one of the main highways would have been closed.
As things turned out the Germans never came by land and direct attacks on the Rock were few and far between. The Italians attempted an air-raid; and the French retaliated for Oran by an air-raid on Gibraltar. On the week-end of the Normandy D-Day German torpedo bombers circled the Rock during the night and a torpedo was launched against an aircraft-carrier. The only damage done was a large hole in the detached mole. Incidentally the only resistance that the Germans met was from Spanish gunners on the mainland. Something had gone wrong with the co-operation between the Royal Air Force warning system and the British army gunners!
The Rock then became the spring-board for the long-awaited attack on the enemy fastnesses in Europe. From the first it had been used to send naval forays into the Mediterranean to harass the enemy and to supply Malta which was holding out valiantly in the very teeth of the Italians and Germans. Then when the time for advance came Gibraltar was the vital base for the pursuit-planes which covered the landings on the North African shore. Crated Spitfires were hurried out in huge quantities and were assembled on the runway by a special erection party which worked 24 hours a day in full view of the enemy. When the attack was launched there was only one narrow airstrip left between the serried ranks of aircraft. Indeed some were still being erected and took off on operations without any preliminary trial flight.
General Eisenhower made his headquarters for this “Torch” Operation in the tunnels of the Rock. Without the possession of Gibraltar the whole strategy of the advance against Hitler’s European Fortress would have had to be vastly different and its success would have been proportionately endangered. It is to be hoped that those who decried the value of Gibraltar before the war took due note of these things.
Once a foothold in Africa was secured the strategic picture was changed. American air stations at Port Lyautey and Casablanca, and a Royal Air Force station at Rabat supplemented Gibraltar as alternative aerial stepping stones on the way from Britain to the East. But as long as Germans held the Biscay coast the trip to Gibraltar and North Africa was still a long hop and had to be undertaken at night. Mosquitoes could manage it. But until France was regained, pursuit planes destined for operational spheres in the East had to be brought on the decks of aircraft carriers as far as Gibraltar and then assembled there to continue their onward journey by air. When the landings in the south of France took place, all the airport facilities in the Straits of Gibraltar area were taxed to the uttermost by a huge movement of American transports which passed through on the way to support the landings and then returned within a few days to their British bases. At that time aircraft took off on the Gibraltar air strip throughout the night at regular intervals of about half a minute.
There is ample evidence that in the second world war, even more than in the first, Gibraltar proved invaluable despite all the criticism which had been levelled against it on the grounds that it was out of date. But now that the war is over the voices of criticism are heard again. The atomic bomb has given them new ammunition. Fortresses of the old type, far-flung naval bases like Gibraltar, are said to be useless in face of the new weapons. According to this assessment it may be argued that they should now be abandoned. Such voices were heard even before the advent of the bomb. Churchill shows in Their Finest Hour that in 1940, when Britain was in her darkest days, suggestions were made to him that an accommodation with Spain might be made by promising “discussions” about Gibraltar after the war. He replied with typical insight that the suggestions had no value. Spain knew that if Britain won the war she would not surrender Gibraltar; and if she lost it the possession of Gibraltar would not be a matter for discussion.
The effect of an atomic bomb making a direct hit on Gibraltar is one which an expert alone should discuss. But no one would deny that it would seriously affect the operational efficiency of the place even if it did not render it completely useless for a long time. This argument would seem, however, to have very little point. The Royal Air Force was always convinced that a concentration of its block-busters placed squarely on Gibraltar would render it useless. Yet there was never any question in anyone’s mind that it must be maintained and defended.
Even in the atomic age armies, navies, and air forces need bases. For the strategy of an atomic war the securing of footholds near to enemy country is still necessary before the attack can be launched. For this purpose the armed forces will have to be deployed as of old. Moreover, the enemy’s supply of atomic weapons will, for a long time to come, be limited by their expense. The number of targets against which they can be used is therefore limited and will be restricted to objectives of major importance and easy to hit. During the last war Gibraltar was not blacked out but was specially illuminated because it was realized that it could not be concealed when Spain was fully lit up. Light was a means of defence against the approach of invaders and spies. Even so, that brilliantly illuminated target did not attract many direct hits. From the point of view of its vulnerability to atomic attack Gibraltar is a much less likely target than the crowded metropolitan area of London.
There remains the question of grand strategy. It has been suggested that in the modern age the Mediterranean itself is useless. It was virtually a closed sea during the last war and it has been said now that atomic weapons would turn its eastern gateway, the Suez Canal, into a swamp. As a result of this possibility, and of the British withdrawal from Egypt and Palestine under the pressure of rising nationalisms, imperial strategists are turning to central Africa for the basis of their strategic communications. The African route was opened up during the last war and will obviously become still more important if there is another.
It would be premature, however, in face of such possibilities, to surrender such naval bases as Gibraltar, Malta, and Cyprus. If these were to fall the Mediterranean would not merely.be lost but would be handed to an enemy for free, unhindered use. Europe would be handed over on a platter. And the opportunity for counter-attack, the only means of winning the war, would be lost. In certain circumstances it is clear that the most convenient route by which an Asiatic power could be attacked would be by way of the historic Middle Sea. British naval bases in that sea have therefore still a tremendous importance. Gibraltar, at the entrance to the Mediterranean, remains one of the most important fortresses and naval bases in the world. It must not be neglected or lightly surrendered.