Luis Carrero White, the dictator’s dolphin, fulfilled to the letter that of being more papist than the Pope. Paul Preston and Gonzalo Fernández de la Mora, ideologically opposed poles, agree that the admiral’s only obsession was to serve Francisco Franco and enforce his maxims from the north to the south of the country. I agreed with him on (almost) everything. And, how could it be otherwise, he also in his opinion about the defeat of Germany in the Second World War. In his work, ‘Spain and the sea’ – a three-volume work – the soldier was correct in affirming that the invasion of Adolf Hitler of the USSR had been a disaster because of the clumsiness of the OKW –’Oberkommando der Wehrmacht’– and that the armies of the Reich should have entered the country as liberators, instead of as conquerors.
Beyond his ideology, which needs little description, the truth is that Franco’s devoted gyrfalcon was a military analyst to be reckoned with. The many dossiers that he wrote on the navy prove it. In 1938, for example, he drew up ‘Outline for a Plan of Naval Operations in the Mediterranean’, in which he gave directions for confronting the Second Republic at sea. Just two years later he wrote a series of reports in which he analyzed the possible participation of Spain in World War II. All of them were remarkable.
Invade Russia
Many experts of the time –among them, countless military veterans– attributed the defeat of Nazi Germany to Adolf Hitler’s decision to invade Russia in the summer of 1941; the mythical ‘Operation Barbarossa’. And Luis Carrero Blanco was no less. In ‘Spain and the sea’, the hierarch charged against the ‘Führer’ for having replicated the mistakes that France and Sweden had already made centuries ago. He did it, yes, in a veiled way and attributing the victory to the strategy of Iósif Stalin, traditional enemy of Francoist Spain as the visible head of communism:
«[Durante la invasión], Stalin decided to change his plan in view of the thrust of the German troops and apply the old recipe of the Russian strategy of seeking the collaboration of space and winter to wear down the invader; do the same thing Peter the Great did against Charles XII of Sweden in 1708 and Alexander I against Napoleon in 1812; retreat to the east, razing all the terrain abandoned to the enemy, and wait for the lengthening of the enemy’s lines of communication and the harshness of the weather to weaken him. Then it would be time to beat him.
In turn, he insisted that Hitler “fell into the Soviet trap twice.” In the first place, he “going to war in 1939”, since the invasion of Poland benefited the USSR. Then “trying to invade the vastness of Russia.” And, boy, would he be expensive. “The ‘Führer’ paid for his mistake as Napoleon and as Charles XII”.
Carrero Blanco and Franco, in the seventies, together with the ministers of the Regime
Carrero Blanco thus joined the opinion of the German general Heinz Guderian, perfecter of the ‘Blitzkrieg’ and, in the end, one of the greatest detractors of the ‘Führer’ for his obsession with conquering the Ukraine. The German military man, who had studied previous military expeditions against Russia, personally advised Hitler against attacking and insisted that going headlong into the Soviet Union was sheer madness. He repeated the same thing after the ‘Operation Barbarossa’ delayed when the Third Reich was forced to intervene in Yugoslavia and Greece. This is how he explained it in his memoirs, ‘Memories of a soldier’:
«The winter and spring of 1941 passed in a horrible nightmare. The renewed study of the campaigns of Charles XII of Sweden and of Napoleon I, and of which we were anxiously awaiting, put clearly before our eyes all the difficulties of the theater of operations and demonstrated our lack of preparation for the enormous undertaking».
But Hitler, as was his custom, ignored the advice of Guderian and the rest of the officers and ordered ‘Operation Barbarossa’ to begin a month later than planned. A real madness. “The successes achieved until then, especially the victory achieved in the West in a surprisingly short time, had so obfuscated the supreme leadership that it had erased the word impossible from its language,” the German general wrote in his memoirs. . Along with him, many other officers advised the leader against abandoning the plan and maintaining peace with the Soviet Union. Otherwise, they knew, Germany could be crushed on a multitude of fronts.
campaign to campaign
And from the general to the particular. Next, Carrero Blanco analyzed –and hit Hitler with the stick of the puppet– for not completing the great advances planned during the first weeks of the invasion:
«The campaign of the spring of 1942 was oriented according to the same plan: to advance taking as objectives the line of the Volga and the oil region of the Caucasus. The successes of this campaign were brilliant on the map; but winter came again without the maneuver having been completed».
Once again he joined the views of Guderian, who believed that the Nazi dictator should not have dallied in the Ukraine, but should have advanced into the very heart of the Soviet Union.
Nor did the Spanish bigwig hold his tongue when referring to the high-ranking officers of the ‘Wehrmacht‘ and from Nazi Party. And it is that, in his words, “the Red Army also had the cooperation and clumsiness of all these leaders.” His argument was not superficial, but was based on verified data:
«Until the defeat at Stalingrad, the German army occupied a territory inhabited by 40% of the Soviet population (about 80 million), in which 44% of the USSR railway network was located, in which the 63% of the coal, 68% of the iron, 58% of the sugar, 60% of the aluminum and 38% of the cattle and in which there were 56,000 industrial companies. Although the Soviets took 32,000 of these and about 20 million people to the eastern regions of the USSR, the conquest would have been frankly important if the Germans had not made a serious mistake…».
What was that serious mistake that the Nazi troops made? One that was also underlined, years later, by the members of the Blue Division: ignore the feelings of the population. “They entered the USSR as colonizers, and not as liberators.” Carrero Blanco attributed this mentality to Hitler’s foreign policy and Alfred Rosenbergresponsible ‘de facto’ for the territories occupied by the Third Reich:
“His policy was disastrous. Instead of trying to win over the sympathy of the populations, which had placed so much hope in the Germans, and instead of using the prisoners to fight against the hated regime, they were treated by the Gestapo men as inferior beings and in so inhumanely that they soon earned the hatred of the Russians.”
Brutality
According to Carrero Blanco, charging against the population caused an annoying guerrilla to be generated behind the German lines that did not let the Teutonic soldiers rest. “It was one of the most serious complications that the support of the front had,” he explained. He was right. In practice, when the calendar marked 1942, more than 60,000 Russians made up the partisan ranks and fought in a vast territory of 14,000 square kilometers. A shadow force that caused more than one headache to contingents such as the IX Army, which had to organize several games through the forests to try to finish them off.
For the Spanish military, in short, the natural German arrogance –of Hitler on the maps and of the soldiers on the ground– was the seed that led to the virtual crushing of the armed forces of the Third Reich in the Soviet Union. And not only that, but he managed to unite a people who greatly hated their leader after decades of famine, suffering and barbarity:
“The arrogance of Hitler’s men, exacerbated by their easy victory over France, meant that the invasion of the USSR, which could have led to the fall of the Soviet regime, provoked, on the contrary, a union of the Soviet masses in the heat of of patriotic sentiment, which the much more skilful communist regime knew how to exploit to its advantage. For the unfortunate Russian mistreated by the SS and the Gestapo, the tyranny of the NKVD was, after all, a lesser evil. If Soviet policemen were as cruel as Gestapo agents, at least they were Russians.”
The minister of the dictatorship was right in his diagnosis. Carrero Blanco was convinced that Nazism caused a spectacular turn in the Soviet Union: he made it ignore the division that had been generated during the civil war between whites and reds and gave it a unique enemy to charge against. “It was no longer discussed, neither in the press nor in radio broadcasts, about the socialist fatherland, nor about universal problems, but Russian patriotism was promoted and only the Motherland was spoken of.” In his words, even traditional “religious sectarianism” stepped aside to proclaim holy war against the invader.