Free The Second World War by Antony Beevor Page A

and experiences, prompting Hitler to say later that he would prefer to have three or four teeth pulled than go through another conversation with the Spanish dictator.
    Hitler finally intervened to say that Germany had won the war. Britain only hung on in the hope of being saved by the Soviet Union or the United States and the Americans would need a year and a half or two years to prepare for war. The only threat from the British was that they might occupy islands in the Atlantic or, with the help of de Gaulle, stir up trouble in the French colonies. This was why he wanted a ‘broad front’ against Britain.
    Hitler wanted Gibraltar and so did Franco and his generals, but they were not happy with the idea of Germans commanding the operation. Franco also feared that the British would seize the Canary Isles as a reprisal. He had, however, been taken aback by the overbearing German demands to be given one of the Canary Islands as well as bases in Spanish Morocco. Hitler was also interested in the Portuguese Azores and Cape Verde Islands. The Azores did not just offer an Atlantic naval base for the Kriegsmarine. The OKW war diary later noted: ‘ The Führer sees the value of the Azores in two ways. He wants to have them in case of America’s intervention and for after the war.’ Hitler was already dreaming of a new generation of ‘bombers with a range of 6,000 kilometres’ to attack the eastern seaboard of the United States.
    Franco’s expectation that French Morocco and Oran would be promised to him before even entering the war struck the Führer as presumptuous to say the least. Hitler is also supposed to have expostulated on another occasion that Franco’s attitude almost made him feel ‘ like a Jew who wants to bargain with the most sacred possessions’. Then, in another outburst to his entourage after his return to Germany, he described Franco as a ‘ Jesuit swine ’. Although ideologically closer to Germany, and with a new pro-Nazi foreign minister Ramón Serrano Suñer who wanted to enter the war, Franco’s government was worried about provoking Britain. Spain’s survival depended on imports, partly from Britain, but above all on grain and oil from the United States. Spain was in a terrible state after the ravages of its civil war. It was not uncommon to see people fainting in the streets from malnutrition. The British and then the Americans applied economic leverage most skilfully, knowing that Germany was in no position to make up the difference in imports. So when it became increasingly clear that Britain had no intention of coming to terms with Germany, Franco’s government, by then critically short of foodstuffs and fuel, could do little more than profess its support for the Axis and promise to enter the war at a later, unspecified date. That still did not stop Franco from considering his own ‘parallel war’, which consisted of invading Britain’s traditional ally, Portugal. Fortunately, it was a project which never came close to fruition.
    After the meeting in Hendaye, the Sonderzug turned round and headed back towards Montoire, where Pétain himself awaited Hitler. Pétain greeted Hitler as though they were equals, which did not endear him to the Führer. The old marshal expressed the hope that relations with Berlin would be marked by cooperation, but his demand that France’s colonial possessions should be guaranteed was brusquely rejected. France had started the war against Germany, Hitler retorted, and now it would have to pay for it ‘ territorially and materially ’. Hitler, far less exasperatedwith Pétain than he had been with Franco, left things open. He still wanted Vichy to join in an anti-British alliance, but eventually came to realize that he could not count on the ‘Latin’ countries when it came to forming a continental bloc.
    Hitler had mixed feelings about a peripheral strategy of continuing the war against Britain in the Mediterranean, now that an invasion of southern England