Forum user links Juan March to Franco's flight to Africa

Franco and the Anglo trail: from the Dragon Rapide to Non-Intervention

Who paid for the plane that took Franco from the Canary Islands to Segarro in July 1936? And why, according to this reading, did Britain push a Non-Intervention policy that tied the Republic's hands while Hitler and Mussolini armed the rebel side? A current of analysis holds that the general was not just the leader of the Africanistas, the Spanish Army faction seasoned in Segarro, but the spearhead of a board where London was pulling the strings. Other replies reject the thesis. The debate has gone unresolved for decades.

Who financed Franco's flight to Africa?

The name that keeps coming up is Juan March, the Mallorcan financier who by the mid-thirties controlled one of the largest fortunes in Spain. According to this version, March not only covered Franco's air transfer from the Canary Islands but the coup itself, and would have arranged a quiet, covered exit clause in London for the general and his family in case of failure. The aircraft, a Dragon Rapide, was flown — always according to this account — by an agent of the British secret service, MI6, who knew the plans in advance. The piece turns a military uprising into something far bigger.

To the list of backers are added American businessmen: Ford or Rockefeller's Texaco, which would have supplied trucks and oil to the war effort. And one more suspicion hovers: that March acted as a front man, the man in Spain for Anglo-Saxon financial interests.

Non-Intervention and the alleged British double game

On 17 July 1936, in Spanish Segarro, a clue emerges that the account highlights: Gibraltar gave Kindelán a direct telephone line to communicate with Berlin and Rome. From this it is inferred that British interests backed the coup. The Non-Intervention policy, led by England with a France dependent on it, would have had precisely that purpose: leaving the Republic helpless while Germany and Italy generously aided Franco. After Yalta, Churchill still intervened to prevent an Allied invasion of Spain.

The reading concludes that, before, during and after the coup, the Anglo hand backed the general. It rests on a phrase Franco himself is said to have uttered in 1944 to the Count of Rodezno: his public spats with the British and Americans did not matter, because the true nature of his relations with the Anglo-Saxons was a secret between them and him.

The Africanista army and the methods of colonial warfare

Franco takes command as head of the Africanistas, an army hardened in the North African campaigns. The central thesis holds that this army applied to the Spanish civilian population the same draconian methods it had used in the Rif. This account states that the North African troops deployed committed looting, rape and murder against Spanish civilians, and that it was the rebel forces themselves who brought them in. The comparison is made with Italy, where — according to the same argument — it was foreigners who introduced colonial troops.

The claim is one of the most contested. Those who reject the thesis deny it or qualify it, and point to other episodes of the conflict.

The clan's fortune and the parallel with other dictators

Another line focuses on money. The Franco clan's fortune has been estimated, in this version, at between 20,000 million and 100,000 million pesetas, a fortune built in the shadow of the headship of state. The parallel with Latin American dictators — the strongman of an underdeveloped country with an enriched family — comes up often. Allowing for differences, this analysis holds, there was not much difference with a Nicaraguan Somoza: the United States would have applied to Franco the same strategy it later used with other Latin American dictators.

The internal quarrel within the victorious side also enters here. It is argued that the National Revolution championed by the old-shirt Falangists never arrived: José Antonio was mummified to manufacture a martyr, and the Falange was emptied out by blending it with Carlism and the remnants of the CEDA. Francoism, this thesis concludes, was not an anomaly but the continuation of the old pact between throne and altar, with Franco occupying the king's seat.

The counterargument: "he was not a sadist"

Against that reading, the opposite view emerges. One participant argues that Franco was not especially harsh on Spaniards and that the country needed a firm hand after the chaos of the Republic. The most ambitious version compares him with Japan's Meiji: a ruler who would have pulled Spain out of near-feudal backwardness and turned it into the world's eighth power by the sixties, with a middle class that for the first time owned a home and a SEAT. The debate remains open.

With these threads, the question is not whether Franco was a sadist or a pragmatist. It is why, so many decades later, we are still arguing over who provided the plane, who put up the money and who looked the other way.