ABSTRACT
At the end of the Civil War Franco had an army of 1,020,500 men, including 35, 000 Moroccans and 32,000 Italians. It was battle-hardened but in technical and operational terms it was hardly an appropriate force to defend Spain in the major conflagration which was about to break out. The Spanish Civil War had not been a modern war, but rather one which at times was reminiscent of the frontier skirmishes of Spain’s colonial wars in Africa, and at others harked back to the trench warfare of the First World War. The modern equipment which had been used and tested by the Germans and Italians was taken back with them when their troops returned home. The Spanish armed forces had virtually no air cover and exiguous mechanized armoured units. There were 850,000 poorly equipped infantrymen to 19,000 artillerymen and the Spanish cavalry was still more dependent on the horse than on the internal combustion engine. In the summer of 1939 a major effort was made to collect and classify abandoned military equipment from the Civil War battle fronts. This helped quantitatively but added to the heterogeneity of material. There was also a partial demobilization, whereby the army’s sixty-one divisions were reduced by half. The wartime army was replaced by an army of occupation for which the Caudillo kept over half a million men and 22,100 officers on a war footing. That was 47 per cent more officers than the combined French metropolitan and colonial armies.1
