If Hitler had allied with Franco and took Gibraltar away, would the outcome of WWII be different?

Question

If the English lost Gibraltar, they would have to go all the way around Africa to move anything to or from India. The Allies wouldn't be able to access North Africa easily either. The Italians could have mopped up in Africa, if the Strait was captured.

One major reason the Eastern Front was fought was to coierce England into surrender because it's allies were all gone. Operation Barbarossa was the failure that cost Germany the war I agree.

Answer 1

The Spanish Civil War pretty much made Spain a non-factor in WWII as three years of internal strife took its toll on the country. If Franco's Spain had entered the war on the side of the Axis, it would have been something of an Achilles' heel for Germany as Spain would have been ripe for an earlier Allied invasion, and Allied forces on the continent would have been another headache that the Germans couldn't take.

Gibraltar was a veritable fortress, so any attempt to capture it would have drained the invading army. It simply wasn't worth the price of bringing in a weakened Spain in an attempt to conquer Gibraltar. Even so, the British were probably glad to not even have to worry about a Spanish attack, so all sides involved had something to gain from Spanish neutrality.

Supposing however, that Germany was successful at capturing Gibraltar (perhaps with Italian naval assistance). It would have merely slowed supply times to and from India, so probably very little effect on the Pacific Theatre. In terms of North Africa, keep in mind that Allied forces landed in Morocco from the Atlantic. It might have slowed the Allied progress in the region as supplies would have to go overland, but I suspect that the Allies would have instead worked from Egypt instead, since the point of the Africa campaign was to reach the oil fields of the Middle East.

Answer 2

Gibraltar would not have held out for much more than a week if the Germans had invaded through Spain. The consequences would have been that the British would have found the Battle of the Atlantic more iddicult to win but ultimately it was his attack on the USSR and the USA declaring war on Germany which won the war. The British were successful in defending their country but would have been unable to liberate Europe without extrenal help.

Any invasion would have happened between the fall of France in June 1940 and the attack on Russia in July 1941. The French fleet would therefore not have been a factor.

Presumably if this had happened Franco would have been deposed and executed and spain would have been forced to relinquish their claim on Gibraltar.

Answer 3

probably not. if franco allowed the nazis to move troops within his territory, the allies would have declared war also over spain, which would have been an easy shore to invade (much more than normandy and sicily) and a good access to occupied france. by the way, the axis should have started from malta, that was defenseless at the beginning of the war and later became a threat to axis cargos moving from europe to the african front.

Answer 4

Don't kid yourself, the fate of the second world war was decided on the eastern front, just ask the 20 million Russians killed. The scale of battles did not compare to that of the western front. Consider this:

Those killed on both sides:

EASTERN FRONT:
Stalingrad: 1.8 million
Siege of Leningrad: 1.5 million
Moscow 1941-42: 700,000
Smolensk 1941: 500,000
Kiev 1941: 400,000
Vorenesh 1942: 370,000
Belarus 1941: 370,000
2nd Rzhev-Sychevka: 270,000
Caucasus 1942: 260,000
Kursk: 230,000
Lower Dnieper: 170,000
Kongsberg: 170,000
Rostov: 150,000
Budapest: 130,000
and others with less killed

Whereas on the Western Front
Battle of France 180,000
Normandy: 132,000
El Alamein: 70,000
Battle of the Bulge: 38,000

Answer 5

Not really, it might have lengthened the war but the Atlantic coast of Africa would still have been available for invasion and then cross-country from there. The Suez canal was not, I believe in German hands and, as someone has already mentioned, the Eastern Front would have been uneffected and that's where the real damage was done.

Answer 6

Black Sabbath,
Hitler did ally with Franco.
The answer to your question would be yes.
Any minuscule deviation of past acts will result
in a different outcome.
That is a fact of nature, and can't be argued.
For whatever it's worth, I'm glad Gibraltar stayed
British during WWII -- even the monkeys celebrate this!

Answer 7

Difficult to say. One result may have been the restart of the Spanish civil war with Spain open to invasion by Britain.

Answer 8

The French in North Africa would have stopped it, as they still had their fleet in Oran until the British scuttled it.

Answer 9

Nope. If you study the Bible deeply, especially the book of aniel, you'll see that it describes a leader who we find out to be Hitler and that there were others who came after him. Therefore he was destined to lose that war in one way or another.
Bible prophecy does not lie.