Churchill and Spain: The Survival of the Franco Regime, 1940-1945

Churchill and Spain examines why Francisco Franco's regime was alone among Europe's Big Three Fascist dictatorships in being able to survive beyond the end of the Second World War. Author Richard Wigg draws upon Foreign Office documents and reports, many of which remained secret until the 1990s or only became available in 2005 under the UK's Freedom of Information Act. The author also uses the wartime papers of Winston Churchill and Samuel Hoare, Britain's special envoy to Madrid, to investigate this important aspect of Spanish and British history. Churchill and Spain explores the political, economic, and diplomatic relations between Spain and Britain during the Second World War and explains how Churchill's lenient policies towards Franco helped significantly in the survival of Franco's regime after the war. In particular, this work demonstrates how the tolerance shown towards Spain's wartime trading in wolfram allowed the rebuilding of the country's gold reserves, which proved crucial in enabling Franco's Spain to endure post-war international isolation. The book - originally published to great acclaim in 2005, and published now for the first time in paperback - is essential reading for scholars and students of European 20th-century history, as well as all those interested in Churchill's international role in the Second World War.