The Spanish Military and the Tank, 1909–1939

The conventional wisdom holds that Spain took only a limited interest in armored warfare until the European powers that intervened in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and the USSR, demonstrated its importance on the battlefield. The author, tapping into the previously ignored professional military literature in Spain, reveals that, to the contrary, officers in the Spanish army early on took a lively interest in armor, an interest fed not only by what they knew of developments elsewhere in Europe but by the possibility of using tanks and other armored vehicles to advantage in Spain’s colonial wars in Morocco. It was not so much lack of interest that retarded Spanish development of armored units as lack of funds. Over the interwar years, upwards of 50 percent of the Spanish military budget was spent on personnel, particularly the army’s bloated officer corps.