The Road to Dunkirk: British Intelligence and the Spanish Civil War

Abstract

This article will explain to what use the British military establishment put military intelligence coming from the Spanish civil war, and whether or not this intelligence had any effect on British defence plans during the late 1930s. Rather than focusing only on what the British armed forces should or should not have learned from the Spanish battlefields, this paper will attempt to explain why these lessons were never learned. An analysis of the ways in which this intelligence was read demonstrates how stereotypes and inter-service struggles over strategy rendered any lessons that could have been learnt from Spain completely worthless.