The Year of Strategic Crisis
Part 5: Operation Valeria Victrix IV, March 23 – April 6, 1941
This period saw the end of Operation Valeria Victrix, as the Spanish state collapsed from the pressure of a continuous string of defeats and the shame and shock of being conquered. Italian strategy, however, was supple enough to deal with the absorption of Spain as a buffer zone and Mussolini was untroubled by the resultant increase in territory and, more importantly, coastline.
The fighting for Madrid was difficult. Despite their greatly inferior numbers, the Spaniards fought for every street and plaza in the city. By the 26th, Aymonnino had brought up reinforcements, and borrowed formations from other nearby corps as well. This was not a reaction to the Spanish resistance, however. It was merely doctrine to concentrate for battle, Aymonnino could certainly have won with the original two or three divisions he had brought to the city and its environs. However, there was some political pressure percolating downward from Mussolini in Rome through the chain of command until it reached him, concerning preventing the Germans from taking overly much of the peninsula. What they had taken was already quite enough, Mussolini believed. In addition to doctrine, it was in pursuit of achieving this goal of limiting their advance that Aymonnino brought in the reinforcements he did. Thus by the 26th, four Italian divisions were actively participating in the battle and another two were being held in reserve. This resulted in four-to-one odds against the Spanish. The battle would end within three days, with some of the most lopsided significant casualty counts seen during the war: a bare mark over one hundred Italian dead versus nearly seven hundred Spanish casualties. This, in an urban battle where the Spanish were the defenders, no less.
The battle for Madrid on the 26th.
The delay imposed by the sturdy Spanish defense of their capital cost the Italians a week, allowed the Spanish government to escape to its secondary capital at Vallodolid and let the Spanish army to reform a frontline to some slight semblance of order and coherence. This may have been the influence of the British, however, for it was in a battle at Avila on the 30th, behind Madrid, that Italian troops for the first time fought British soldiers in theater, under the command of a British general. It during this battle that Italian soldiers in Madrid were bombed by the Spanish air force, which the Italians learned through signals intelligence was commanded by a German air force officer, on loan to the Spanish! The discovery of von Richthofen led to a minor diplomatic spat between Italy and Germany, though in practical terms von Richthofen’s actions in Spain were negligible. Also during this time Mussolini placed a premium on reaching Vallodolid before the Germans, though the Italians in Madrid were twice as far away as the Germans were. This desire to prevent the Germans from stealing more territory was becoming blatant. By the 4th of April, however, the Germans had failed to push forward despite a relative dearth of Spanish resistance on their front while the Italians had pushed against the stronger portion of the Spanish front and but was already on the verge of entering the city.
Italian formations moving on the new Spanish capital and generally pushing northward.
Vallodolid fell on the 5th. The Spanish government fled to London to persist in exile. The army refused to accept the fall of their country and also remained in being, though scattered across the northwest of the country, under British commanders. It would take another two weeks to clean up these remnants, but they were all swept up in the end. While the Balearic Islands remained defiant, and the Spanish colonies fought on, the Second Iberian War, as the Italians proceeded to call it, was essentially at an end. It became merged with the greater struggle of the Allied and the Axis powers over the future of Europe and, indeed, the world. The issue of perspective is well presented by this war; for though the Italians counted it as separate from the greater struggle the British did not. For the Italians, there was a continuity here that traced itself back to 1938 and the Italian intervention during the Spanish Civil War and, given the choice of operational names, a continuity that even stretched back two thousand years to the Roman conquest of Iberia. For the British, on the other hand, this was a one-off policy, an attempt to unbalance the senior Axis partner, Italy, and their part in it could not be seen as separable from their overall struggle. Their two perspectives only come together toward the end, when the British intervene with troops, albeit very weakly, in the last week and then take up command of some resistance after the fall of Vallodolid.
Spain, not surrendering to Italy.
As had been hinted above, there had been diplomatic tensions between Rome and Berlin during this period. Hitler conceived of himself as the senior Axis partner, a conception that Mussolini held about himself. Italy thus far has steered a largely independent course from its northern neighbor, fighting its own wars and determining when to join in the greater struggle against the Allied powers. This had annoyed Hitler, an annoyance which was only exacerbated by the spat over von Richthofen and the inheritance of northern Spain. He thus perceived of a great way to tie Italian policy to his. Without consulting Rome, he declared war on the Soviet Union in the name of the entire Axis alliance. Mussolini’s first notice of this was when the Soviets began marching into eastern Anatolia and northern Dacia. To make matters even worse, it actually preempted Italy’s capture of Vallodolid and the conquest of Spain by two days.
This news did not make Mussolini happy.
Thus did one crisis end, seeing a temporary reappraisal of Italian strategy away from having a buffer state in between it and the Allies toward simply having a buffer zone, but another and undoubtedly greater crisis had begun. Indeed, it was likely to be a crisis for Germany as well, with its army either in Iberia on en route back to Germany from Scandinavia. They likely did not have much on their eastern borders either.
. Nat Spain starts off with a bunch of clones of Italian commanders like Gambara, and they don't go away when the SCW ends 
