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by Lee Williams
Saturday was supposed to be a big sales day for Lock N’ Load Firearms, which is located in Southington, Connecticut. The gun shop has two major sales each year, and Saturday was its “Customer Appreciation Day.” The store spent a lot on advertising the event and on party goods. Several vendors came out for the sale.
The fun ended around 11:40 a.m., when the state’s computer system went down, and it stayed down throughout most of the day.
Josh, who works at the gun shop, estimates they lost thousands of dollars.
“Guns aren’t $200 or $300 anymore. They cost $600 or $800,” he said. “To set up an event like that, all the advertising, and then to not be able to sell firearms definitely hurt us. But here, it happens all of the time.”
The State of Connecticut does not allow gun dealers to run their own NICS computer checks. It insists on running the checks for them, as well as a half-dozen other state checks.
Josh said the state’s computer shutdowns are becoming far too common.
“I don’t know how to hold the state accountable,” he said. “I hate to think that a lawsuit is the answer, but that’s where we are at. We can’t flip the state reps and senators to get more fair representation at the state capitol.”
Matt, who works at The Gun Store in Waterbury, Connecticut, said the state’s computer shutdowns have become “random but consistent.”
“You can expect to go down every couple of days,” Matt said. “It’s more than I’ve ever experience in the past 20 years. I’m not saying that the State of Connecticut is intentionally doing it, but it’s been consistent enough lately.
If only they used NICS and circumvented all the other six or seven checks they use. The problem is that the state legislature added all these checks. It’s created massive amounts of confusion.”
Common names, he said, like “John Smith” have become a serious issue for the state’s computer systems, which lack the clarity of a NICS Unique Personal Identification Number or UPIN, which gun owners can apply for.
“If they have a NICS UPIN, you find out quickly that it’s not the ‘John Smith’ wanted for murder in Idaho,” he said.
At Central Connecticut Arms in Portland, Connecticut, staffer Ronnie said the shop lost thousands of dollars.
“We couldn’t sell any firearms. It was not a very good day,” he said. “Some customers put their purchases on layaway, which helped.”
The state had another major shutdown just a few weeks ago, Ronnie said.
“We were down for three days. They don’t explain when it’s going to be back up,” he said. “We just sit around here hoping it will be back up soon. It’s a major pain in the ass, man.”
Holly Sullivan is president of the Connecticut Citizens Defense League and serves on the board of the Citizens Committee for the Right to Keep and Bear Arms.
She said there is growing speculation on whether the shutdown was an effort to prevent state residents from purchasing firearms.
“Unlike other states, FFLs are not allowed to use the NICS system themselves. The State of Connecticut acts as a middleman between the FFLs and the NICS system,” she said.
“The state does NICS and state-level checks. Usually, if there’s an IT issue, every FFL gets an email. None were sent on Saturday. This ‘breakdown’ was unusual. Generally, the state will say it’s an IT issue, but they didn’t do that this time.”
Hundreds of Connecticut gun shops were affected, she said.
“This is a symptom of a much larger problem,” she said. “The state wants to control us, but they’re not adequately doing their job. They don’t trust FFLs to do their job. People are denied their Constitutional rights. Let’s say if someone works offshore, it could be months before they get this opportunity again. And besides, Saturday at noon is prime time to buy guns!”
The state has an extreme anti-gun history, Sullivan explained.
“Attorney General William Tong—his hobby is being anti-gun,” she said. “Every legislative session, every anti-gun bill was proposed by Tong. And then he’d bring in his Mom’s Demand action crew. It’s an ongoing problem. Dealers lost a lot of money.”
Neither Connecticut Attorney General Tong nor Connecticut Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection commissioner Ronnell A. Higgins, whose office is responsible for conducting the background checks, returned calls seeking their comments for this story.
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We reported last month that several anti-gun measures that were still under consideration as California’s legislative session closed remained on track to be considered when lawmakers reconvened on August 3.
Five bad bills clear appropriations — now on to the floor
Now, five of those measures have, indeed, been passed in committee and are eligible for floor votes in the state Senate and Assembly.
According to a legislative update by the National Rifle Association’s Institute for Legislative Action, three bad Assembly bills were passed by the Senate Appropriations Committee and are now eligible for a vote on the Senate floor.
AB 1743 expands the database that leaked CCW holder data in 2022
Assembly Bill 1743 expands the state’s firearm owner data-sharing framework by increasing access to information maintained in California’s Automated Firearms System and related databases.
“Expanding this system raises significant concerns given California’s track record of protecting firearm owner data,” NRA-ILA explained. “In 2022, the California Department of Justice exposed the personal information of thousands of firearm owners and concealed carry permit holders in a widely reported data breach.”
AB 1753 expands red flag laws under the guise of “clarification”
AB 1753 “clarifies” California’s Gun Violence Restraining Order (GVRO) violation framework by explicitly subjecting ammunition possession to the same hearing and enforcement procedures currently applied to firearms.
“Red flag laws have repeatedly stripped law-abiding citizens of their Second Amendment rights while undermining basic due process protections,” NRA-ILA wrote. “Existing red flag laws in California should not be expanded under the guise of ‘clarification,’ but repealed.”
AB 2047 goes after 3D printers — the same play as New York’s Hochul law
Finally, AB 2047 targets 3-dimensional printers by restricting their sale or transfer unless equipped with so-called “firearm blueprint detection algorithms.”
“The bill represents a broad attack on lawful technology and raises concerns about free speech, innovation and the rights of law-abiding Californians,” NRA-ILA reported. “These concerns are not just realized by firearm owners, but tens of thousands of STEM educators and technology professionals.”
firefly
There’s accumulating guns—and then there’s collecting. The thing that distinguishes the latter from the former is that there’s generally a theme to a collection. It’s not that one’s better than the other, and there’s often a fair bit of overlap, but collectors generally have a running list in their head of desired acquisitions; the next “Grail gun” to add to the safe, if you will.
This used to be more difficult in the olden times. However, along came the various web forums, whether brand-centric, themed around a certain type of shooting sport or hunting or specific to a state or other geographic location. Collecting, say, Rugers or Smith & Wessons became a lot easier when you could peruse the buy/sell/trade board on a Ruger or Smith & Wesson fan site.
Then came the auction sites. If you weren’t aware, in its earliest days, eBay actually allowed the listing of firearms before getting cold feet at the regulatory and political morass and pulling out in 1999. The market vacuum was quickly filled by specialized firearm-auction sites. These days, if one has a sufficient bank balance and some leisure time to surf the internet, a lot of the drama and suspense has been taken from the previously intriguing hunt for the next piece in a collection.
While this is convenient, it somehow feels less than—well, sporting.
Having come up in that earlier world as something of a casual collector, I feel like something’s been lost, at least in regard to the things that made it feel fun to me. The two big variables were availability and affordability.
It was easy to control for affordability. If one was making only gun-counter-clerk wages in the 1990s, one knew that the Colt Pythons and Peacemakers or Smith & Wesson Registered Magnums and Triple-Locks were pretty much off the table, but post-war S&W Hand Ejectors or the more common varieties of Colt autoloaders were still in the attainable range. Furthermore, unless you were attending major auctions or had some other sort of “in,” the playing field was pretty well level.
If you’re a bazillionaire with the ability to quickly scan all the auction sites for whatever rare $15K Luger variant tickles your fancy and buy every copy for sale in the U.S. right now, I won’t lie: I’m a little bit envious. But, that also kinda feels like some 19th century “hunt” with a sahib paying to shoot a tiger chained to a post.
Now, I will confess to the gun-collecting equivalent of “hunting over bait,” in that I spent many a year working behind the counters of gun shops, which is where people bring in guns to sell or trade. I well remember, back in the height of my military-surplus collecting phase, standing in the gunsmithing shack at work, chatting with the ’smiths about something work-related, when one of our regulars dipped in the back to show off the rifle he’d just acquired as part of a collection.
“Bet y’all haven’t seen one of these before,” he drawled. I looked it up and down. It had a large-ring Mauser action, a deep belly to the stock around the magazine, and a sliding sheet-metal cover over the bolt reminiscent of that on an Arisaka.
“OHMIGOD!” I squealed, “A Siamese 1903 Mauser!”
In retrospect, I’m pretty sure he was expecting this reaction from me, but, to be fair, I hadn’t seen a Siamese Mauser outside of some black-and-white photos in collectors’ guides and a few bubbaized sporters.
I checked the contents of my pockets and then scuttled off to a corner of the gunsmithing shack to pull out my phone and dial 1-800-AM-I-BROKE to see if my paycheck had cleared. It had, and I was soon a proud Siamese Mauser owner.
This is the sort of thrilling collecting I remember. It was like seeing that once-in-a-lifetime buck come strolling out of the woods when you’re expecting a dull afternoon and reading a comic book in the tree stand to kill time before going back to tell lies around the campfire. Someone nowadays might plug “Mauser, Siamese” into a search engine on an auction site, but it’s just not the same.
If you want to do it the easy way, I’m not going to hate on you—well, not publicly at least. But, I will tell you that there are some intermediate steps that can greatly aid your collectible chops without completely outright throwing in the towel on your amateur status.
The first and easiest is developing a relationship with your local FFL, the one with whom you do the most of your business. I know my current collecting mania, Smith & Wesson semi-automatics, has benefitted from the fact the guys at Indy Arms Company know that’s my jam and I’ll get a call if one they think I’d like turns up for sale.
When I’m working in sales, I keep a list of my regular customers and their particular proclivities; no sense letting some World War II Walther P-38 languish in the case when I know I can call Norm Smith and he’ll swing by on the way home from work to grab it.
In fact, at the first shop where I worked, we had one of those sorts of regulars who’d hang out on Saturday mornings and even help behind the counter a bit when things got busy. He’d travel for work and we’d let him have a couple photocopies of the shop FFL. That way, when he was out checking out the local gun stores and pawn shops for antique Colts during his off hours, he could just hand them the FFL copy and have his discovery shipped to us.
This is the good, old-fashioned shoe-leather work that makes the “fair chase” style of gun collecting so much fun; checking the used counters at local shops and trawling the tables at the local gun show. Ducking into unfamiliar shops when you’re on the road to scope the inventory of used and collectible pieces. Networking with other collectors.
Once, while perusing the “Standard Catalog of Smith & Wesson” with my friend Marko, we came across the description of the Performance Center Model PC13, described as “a very serious carry revolver.” Marko was immediately smitten.
“One of these might be at the show this weekend!” he surmised hopefully.
“Yeah, and monkeys might fly out of my butt. It says right here they made only 200 of them five years ago. What’re the odds one’ll be there?”
Pretty good, as it turned out.
You just can’t get that kind of excitement scrolling a mouse pointer across a screen. You gotta get out there and hunt.
History repeats itself because mankind rarely pays attention to its own past. A quick look at the calendar recently revealed the fourth anniversary of the full-scale war in Ukraine.
Since the Russian invasion in late February 2022, we’ve witnessed the largest military action in Europe since World War II. The scale of the destruction and the casualty numbers are staggering. Nearly 1.2 million Russian troops have been killed or wounded, along with more than 500,000 Ukrainian. Civilian casualties in Ukraine have reached 60,000. Sadly, the end does not appear to be in sight.
Almost 90 years ago, Europe hosted a bloody preview of the Second World War, as the Spanish Civil War raged from July 1936 until April 1939. Like the current war in Ukraine, casualties were surprisingly high, particularly among civilians.
Nearly 200,000 men died on the battlefields of Spain, closely split between Nationalist rebel and Republican government forces. Ultimately, it was the Spanish people who suffered horribly, with as many as 300,000 civilians killed in fewer than three years. Man’s inhumanity to man was on full display, as war crimes and reprisals were commonplace on both sides of the lines.
Like what we see in Ukraine, the Spanish Civil War became an international arms bazaar and testing ground. The firearms, both innovative new types and older, reliable designs, coupled to create a dramatic impact on the battlefield. At the baseline, the conflict in Spain was an infantryman’s war, and by 1939, you could find at least a handful of almost every military rifle, submachine gun, light machine gun (LMG) and heavy machine gun from around the world in use by either side.
Acquiring Arms at Any Cost
Records show that there were roughly half a million military rifles in Spain at the start of the conflict. Republican government forces secured a little fewer than half of these, then quickly turned to foreign sources to buy arms. The Republicans were starved for manpower, and they embarked on a risky strategy of recruiting communist and anarchist militias into their army. What’s more, the Republicans needed an inordinate number of rifles for their growing force. While not every man required a rifle, there was a tremendous shortage of support arms in the Republican ranks.
Machine guns and artillery were in short supply, and the ability to train specialist troops was particularly limited. However, both male and female volunteers could be trained to use a rifle. Consequently, nearly 60 percent of Republican brigades were equipped with rifles. Compare that with U.S. Army brigades at the time, which equipped about 50 percent of their men with rifles, with the rest employed in specialist roles.
Meanwhile, the Spanish Republic faced significant roadblocks to obtaining modern firearms. In America, the Neutrality Act of 1935 prevented U.S. involvement in foreign conflicts, and this blocked arms sales to either side.
Despite concerns about the growth of fascism—and the opportunity for American arms makers to make sales during the Great Depression—President Franklin D. Roosevelt maintained a specific non-intervention doctrine and demanded an arms embargo on Spain. Congress agreed, and both houses overwhelmingly passed the resolution into law in January 1937. Consequently, neither Spanish Nationalists nor Republicans would receive arms shipments from America.
At the same time, England and France led a non- intervention committee of 27 nations to keep the war from spreading throughout Europe. Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union were also members of the committee, even while they intervened, providing arms, advisors and even combat troops to the warring factions in Spain. Nazi Germany and fascist Italy supported Ferdinand Franco and the Nationalists, while the communist Soviet Union quickly became the Spanish Republic’s largest supplier of arms.
By 1937, fascism and communism had squared off in a murderous brawl, with the Spanish people as their proxies. In America, the Neutrality Act, as applied to Spain, was condemned by some as favoring fascism. Yet at the same time, American neutrality did not contribute to the spread of international communism. All these years later, the Spanish Civil War still presents a brutal paradox for historians. Neither communism nor fascism was, or is, an acceptable ideology to free people, but those were the only choices visible during the war in Spain.
A Logistical Nightmare
While both sides suffered from complicated logistics, managing Republican small arms and ammunition required herculean efforts. With the Soviet Union as their primary supplier, the Spanish Republic received its first shipment from Russia in September 1936. By March 1939, the Soviets had delivered nearly 400,000 firearms of an extremely wide variety.
Already in possession of Spanish gold, Stalin decided to clean out Soviet arsenals of the rifles left over from the Czarist era. The first Russian delivery was a dismal collection of forlorn rifles ranging from disparate models like 8 mm Lebels and 6.5 mm Arisakas to long-obsolete, black-powder guns like the Italian Vetterli (10.4×47 mmR) and French Gras (11×59 mmR). Newer rifles were often shot-out, rusty or broken. The antiques were essentially useless as combat arms. Whatever the rifle, its age or chambering, there was rarely enough ammunition for sustained use.
(l.) In the fighting outside of Guadalajara in 1937, some Spanish Republicans carried Soviet Mosin-Nagants. photo: NARA (r.) While the U.S. did not ship arms to Spain, some American-made guns appeared via Soviet aid, such as these M1895 Winchesters seen in January 1937. photo: NARA
Author George Orwell went to Spain and served with the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) militia. He commented on the varied quality of ammunition for Republican arms: “Ammunition was so scarce that each man entering the line was only issued with 50 rounds, and most of it was exceedingly bad. The Spanish-made cartridges were all refills and would jam even the best rifles. The Mexican cartridges were better and were therefore reserved for the machine-guns. Best of all was the German-made ammunition, but as this came only from prisoners and deserters there was not much of it. I always kept a clip of German or Mexican ammunition in my pocket for use in an emergency.”
Late in 1936, the Soviets began to deliver more modern arms, consistently chambered in the Russian 7.62×54 mmR. Among the first of these was the Winchester M1895 lever-action, a robust and well-made rifle when first delivered to the Russian Empire in 1915. But by 1936, the guns that reached Spain were mostly worn out. Orwell remarked: “There were also a few Winchester rifles. These were nice to shoot with, but they were wildly inaccurate, and as their cartridges had no clips, they could only be fired one shot at a time.”
By early 1937, the quality of the Soviet imports began to improve, and this meant significant deliveries of the Mosin-Nagant M91 rifle (7.62×54 mmR). Again, Stalin would send the most elderly examples first, delivering tens of thousands of the original M91 rifles through the summer of 1937. By the autumn, the Republicans would begin to receive newly manufactured M91/30 rifles. By the war’s end, nearly 105,000 Mosin-Nagant rifles were provided to Spain, with the USSR providing the lion’s share, plus Poland and Mexico providing smaller amounts.
The American volunteers of the Republican Abraham Lincoln Brigade created an enduring legend of the Spanish Civil War when they nicknamed their M91 rifles the “Mexicanski.” American-made Mosin-Nagant rifles, produced at Remington and New England Westinghouse (originally made for Czarist Russia during World War I), had been acquired by Mexican gun dealers, who then sold them to the Spanish Republic. Enough of these U.S.-marked M91 rifles were issued to American volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade to create the circuitous nickname. Whatever markings they carried—U.S.; Mexican; Polish; Czarist; or Soviet—the Mosin-Nagants became the backbone of the Republican infantry.
A New Era of Infantry Firepower
Twenty years before the civil war in Spain, the combatants of World War I launched a breakneck arms race for infantry firepower, ultimately driving the design of portable, fast-firing machine guns. Consequently, the immediate post-war years saw an intense period of development of light machine guns (LMGs) and automatic rifles. By 1936, several full-automatic firearms that would play a major role in the battles of World War II were already in production, and many of them would see use on the battlefields of Spain.
(l.) About 1,000 Soviet-supplied Maxim-Tokarev M1925 LMGs were sent to Spain. photo: Tom Laemlein (r.) Catalonians march with Soviet-supplied DP-27 machine guns in late 1927. The Spanish Civil War saw some of the earliest combat use of the DP-27. photo: Polish National Archives
The troops in the Spanish Civil War continued to build on the deadly lessons learned in World War I, and almost every type of machine gun, old or new, could be found there. The logistical problems experienced with the wide range of imported rifles were only magnified with machine guns. Again, these challenges were more pronounced on the Republican side. At the beginning of the war, the Nationalists secured a larger portion of Spain’s meager supply of full-automatic firearms—primarily the Spanish-built version of the heavy Hotchkiss Model 1914 machine gun in 7 mm Mauser, and the Hotchkiss Model 1922 O.C. LMG, also in 7 mm Mauser. The Hotchkiss Model 1922 was a 19-pound machine gun that fed from a top-mounted, 20-round box magazine in its Spanish variant, or a 15-round metal feed strip. The rate of fire on the Model 1922 was a pedestrian 400 rpm, but in the first months of the war, it was the only LMG available in any numbers to either side. Spain had also adopted the excellent Madsen LMG in 7 mm Mauser (with a 25-round, top-mounted magazine), but these guns were quite expensive, and it seems there were very few in service when the war started.
In early 1937, as foreign arms shipments began to arrive, other machine guns reached Spanish shores. These early deliveries con-tained some of the most unusual LMGs to ever be used in combat. The Mexican government provided the Spanish Republic with arms, and along with 20,000 Mexican Mauser rifles (conveniently chambered in 7 mm) came about 100 Mendoza Model C-1934 LMGs (7 mm Mauser). The 18-pound Mendoza was a modern, efficient design, fed by a top-mounted 20-round box magazine, and cycling at 450 rpm. Unfortunately, I’ve never found a report on the Mendoza’s use in Spain.
Another rare machine gun that entered combat for the first time in Spain was the Soviet Maxim-Tokarev (7.62×54 mmR), a bulky, 34-pound, air-cooled beast fed by a 100-round belt in a drum carrier. The Maxim-Tokarev was almost an LMG, at least in name, and yet another example of the Soviets cleaning out the odds and ends of their arsenals in exchange for Spanish gold. Even so, Republican infantrymen were grateful to have anything like an LMG, and more than 1,000 Maxim-Tokarevs were used in Spain.
In 1937, the Soviets finally began to deliver modern small arms to Spain, including the Degtyaryov DP-27/28 LMG (7.62×54 mmR). The 25-pound DP-27 was fed by a distinctive, 47-round pan magazine. While the DP-27 saw its first action in Spain, that wouldn’t be its last appearance. The iconic machine gun served Soviet troops throughout World War II and saw use with communist forces around the world in multiple conflicts during the Cold War. In 2022, the DP-27 was still seen in action with Ukrainian troops resisting the Russian invasion.
Poland became the Spanish Republic’s second-largest weapons supplier, and the Poles provided some of the excellent Rkm wz.28, their version of the M1918 Browning Automatic Rifle chambered for the German 8 mm Mauser cartridge. The wz.28 was highly prized by troops on both sides of the lines in Spain. So, too, was the Czech-produced ZB vz.26 (8 mm Mauser), sold to the Spanish Republic in violation of the non-intervention treaty. The vz.26 was the forerunner of the British Bren gun, and in Spain, it provided a preview of how potent LMGs would be during fighting in World War II.
(l.) Spanish militia troops train on the Spanish Model 1895 carbine (7 mm Mauser), which had a 17.5-inch barrel and a stock that extended to the muzzle. photo: Polish National Archives (r.) The water-cooled PM1910 machine gun (chambered in 7.62×54 mmR) was supplied to the Spanish Republic by the USSR—normally on its two-wheeled Sokolov mount, giving it a total weight of 138 pounds. The PM1910 offered a steady cyclic rate of 600 rpm. photo: Tom Laemlein
On the Nationalist side, the German Condor Legion brought the MG13 (8 mm Mauser), a 25-round, box-magazine-fed design that was employed as a general-purpose machine gun by the Wehrmacht before the emergence of the MG34/MG42 family of machine guns. The Italians brought their fixed-magazine, stripper-fed Breda Model 30 (6.5 mm Carcano)—the Spanish war saw some of the best and worst LMGs of the era.
As in World War I, heavy machine guns often dominated the battlefields of Spain. The Soviets provided the Republicans with a significant number of Maxim PM1910 water-cooled machine guns (7.62×54 mmR). The Maxim was weighty (nearly 140 pounds on its wheeled mount), but its steady 600-rpm cyclic rate provided the sustained fire that deterred all but the most fervent (and costly) Nationalist infantry assaults. Albert Prago served in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and described his experience with the Russian Maxim in his war memoir “We Fought Hitler”:
“The great majority of all the weapons used in Spain were Soviet manufactured. We tested the superior quality of the Soviet Maxim-type machine gun in action. The simplicity of its mechanism (any soldier can learn in a day’s time how to field strip it; any trained machine gunner can strip it completely within 100 seconds), in no way detracts from its quality; I have seen its deadly hail of 600 bullets per minute mowing down wave after wave of attacking enemy infantry. The members of the Tom Mooney Machine Gun Company can tell you of their respect and admiration for this machine gun; in one of the daily battles at Jarama it was a Soviet gun that saved the day after all others jammed or had gone haywire.”
Interestingly, the M1910 Maxim soldiers on even today, fighting with Ukrainian forces as a heavy machine gun in fixed emplacements, and coupled in twos or fours as an anti-drone platform mounted on light vehicles.
Personal Firepower
The Spanish Civil War, like most of the conflicts of the 1930s, featured a new type of firearm: the submachine gun (SMG). Before the war started, the Spanish arms industry was busy making selective-fire pistols, similar in appearance to the Mauser C96, for sale to the lucrative Chinese market. Spanish manufacturers Beístegui and Astra both had success with 20-shot, selective-fire pistols fitted with shoulder stocks. These automatic “broomhandle” pistols (chambered in 7.63 mm, 7.65 mm and 9 mm Largo) were very fastfiring, some up to 10 rounds per second, and were popular on both sides in the civil war.
Republican troops engaged in house-to-house fighting using Soviet-supplied M91 Mosin-Nagant rifle, scenes that would be repeated at Stalingrad. photo: Polish National Archives
The Republican government intended to purchase a significant number of Thompson submachine guns from America, but the neutrality act(s) quashed that hope. Instead of the Thompson, several European submachine guns were used in Spain, most notably the MP28/II (9 mm) and the Erma EMP (multiple calibers). One of Spain’s first submachine guns was a MP28/II copy manufactured before the war and called the Modelo 1929 (9 mm Largo). About 5,000 were made. The Erma EMP was also produced (unlicensed) in Spain by the Republicans, and again, it was chambered for the 9 mm Largo. The issue of SMGs and the doctrine for their use in Republican forces seems to have been rather ad hoc. However, the impression they made far outpaced the actual numbers that served.
Lessons Learned, Ignored or Forgotten
On April 1, 1939, the Spanish Civil War came to an end as the Nationalists defeated the Second Spanish Republic. Francisco Franco became the head of state and would remain in that position until his death in November 1975. Although closely associated with fascists in Germany and Italy, Franco maintained Spanish neutrality during World War II. Throughout his tenure as the Spanish head of state, he remained a fervent anti-communist.
There was much for the world’s military powers to observe in Spain. With the battleground confined to the Iberian Peninsula, the conflict was quickly acknowledged as a combat testing ground. Col. Stephen Fuqua, the military attaché to U.S. ambassador Claude Bowers, wrote in 1937: “It is generally accepted that the civil war in Spain is not only a laboratory for testing equipment, particularly of German and Russian design, but also a ‘dress rehearsal’ for the next war.”
More than a century after its introduction, the Soviet PM1910 continues to see service in the Russo-Ukrainian War, where it has been pressed into service as a drone-defense platform, often mounted in pairs and used with modern mounts and sighting systems. photo: Getty
With so much to examine, certain weapon systems gained a much higher profile, particularly aircraft, tanks and anti-tank guns. Germany, Italy and the Soviet Union committed their latest aircraft, and the German Condor Legion debuted its combined-arms tactics employing close air support. For many students of military arms and tactics, the aircraft and the armored vehicles drew more attention, often obscuring the myriad small arms involved in infantry combat. Regardless, the information was there for the world’s armies to analyze. In the end, very few chose to, particularly in the U.S.
The Soviets probably learned quite a bit in Spain, but much of this was lost or suppressed during the purge of Red Army officers from August 1936 through November 1938. Britain and France showed only mild interest in the lessons of Spain, regardless of what their intelligence services reported.
It is apparent that German forces learned the most from their experiences in the Spanish Civil War, particularly about how to use their equipment to its full potential, as well as details about the arms and techniques of their opponents in the coming war. Their preparation in Spain would pay tremendous dividends during the Blitzkrieg.
Time marches on, and history has a curious way of repeating itself. Four years into the war in Ukraine, I wonder what we are learning about the changes in firearms, tactics and technology. It seems that some things never change, and it still takes a determined infantryman with a rifle to occupy and hold a piece of ground before one side or the other can claim it. Technology gives us the tools, but brave humans must do the dangerous work. Just like in Spain 90 years ago, the information is there for us to analyze. What we do about it will define our future.