Slashing to the Sea

An entire generation has been lost.

Every day, thousands die.

Not just the fighting men entrenched in the frontlines, but women and children as well. The anarchists and communists pillage the cities and burn churches. Nuns are brutally raped while their priests hang from the altars. Foreign powers have choked and bled the very flower of Spain for far too long. Its once rich soil has become a wasteland.

Now, the commander of the Nationalist Army of the North has a strategy that will win this Civil war.

General Juan Vigon, former chief of staff to Mola is one of the few Spaniards to gain the respect of the German General Staff. This gnome-like, wizened disciplinarian was once a schoolteacher. He was also architect of the murderous destruction of Guernica. With Northern Spain firmly secured, Vigon focuses his powerful steel-rimmed spectacles on final victory.

Madrid had boasted of its impenetrable "Ring of Iron". The Condor Legion however, under the command of General Hugo Sperrle has leveled the city three times. Described by Hitler as "My most brutal looking general", the stocky, monocled Sperrle and his chief of staff, Wolfram Von Richtofen, cousin of the World War I Ace, carried out the Guernica mission at the request of Vigon.

But Madrid is not the objective.

Two hundred and thirty years ago Gibraltar was yielded to the Crown of Britain "for ever' and has been the thorn in the side of Spain's national pride ever since. Overlooking the western approach to the Mediterranean Sea, Gibraltar commands the world's most strategic crossroad. Whoever controls The Rock controls the Mediterranean, and whoever controls the Mediterranean, controls southern Europe and Africa.

The 1,000 anti-aircraft batteries surrounding Madrid could not save it from the Condor bombers.

In 1937, the most modern battleships have no defense against the air.

Vigon issues this directive:

"While our nation is torn apart by civil war, the opportunist Anglo imperialists have cast the deadly shadow of aggression across our shores. In addition to the massive Mediterranean Fleet moored off our coast is the sudden arrival of Britain's most powerful and modern warships - the Grand Fleet of the Atlantic.

This action should be viewed as an act of war and the threat of invasion is imminent. We must act now for we not only risk losing our Catholic ideology, but our culture as well. With the aid of our noble and heroic brothers, Spain will once and for all purge the bane of Trafalgar, the Royal Navy, from our shores forever."

The war will end after Franco reclaims Gibraltar for Spain. He will be heralded as a national hero, the champion who has made Spain whole again.

For without its Navy, the British Empire will be nothing more than a paper lion and the sun will set on the Union Jack "for ever."

Victoria Cross