Taking into account that the Spanish CW was a testing ground for new weapons and developments such as tanks and aviations, but it was still a mostly infantry based conflict with big infantry and trenches battles such as the Battle of the Ebro, how much did this influenced the military theory and planning of the countries such as France or Italy arriving into a conflict such as the first 2 years of WW2? Did this reassure the French that a static defense was a better idea or were they too engraved in the old thinking for this to have any effects ?
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Germany was able to work out some of the technical issues with its dive-bombers, although the lack of any effective opposing AAA or modern fighter aircraft seems to have blinded them to the technique's inherent vulnerabilities.
So the Spanish CW predisposed them to take more a dive bombing approach to ground support instead of a more balance take?
Yes, and it worked against Poland, and later against the Soviet Union while they had air superiority because modern air defences in those regions were far in between.
But because they met a well equipped RAF with modern planes as well as modern extensive air defences in the Battle of Britain, they had to completely withdraw the Stuka from battle as its losses were catastrophic and the invulnerability myth was shattered.
The Germans learned the hard way that tactics and the functionality of their planes were very different when fighting a modern army compared to fighting the types of battles they fought in Spain.
So had the Spanish CW not happened, which confirmed their direction in dive bombing as main aerial support, we may have seen the Luftwaffe take another route (maybe tactical bombers? or some sort of other ground support doctrine). I guess we might never know. Thanks for your answer.
We may have still seen them briefly. But without the Spanish Civil War to work out some of the technical problems, their efficacy would have been much lower, while still carrying the same risk.
Probably. The Luftwaffe relied heavily on dive bombers early in WWII. They were often quite successful tactically, but the attrition rate was unsustainable, particularly against peers like Britain, France and the USSR.
Germany was able to develop and practice the coordination of air and artillery forces with mobilized land forces via radio, which would become the basis of Blitzkrieg in the next war.
Guernica scared the hell out of politicians and military leaders who thought war meant London and Paris would be wiped from the earth by such attacks in a matter of days. It would be hard to underestimate the impact that had on the course of appeasement and the German success up to the Battle of Britain.
In the end it turned out that civilians are way more resilient than predicated, that what you indeed can achieve remarkable results against objectives with no defence and that was a terrible atrocity in 1937 is something you can do with less than a full squadron of Mosquitos as a diversion in 1944
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Tanks had been armoured against rifle calibre machine gun fire - this was a time when the M2 .50cal was still considered a viable at weapon. In Spain however they came up against 37-45mm AT guns for the first time. Popularly this is supposed to have convinced blimpish generals that AT guns had made tanks as obsolete as machine guns had cavalry. What actually happened is that it prompted urgent up-armouring of tanks to "shell proof". Hence it accelerates the armour/gun race with things like the R-35, Matilda II, T34 and KV and rendered interwar tanks like the Vickers 6 ton and inter-war at weapons like AT-rifles obsolescent if not obsolete.
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German use use of divebombers has been mentioned.
Tactically their fighters moved to a "finger four" formation that out-classed the old 3 man "vic" formations other airforces kept using
It also demonstrated the effectiveness of "schlact" aircraft like the HS-123 operating in close support rather than as pure divebombers
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And the intervention was very expensive for Italy, and along with their invasion of Abyssinia is one of the factors that meant that what was a good army by the standard of 1932 was outdated by 1940