> My point was always that Nazi and Fascist support of the Nationalists had been over-emphasized by history.
How so? Hitler got to road-test his war methodologies like blitzkrieg during the Spanish Civil war (he wasn’t even supposed to have war making capability at the time!) and the Luftwaffe was able to road-test their Stuka dive-bombing skills against relatively-benign targets. All of this was to stand the Nazis in good stead in 1939, 1940 and 1941 — the years that America played hooky from WW-II.
Franco and his tin-pot Fascist dictatorship was the sidebar to the main event, which was the build-up of the military capabilities of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and the conquest of Europe. The West could have kiboshed that in Spain.
It’s fine for Americans to blame Chamberlain for Hitler being able to make the gains he did thru British indecisiveness and appeasement. Fair enough: Chamberlain deserved a fair bit of criticism for that.
That said, it’s not like America did anything to stop Hitler during that time. Only a few communist volunteers saw the threat for what it was.