Bofors Gun in Spanish Civil War

[old knobbly]

According to Terry Gander's book 'The Bofors Gun', (2013 p.109) 24 Polish-made 40mm L/60 Bofors Guns and 50,000 rounds of ammunition were supplied to Republican Spain in mid-1938. I am planning to build a diorama of a Bofors in SCW but can't find any other references or (better still) photographs of Bofors Guns used in Spain. Can anyone help?

[Kingsman]

Doesn't seem to appear on any of the sites listing weapons used in the SCW.  Bofors 37mm AT guns yes, 40mm AA no.  Spain doesn't even seem to be listed as a Bofors 40mm user: one of very few Western-leaning nations not listed.......  I can't see Poland wanting to get involved in supplying weapons to either side with their precarious political position in that era.  Condor Legion does not seem to have used the 40mm FlaK 28 version of the L/60.

 

Wikipaedia - not always 100% trustworthy - notes that 24 Bofors L/60 originally ordered by the Spanish state pre-SCW and "not delivered due to the civil war" were in fact supplied to Peru.  It seems that they still have them.  So maybe that is the answer.

[old knobbly]

Thanks for the reply. This would explain why no other information about Republican Bofors guns has been found. It is unfortunate that Terry Gander does not give his sources in the book but he does also say that a few Polish-made Bofors guns were supplied to Nationalist forces and used as coastal defences towards the end of the war. In an otherwise authoritative monograph it does seem strange if he has got this Spanish information so wrong.?

[Kingsman]

I've surfed several sites listing SCW weapons and about the Bofors and I couldn't find a single mention of the Bofors or even anything that could be mistaken for one on either side.  There was an AAA gap between 20mm and 75mm on the Nationalist side and the Republicans didn't have any Russian 37mm 61-Ks as these were too late for that conflict (M1939).  It would be logical that emplaced coastal guns would have been inherited by the Spanish state after the war, yet Spain is not listed as ever being a Bofors user.  And that mention is strange as the SCW is notable for not being a naval conflict and having no amphibious operations.

 

The Polish model company Panzer Garage claims in their blurb for their 1/72 Bofors kit that Poland sold "at least 40" Bofors 40mm Armata Przeciwlotnicza wz36 to the Nationalists.  Large pinch of salt required.......

 

However, I think I have the answer.  The coastal guns Gander mentions are not Bofors but a little-known unique Spanish-built version of the Vickers 40mm "Pom-Pom".  Unique insofar as it was a twin mounting and may have used a longer L/50 barrel than the usual L/40 to take advantage of the Vickers HV 40mm round.  These mountings were commissioned in 1936 for the Spanish navy heavy cruisers Baleares and Canarias, each of which would have had 6 twin mountings.  Some had been installed on the ships, which were still under construction.  But when the SCW broke out it seems that 7 mountings were still at the Placencia de las Armas factory when it fell into Republican hands.  These guns were apparently taken into ground use by the Republicans, presumably on some sort of improvised wheeled trailers or on trucks. They would have weighed a good couple of tons.  Two were captured by the Nationalists in March 37, fate unknown.  Four were captured by the Nationalists at Gijon in October and were then emplaced in 2 pairs in the coastal forts at Ferrol.  The fate of the 1 remaining in Republican hands is unknown.

 

Here is one of the mountings on what looks like an emplaced or test mount.  Not easily confused with a Bofors.  Water jacketed barrels with large conical flash hiders, side belt rather than top clip fed.  But maybe the 40mm calibre led to the wrong conclusion.

 

[old knobbly]

Excellent research Kingsman and an interesting post. Perhaps this written description was the cause of confusion. We must presume that Gander had not seen this photo as it cannot have been misidentified as the single barrel Bofors L/60.

[Kingsman]

Don't thank me.  Mr Google provideth.....  The information was apparently out there some years before Gander's book.  The weapons were identified in 2011 with a bit more info in 2022, including the photo.

 

Look here https://forum.axishistory.com/viewtopic.php?t=178078

and here https://www.secretprojects.co.uk/threads/spanish-pom-pom-vickers-40-40-anti-aircraft-machine-gun-for-canarias.39530/

[Carvil]

Bofors AA 40 mm guns arrived to Republican Spain approximately in March 1938. Here is a photograph attributed to a Republican gun, though it is erroneously dated. 

 

https://postlmg.cc/w1dFMc0R

Edited February 18 by Carvil

[old knobbly]

Thank you Carvil, that is a very interesting photo. Do you have any more information about this image? e.g. where is it taken? are these Republican or Nationalist soldiers?

[Kingsman]

That exact photo is currently for sale on eBay titled as Italian Army Bofors guns in Spain in 1936.  Although 1937 is pencilled on the back of the photo.  The seller seems to be a seller of primarily Italian military photos.

https://www.ebay.it/itm/256281739509?mkevt=1&mkcid=1&mkrid=724-53478-19255-0&campid=5338722076&customid=&toolid=10050

 

Here it is to aid the discussion.  It certainly looks like a photo of that era.  The white section is not explained.  It sure looks like a cut-out section from the front because of the shadow at the top but does not appear in the image of the back of the photo.  But the bottom edge profiles of the 2 images do match up so they are the same picture.  So is it a piece stuck on, and if so what is it covering - and why?

 

 

 

The Italians had a considerable - if often ineffective - presence in the Nationalist forces.  About 45,000 regular Italian soldiers and 30,000 Blackshirt militia volunteers would serve in Spain.  Italy would supply Spain with about 1,800 artillery pieces in addition to those they fielded themselves.  It seems that Italian ground forces did not deploy to mainland Spain until January 1937 and that their involvement in 1936 might have been limited to the Balearic Islands.  The photo is clearly a coastal location and it appears that live fire against an airborne target is going on.  The uniforms could be Italian artillery or Nationalist: units of both wore jodhpurs with puttees or long socks and sidecaps.  But they could be several other nations too.  Greece did not get any of the Bofors they ordered.  They could be Poles, Dutch, Romanians or even Finns.  The uniform detail is not clear enough.

 

But Italy's medium-calibre AA gun of the period was the 37mm Breda 37/54.  And the only identified Italian use of the Bofors gun was the US-made M1 version supplied to Italian Co-Belligerent forces working alongside Allied forces after Italy's surrender.  One Co-Belligerent AA unit was equipped with British-made Bofors but 5 Aviation Groups (51st - 55th) supported the USAAF with ground defence and AAA.  The Bofors in the picture are not US-made as they have the predictor sights.  The very earliest British guns did still have the predictor sights but it is unlikely that any of these would still have been around in 1944.

 

The US NavWeaps site claims that Poland supplied 24 guns and 50,000 rds of ammunition to the Republicans in 1938 which were "eventually" captured by the Nationalists and ended up as coastal defence guns.  Which sounds very much like the Vickers guns mentioned in my earlier post.  But if true that is the wrong side and wrong date for the Italian photo.  I'm not sure that I can see Poland supporting the Republicans anyway.  Pre-war Poland was no friend of Communist causes.  And Poland was busily re-equipping its own armed forces, although they apparently actually exported 168 guns to the United Kingdom, France, Romania and The Netherlands.  None of which seem likely to have ended up in Spain or Italy.  And the early Polish built Wz36 guns had wheels with fewer larger holes, although the type shown here was used later on the Wz38 - potentially too late for the picture date.  A Russian-hosted site on Polish AA weapons doesn't mention Spanish exports of the Bofors.

 

So I don't think we're much further forward despite what the photo says.  Supply of Bofors to Spain remains unclear and use by Italy in the timeframe as the photo claims seems to be a definite no.  And if Italy was supplying the Nationalists with artillery why would Italian forces be using Nationalist weapons supplied by others?

 

 

Edited February 19 by Kingsman
addition

[old knobbly]

Thanks Kingsman for your interesting additions to the discussion. I agree that the soldiers shown in this photo do not look like Republicans and are most likely to be Nationalists or Italians.

 

According to Terry Gander in his book The Bofors Gun (p109) 'a few' Polish Bofors guns were supplied directly to the Nationalists, 'enough to equip a static coastal bettery'. In addition, Gander tells us that an unknown number of Polish guns were delivered to the Republicans in 1938 but eventually fell into Nationalist hands and 'were retained by the coast artillery and concentrated around the northern port of El Ferrol for many years after 1939'.

 

These Nationalist coastal guns may well be the Polish ones described by Terry Gander, operated by Italian or Nationalist troops in 1938 or 39.

[Kingsman]

What interests me here is that the Bofors story exactly parallels the Vickers HV story.  Exactly, except for the source.  Which to my mind is hinky.  And many observers would never have heard of the Vickers and many researchers might have been confused.  The Vickers looks more than a little like the naval water-cooled Bofors, which came along a lot later.

 

Also, the Bofors 40/60 was an inherently mobile weapon and the SCW was the first war where air power was a significant factor.  Why would such weapons be squandered for coastal defence?  They would be far better employed defending land forces, forward HQs etc.  The Nationalists' German advisers would have understood this even if the Italians didn't.  The Vickers guns were on hefty shipboard mountings really only suitable for permanent emplacement.  The Republicans seem to have found some way of using them but their inherent immobility may have contributed to their capture.  Although it is not impossible that we could be talking about both Vickers and Bofors and that they have become conflated as one and the same.  It is also not impossible that we could be seeing circular sourcing: this image is already appearing in Google searches.

 

The only other source I have found for Polish Bofors - admittedly not with the most thorough research ever - is NavWeaps.  But their information is confused as it says that Polish export Bofors were embargoed in Sweden in the run-up to WW2.  Which makes no sense as there is no reason for Polish-made Bofors to be in Sweden.  The Russian-hosted site on Polish AA weapons does not mention Spain, only the UK and the Netherlands, as Polish export customers.  https://en.topwar.ru/196021-polskie-sredstva-pvo-vo-vtoroj-mirovoj-vojne.html.  There is a Polish-language book on the Polish Bofors which might shed more light.

 

Now, the other confusing factor here is the Bofors 37mm anti-tank gun, licence-built in Poland as the Wz.36 (same year designation as the 40mm AA) and sold for export by Poland.  A quantity of these were definitely acquired by Republican forces although the source seems unclear.  This widely used and initially effective anti-tank gun is generally overlooked.  The SCW was its first combat use.  As a Bofors design it may be that these anti-tank weapons are being confused by name with the anti-aircraft weapon.  But are not something suited to coastal defence.

 

This very niche book confirms the dismounted naval 40mm Vickers but the site on which I found this extract did not show pages for land service weapons.

 

However the photo could be the single piece of evidence that proves Bofors AA guns in Spain.  Although the fact that the seller seems to deal exclusively in Italian memorabilia is a confusing factor.

 

[old knobbly]

Thanks Kingsman, you make some very interesting comments again. Although there could well be some conflation of information between Vickers guns, Bofors anti-tank and anti-aircraft guns in our sources I think the subject of the post, Bofors 40mm L/60 AA guns were definitely supplied to Republican Spain. 

 

In the time between this original post and now I have been sent several photographs showing Bofors guns in Republican service and one or two truck mounted ones being driven through a city, probably Barcelona, surrounded by Republican soldiers.

 

I can't upload a photo to this site to show you (don't know how) but we do have more than the recent Italian/Nationalist photo evidence. 

 

Still lots more to discover and clarify for this interesting (to me anyway) topic.

[Pig of the Week]

Interesting photo, the forage type caps worn by the men look fairly Italian to me, though I'm no expert. 

Is the white strip on the pic perhaps something put there by the eBay seller so people don't just copy the pic and print one off themselves? 

[old knobbly]

Thanks PotW. The forage caps certainly don't look Republican.

 

As for the white strip on the photo - your suggestion sounds good to me (but it would be easy enough to clone the thing out if printing a low-res version was wanted).

[Kingsman]

@old knobbly Those would be good to see to close this discussion off conclusively.  To do that you would need an image hosting service like Imgur, which is (still) free.  I use that one but there are others like Hobby Photo Host.  Basically you create your free account then just drag and drop images from your own PC or cloud storage into your hosted image library.  From there you can select various forms of link to embed the images into web pages like this one.

 

I could do that for you but you would need to email them to me, and they would then be in my image library.  Although that doesn't stop you creating your own and uploading them yourself later.  At least that would get them into the debate.

[Kingsman]

Here are the photos @old knobbly mentioned.  The first 3 look to be the same vehicle, which seems to be carrying the gun portee for the parade.  It probably couldn't be fired like that.  So definitely at least 1 Bofors.  The insignia on the cab door suggests an AA unit. 

 

The red French writing on the lower right photo possibly says "Souvenir of/from the 401st Defence Contre Avion (i.e. anti-aircraft)".  There was a French Army 401st Regiment d'Artillerie Defence Contre Avions from January 1924, renamed from the 1st RDCA.  Interestingly they are noted as having Bofors guns in 1940 as well as 25mm Hotchkiss and 75mm mle 32/33 AA guns.  France was not of course involbed in the SCW.  Could that photo be an interloper from France and not SCW?

 

Does anyone recognise the truck brand? 

 

At the risk of continuing to be a naysayer, I'm not entirely convinced this is SCW: I think it might be later after the civil war when the Spanish Army had adopted German-style uniforms.  Also the guy in uniform on the left of the picture appears to be wearing the curious and distinctive Guardia Civil cap,  Although they split onto both sides in the SCW with the Republican cadre re-naming themselves Guardia Nacional Republicana (Republican National Guard).

 

 

 

Edited February 21 by Kingsman
addition

[Pig of the Week]

The truck says Autocar on the badges, they were a well established US vehicle manufacturer, they made a lot of vehicles for the US army during WW2 too. 

No idea if they had "made under licence" European operations like Ford for instance. 

[old knobbly]

At the very start of this thread almost one year ago I was intending to build a diorama based around a Republican Bofors gun. Well, the project is now completed. The photos here are my interpretation of a Bofors 40mm L/60 anti-aircraft gun used in Barcelona, 1938.

[Pig of the Week]

That's a cracking model and setting 👍

[Kingsman]

Thanks @Pig of the Week.  Your eyes are better than mine.  I can see it now.  No, Autocar did not have any European subsidiary operations. Ford and GM both had plants in Spain which were expropriated by the Nationalists.

 

Having identified the truck brand I can confidently say that those 3 photos with the truck are definitely not SCW as the truck is a post-WW2 model.  That style of Autocar radiator grille only appeared in 1947.  The previous style had fewer thicker vertical bars, but even that was only introduced in 1940 briefly before production of civilian-specification Autocars was suspended in 1941.  Does anyone recognise the architecture?  I have a suspicion those photos could be Argentina or Chile.  Both used Bofors and many civilian-type trucks of US origin, although I can't find Autocars definitively.  The Germanic uniforms could certainly be Argentine. 

 

I'm convinced the guys in the photo with the French writing are French from early WW2.  To suggest that Spanish troops of either side had souvenirs from a French AA unit is to suggest that France played some role in at least training them, which is contrary to what we know.  Unless it belonged to a French soldier who left or deserted from 401 RADCA to join one side or other in the SCW, which does not prove that he operated Bofors in Spain - only that he came from a unit equipped with them in France.

 

The photos from @old knobbly came from this book BTW.  Bofors 40mm prominent on the cover with Bofors 37mm AT peeking in on the right.

[old knobbly]

Thanks Kingsman, your anlysis of those photos I sent sounds reasonable to me. I agree that there is no definite association with Spain in any of these images. I had accepted the odd looking uniforms worn by the men on the truck being Republicans as they did use a wide variety of clothing!

 

If non of these images are Spanish we are still struggling to find any photo evidence of Republican use of Bofors guns in SCW...

[StuartH]

Interesting thread.

 

This site mentions use of Bofors 40mm in SCW:

https://www.everand.com/article/651009558/Big-Shooter

 

On Page 3 of this document it mentions use of Bofors 40mm in hands of insurgents in Spanish Civil War to bring down aircraft:

https://eugeneleeslover.com/US-NAVY-GUNS/40_mm_Bofors_History.pdf

 

 

Architecture in the photo certainly looks like South America. One of the earlier posts mentions Peru?

[Kingsman]

Yes that is interesting. But if they were as common and effective in SCW as that memo suggests, then why is it so difficult to find any hard evidence??  I am tempted to say that people are perhaps trying to fit evidence to the theorem. Nothing unearthed so far has proved conclusive.

[StuartH]

A Bofors 40mm gun was used in the 1975 film 'The Tree of Guernica' if that counts as hard evidence 

 

 

 

 

[Pig of the Week]

I'd say there's enough doubt both ways to just go with the diorama anyway and say "it very likely occurred somewhere during the conflict" 

That'd be my get out clause ! 😉

Just thought.. I must listen to the Clash "Spanish Bombs" now....