When Graham Hurley found out about Operation Felix, the Nazi plan to seize Gibraltar, it sparked the idea behind his new book, Dead Ground. He tells Historia how his research unearthed other surprising facts which knitted together to provide a compelling plot.
Confession time. Eight books into the Spoils of War collection, I’d never heard of Operation Felix. This turned out to be Hitler’s bid to extend his astonishing run of major victories on the European mainland in the summer of 1940.
After gobbling up Norway, Denmark, and Belgium before humbling mighty France, his attention turned to Gibraltar. Kick the Brits off the Rock and he could turn the Mediterranean into a German lake. Just think about that.
And so I did. Berlin’s plan called for a pact with Generalissimo Francisco Franco, victor in the Spanish Civil War and now Spain’s undisputed leader. Hitler calculated that a spot of personal diplomacy would do the trick and headed his train south towards the Franco-Spanish border at Hendaye.
What he hadn’t anticipated was the wily, soft-spoken Galician who arrived late on his own train, and came armed with a shopping list of must-haves. Spain was starving. She was running out of oil. Substantial German aid would be essential if Franco was to open his borders to Wehrmacht troops.
In principle, Franco had no love for the Brits but he was wary about the Royal Navy and he demanded the protection of a proper alliance.
No one talked to Hitler like this but Franco seem to have mislaid his script. He droned on and on, commanding the conversation, testing the Fuhrer’s patience to breaking point. Hitler later confided to Benito Mussolini that he never wanted to see the little man again. I’d settle for root canal treatment in the dentist’s chair, he grunted, rather than submit to another dose of that Spanish nonsense.
This, of course, wasn’t the end of it. It is the business of diplomats to mend broken fences in the wake of their irascible leaders and Berlin did its best to secure passage for the guns, ammunition, and many thousands of men who would batter Gibraltar into submission.
Operation Felix was a daunting challenge, made all the more complex by the decrepit state of the track south of the border, and the fact that Spanish Railways operated on a different gauge, meaning that everything had to be transhipped. German planners were used to solving problems like this, and the bid to seize Gibraltar still had the backing of Hitler, but one name caught my eye.
Admiral Wilhelm Canaris was the canny head of the Abwehr organisation, in charge of the gathering and sorting of German military intelligence. I knew about this man. I knew about his background, the languages he spoke, his friends and contacts in foreign capitals, his lifelong support for an older Germany.
The latter had been shaken by what he’d seen of SS death squads operating behind the front line troops in Poland in 1939. Killing Polish civilians and sundry other groups, in his view, had no place in the Thousand Year Reich, and as a result he was locked into a merciless turf war with SS Chief Heinrich Himmler, eager to first humble and then absorb the Abwehr. Canaris, in short, had developed serious doubts about exactly where Hitler was taking his precious Germany.
Gibraltar. Franco. Hitler. And now Canaris. Somewhere in that jigsaw, I thought, might lie the germ of book nine in the Spoils of War. What if the Brits, stripped to the bone but still fighting on, were searching desperately for a way of keeping the Wehrmacht out of Gibraltar?
What if one of my leading fictional characters, MI5 agent Tam Moncrieff, was despatched to Madrid to seed mischief amongst the topmost level of the Nazi tribal chiefs? What if Canaris himself turned out to hold the key to keep Gibraltar safe? And precisely what leverage could Moncrieff seize to make that happen?
And so the novel began to take shape. What I needed was a narrative focus, a single compelling character to get under the readership’s skin and thus keep the pages turning.
As it happened, I’d come up with just such a figure in the previous book, The Blood of Others. This explores the circumstances surrounding one of the war’s uncontested disasters, eight hours of away-day violence that took thousands of Allied troops, chiefly Canadians, to the stony beach of Dieppe in Northern France, only to lose more than half of them to German guns and mortars.
Central to The Blood of Others is an Anglo-Breton woman called Annie Wrenne. She’s an aide to Rear-Admiral Louis Mountbatten, head of Combined Operations and architect of the raid. Striking, fearless, and rather older than she looks, Annie worked well on the page and I’d often wondered what she’d been up to in the Thirties. Now, in the shape of what was rapidly hardening into Dead Ground, I had the answer.
The novel’s opening pages find Annie in Madrid. It’s 1936. Fluent in Spanish as well as her native French, she’s pursuing a fascination for the work of artist Francisco Goya. In mid-summer, the Spanish Civil War breaks out and Annie finds herself swept up in the violence.
She enlists as a trainee nurse, helping to look after the many wounded from the International Brigades. One of them is a beguiling young Englishman, Giles Roper, with whom she has an all-consuming affair, but Roper has a roving eye and betrays her.
Hurt and humiliated, Annie crosses the path of a mercenary sniper dubbed El Diablo, who has been hideously disfigured by a rebel bomb. He’s another character from the previous book and El Diablo, in turn, will lead her to Moncrieff, and a plot to have Himmler shot on a brief visit to Spain.
Annie Wrenne, with her fluent Spanish, her good looks, and her boiling anger, thus becomes the missing piece in Moncrieff’s bid to head off Operation Felix.
This is heady stuff but the miracle of long-form historical fiction is the sheer narrative space that lets you first develop and then resolve a web of interlocking themes. And so Operation Felix found Lin and me on the ferry to Santander, and thence to a long series of coach journeys that took us to all the key locations vital to the book.
Dead Ground by Graham Hurley was published on 4 July, 2024.
You may also be interested in reading these related features:
The Spanish Civil War: a war against children by Maggie Brookes
Down the rabbit hole – to kill Hitler by Eric Lee
Making room for the master race: the true scope of Himmler’s Lebensborn programme by Catherine Hokin
Fifty years of fake news; the cover-up of the Katyn Massacre by Carolyn Kirby
Images:
- Adolf Hitler and Francisco Franco saluting troops during their meeting at Hendaye: Heinrich Hoffmann/Krakow-Warsaw Press Publishing via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Franco, c1940: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Wilhelm Canaris, 1940: Deutsches Bundesarchiv Bild 146-1979-013-43 via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)
- A BOAC Douglas Dakota, silhouetted by night at Gibraltar by searchlights on the Rock, 1940–45: Imperial War Museum IWM (CH 14746) (IWM Non-Commercial Licence)
- Karl Wolff, Heinrich Himmler and Francisco Franco during Himmler’s visit to Spain, October, 1940: Deutsches Bundesarchiv Bild 183-L15327 via Wikimedia (CC BY-SA 3.0 DE)
