Franco promptly dispatched envoys to the two European leaders he was confident would help, Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler. The emissaries to Germany were received just after Hitler had attended a performance of Wagner’s Siegfried at the opera festival in Bayreuth. The Führer was wearing his brown storm-trooper’s uniform; the rest of his entourage, in evening dress, were kept waiting for their supper while he met with Franco’s representatives. They gave him a handwritten letter and map from the general. After several hours’ talk—much of it a monologue from Hitler, who was still annoyed that Spain had stayed neutral in the First World War—the dictator agreed to supply whatever Franco needed. He then summoned Air Marshal Hermann Göring and ordered him to send more planes than Franco had asked for.
Within a few days the first of them were on their way to Spanish Morocco, and soon they were ferrying Franco’s troops, and before long the general himself, across the Strait of Gibraltar to Spain. In a bow to the opera the senior Nazis had just watched, in which the fearless Siegfried passes heroically through flames to wake Brünnhilde from a deep sleep, the dispatch of German transport planes would be called Operation Magic Fire. For Hitler, resentful of being disdained by the Western democracies since he had come to power three and a half years earlier, it was a delight to have another country’s military ask for his aid.
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