Dilip Kuner
TODAY marks the 80th anniversary of VJ Day – Victory over Japan Day – when the Second World War finally came to an end on August 15, 1945.
Across the world, Allied nations are remembering the moment Japan’s surrender ended years of brutal fighting in China, Burma and the Pacific.
Spain, officially neutral during the conflict, was not a combatant in the war against Japan – but the country’s involvement was more complex than the history books sometimes suggest.
While General Francisco Franco’s government kept Spain out of direct fighting, Madrid maintained diplomatic ties with Tokyo right until the closing days of the war.
Spain served as a ‘neutral bridge’ between Japan and the Axis powers – particularly Nazi Germany – and even acted as a conduit for intelligence gathering.
Through its embassies in Manila (before the Japanese occupation), Shanghai, and Tokyo, Spain became an unofficial channel for both sides.
Spanish diplomats helped exchange messages between Japan and neutral nations, and, after Pearl Harbor, were sometimes used to pass information to Allied representatives.
There was also a human element. In 1943, Spain arranged for the evacuation of several hundred Allied civilians from Japanese-occupied China and the Philippines under the protection of the Spanish flag. In return, Japanese citizens trapped in Allied territories were repatriated through Spain.
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At home, Spanish media under Franco’s censorship often reported the war in Asia with a careful balance – sympathetic to Japan’s imperial struggle against the Western colonial powers, yet cautious not to alienate the Allies, who were becoming increasingly important to post-war Spanish diplomacy.
By August 1945, with Germany defeated and Japan facing atomic devastation, Spain’s role was largely symbolic.
Still, the country’s diplomatic manoeuvring during the Pacific War remains a fascinating footnote – a reminder that even ‘neutral’ nations could play a quiet but significant part in history’s most far-reaching conflict.
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You missed a key role of Spain in the war between Japan and the USA. Angel Alcázar de Velasco was a Spanish master spy and leader of a spy ring at the Spanish embassy at Washington DC. In the desert of New Mexico his agents detected that the US was experimenting with nuclear explosives. Velaso informed the Japanese spy ring in Mexico who sent the message via Buenos Aires to Tokyo. The Japanese were alerted and began to develop their own atomic bomb in their Tokyo Labs and later at Konan, the world’s largest ammunitions factory nearby the North Korean city of Hamhung. The Japanese planned to have their atomic bomb ready (probably a ‘dirt bomb’) and to bring it by a Kamikaze submarine into the middle of the US fleet to detonate the bomb. Unfortunately for the Japanese, Japan had already to surrrender in August 1945 and Konan had been ocupied by Soviet paratroupers. The Soviets confiscated all radioactive material and captured the Japanese scientists to develop the Soviet atomic bomb which became operational in 1949.