by 1945, although for fiscal reasons Franco had to restrain attempts by both services to undertake dramatic expansions. During the Second World War, the Army in metropolitan Spain had eight Army Corps, with two or three Infantry Divisions each. Additionally, the Army of Africa had two Army Corps in Northern Africa, and there were the Canary Islands General Command and the Balearic Islands General Command, one Cavalry Division, plus the Artillery's General Reserve. In 1940 a Reserve Group, with three Divisions, was created. Accustomed to a fixed-position war, without major strategic changes, the Spanish Army lacked the operational mobility of the armored units of large European armies, as well as experience in combined tank-infantry operations. The most modern tanks used in the Civil War had been the Russian T-26, the German Panzer I and various Fiat Italian tanks, already out of date by 1940. On the main ships of the Spanish Navy; of the six cruisers, only four were operational: the flagship, the heavy cruiser Canarias, the light cruiser Navarra, the light cruiser Almirante Cervera, and the obsolete Méndez Núñez. The other two, the cruiser Galicia and the cruiser Miguel de Cervantes (both Cervera class), were in shipyards, without crew, undergoing refitting. The destroyers were of the Churruca classes and Alsedo classes. Some surviving ships included a few submarines which were C class and some Archimede class. The Spanish Air Force had a few hundred fighters, mainly of Italian or German manufacture: Fiat C.R.32, Heinkel He 112, Bf 109, Fiat G.50 and Heinkel He 51. Among the bombers, the SM.79, SM.81, Junkers Ju 52, Heinkel He 111, Dornier Do 17 and Fiat BR.20. In addition, it owned Soviet-made aircraft, mainly Polikarpov I-15 and Polikarpov I-16, used in the civil war by republican aviation. At the end of the Second World War in 1945, the Spanish Army had 300,000 enlisted men, 25,000 non-commissioned officers and 25,000 chiefs and officers in the Army. Their weapons were by now very obsolete, due to the rapid technological evolution that had occurred by the Allied and Axis armies during the war. Operation Felix Before Franco and Hitler's October 1940 meeting in Hendaye, there had been Spanish-German planning for an attack, from Spain, upon the British territory of Gibraltar, a British dependency and military base. At the time, Gibraltar was important for control of the western exit from the Mediterranean and the sea routes to the