Churchill, Salazar and the Azores bases: 12 October 1943

On the last day of September 1943, three small convoys left Britain for the middle of the Atlantic. Under Commodore R. V. Holt, a retired vice-admiral, they were made up of an escort carrier, the Fencer, three destroyers, merchant ships, oilers, anti-submarine trawlers and landing craft. They carried the men and stores needed to open air bases on islands belonging to a neutral country.1 source

They arrived off the Azores on 8 October. The Portuguese were expecting them. Seven weeks earlier, António de Oliveira Salazar's government had signed an agreement giving Britain the use of facilities on the islands of Terceira and Faial, and both sides had kept it secret. Washington planned to keep quiet too, and to describe the landings, when it had to, as “in no sense an occupation”.4 sources

The RAF Fortress bombers meant to fly in from Gibraltar were held up by bad weather. So on 11 October the Fencer put to sea again and flew nine Swordfish biplanes to Lagens, the small airfield on Terceira. For the next week they flew dawn and dusk searches over the surrounding sea. On 12 October, the day after they landed, Winston Churchill stood up in the House of Commons in London to explain what Britain was doing there.2 sources

Portugal in 1943 was a dictatorship. As President of the Council of Ministers, Salazar had drafted the constitution of 1933, approved by plebiscite, which founded the Estado Novo, or New State, an authoritarian regime with a single party. By the war years he was also Minister of War and Minister for Foreign Affairs.2 sources

When the war began in 1939, Portugal declared itself neutral “in full agreement” with Britain, as Churchill later put it, to keep the fighting out of the Iberian Peninsula. Lisbon also reaffirmed its alliance with Britain, which went back to a treaty of 1373. Salazar repeated in a speech on 27 April 1943 that neutrality and the alliance did not contradict each other.1 source

Neutrality meant trading with both sides, and both sides wanted Portuguese wolfram, the ore of tungsten. The American minister in Lisbon judged that Portugal's help to Germany, above all with wolfram, was worth about as much to Germany as the Azores were to the United States. The Allies tried to buy the ore before the Germans could. In the nine months to December 1943, he reported, pre-emptive buying and other methods took 1,160 tons off the Portuguese market, and the Allies bought another 400 to 500 tons that had crossed into Spain.1 source

Britain needed food, fuel and weapons from across the Atlantic, and German submarines, the U-boats, were sinking the ships that carried them. Aircraft were the U-boat's worst enemy; by late 1943 Dönitz's own staff complained that “the air menace has curtailed the mobility of the U-boats”. But land-based planes could not yet reach the whole ocean. The stretch they missed in the north was known as the “Greenland air gap”, and U-boats gathered on its edges.2 sources

The Azores lie in the middle of that ocean, about 1,000 miles (some 1,600 kilometres) west of the Iberian Peninsula. In January 1943 a tanker convoy from Trinidad to Gibraltar was cut to pieces south of the islands, out of range of air cover; only two of its nine tankers survived. In March the British Naval Staff listed what it needed besides heavier bombing of the U-boat bases: more very long-range aircraft, escort carriers in service sooner, and the use of bases in the Azores.2 sources

Then the battle turned. In May 1943 more escorts and support groups, more long-range aircraft and new ten-centimetre radar pushed U-boat losses from about 13 per cent of the boats at sea to 30 per cent. Karl Dönitz, who commanded the German navy and its submarines, pulled them out of the North Atlantic convoy routes. The Azores agreement came after this defeat, as the chart shows.2 sources

Everyone had looked at the Azores. In the spring of 1941 Hitler wanted to occupy them “in order to be able to operate long-range bombers from there against the United States”. On 22 May 1941 President Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered his army and navy to plan an expedition strong enough to occupy and defend the islands, to be ready within a month. He approved the plan on 4 June.1 source

The Americans stood down within days. Churchill had told Roosevelt that Britain was ready to occupy the Cape Verde Islands, Grand Canary and one of the Azores if the Germans marched into Spain, and on 2 June the British suggested that the United States step back from the Azores for the time being. The Army suspended its planning for an Azores expedition, and Washington turned to Iceland instead.1 source

By 1943 the British had plans for an occupation “by force or by invitation”, wrote S. W. Roskill, the Royal Navy's official historian, but hoped they would not need force against an ancient ally. In Allied papers “Lifebelt” was the code name for the islands and for a plan to take them by assault. “Alacrity” was the plan for British forces to enter the Azores on 8 October 1943. Norman Herz, who took part as a corporal in the US Army Corps of Engineers and later became a geology professor, used that name for his 2004 book about the operation.4 sources

Roosevelt worried that Germany would strike back at Portugal. On 30 June 1943 he suggested sending an infantry division, anti-aircraft battalions and fighter squadrons to the Portuguese mainland. Churchill disagreed. The talks were going ahead on the basis that Portugal remained a non-belligerent, which he knew Salazar wanted, and success was “far from certain”. If the Germans bombed Lisbon and Porto, he argued, they would lose a listening post and their wolfram.2 sources

The British ambassador in Lisbon, Sir Ronald Campbell, made the formal request in a note to Salazar marked “Most Secret” and dated 16 June 1943. His government, he wrote, had decided “in the name of the Alliance” to ask Portugal for the facilities it needed in the Azores, leaving the precise conditions for later discussion. An aide-mémoire followed two days later, which is why some accounts date the request 18 June. Salazar agreed in principle on 23 June and asked for the negotiations to be held in Lisbon.3 sources

The talks took two months. Salazar was afraid of German reprisals, and he did not want American forces in the islands as well as British ones. Roskill wrote that American insistence on a share very nearly broke the negotiations down. The agreement was signed in Lisbon on 17 August 1943, the date on the text the British handed to the Americans and in the published treaty collection; Roskill gives 18 August.4 sources

In return Britain promised war material for Portugal's armed forces, supplies for its economy and a guarantee against German aggression. The American legation in Lisbon later listed what that meant in practice: extra shipping, more coal and wheat, and British help in obtaining goods from the United States. The agreement was temporary, Portuguese sovereignty was untouched, and all British forces were to leave at the end of the war.3 sources

Churchill's statement on 12 October 1943 began in the fourteenth century. He named the treaty signed in 1373 between Edward III and King Ferdinand and Queen Eleanor of Portugal, listed the treaties that renewed it, among them a secret declaration of 1899, and read out its first article. Then he came to the point.1 source

He stressed the limits of the deal. The arrangement was “of a temporary nature only”, British forces would leave at the end of hostilities, and Portugal remained neutral on the European mainland. He thanked a government “whose loyalty to their British Ally never wavered in the darkest hours of the war”.1 source

MPs asked three questions. One asked Churchill to draw the attention of “the Government of Southern Ireland” to Portugal's attitude. Another asked whether Britain would help Portugal if Germany struck back; Churchill would add nothing. A third asked whether the United States was making a similar agreement. “No, Sir,” Churchill replied, “I have no information on that.” Two days later Roosevelt asked him to back a direct American approach to Lisbon for air transport and ferry facilities in the islands.2 sources

A new RAF command, No. 247 Group under Air Vice-Marshal G. R. Bromet, ran the islands' aircraft, with an Area Combined Headquarters on Faial. The first Fortresses reached Lagens on 18 October and began operations the next day. With them, Roskill wrote, “after more than four years of war”, reliable air cover could at last be provided over the whole Atlantic north of latitude 30° North.1 source

The field was rough, and in late 1943 RAF engineers prepared two runways of 6,000 feet for American use. A British engineer became the first of the garrison to die, on 3 November. On 9 November a Fortress of No. 220 Squadron escorting a convoy sank U-707, the only loss the Germans suffered in their attack on that convoy and the first U-boat sunk by an Azores-based aircraft.4 sources

With the northern routes closed to them, the U-boats moved to the convoys running between Britain, Gibraltar and Sierra Leone. There the islands counted. In November 1943 one southbound convoy passed safely “well shielded by aircraft from the Azores”, Roskill wrote, and the U-boats never found it. In January 1944 a Wellington from the islands sank U-231 about 465 miles to the north-east.1 source

Washington wanted more than submarine patrols. Roosevelt told Churchill that a central Atlantic air route through the Azores would save millions of gallons of high-octane fuel and many thousands of pilot and engine hours a month. On 31 December 1943 Salazar accepted a formula for American personnel to go to Lagens under the British arrangement.2 sources

It nearly went wrong at once. Shortly after 2 am on 9 January 1944 Salazar was woken by a telegram from Terceira: a British officer had said that two American transports “with troops” would arrive in the night. Salazar said he had agreed to technicians, not troops, and that soldiers trying to land would be stopped by force. The British and American envoys hurried to calm things down. In the end, Roskill wrote, American aircraft used the bases disguised as part of No. 19 Group of RAF Coastal Command.2 sources

On Santa Maria, the most south-easterly island, the United States built an airfield of its own. The first American military personnel arrived on 3 August 1944. They were ordered to wear civilian clothes so they would pass as staff of Pan American Airways, and army equipment carried Pan Am markings. Portuguese workers and American engineers used nearly two million pounds of dynamite to level the lava, and the field was activated on 17 October 1944.1 source

The formal agreement came only on 28 November 1944. The notes exchanged that day presented the base as Portugal's indirect contribution to freeing Portuguese Timor, then occupied by Japan: it would help move American forces to the Pacific. The Portuguese government told the Azores authorities to hand the base over to the US Army at once.2 sources

The wolfram question was settled that summer. On the evening of 5 June 1944, the eve of the Normandy landings, Salazar agreed to an immediate embargo on wolfram exports, with the government buying up existing stocks and production winding down. He presented the decision as taken on the basis of the Anglo-Portuguese alliance. The embargo was announced on 7 June.3 sources

The British kept their word. In September 1945 London told Washington it meant to withdraw its forces from Terceira and Faial within six months of the end of the war, hoping to keep only emergency and diversionary landing rights. A further Anglo-Portuguese exchange of notes on the Azores facilities followed on 30 May 1946.1 source

The Americans stayed. Portugal was one of the 12 founding members of NATO on 4 April 1949, its treaty signed by the Foreign Minister José Caeiro da Matta, and the newspaper Observador has argued that the base in the Azores counted for much in its admission. On 6 September 1951 the United States and Portugal signed a defence agreement on the use of facilities in the Azores, negotiated as part of NATO's planning for the North Atlantic.3 sources

Lajes, as the field is now spelled, proved its value to Washington again in October 1973, during the Arab-Israeli war. When the United States decided to airlift weapons to Israel, its other allies, fearing an Arab oil embargo, refused landing and overflight rights, according to the aviation historian Walter J. Boyne. Portugal, after hard bargaining, let the flights stage through Lajes, where daily departures grew from one to 40 within a few days. By the end of the airlift on 14 November, US Air Force transports had delivered 22,395 tons of cargo.1 source

On 16 March 2003 the Portuguese Prime Minister, José Manuel Durão Barroso, welcomed George W. Bush, Tony Blair and José María Aznar to the Azores, which he described as “halfway between the continent of Europe and the continent of America”. Bush called the next day “a moment of truth for the world” on Iraq. The meeting at Lajes became known in Portugal as the Cimeira das Lajes, the Lajes summit, and the invasion of Iraq followed.2 sources

Lajes has two halves. The Portuguese side has always remained a Portuguese air force base, Base Aérea n.º 4, while the American side grew into a small town, with houses, a church, schools and shops, home at its peak to around 5,000 Americans including families. Its money and its contacts with the outside world mattered on Terceira, especially under the dictatorship.1 source

That presence has shrunk. In January 2015 Observador reported that the United States had confirmed cuts to its contingent at Lajes. Portugal's Foreign Minister, Rui Machete, said he had hoped for a better result than a reduction of about 500 military personnel and their families. The decision, part of a programme closing 15 American bases in Europe, was expected to save Washington 35 million dollars a year.1 source

The 1943 agreement also brought a third country under the old alliance. Britain asked in the name of a medieval treaty, but within a year American personnel were at Lagens too. Vernon Walters, a US Army officer who escorted two Portuguese officers around American arms factories in 1943, later wrote that the alliance was “the umbrella under which we intended to slide into the Azores as subtenants of the British”.3 sources

From 1951 the United States had its own agreement with Lisbon. Portugal joined NATO in 1949 while still a dictatorship, and the islands kept their place in Atlantic defence through the Cold War and after.3 sources