The Azores Agreement

On 17 August 1943 in Lisbon the Prime Minister and Foreign Minister of Portugal, António de Oliveira Salazar, and the British ambassador, Sir Ronald Campbell, completed an exchange of notes under which the United Kingdom obtained the right to use bases in the Portuguese Azores. Its legal basis was not a new treaty but the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance, concluded in London in 1373 by King Edward III and by King Ferdinand I and Queen Eleanor – the oldest alliance in the world still in force. The agreement was secret. The world learned of it only on 12 October, when Winston Churchill told the House of Commons that he had an announcement to make “arising out of the treaty signed between this country and Portugal in the year 1373”. The formula of the six-hundred-year-old alliance became one of his best-known utterances.

Many war chronologies describe the agreement as Portugal’s consent to the use of the Azores by “the Allies”. In August 1943, however, the consent applied only to Britain; at first the Americans could operate on the islands only under the British flag, and they concluded their own agreement with Lisbon more than a year later.

Neutrality on a knife-edge

On 1 September 1939 Portugal announced that its alliance with Britain remained in force but that, since London was not calling on it for assistance, the country would stay neutral; the British took note. Salazar, the dictator of the Estado Novo (New State), disliked the Nazis but feared communism, and above all he feared that drawing Portugal into the war would give the Germans a pretext to march through Spain and give General Francisco Franco an opportunity to join the Axis. Portugal traded with both sides. Of particular importance was tungsten (wolfram), indispensable for the production of armour-piercing shells and cutting tools; Portugal was Germany’s main European supplier, and the Allies bought it up at inflated prices to keep it out of enemy hands.

The Azores, lying halfway between Europe and America, had been the object of other people’s plans since the start of the war. In 1941 Franklin Delano Roosevelt ordered a plan for their occupation (War Plan Gray), the British had their own landing plans, and the Germans too considered seizing the islands. Salazar reinforced the garrisons and the airfield at Lajes on Terceira, and President Óscar Carmona visited the archipelago in the summer of 1941 under the slogan “This is Portugal”.

A request in the name of the alliance

In the spring of 1943 the situation changed. The Germans could no longer threaten the Iberian Peninsula as they had in 1940, and the Battle of the Atlantic was entering its decisive phase. One gap after another in the air cover of the convoys was being closed, but the central Atlantic around the Azores remained beyond the reach of aircraft from Gibraltar, Bermuda and Newfoundland. At the Trident Conference in May 1943 Churchill and Roosevelt decided that obtaining bases in the Azores was essential. Churchill was prepared to threaten Portugal that if it refused, the islands would be taken by force. Such methods were opposed by Ambassador Campbell and the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden; both argued that Salazar would grant the request if it were made in the name of the alliance.

On 16 June 1943 Campbell handed Salazar a top-secret note: His Majesty’s Government, “in the name of the alliance which has existed between Portugal and Great Britain for six hundred years”, asked to be granted facilities in the Azores, leaving the details to further talks. Salazar agreed in principle but negotiated throughout the summer. He demanded guarantees that Allied forces would leave the islands after the war, that Portuguese sovereignty over the Azores and the whole colonial empire would be respected, and that Britain would supply arms for the country’s defence in the event of reprisals by Germany or Spain. The notes exchanged in August settled the terms: the British obtained the right to use the ports of Horta on the island of Faial and Ponta Delgada on São Miguel, and the airfields of Lajes on Terceira and Santana on São Miguel. The bases were to be made available on 8 October.

The British on Terceira

As agreed, on 8 October 1943 a British convoy carrying air force personnel, equipment and materials for extending the airfield arrived at Angra do Heroísmo on Terceira. The undertaking was named Operation Alacrity, although the same code name is sometimes also applied to earlier Allied plans to seize the islands by force. Command was assumed by Air Vice-Marshal Geoffrey Bromet. Lajes airfield, renamed RAF Lagens, received aircraft of RAF Coastal Command: Boeing B-17 Flying Fortresses and Lockheed Hudsons, and later Wellingtons as well. As early as November aircraft from the Azores sank their first U-boat.

The Germans protested, but went no further than protests. They did not bomb Lisbon, did not sink Portuguese ships and did not enter the Iberian Peninsula – by the autumn of 1943 they no longer had the strength for that. Franco’s Spain did not react either.

The Azores gap

The importance of the islands for the Battle of the Atlantic was enormous, even though it came at a time when the heaviest fighting had already been decided. After Black May 1943 Admiral Karl Dönitz withdrew his U-boats from the North Atlantic and moved some of them precisely to the area south-west of the Azores, where the routes of convoys sailing from the United States to the Mediterranean and from Britain to Gibraltar and West Africa crossed. In the summer this gap was filled by American escort carrier groups, which inflicted heavy losses on the U-boats and their submarine tankers. The airfields in the Azores provided permanent air cover over the whole central Atlantic, and the port of Horta became a supply base for escort vessels. From then on convoys could take a shorter route, without long detours.

Their role as a transit point proved just as important. Through the British, the US Army’s transport aircraft were using Lajes from as early as December 1943. Aircraft, men and cargo were ferried via the islands to North Africa and later to Europe; according to American figures, the journey from America to North Africa was cut from about 70 to 40 flying hours.

Place in the war

The Azores Agreement showed how the position of the neutral states had changed in 1943. Once the scales had tipped in the Allies’ favour, Portugal, like Sweden, began to give way to their demands, cautiously and at a high price. The United States, which had no treaty with Portugal, obtained rights of its own only after lengthy negotiations, conducted at first by the chargé d’affaires George Kennan. On 28 November 1944 Lisbon agreed to the construction of an American air base on the island of Santa Maria. The justification was Portugal’s participation in the future liberation of Portuguese Timor, occupied by the Japanese, to which the American base was to contribute indirectly.

Salazar stopped the tungsten trade with Germany only under heavy Allied pressure, imposing a total ban on its export at the beginning of June 1944. The British left the Azores after the war, but the Americans remained at Lajes. The base became one of the arguments for admitting Portugal – despite its dictatorial regime – as a founding member of NATO in 1949. The alliance of 1373, invoked in 1943 to secure a key position in the central Atlantic without a shot being fired, remains in force to this day.