Portugal during World War II
He has balanced the budget, built roads and schools, torn down slums, cut the death rate and enormously raised Portuguese self-esteem."[5][a] In September 1940, Winston Churchill wrote to Salazar congratulating him on his ability to keep Portugal out of the war, asserting that "as so often before during the many centuries of the Anglo-Portuguese alliance, British and Portuguese interests are identical on this vital question.Military activity in the Azores grew as the Gladiators' role progressed into flying cover for Allied convoys, reconnaissance missions and meteorological flights.This was a key turning point in the Battle of the Atlantic, allowing the Allies to provide aerial coverage in the Mid-Atlantic gap; helping them to hunt U-boats and protect convoys.During the Cold War, the United States Navy's P-3 Orion anti-submarine squadrons patrolled the North Atlantic for Soviet submarines and surface spy vessels.Portugal resisted, defending their right as a neutral state to sell to anyone and fearing that any reduction in their German exports would prompt Germany to attack Portuguese shipping.On 14 December 1941 the unescorted (and neutral) Cassequel was hit in the stern by one of two torpedoes from U-108 about 160 miles southwest of Cape St. Vincent, Portugal, and sank immediately.Rather, he appeared a modest, quiet, and highly intelligent gentleman and scholar...literally dragged from a professorial chair of political economy in the venerable University of Coimbra a dozen years previously in order to straighten out Portugal's finances, and that his almost miraculous success in this respect had led to the thrusting upon him of other major functions, including those of foreign minister and constitution-maker.Hayes is very appreciative of Portugal's constant endeavours to draw Spain with Portugal into a genuinely neutral peninsular bloc, an immeasurable contribution, at a time when the British and the United States had much less influence, toward counteracting the propaganda and pleas of the Axis.[18][19] On 26 June 1940, four days after France's armistice with Germany, Salazar authorised the main Office of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society (HIAS-HICEM) in Paris to be transferred to Lisbon.At that time, Portuguese Madeira agreed to host about 2,500 Gibraltarian evacuees, mostly women and children, who arrived at Funchal between 21 July and 13 August 1940 and remained there until the end of the war.[25] The Portuguese consul general in Bordeaux, Aristides de Sousa Mendes, helped an undetermined number of refugees, and his actions were not unique by any means.Along with Carlos de Liz-Texeira Branquinho, under Salazar's direct guidance, they rented houses and apartments to shelter and protect refugees from deportation and murder.Other Portuguese who deserve credit for saving Jews during the war include Augusto Isaac de Esaguy, Professor Francisco Paula Leite Pinto and Moisés Bensabat Amzalak.[29][30] Most were Frenchmen, half starved, without money or clothes, and Hayes writes of the decisive intervention of the Ambassador Pedro Teotónio Pereira in favour of 16,000[31] French military refugees who were trying in 1943 to get from Spain to North Africa in order to join the Allied forces there.[44][45] After Germany invaded the Soviet Union in Operation Barbarossa, recruits from France, Spain, Belgium, the territory of occupied Czechoslovakia, Hungary and the Balkans signed on.They were mostly veteran volunteers of the Spanish civil war, the so-called Viriatos and were essentially adventurous mercenaries or Portuguese fascist nationalists fighting the communist and Bolshevik threat.[50] While Japan did not invade Macau, its forces attacked a British merchant ship anchored off the colony in August 1943 and killed 20 members of its crew.In addition, Macau's government traded some of the colony's defensive guns for food and agreed to sell supplies of aviation fuel to Japan in early 1945.The main targets were the aviation fuel stores, which the Allies had learned were to be sold, and a radio station in or near the fort of Dona Maria II.[52] In June 1941, Operation Isabella was a Nazi German plan to be put into effect after the collapse of the Soviet Union to secure bases in Spain and Portugal for the continuation of the strangulation of Great Britain.Writers such as Ian Fleming (the creator of James Bond) were based there,[citation needed] while other prominent people such as the Duke of Windsor and the Spanish royal family were exiled in Estoril.The Spaniard Juan Pujol García, better known as Codename Garbo, passed on misinformation to the Germans, hoping it would hasten the end of the Franco regime; he was recruited by the British as a double agent while in Lisbon.Conversely, William Colepaugh, an American traitor, was recruited as an agent by the Germans while his ship was in port in Lisbon – he was subsequently landed by U-boat U-1230 in Maine before being captured.In 1941 John Beevor, the head of Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Lisbon, established an underground network with the aim of carrying out sabotage tasks in the event of a German and/or Spanish invasion of Portugal.In an operation organised by Caritas Portugal from 1947 to 1952, 5,500 Austrian children, most of them orphans, were transported by train from Vienna to Lisbon and then placed in the foster care of Portuguese families.Unlike Spain, Portugal under Salazar was accepted into the Marshall Plan (1947–1948) in return for the aid it gave to the Allies during the final stages of the war.
History of PortugalAncientPrehistoric IberiaPre-Roman PeoplesRoman conquest of HispaniaRomanization of HispaniaLusitaniaGallaeciaSuebic KingdomVisigothic KingdomSpaniaMedievalUmayyad conquest of HispaniaAl-AndalusGharb Al-AndalusAlmoravid dynastyCounty of PortugalReconquistaPortuguese House of Burgundy1383–1385 CrisisImperial expansionHouse of AvizPortuguese RenaissancePortuguese EmpireWar of the Portuguese SuccessionIberian UnionDutch-Portuguese WarBragantineRestoration WarHouse of BraganzaGreat Lisbon earthquakeImperial decline, war, and revoltTransfer of CourtLiberal WarsConstitutional Monarchy1910 RevolutionFirst RepublicMonarchy of the NorthPortugal during World War I1926 coup d'étatDitadura NacionalEstado NovoPortuguese Colonial WarCarnation RevolutionProcesso Revolucionário Em CursoTransition to democracyThird RepublicFinancial crisisCOVID-19 pandemicEconomyLanguageJudaismMilitaryRegionsAzorean historyMadeiran historyTimelineWorld War IIPortuguese GovernmentAnglo-Portuguese AllianceBritishaide-mémoireAdolf HitlerTerceira Islandnon-belligerentAntónio de Oliveira SalazarcorporatistauthoritarianSpanish nationalistcoloniesDouglas VealeRegistrar of the University of OxfordHebdomadal CouncilMadeiraGibraltarHenry the NavigatorWinston ChurchillPortuguese Timorlanding troopsAzoresCanary IslandsLajes FieldGloster GladiatorBattle of the AtlanticMid-Atlantic gapU-boatsmembers of parliamentAnglo-Portuguese Treaty of 1373RAF LajesUnited States Army Air ForcesUnited States NavyAir Transport CommandAmerican forcesSanta Maria IslandBrazilWest Africanon-rigid airshipsGoodyearK-shipsNaval Air Station South WeymouthMassachusettsNaval Station ArgentiaNewfoundlandPort LyauteyFrench MoroccoFleet Air Wing 15anti-submarine warfaremagnetic anomaly detectionWeeksvilleAir Force baseCold WarP-3 Oriontungsteninvasion of the Soviet UnionCape St. VincentNormandy invasionSpanish Civil WarIberian PactIberian relationsIberian PeninsulaSir Ronald CampbellSir George RendellBernardino MachadoCarlton HayesUniversity of CoimbraAntoine de Saint-Exupéry