Santa Comba Dão
António de Oliveira Salazar, who was the Prime Minister of Portugal from 1932 to 1968 and leader of the "Estado Novo", was born in Vimieiro, Santa Comba Dão on 28 April 1889.
António de Oliveira Salazar
British strategists regarded Portuguese non-belligerency as "essential to keep Spain from entering the war on the side of the Axis". Britain recognised Salazar's important role on 15 May 1940, when Douglas Veale, Registrar of the University of Oxford, informed him that the University's Hebdomadal Council had "unanimously decided at its meeting last Monday, to invite you [Salazar] to accept the Honorary Degree of Doctor of Civil Law". The same "Life" magazine article of July 1940 that praised Salazar's work on behalf of the Portuguese nation commented, "this year, for [the] first time in centuries, Portugal is important to America. It is the funnel through which to pour all the exchanges – of people and messages and diplomacy – between America and Europe. The war, by cutting the lines of intercourse to Northern Europe, has made Portugal what [one might say] geography intended – not a faraway corner of Europe but its front door." In September 1940, Winston Churchill wrote to Salazar to congratulate him for his policy of keeping Portugal out of the war, avowing that "as so often before during the many centuries of the Anglo-Portuguese alliance, British and Portuguese interests are identical on this vital question." Sir Samuel Hoare, the British Ambassador in Madrid from 1940 to 1944, recognised Salazar's crucial role in keeping Iberia neutral during World War II, and lauded him for it. Hoare averred that "Salazar detested Hitler and all his works" and that his corporative state was fundamentally different from a Nazi or fascist state, with Salazar never leaving a doubt of his desire for a Nazi defeat. Historian Carlton Hayes, a pioneering specialist on the study of nationalism, was the American Ambassador in Spain during the war. He met Salazar in person and also praised him, expressing a similar opinion to Hoare's in his book "Wartime Mission in Spain". In November 1943, the British Ambassador in Lisbon, Sir Ronald Campbell, wrote, paraphrasing Salazar, that "strict neutrality was the price the allies paid for strategic benefits accruing from Portugal's neutrality and that if her neutrality instead of being strict had been more benevolent in our favour Spain would inevitably have thrown herself body and soul into the arms of Germany. If this had happened the Peninsula would have been occupied and then North Africa, with the result that the whole course of the war would have been altered to the advantage of the Axis."
Sir Ronald Campbell saw Salazar as fundamentally loyal to the Anglo-Portuguese Alliance. When in May 1943, in the Third Washington Conference, codenamed Trident, the conferees agreed on the occupation of the Azores (Operation Alacrity) the British Ambassador reacted to the US State Department's suggestion as "particularly ill-timed and incomprehensible at the present juncture." He recalled that at the outset of the war, Salazar had remained neutral with British approval and stated that "he [Salazar] would answer the call if it were made on grounds of dire necessity". The British Ambassador was correct, and when in August 1943 the British requested military base facilities in the Azores, invoking the alliance, Salazar responded favourably and quickly: Portugal allowed these bases, letting the British use the Azorean ports of Horta (on the island of Faial) and Ponta Delgada (on the island of São Miguel), and the airfields of Lajes Field (on Terceira Island) and Santana Field (on São Miguel Island). From November 1943, when the British gained use of the Azores, to June 1945, 8,689 US aircraft departed from Lajes, including 1,200 B-17 and B-24 bomber aircraft ferried across the Atlantic. Cargo aircraft carried vital personnel and equipment to North Africa, to the United Kingdom and – after the Allies gained a foothold in Western Europe – to Orly Field near Paris. Flights returning from Europe carried wounded servicemen. Medical personnel at Lajes handled approximately 30,000 air evacuations "en route" to the United States for medical care and rehabilitation. Use of Lajes Field reduced flying time between Brazil and West Africa from 70 hours to 40, a considerable reduction that enabled aircraft to make almost twice as many crossings, clearly demonstrating the geographic value of the Azores during the war. The British diplomat Sir George Rendell stated that the Portuguese Republican Government of Bernardino Machado was "far more difficult to deal with as an ally during the First War than the infinitely better Government of Salazar was as a neutral in the Second."