Portuguese Second Republic
Government: Authoritarian corporatist one-party republic
Ruler: Ant nio de Oliveira Salazar
Area: 837,000 square miles
Population: 17.1 million
Military: 16 infantry regiments, 10 infantry battalions,
two Calvary battalions, 150,000 men garrison in the territories.
Navy: six destroyers, seven avisos, three submarines, three torpedo boats,
five gunships, two river gunboats, three patrol boats, two mine warfare vessels,
four survey vessels, two support vessels and two training ships.
We will start by looking at Portuguese Africa in 1890, Portugal had attempted to claim a large area
of land between its colonies of Mozambique and Angola including most of present-day Zimbabwe and
Zambia and a large part of Malawi, This was seen a threat to the British interests in the area and
after some skirmishes and an establishment of a tribal protectorate. The British sent an ultimatum
that told Portugal to remove all military forces and claims to the between area. King
Carlos the first accepted this ultimatum quickly as he rightly assumed that his nation could not
win in a war against the British. This caused a huge stur in the public who viewed the king
as starting a national decline. This came at the same time that an economic crisis pledged Brazil
and damaged the Portuguese economy so heavily that the nation declared bankruptcy in June of 1892.
In 1908 Carlos and his heir were assassinated in what is to be called the Lisbon Regicide.
The 18 year old Duke of Beja Manuel the second ended up assenting the throne. He
originally got moderate sympathy from the general public but little more then two
years later a revolution broke out and after some fighting, ousted Manual from power and
proclaimed the First Portuguese republic. The sixteen years of the First Republic saw nine
presidents and 44 ministries, and have been described as consisting of "continual anarchy,
government corruption, rioting and pillage, assassinations, arbitrary imprisonment and
religious persecution". You had numerous assassinations, a brief civil war in 1918,
and it wasn't until the coup in 1926 that things got better within the nation.
During the first world war. Portugal had proclaimed it's neutrality once war was declared,
but ties with the British had existed ever since the end of the 14th century and Portugal
was not secret in their support for the entente. German ships were seized in Portuguese ports by
September, but the parliament refused to declare war. Portugal's location far from the Western
front and Germany meant that it was unaffected by the actual fighting in Europe. This was not
the case in Portugal's African colonies which did border on German colonies. The Portuguese
Army even before the War began fought border skirmishes with German troops in East Africa.
Portuguese Mozambique bordered with German East Africa and the Germans attempted to incite local
tribes to rise up and join the Germans. In March of 1916, Germany declared war on Portugal, and an
expeditionary force, the CEP, was trained and equipped to be sent to France late that year,
numbering some 20,000. An authoritarian government took control back home in late 1917,
freezing assistance to the men at the front lines and attempted to fully disengage from the war as
a whole. This caused severe moral problems in the army, as they felt abandoned by their
government. In April 1918, the Germans launched a full-scale assault along the Portuguese lines,
causing 13,000 casualties out of the 20,000 men. A rift built up between the government
and the Military after this, even though issues between the two parties had been around for
years. Many of the generals and enlisted men were simply un-trusting of the government,
and weren't well received back home. This, combined with high inflation,
high un-employment, and the shock waves from the Russian revolution put the Portuguese
republic in a per curious state. Between 1919 and 1926, Portugal saw 23 governments as they
fell one after another. De costa, one of the generals that had commanded the CEP in France,
staged a coup in 1926 and usured in nearly 50 years of Authoritarian rule.
At the outbreak of World War II, Portugal was ruled by Ant nio de Oliveira Salazar,
the man who had founded the Estado Novo or New
State in 1933, a corporatist authoritarian government. While he was fascist in nature,
he, like Franco in Spain, were wary of the Fascist movements in Germany and Italy and they
general intentions. Salazar's dislike of the Nazi regime in Germany and its imperial ambitions was
tempered only by his view of the German Reich as a bastion against the spread of communism. He had
favored the Spanish nationalist cause, fearing a communist invasion or uprising in Portugal,
yet he was uneasy at a Spanish government bolstered by strong ties with the Germans.
Salazar was in a very precarious position however. Portugal had been a long-time ally
of Britain that dated back to 1373. When the war started they upheld the treaty but claimed
that since the British didn't ask for assistance, they did not need to honor that alliance at that
moment. Unlike the case with Ireland, the British government was content with this decision. They
viewed that if Portugal joined the allies, then Spain would join the Axis powers. How
true that was is hard to say. Portugal was very vulnerable to British naval power (particularly
in its colonies). Making the wrong move would risk Portugal's independence whether Britain
stepped in to seize the Azores, Germany stepped in to secure the Portuguese mines necessary for
the war effort, or Spain took advantage of the confusion to reassert control over Portugal,
even though that threat wasn't likely to materialize. If anything, Salazar's neutrality
was more sincere than Franco's, He enforced an embargo on either side's activities in Portuguese
territory and banning Portuguese citizens from assisting one side or the other. When east Timor,
then a Portuguese colony in the east indies was occupied by Australian and Dutch forces
Salazar protested heavily, sending 800 men from east Africa to take over as a garrison force but
they arrived too late to defend against the Japanese invasion on Feb 20th 1942.
Some Portuguese in the colonies did join the war though. Around 200 men from the
Indian possessions joined the Indian army and six hundred were part of the Blue Division,
a mix of Iberians that were sent to join the German army on the eastern front.
An invasion plan was drawn up by the United States during 1940 that called for an invasion
of the Azores islands. This plan would only occur if Germany tried to invade Portugal,
or if Spain joined the Axis powers. Britain also
had a plan in the works that was very similar to the American one.
Portugal was very keen to keep its colonial empire intact and weary of losing any of the few
colonial possessions it had left to either side by joining the Axis or the Allied. WWI had a great
cost to Portugal and Salazar economical ideas to bring progress to the country after the chaotic
governments of the First Republic relied deeply on the colonies - the reason he tried so hard
and so long to keep them later on even when it was clear Portugal was bound to lose them eventually.