Anglo-Portuguese military convention

On 3 January 1917 the governments of Portugal and Britain signed a military convention setting out the terms on which Portuguese soldiers would go to fight in France. The British chronology of the war records under this date that the first units of the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps (Corpo Expedicionário Português, CEP) arrived in France. Portuguese chronologies of the war and historians’ accounts describe this day differently. At the beginning of January there was only a small group of staff officers in France, who had gone there in December 1916 with the corps chief of staff, Major Roberto Baptista, to prepare for the reception of the troops. The first brigade sailed from Lisbon only at the end of January, and set foot on French soil on 2 February.

What was agreed

The convention concluded half a year of negotiations. In the summer of 1916 the British government, at Lisbon’s request, invited Portugal to take part in Allied operations, and on 7 August the Portuguese parliament accepted this invitation. After that, however, the most important things had to be settled: how many soldiers would go, who would transport, arm and supply them, and above all who would command them. According to Portuguese chronologies the convention placed the corps under the orders of the British Expeditionary Force in France. The Portuguese were thus to fight not as a separate army but as one of the formations within the British command system, with British supplies and, as it turned out, British weapons. Their Mauser-Vergueiro rifles fired different ammunition from the British ones, so in France the soldiers were given Lee-Enfield rifles.

The convention also settled the question of transport. Portugal did not have enough ships to carry its troops across the Bay of Biscay, so under the agreement Britain assigned seven ships to the task, and the Portuguese added two of their own, Gil Eanes and Pedro Nunes. Portuguese publications marking the centenary of the war stress that the transport was to be at the expense of the British and that this part of the agreement was not kept. When the United States entered the war in April 1917, British ships began carrying Americans, and Portuguese reinforcements stopped reaching France.

A corps that was a division

Despite its name, the CEP was at first organised as a single reinforced infantry division. This structure was approved in Lisbon on 17 January. It was commanded by General Fernando Tamagnini de Abreu e Silva, previously commander of the division trained at the Tancos training ground. Once in France, in February, on the initiative of the British military mission attached to the Portuguese command, it was decided to convert the division into a corps of two divisions, built like British divisions. Separately, at the request of the French of 26 December 1916, Lisbon offered to send gunners to man 25 batteries of French heavy artillery. France accepted this offer on 7 January, and so the Independent Heavy Artillery Corps was formed, which fought with the French army.

The British had earlier made no secret of their scepticism about the Portuguese army and preferred to see the Portuguese working in the rear rather than in the front line. For the government of António José de Almeida the convention was therefore a success: it gave Portugal a place on the Western Front and with it, as Lisbon hoped, a place at the future peace table, where it intended to defend the Portuguese colonies. At home the issue still divided people. Opponents of war in Europe recalled that only three weeks earlier, on 13 December 1916, the naval officer Machado Santos had led an unsuccessful revolt in Tomar against sending troops to France.

The first transports

On 30 January 1917 three British steamers sailed from the Tagus with the 1st Brigade of the CEP under General Manuel Gomes da Costa. On 2 February the soldiers landed at Brest, and from there went by rail to Flanders, to the area of Aire-sur-la-Lys and Saint-Omer, where the whole division was to concentrate. They arrived in the middle of a freezing winter to which they were not accustomed. The transports continued until the autumn. According to Portuguese figures, 59,388 men had been shipped to France by 28 October 1917. The first Portuguese units entered the trenches for training alongside the British on 4 April, and in November the corps took over its own sector of the front in Flanders.