The Portuguese Expeditionary Corps in the First World War

The Portuguese Expeditionary Corps (Corpo Expedicionário Português, CEP) was the force that Portugal sent to the Western Front. It began to be organised in 1916, when the country found itself at war with Germany, and for the government in Lisbon it was meant to prove that the young republic was a full ally and deserved a seat at the peace table. From 1917 it fought under British command in French Flanders. On 9 April 1918 a German attack on the Lys shattered its 2nd Division within a few hours, and the corps in practice ceased to exist as a fighting force.

The birth of the corps (1916–1917)

The Portuguese had clashed with the Germans in Angola and Mozambique since 1914, but formally Portugal was at war only from 9 March 1916, after it seized the German ships in its ports. The republicans wanted to fight not only in Africa. The strongest figure in the government, the finance minister Afonso Costa, won in London a place for Portuguese soldiers on the Western Front, and on 7 August 1916 parliament accepted the British invitation. The British command did not hide its scepticism and would rather have seen the Portuguese doing labour in the rear.

The troops were trained at the Tancos camp on the Tagus, where the war minister José Norton de Matos together with General Fernando Tamagnini de Abreu e Silva prepared a division on the lessons of the Western Front. The pro-war press called its display on 22 July the “miracle of Tancos”. The CEP was officially established on 17 January 1917, with Tamagnini as its commander. At first the corps was a single reinforced division, but once in France it was decided to turn it into a corps of two divisions organised on the British model. A separate Independent Heavy Artillery Corps was formed and attached to the French army.

On 30 January 1917 General Manuel Gomes da Costa’s 1st Brigade sailed from the Tagus, and on 2 February it landed at Brest, from where the soldiers went by train to Flanders, to the area of Aire-sur-la-Lys and Saint-Omer. Under the convention of 3 January the Portuguese came under the British Expeditionary Force and its First Army, received British rifles and went through courses in British schools. The voyage took three days, and the British ships, built for crossings of the Channel lasting a few hours, did not even have room for the men to sleep. The shipments went on until the autumn: by 28 October 1917, 59,388 men had reached France.

At the front in Flanders (1917–1918)

On 4 April 1917 the first Portuguese units went into the British trenches for training. The Portuguese joined the British XI Corps, on a flat and marshy sector in the valley of the Leie (Lys), near Neuve-Chapelle. On the night of 3–4 June the Germans attacked their trenches for the first time, and the 35th Battalion from Coimbra drove the raiders off. From 5 November 1917 the corps of two divisions held its own sector of the front on its own. In October the president, Bernardino Machado, and the prime minister, Costa, visited the soldiers in Flanders.

Winter brought a crisis. After the United States entered the war, British ships began carrying Americans and the replacements stopped arriving. On 8 December 1917 power in Lisbon was seized by Sidónio Pais, an opponent of sending troops to France. He did not leave the war, but his government made leave easier, and some officers who went home never came back. Soldiers were kept in the trenches for up to six months, and on 4 April 1918 the exhausted 7th Battalion refused to return to the front. The British decided to relieve the Portuguese: on 6 April the 1st Division left the line, and the 2nd Division, now holding a double sector, was to leave on the night of 9–10 April.

9 April 1918

On the morning of 9 April 1918, at 4.15 a.m., in thick fog, the artillery of the German Sixth Army opened fire. So began the Battle of the Lys, whose first days the British called the Battle of Estaires. One of the first shells hit Gomes da Costa’s quarters, communications with the lines were cut, and when the infantry attacked, within a few hours the 2nd Division ceased to exist as an organised force. Some posts, among them at Neuve-Chapelle, held out until late morning. On the southern flank Portuguese battalions held on until the next morning together with British cyclists and cavalrymen. There Private Aníbal Milhais made his name by beating off two German attacks alone with a Lewis gun.

The losses of that day are disputed. Older Portuguese tallies spoke of over a thousand dead, newer research gives about 300–400 dead and about 6,000 prisoners, and the total losses are usually estimated at about 7,000–7,500 men. The commander of the British First Army had warned as early as December 1917 that the corps would not withstand an attack. In Portugal people argued for decades over whether the blame lay with the government, which did not send replacements, or with the British, who put off the relief one night too long.

The end of the corps (1918–1919)

The remnants of the corps were withdrawn to the rear and used mainly for building trenches and fortifications. Pais’s government announced that it would send another 10,000–15,000 men, but the British did not provide a single ship for them. In September, under General Garcia Rosado, work began on rebuilding combat units. When some battalions were ordered back to the front, mutinies broke out, but by the end of October four battalions were fit for combat and took part in the Hundred Days Offensive. The last attack by a Portuguese company, at a crossing of the Scheldt in Belgium, came on 11 November 1918.

After the armistice Portugal did not even have the ships to bring its soldiers home. On 1 December 1918 a last parade was held at the airfield at Trézennes near Aire, and from there the first train with four hundred soldiers left for Cherbourg. In the following months prisoners also returned from German camps, and in July 1919 a CEP detachment marched in the Paris victory parade. According to the most often cited figures the corps lost 2,160 dead, 5,224 wounded and 6,678 prisoners. For the Portuguese, 9 April became a national trauma and the most important date in their memory of this war.