Portuguese in action on the Western Front

On the night of 3/4 June 1917 soldiers of the Portuguese Expeditionary Corps (CEP) for the first time beat off a German attack on their own trenches. At about four in the morning, after an artillery bombardment, German assault troops advanced across no man’s land in French Flanders. They struck the 35th Infantry Battalion from Coimbra, which had been in the front-line trenches for only two days. Accounts differ as to exactly where the raid fell: on the Neuve-Chapelle sector or on the neighbouring Ferme du Bois sector. Red rockets calling for help were fired from the Portuguese trenches, the Portuguese artillery shelled the ground in front, and the battalion drove off the attackers. The British chronology of the war records the first Portuguese fighting only under 17 June, but Portuguese military historians agree in pointing to the night of 3/4 June.

The road to the front line

Four months after the first brigade landed at Brest, the Portuguese entered the front gradually, on the British model. From 2 April General Manuel Gomes da Costa’s 1st Division moved closer to the front line and learned trench warfare alongside the British 49th Division. Gomes da Costa was in reality a colonel who had been made a general only so that he could take command of the division. The Portuguese historian David Martelo sees this as proof of how few generals capable of field command the country had. The first soldiers entered the British trenches on 4 April, and on the same day the first Portuguese soldier to fall on the Western Front, António Gonçalves Curado, was killed. Units usually went into the trenches for a week, attached to British companies, and then returned to the rear. On 7 May the first Portuguese company took over a position in the front line on its own, and according to Filipe Ribeiro de Meneses on 30 May the 1st Brigade took over the Ferme du Bois sector.

The Portuguese came under General Richard Haking’s British XI Corps in General Henry Horne’s First Army. This was flat, marshy ground in the valley of the Leie (Lys), where the British had fought the Battle of Neuve Chapelle in March 1915. The Germans held the few rises here and had better observation. The sector was nevertheless regarded as quiet: the British were preparing for great operations further north, in Belgian Flanders, and the Germans kept to the defensive in this area. Daily life at the front was the same as everywhere else: artillery fire, patrols and raids on the enemy trenches.

What came next

On the night of 12/13 June the Germans made a stronger attack on the Ferme du Bois and Neuve-Chapelle sectors and were again repulsed, this time by the 2nd, 3rd and 7th Battalions. According to Martelo, there were several such attacks in June. On 16 June, according to Meneses, the 2nd Brigade took over the Neuve-Chapelle sector, so that the Portuguese held the front of a whole division. Martelo, however, writes that the headquarters of the 1st Division took over responsibility for the whole divisional sector, extended to include Fauquissart in the north, only on 3 July. By 5 November 1917, when the CEP became a corps of two divisions with its own sector of the front, 352 Portuguese soldiers had been killed in action, according to Martelo, and more than a hundred more had died from accidents, disease and gas.

For the government in Lisbon, the entry of Portuguese battalions into the front line was proof that Portugal was not merely a nominal ally. The British, however, retained doubts about the value of the poorly trained corps. Problems with replacements also soon began, because British ships were now carrying mainly Americans across the Atlantic.