Michael Hodder and Q. David Bowers
Norweb responded to Secretary Hull's cable of July 10 on the 13th. He wrote that he saw no need for being so gloomy about the prospects for obtaining base rights eventually. He felt Salazar was a wise leader, if a cautious one, and that he would come around in the end to the American position. Norweb went on to say that he felt matters were proceeding as fast as they could be expected to under the circumstances.
Secretary Hull cabled a reply to Norweb's soothing message the next day. Norweb was told to obtain, in writing, Salazar's replies to two questions: Can the United States build an air base on Santa Maria? If so, will the United States be in sole control of the base? Norweb was told that if no reply were received in the next two or three days, the entire project would have to be abandoned.
Unaccountably, Norweb's reply to this cable made no mention of its contents, or the urgency pressed by the Secretary. Instead, he concerned himself with asking for an immediate decision about the composition of an American delegation intended to meet with Portuguese military officers to discuss joint operations in Timor.
Four days later, on July 18, 1944 President Roosevelt wrote personally to Salazar, advising the Prime Minister that Paul Culbertson, Chief of the Division of Western European Affairs of the Department of State, would be traveling to Lisbon as the President's personal representative. Culbertson would discuss the urgency with which the United States viewed the matter of the Azores bases, and the need for an immediate decision on their status from Salazar.
Between July 18 and 22, when Culbertson met with Salazar, Norweb's cables to Washington were preoccupied with the minu-tiae of the negotiations. Following the meeting with Salazar, at which Norweb was present, the Portuguese head of state agreed to allow the landing of construction material necessary to the building of the base on Santa Maria Island. Roosevelt's personal intervention seemed to have worked. Secretary of State Hull advised Norweb not to press the issue of who would control the base once it was built, but rather, to get on with securing written authorization for its construction from Salazar, so there could be no further misunderstanding and delay.
To preserve the fiction of Portuguese neutrality, the authorization for constructing the base was awarded to Pan American Airways in the guise of a civilian, inter-island airfield. Earlier surveys of the site for the base had been made by American military personnel disguised as Pan American contract engineers. At one point in the early negotiations Pan American actually attempted to" word the authorization so as to give the company exclusive commercial rights to the airfield after the war was over. The Secretary of State was forced to intervene, and personally warned Pan American not to confuse the issue in Salazar's mind! The fiction of the Santa Maria base being a civilian one fooled no one, least of all the Germans or Japanese.
As a sign of the complexity of these negotiations, it appears that at the same time that Salazar was delaying authorizing the As a sign of the complexity of these negotiations, it appears that at the same time that Salazar was delaying authorizing the construction, he was holding secret talks with the Japanese ambassador about a possible voluntary withdrawal of Japanese Imperial Army forces from Timor. Salazar's delaying tactics with Norweb were designed to buy time to see the negotiations with the Japanese through to the end. Had the talks been successful, it is possible that" Salazar might not have agreed to an American presence. in the Azores at all.
The authorization Salazar ostensibly gave to Pan Am allowed the company to construct an inter-island air base, implying it would be a small one. That this was a fiction everyone understood, including Salazar. However, when U.S. army engineers arrived to begin building the field, local Portuguese authorities refused to allow them to purchase more than enough land than was necessary to build a small airfield. Salazar backed their decision, and the United States was back to square one again. Once again, the president was called upon to intervene.
On October 6, 1944 Secretary of State Hull cabled Norweb with the president's personal message for Salazar. Norweb was instructed to say that Salazar's hesitancy about the size of the base on Santa Maria Island was incomprehensible. Further, any continued delay in the construction of a suitable air base would result in all economic aid to Portugal being cut off, and talks with the Portuguese about their army's participation in the liberation of Timor would be immediately suspended. Norweb was told to deliver this message at the next opportunity, and to be certain that Salazar fully understood its. implications.
President Roosevelt's personal intervention re-emphasized the importance the United States placed on the air base on Santa Maria Island. Upon hearing his message, Salazar agreed to allow construction work on a large military base on the island. In return, Norweb gave his personal assurance that the question of Portuguese participation in Timor's liberation would be raised once again with the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Norweb then cabled Secretary Hull with the news about Salazar's approval, saying that the deal was a better one than the British had obtained a year earlier. Formal instruments allowing the United States to build and operate an air base on Santa Maria Island were signed on November 28, 1944.
Concurrently with the lengthy negotiations about air base rights, Norweb was working to persuade Salazar to suspend shipments of tungsten to Germany. Salazar continually protested that only a small fraction of the metal mined in Portugal was actually being shipped to the Axis, and that the vast majority of his mines' output was consumed in the home industries. Everyone knew that this was untrue, since Portugal's industrial base was not large enough to absorb the amount of tungsten known to have been mined before 1940, when figures were no longer published. The trouble was, the Allies did not know how much was being mined in 1943 and Salazar would not tell them. Consequently, Salazar's claim, although clearly specious, could not be formally countered.
Ambassador Norweb, therefore, cooperated with U.S. military intelligence in creating cover stories for officers sent to Portugal to discover the actual tonnage figures of tungsten shipped to Germany. The game of spies went on for some months, and eventually the real figures were found out. Nearly half of Portugal's tungsten output was going to the German war industry, not the fraction Salazar had claimed. Norweb confronted the Portuguese head of state with the figures, in a way designed to insure that the source of the information would remain unknown, but Salazar replied that what his country did with its raw materials was no one's business but his own. Portugal was, after all, officially a neutral in the war. Pressure from the United States in this matter would jeopardize his country's neutrality; tungsten was so vital that a suspension might bring on a German attack.
All arguments against Salazar's position on this issue were unavailing. When Brazil joined the Allies and declared war on Germany in 1944, Salazar finally changed his mind and suspended shipments of tungsten to Germany. Salazar told Norweb that the thought of Portuguese speaking Brazilians dying under German tanks gave him no choice in the matter.
By the end of 1944, the three objectives of United States policy towards Portugal had been obtained. In the first place, the U.S.had received authorization for their planes to operate from British bases in the Azores. That interim goal reached, after some long discussions the second objective had been realized, and an independent American base had been authorized and was under construction. Finally, Portuguese shipments of tungsten, vital to the German war effort, had been suspended. Ambassador Norweb had played important parts in achieving each of these goals. When he was named as Ambassador to Panama early in 1945, he would assume his new post there with some pride in his accomplishments.