The World War II military cemetery in the parish of Lajes is a “unique case in Portugal,” argues the researchers behind an article featured in this month’s edition of Al-Madan, the publication of the Almada Archaeology Center.
Known on the island as the English cemetery, the Lajes War Cemetery is the only World War II cemetery in the country, as Carla Devesa Rodrigues, a historian with the Angra do Heroísmo Museum, José Luís Neto, and Luís Borges, archaeologists with the Regional Directorate for Culture, point out.
“The Lajes War Cemetery is home to military personnel who died between 1943 and 1946 and arose in association with the air base that the British Royal Air Force then maintained a short distance away. The 49 burials there include servicemen from England, Scotland, Northern Ireland, Wales, Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand”, the authors describe.

The deaths were related to air accidents. “The Azorean bases also provided an important supply point in the middle of the Atlantic, allowing flights to leave the United States, stop at Lajes and leave for England, since the aircraft’s autonomy did not yet allow them to cross the Atlantic without a refueling stop. However, if German submarines didn’t cause casualties from the start of air operations, air accidents took lives,” the article recalls.

The rate of deaths led to the adoption of safety measures on the runway, which reduced the number of fatalities to three in 1944 after a dark year in 1943. The cemetery was another measure. “With the danger of demoralizing the troops when they saw the piles of corpses, a solution had to be found, and that was to set up the military cemetery,” explains the article, which delves into the history of the site in detail.

“The bodies that until then had been buried in the Angra do Heroísmo cemetery were transferred there, as a burial structure shared by all the victims of the Allied troops. With the end of the war, the bodies of the American soldiers were repatriated, while those of the Commonwealth, the Czechoslovaks and a Pole remained,” he continues.
Portugal was a neutral country throughout the conflict, but more burials were recorded there.
In the case of the Azores, it says that in the Carmo Cemetery in Horta, Faial, “there are two graves, one referring to an air crash on April 6, 1945, and the other to a H.M.S. Hesperides sub-officer who died on December 1, 1945”.
In Ponta Delgada, “in the Protestant Cemetery of Saint Georges, of the Evangelical Presbyterian Church, there are three burials, two related to the attack of the submarine U-563, carried out on October 23, 1941, off Gibraltar, on the H.M.S. Cossack, which sank four days later, with one of the sailors dying on October 27 and the other on November 3. 159 of the crew died as a result of this attack”.

“The other burial is of a crew member of the S.S. Avila Star, who died on July 17, 1942. The S.S. Avila Star, on its journey from Buenos Aires to Liverpool, via Freetown, was sunk by submarine U-201 140 kilometers east of the island of São Miguel, on July 6; 84 lives were lost at sea in this attack,” the text recalls.
Today, the English cemetery, next to the Nossa Senhora de Fátima Urbanization, is a bucolic, orderly place, and, as the researchers write, “unpretentious.” But a closer look is a return to history: “It is not because of its unpretentiousness that it provokes fewer questions about human nature, involving meanings that are so present there, almost so dense as to be transubstantiated, almost palpable: life and death; peace and war; the supreme sacrifice of these same lives, so young, in the name of democracy, insurgent against totalitarianism, ghosts that, in our present times, are resurfacing.”

in Diário Insular-José Lourenço, director

Translated to English as a community outreach program from the Portuguese Beyond Borders Institute (PBBI) and the Modern and Classical Languages and Literatures Department (MCLL) as part of Bruma Publication and ADMA (Azores-Diaspora Media Alliance) at California State University, Fresno, PBBI thanks Luso Financial for sponsoring NOVIDADES.