Barron Plan
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The Barron Plan was an Anglo-Portuguese plan for military infrastructure developed after World War II, to provide coastal defences for the Portuguese capital of Lisbon and the major port of Setúbal. These defences were installed between 1948 and 1958, involving fixed batteries along the banks of the Tagus and Sado rivers and on the Atlantic Ocean side of the Setúbal peninsula. The batteries were manned by the Coastal Artillery Regiment (RAC).[1][2]
Lisbon had always been vulnerable to attacks from the sea and the use of forts and cannon fire for defence went back to the 14th century. In 1938, the Portuguese leader, António de Oliveira Salazar requested the British War Office to develop a project to defend the capital of Portugal. The strategy used to develop the plan began with the identification of vulnerable points in the Lisbon and Setúbal areas, based on the assumption that enemy vessels would comply with the rules set out in the Washington Naval Treaty, which limited the range of naval guns to 32 kilometers (20 miles). The plan was worked on before World War II by a British general named Barron. In 1938, he presented his preliminary plan. The following year, this was revised by technical specialists from Portugal and Britain during numerous meetings.[1][2][3]
In 1943, Portugal implicitly ended its neutrality in World War II by transferring the Lajes airfield on Terceira Island in the Azores to the United Kingdom for use by US and UK planes to search for German submarines. In exchange, one of Portugal's demands was that the Barron Plan be implemented. However, the first artillery battery was not finished until 1948 and it took a further ten years for all to be completed. There was a high level of secrecy about the plan and its implementation and it was not until the second decade of the 21st century that information about it was declassified, even though the RAC was disbanded in 1998, by which time only two of the batteries remained active.[1][2][3][4][5]
