“During the war, Bermuda teemed with Allied naval and air force personnel: British, American and Canadian.”

By Bob Richards

BERMUDA does not exactly loom large in the annals of military history. When most people think of the small, mid-Atlantic, British territory, they mostly imagine pink sand beaches, cruise ships and the picturesque streets of the capital Hamilton.   

Yet despite its diminutive size and reputation as a tourist destination, almost from the time it was first permanently settled in the 17th Century, the island of Bermuda has been involved in a number of conflicts between major world powers.

Consider the following:

King’s Castle

The Spanish navigator Juan de Bermudez discovered the uninhabited island in 1505. Mariners from both Spain and Portugal were soon using the island as a waypoint for transatlantic voyages. In 1609, the English, who in the 17th Century were keen to establish their own colonies in the New World,  saw Bermuda as a prime strategic foothold. 

King’s Castle was one of Bermuda’s earliest fortifications, built in 1612 on Castle Island which guards the gap in the reef line, Castle Roads, the entrance to Castle Harbour. The fortress saw its first action in 1614 when a Spanish warship approached Castle Roads. The guns at King’s Castle fired on the intruder, which turned away and headed back out to sea. It was just as well; the fort only had one remaining shot.

The American War of Independence

In 1775 the rebellion of Britain’s American colonies was fully underway. But from the very outset of the rebellion, colonial forces suffered from a critical shortage of gunpowder. Continental Army supreme commander George Washington hoped to secure a stockpile from Bermuda’s merchants, with whom American colonists had been trading for years. British policy however was to cut off all trade with the American colonies. Reeling from the embargo, islanders hatched a plan to seize gunpowder from a lightly guarded magazine in St. George’s and sell it to the rebels. In the early morning hours of Aug. 14, 1775, a group of locals under the command of a Bermudan official and  militia colonel named Henry Tucker, broke into the arsenal and stole 100 barrels of gunpowder. The casks were rolled down the hill to waiting dinghies, then rowed out to two waiting American ships. The stolen powder would prove critical to the fledgling rebellion. Despite aiding in the establishment of American independence, Bermuda remains to this day connected to Great Britain. The island’s archives still preserve a letter of thanks from General George Washington to the people of Bermuda for their assistance in 1775.

The War of 1812

A generation after the War of Independence, Britain and America found themselves embroiled in yet another conflict. Situated just 600 miles off the coast of North Carolina, Bermuda was on the front lines of the contest. Indeed, during the War of 1812, the Admiralty moved the headquarters of its Western Atlantic Fleet from Halifax to Bermuda. A large dockyard was also built there. Britain also constructed a string of fortifications on Bermuda in the event the United States tried to seize the island. In fact, so impregnable were the defences there, Bermuda became known as the “Gibraltar of the West.” The famous summer of 1814 British invasion of Maryland and subsequent capture and burning of Washington D.C., along with the siege of Baltimore (later immortalized in the Star-Spangled Banner) were launched from Bermuda.

Similarly, the spoils of war were brought back to Bermuda when the task force returned. Part of the booty included two large paintings of King George III and his wife Queen Charlotte. These paintings, which were captured by Continental forces during the Revolutionary War, were found in a warehouse close to what would later be the White House. Both can now be found in the Bermudian legislature, which after Westminster is the oldest parliament chamber in the Western Hemisphere. To this day, the paintings flank the Bermudan Speaker’s chair. 

The U.S. Civil War

Bermuda also played a role in America’s Civil War. A key part of the Union strategy was to blockade major Confederate ports to deprive the Rebellion of its economic lifeblood – cotton – while preventing the South from obtaining vital supplies. To penetrate the Union cordon, Confederate shipyards produced streamlined, steam-powered vessels that became known as Blockade Runners. The vessels, their holds crammed with goods, used their speed and the cover of darkness to slip past Federal warships. Many would make port in Bermuda to unload cotton and take on supplies for the Confederate war effort. In fact, Bermuda became such a hotbed of trade with the South, the Union eventually parked a warship off the entrance to St. George’s harbour. Unable to effectively close a foreign port, goods and wealth continued to flow in and out of Bermuda.

The Boer War

When Britain went to war against the Boers in South Africa, Bermuda once more was involved. Although far from the fighting, the island became an ideal out-of-the-way place to keep prisoners of war. POWs were housed in prison hulks – former Royal Navy ships where conditions were appalling. When not rotting aboard their floating jails, Boer prisoners were put to work on shore completing a seemingly never-ending series of improvements to the Royal Navy Dockyard. Many Boers died on Bermuda, but those that survived the war were obliged  to pledge allegiance to the Crown before being transported back to South Africa.

First World War

Like elsewhere in the empire, young men from Bermuda answered the call when Britain went to war against Germany in 1914. But the island did more than just supply recruits for the trenches of France and Belgium; Bermuda would also play a role in British naval operations.

The development and deployment of submarines, U-boats, by Germany and their use to destroy Allied merchant shipping was a strategically new development in naval warfare. Even though the German U-boats of the era were relatively primitive, they were able to loiter and hide off America’s Atlantic coast and pick off British merchantmen as they left port for Europe. Bermuda was well situated for the campaign against the Kaiser’s submarines.

Later, when America entered the war, the U.S. Navy opened a temporary base for its fleet of “submarine chasers.” These small, fast, narrow-beam vessels were armed to hunt down and destroy German U-boats. But with anti-submarine warfare still in its infancy, their effectiveness was limited. The base was closed after the Armistice was signed to end the Great War.

However, this was the first step to convert Bermuda from the Gibraltar of the West to a U.S. early warning platform in the mid-Atlantic.

Second World War

Long before September 1939, U.S. military analysts watched the deteriorating situation in Europe with growing concern. Remembering how Britain launched raids against the Atlantic seaboard during the War of 1812, Washington recognized that a Bermuda controlled by Nazi Germany could pose a similar threat. Negotiations with London for a seaplane base on the island were initiated early in 1939. However, the U.S. Neutrality Act forbade the establishment of a military presence on the soil of a foreign power that was already at war. With London and Berlin on a collision course in the summer of 1939, the Roosevelt Administration had to hurry to secure a base before hostilities between the two powers erupted.

A lease was signed in New York in late August, but it would not be legal until stamp duty was paid in Bermuda. The lawyer handling the deal rushed back to the island by flying boat and had the document stamped. Three days later Great Britain declared war on Germany.

Naval patrol seaplanes, both Catalinas and Kingfishers, were deployed to the island early in 1941, even before a base was built. The planes used an old WWI-era destroyer as a seaplane tender. By 1943, the base was operational, along with a runway for land-based patrol planes and bombers, which was opened under the Anglo-American Lend Lease destroyers-for-bases deal.

During the war, Bermuda teemed with Allied naval and air force personnel: British, American and Canadian.

In addition to serving as a base from which to hunt German U-boats, the island was also a refuelling station for Catalinas which were being built in California and ferried to Britain. Pilots were also trained in Bermuda to take them over the long hop to the Azores, then to Britain.

The British Imperial Department of Censorship established a major operation in Bermuda to open and censor all mail between the United States and the U.K. Pan Am and Imperial Airways flying boats dropped off thousands of pieces of mail in Bermuda each week to be read on their eastbound and westbound flights across the Atlantic. The United States was home to many secret Nazi sympathizers and even spies. Bermuda-based censors, mostly women with foreign language skills, hunted for and caught many spies.

In June of 1944, when the German sub, U-505, was captured, along with her code books and Enigma machine, the vessel was towed to Bermuda. It was hidden on the island for the balance of the war. It’s now on permanent display in the Chicago Museum of Science and Industry.

The Cold War

As the Second World War gave way to the Cold War, once again, Bermuda played a role. With the introduction of ballistic missile subs in the 1960s, a number of top-secret anti-submarine warfare systems were developed at the Bermuda based SOFAR Station, the Tudor Hill Lab and the super-secret Naval Facility. Strings of hydrophones laid on the ocean floor, some hundreds of miles long, converged on the Naval Facility at Tudor Hill. From the nerve center there, it became possible to detect Soviet subs passively. In fact, subs could be tracked thousands of miles away by analyzing underwater sounds that traveled through the SOFAR channel, without the Soviet sub crews even realizing they were being tracked. Bermuda also served as a base for sub hunting American Martin Marlin seaplanes and later Lockheed P-3 Orions.

The American outposts on Bermuda were finally closed in 1991, bringing to an end 50 years of U.S. presence on the island.

Bob Richards is the author of the new spy thriller TRIANGLE OF TREASON. It is a story centered in Bermuda during World War II. The story involves the collision of three principal protagonists; a Royal Navy captain who is a Nazi sympathizer and who retires in Bermuda; a young US Navy pilot whose first posting is on the island; and a Bermudian ferry pilot/fisherman who, with his family, are dealing with the upheavals in Bermuda what war has caused. Following a successful career in finance and public policy, Bob Richards became Finance Minister of Bermuda. Richards grew up during the period of segregation and witnessed its demise. He then witnessed the transformation of Bermuda into a strategic military outpost and participated in its incredible emergence as a financial pivot in the middle of the Atlantic. All this gave him unique, often confidential insight into Bermuda’s rich past. Richards is currently pursuing his lifelong interest in history, which has led him to author three books embedded in military and geo-political events. TRIANGLE OF TREASON is his first book in the series.