The Eastern Atlantic Islands — {Azores}

Ok, so here we finally get to see the complete Azores Islands chain, that I have been trying to post and show for some time now, but have at last managed to be able to bring to the Blog!  As you can see, the chain has the 5 main and centrally located Islands, as well as a pair of smaller islands a decent distance West and slightly North of the central islands.  Another large island lies to the East and slightly south, and itself has a smaller island at a distance to the south of it.

I intend to take a good, long look at all of these islands, in order to get a clear picture of exactly how big each one is, and what having them would/wouldn’t do for an invader during an alternate world war 2, battle of the atlantic.

 

The Madeira Islands

Below we see the Madeira Islands highlighted, with the Azores ~ 600 miles to the northwest, and Portugal’s capitol ~ 600 miles to the northeast.  The Madeira islands are thus about equal distance from either, and a WWII era aircraft with at least this range would be required to stage from the mainland to the Madeira, and on to the Azores.  Leaving these islands in allied hands would be giving them a perfect base to stage aircraft out of to interdict resupply to an axis Azores.3a