United States Army Bermuda Garrison

The United States Army's Bermuda Garrison was a Second World War establishment of US military defences of the British Colony of Bermuda, located 640 miles off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.

Bermuda, or the Somers Isles, had been settled as part of Virginia, unintentionally in 1609, and officially in 1612. The Shareholders of the Virginia Company soon spun off a separate Somers Isles Company, which administered the colony under a royal charter 'til 1684, when the English Crown assumed direct administration. Bermuda's links to the continental colonies, especially Virginia and South Carolina remained strong. Bermudians using their large merchant and privateering fleet and the web of familial connections resulting from large-scale Bermudian settlement on the continent and elsewhere (roughly ten thousand Bermudians had emigrated, primarily to the continent, before US independence, establishing towns, and playing a key role in establishing the colony of South Carolina under Governor William Sayle) to play important roles in the history of British America. Despite the close connections with the American colonies, which initially caused Bermudians to favour the American Rebellion, there was no realistic hope that Bermuda could join it, and the interests of Bermudians converged with those of the British Government, and Bermuda's privateers turned on their erstwhile countrymen in the American War of Independence. Following US independence, the Royal Navy, deprived of all or its continental bases between Nova Scotia and the West Indies, established a presence in Bermuda in 1795 that would grow to become its primary base in the Americas, and included the Royal Naval Dockyard, Bermuda, the North America and West Indies Squadron, and Admiralty House, and various other facilities and landholdings. This was used to good advantage during the American War of 1812, when the blockade of the Atlantic Seaboard was maintained from Bermuda, and Royal Naval, British Army, and Royal Marines force that carried out the raid on the Chesapeake which included the Burning of Washington, was sent from Bermuda. Britain's tacit support for the Confederate States of America during the United States Civil War made Bermuda again a thorn in the side of the US Government when European munitions were funnelled into Confederate ports by blockade runners operating from Bermuda under the benign gaze of the Royal Navy and British Army, which had established a large Bermuda Garrison, and heavily fortified the archipelago to protect the naval base from attack, and to keep the handily located colony from capture by an enemy. After the British victory in the Napoleonic Wars, the most likely attacker of Bermuda was perceived to be the United States.

...
Wikipedia