The troops and their families could not have asked for a more dramatic send-off, even if Vargas’s claim that they had everything they might need for the task ahead surely rang hollow for the soldiers whose weapons were literally falling apart in their hands.
On the evening of June 30, 1944, Vargas went aboard the General Mann to address the troops one last time. Using the captain’s radio, the president wished the 5,075 Brazilian troops on the ship the best of luck, while Dutra—who had accompanied Vargas on board—contented himself by shaking the hands of a few of the soldiers.
Two days later, the men finally set off for Europe. At 5:30 a.m. on Sunday, July 2, 1944, the General Mann raised its anchor and, under the cover of darkness, quietly slipped out of the harbor in Rio and headed toward the open ocean. The change of destination from Algiers to Naples had caused some organizational problems, and logistically the Brazilians already seemed in over their heads, as well; US observers aboard the General Mann noted that the first meal on board took five to six hours to serve.22 But far more severe problems lay ahead; although not as infested as it had been during the height of the Battle of the Atlantic, the high seas were still teeming with German U-boats, any one of which would have delighted in sending the General Mann and everyone on board to the bottom of the ocean.
Luckily, the trip progressed smoothly—that is, until the very end. On July 6 the troop ship crossed the equator and, on July 13, 1944, its crew spotted the Strait of Gibraltar. But as the General Mann sailed through the strait, the ship’s radio picked up a broadcast by the BBC that informed listeners of the ship’s dispatch and progress. Needless to say, nobody on board was impressed by Great Britain’s manifest lack of concern for their security.
At long last, on Sunday, July 16, the General Mann reached Naples, where the troops immediately disembarked to the sounds of a US military band. Back in Rio, there was widespread relief that the men had made it safely across the ocean, successfully avoiding the German U-boat menace.
The arrival of the first division of Brazilian troops in Italy represented a triumph for President Vargas. Not only were Brazilian troops securing their country a greater role in the war (and thus in the postwar world), but they were also receiving free training from the United States—experience that would serve Brazil well in its long standoff with its Latin American rival, Argentina. Indeed, as the division started its intensive training program, the Brazilian air force was undergoing training of its own back in Brazil. Part of the air force would shortly follow the FEB to Italy, and at least one of its pilots had the blood of the Estado Novo coursing through his veins. Among the men training with US officers was President Vargas’s oldest son, Lieutenant Lutero Vargas. At the start of October 1944, around four hundred members of the Brazilian air force were scheduled to head to Italy. Around the same time, the second group of Brazilian soldiers were scheduled to land there.
Training for the Brazilian troops, however, did not go according to plan. The equipment the United States had promised was slow to arrive, so the force had to train with their inadequate Brazilian equipment. Moreover, the soldiers found the US army trainers’ methods very different from what they had experienced back in Brazil. The US trainers were tough and unsparing, and intercepted letters from Brazilian soldiers back to their loved ones in Brazil were full of complaints. The US army, for its part, was finding it hard to prepare the Brazilians for battle. The Americans praised the attitudes of both the Brazilian officers and their men, but reported that their enthusiasm often got the better of them. Another problem appeared to be the Brazilians’ inability to launch coordinated attacks using artillery support. Following an exercise in which the Brazilian artillery gunners opened fire late and inaccurately, General Masarenham de Morais was forced to admit to the American trainers, “Punctuality and accuracy are not natural characteristics of the Brazilians.”23
Still, the Brazilian soldiers’ spirits were high as they joined part of the US Fifth Army and prepared for their first taste of combat against the Germans. They even devised a slogan for themselves: a cobra vai fumar, a common Portuguese idiom meaning, literally, “smoking snakes,” but whose English analog might be “when pigs fly.” It had taken so long for the Allies to agree to the participation of the FEB, and then for the men to be recruited and trained, that many Brazilians believed it would never become a reality—hence the FEB’s motto. When the soldiers of the FEB went into the battle, they proudly wore their newly created divisional shoulder patch, which showed a snake smoking a pipe. The irony of the logo may have been lost on the soldiers’ US commanders in Italy, but it was not lost on their countrymen back in Rio.
The Americans were, by this time, far less cheery than the Brazilians. Brazil’s original plan of sending one hundred thousand men to fight in the war had proven overly optimistic; Rio had since reduced its troop commitment to twenty-five thousand. The United States was growing tired of what it viewed as Brazilian posturing and hesitation; privately, US military commanders feared that the Brazilians would prove to be more of a burden than an asset in any active theater of the war, and they became more committed than ever to finding a quiet spot for the Brazilians to wait out the war while the other Allied troops did their work.
In truth, Vargas was not reneging on his commitment as much as the United States thought. He was fully behind the expeditionary force. From the outset, he had wanted the FEB to be drawn from across Brazil. It may not have occurred to him that drawing the FEB from across Brazil would result in such diversity that the officers and soldiers had little in common with one another.
A recruitment drive had failed to dredge up additional volunteers for the FEB, and so Vargas had turned to conscription. This exposed deep divisions within the country, and belied the myth that all Brazilians were proud to participate in the conflict. Of the young men initially called up for service, many managed to avoid the draft by producing medical reports of back trouble, poor vision, and the like. While many Brazilians cheered the departing troops, the truth was that the idea of sending the force had never been wildly popular among the Brazilian people, and especially not among those who had good lives they were leaving behind; in rich downtown Rio de Janeiro, for example, few young men had any appetite for risking their lives in a war on the other side of the ocean. In a sense, Vargas got his wish; the FEB was diverse. Those Brazilians who finally did make the trip to Italy included firemen, electricians, and historians, as well as a group of nurses.
Officials in the huge ministry of war building on Avenida President Vargas carefully tracked the FEB’s progress in Italy, and the early reports were not good. It was immediately clear that US attempts to send the Brazilians to a relatively quiet and pacified front had hugely misfired. The fighting in Italy in late 1944 and early 1945 was some of the most intense of the entire war. Allied attempts to uproot the Germans during the end of autumn 1944 had not fully succeeded; as a result, the FEB found itself taking part in several key battles, including the Battle of Monte Castello, the outcome of which was crucial to securing a German surrender in Italy.
The hardships experienced by the Brazilian troops were myriad. Correspondence from soldiers at the front to their families in Brazil was routinely opened, and it revealed tensions between the Brazilian and US soldiers. To some extent, this was a product of the dissonance between the intensive and rigorous training methods that were a part of the US army manual and US military habits and the Brazilian training methods and protocols; the Brazilians were used to the more laid-back methods that had characterized much of their army service in Brazil. But the experience of being in the field quickly took a toll on the men, as well. Although there was little fighting during the harsh Italian winter, FEB members reported that some soldiers suffered frostbite during patrols. They were all unfamiliar with the snow and cold, which penetrated even their new, US-sponsored winter uniforms.
The Americans, at least, found some cause to stop complaining. US accounts of the
fighting involving Brazilian forces during September and October 1944 record that the Brazilians fought with bravery and cooperated well with the US army. There were instances of small advances made by the FEB, and the Brazilian forces even captured some German prisoners of war. In a typical account of the FEB’s operations in September 1944, the US army said, “During the first week of the fighting the FEB showed splendid advances all along the front. The favorable reports of the combat team were in no small part due to the tremendous activity of the Brazilian artillery personnel.”24
In these first weeks of action, the FEB did help to push the Allied lines forward, but their advances were limited due to both the tough resistance of the Germans and the arrival of autumn rains followed by the onset of winter, which brought early snowfall to the region. There were still the familiar problems, along with these new ones. Since the bulk of the Brazilians’ training did not take place until they arrived in Italy, the men who entered the line during the month of September 1944 were not fully ready for battle.
In late September, the Brazilian minister of war, General Dutra, arrived in Italy to inspect the troops and discuss their progress with senior US officers. If Dutra was still sore at President Vargas’s refusal to allow him to personally command the FEB, he did his best not to show it—even though such stoicism was not always easy. On September 26, Dutra and the senior officers of the FEB were the guests of Lieutenant General Mark W. Clark, the commander of the US Fifth Army.25 During the ceremonies, Dutra watched as General Clark presented Legion of Merit medals on behalf of President Roosevelt to the senior Brazilian commanders. Later, Dutra and his party visited the front line to tour Brazilian positions. Finally, Dutra toured those hospitals to which the Brazilian wounded had been evacuated. US officers noted that the visit of Dutra and other senior Brazilians officers had a positive impact on the morale of the FEB. The result was, as one American put it, that “patrol activities all along the FEB front increased as enthusiastic Brazilians harassed the Germans with everything they had.”26
Dutra’s trip was hailed as a great success. When newsreel footage and photos of his visit to the troops arrived back in Rio, Dutra looked to many of his countrymen like a commander in chief. He was starting to receive more publicity, and was slowly coming into his own—and emerging from the shadows behind President Vargas. The general continued to swear loyalty to the president—at least, for the time being—but he had his own reasons to be discontented. The FEB, while holding its own, was not the success anyone in the Estado Novo had hoped. During his meetings with senior US army officers in Italy, Dutra had been informed of continuing problems between the US and Brazilian armies, much of which was put down to communication problems that plagued the two forces’ cooperation, despite the best efforts of their translators. The Americans also warned Dutra that Brazilian casualty figures would sharply rise when the spring offensive got under way in 1945.
For all of the problems with the FEB’s dispatch to Italy, and while its deployment had occurred on a much smaller scale than originally planned, President Vargas continued to believe the force represented Brazil’s best opportunity to secure its position in the postwar order. In reality, however, the army had been sent into the field too late to achieve the lofty political goals Vargas had set for it. And even if the FEB had arrived a year earlier, it might not have made much of a difference on the Italian front. While the Allies were making progress in northern Europe, the Germans were firmly rooted throughout Italy, where the topography favored defenders over attackers. The Germans occupied the high ground, and the Brazilians and their US allies were in the unenviable position of having to dislodge their enemy with frontal assaults, on foot and uphill.
The FEB was engaged in much fiercer fighting than the United States had intended for it. And during the initial stages of its deployment in Italy, the soldiers in the FEB suffered a much higher rate of casualties than their US counterparts. The United States attributed this to the bravery of the Brazilian men but also to their naiveté. Still, the Allies were making good progress in other European theaters, and it was just a matter of time until the German army was crushed—whether in the hills of Italy, or in the heart of the continent.
Back in Rio, attention was shifting to the postwar period—and President Vargas’s political problems were multiplying. During the final months of 1944, he faced growing opposition to his regime from Brazilians who were tired of the economic situation in Brazil; and as news of the Brazilian casualties in Italy trickled back to the country, the pressure for political change only increased. Curiously, at this key juncture, Vargas’s political judgment—usually so sound, but in scarce supply following his accident and the death of his son—deserted him altogether. The decisions he made in the months ahead would effectively open the door to enemies both within and outside his regime. And perhaps Vargas’s most fatal decision of all was his choice to withdraw support for an old friend: Osvaldo Aranha, the minister of foreign affairs.
16 A Farewell to Aranha
On August 22, 1944, Osvaldo Aranha sat hunched over his handcrafted desk at the Itamaraty Palace, signing one personalized letter after another. All of them were addressed to foreign diplomats in Rio, and all of them reflected on the massive political upheaval that had recently shaken the Brazilian capital.
The past few days had been filled with drama, both in Brazil and overseas, but the previous day had been particularly consequential. On August 21, Allied forces had reached the outskirts of Nazi-occupied Paris, sparking the liberation of the French capital. And that same day, thousands of miles away in Rio, Aranha had resigned as foreign minister of Brazil.
Aranha was tired, angry, and hurt by the events that had led him to resign, and he wanted nothing more than to quietly depart to his farm without further delay.1 His one last self-imposed duty was to write to the relevant Rio-based Allied ambassadors, in order to try to reassure them and their governments, that his departure from office was caused solely by internal Brazilian political intrigues and did not represent any redirection of his nation’s foreign policy.2
Aranha regarded many of these ambassadors as personal friends, and though he was trying his best to put on a brave face, the tone of his letters was almost funereal.3 Several aides were in the room with Aranha as he worked; he barely acknowledged their presence, and nobody spoke for fear of breaking the stony silence.
The downturn in Aranha’s fortunes had been swift and, to most, unexpected. Just months earlier he had seemed to be at the height of his power. His year had started with an address to an adoring crowd of his fellow Brazilians in front of the Municipal Theater. Now he found himself ingloriously shunted from the foreign ministry, watching from the sidelines as Brazilian troops prepared to join the fighting in Europe and bring to its culmination his policy of allying Brazil with the United States.4
According to British sources in Rio, the catalyst for Aranha’s downfall was his support of Brazil’s recognition of the Soviet Union and the two countries’ exchange of diplomatic representatives. Minister of War Dutra, on the other hand, strongly opposed these decisions. Dutra, after all, had started the anticommunist campaign in Brazil, and had a hard enough time stomaching Brazil’s alliance with the United States; strengthening Brazil’s relationship with the Soviet Union, the bastion of international socialism, was, for Dutra, simply too much to bear.5
In moving Brazil closer to the Soviet Union, Aranha displayed a lapse in his famously razor-sharp judgment. For much of the year, Aranha had pushed for closer ties with the Soviet Union on the grounds that it was a partner in the war against the Axis powers, and that it was likely to play an important role in the postwar order. Aranha did not foresee a potential cold war between the west and the east. Rather, he viewed the Soviet Union as a potential trading partner for Brazil—a nation to be courted, not kept at arm’s length.
Yet this misstep was only the tip of the iceberg. The reasons for Aranha’s ouster were, in reality, mu
ch more complex. Dutra was not the only Brazilian official with whom Aranha had bad blood—and while he had historically been able to rely on President Vargas for support, this time he discovered that nobody had his back.
Aranha’s downfall was triggered by what amounted to a power struggle with the chief of police. It was a contest in which President Vargas had, ultimately, chosen not to intervene—essentially abandoning Aranha to his fate.6 And it was a clash, moreover, in which one could detect the shadowy hand of Dutra, who at last seemed to have succeeded in planting a dagger in his archenemy’s back.
Speaking with his British counterpart at a drinks reception at the US embassy on August 23, two days after Aranha’s resignation, Jefferson Caffery outlined his understanding of the political undercurrents that had led to Aranha’s resignation. The US ambassador spoke in hushed tones, as if he was imparting top secret information (which he was not), pausing from time to time or clearing his throat for dramatic effect. Caffery obviously still took immense pleasure in being privy to knowledge that the British ambassador lacked.
“In recent months,” Caffery told the British ambassador conspiratorially, “when I have met with the minister, he has complained that he was more and more being edged out of everything, especially internal affairs, by a group who were determined to get rid of him.”7 When the British ambassador quizzed him about the names of the ministers, Caffery replied, “the minister of war, the president’s brother, the minister of labor, and the new chief of police.” It was a powerful list of Dutra and his allies in the government, prime among them the police chief, who enjoyed immense national power.8 The British ambassador may well have rolled his eyes at the mention of Benjamin Vargas—the embassy had for some time characterized the president’s brother as being “little more than a high class gangster.” Unbeknownst to the British, Caffery had a similar assessment of Benjamin.
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