Brazil declares war on Germany and Italy

On 22 August 1942 the ministers of President Getúlio Vargas met in Rio de Janeiro for an extraordinary session. After the meeting the government announced that, in view of the acts of war committed by Germany and Italy against Brazilian shipping, it recognised the existence of a state of war with those two countries. A week earlier a single German submarine had sunk five passenger-cargo ships off the coast of north-eastern Brazil, and the sea was washing the bodies of women and children onto the beaches of Sergipe and Bahia. The largest country in Latin America, which had had no diplomatic relations with the Axis powers since January 1942, ceased to be neutral under pressure from the street, which for several days had been demanding revenge.

It is often said that Brazil declared war on “the Axis powers”. In fact the decision of 22 August concerned only Germany and Italy. It did not extend to Japan, with which Brazil had also broken off relations in January 1942: Brazil declared war on Japan only in June 1945.

From the break in relations to August

Vargas’s government, the authoritarian “New State” (Estado Novo), had long manoeuvred between Washington and Berlin, but in 1941 it leaned towards the United States: in return for an American loan for the steelworks at Volta Redonda and deliveries of arms, it agreed to the expansion of airfields on the north-eastern coast. On 28 January 1942, at the close of the conference of foreign ministers of the American republics in Rio, it broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, Italy and Japan.

For Germany this meant that Brazilian ships were no longer untouchable. From February 1942 the U-boats that were hunting off the coast of the United States and in the Caribbean as part of Operation Drumbeat also sank vessels under the Brazilian flag, and in May Italian submarines ventured into the South Atlantic. By the end of July Brazil had lost fourteen ships and some 135 people, almost all of them seamen, on long-distance routes. From May Brazilian and American aircraft from bases in the north-east were attacking Axis submarines, although the country formally remained neutral. When the American coast became too dangerous for the U-boats and Admiral Dönitz withdrew them from there in July, he sent some of the boats further south. According to German documents cited in the literature, at the beginning of August U-boat Command authorised the boats operating off Brazil to attack all ships except Argentine and Chilean ones.

Six ships in five days

One of these boats was U-507 under Korvettenkapitän Harro Schacht, who earlier, in May, had been sinking ships in the Gulf of Mexico. In mid-August she reached the coast of the states of Sergipe and Bahia. Ships there sailed along the coast without escort and with their lights on, carrying passengers as well as cargo: in a country with no roads or railways linking its regions, coastal shipping was for many people the only means of travelling from one state to another.

On the evening of 15 August, off Sergipe, U-507 torpedoed the Baependy, which besides passengers was carrying soldiers being transferred to garrisons in the north-east. 270 people were killed and 36 saved. A few hours later the Araraquara went down (131 dead), and in the early hours of 16 August the Aníbal Benévolo, whose passengers were asleep in their cabins (150 dead). On 17 August, within sight of the town of Valença in Bahia, U-507 sank the Itagiba (36 dead) and then the Arará, which had stopped to rescue survivors (20 dead). On 19 August the boat’s crew stopped the small sailing vessel Jacyra with warning shots, ordered her crew into the boats and sank her. According to Brazilian tallies, 607 people died within a few days, many of them women and children – more than four times as many as in all the earlier sinkings of Brazilian ships put together.

The anger of the street

The censorship of the Estado Novo could not conceal the catastrophe that had taken place off Brazil’s shores. “A challenge and an insult to Brazil!” wrote the daily O Globo on 18 August. That day in Rio de Janeiro a crowd gathered outside the Itamaraty Palace, the seat of the Foreign Ministry, and the minister, Osvaldo Aranha, for years the chief advocate of co-operation with the United States, assured the demonstrators that Brazil would respond to the “barbarous and inhuman” attacks on its shipping. The National Union of Students (UNE) organised marches in the largest cities. Students dressed up as Hitler to ridicule him, and workers and office clerks joined the processions.

The anger was also turned against neighbours. In many cities, among them Rio, Porto Alegre and Salvador, crowds wrecked shops, bars and businesses belonging to Germans and Italians, and to Japanese as well, and tried to lynch people suspected of sympathising with the Axis. The police did not always intervene. Brazil had hundreds of thousands of inhabitants of German, Italian and Japanese descent, and since 1938 the authorities had pursued a policy of forced assimilation towards them. After the declaration of war, publications in the languages of the Axis countries were banned, and citizens of those countries suspected of espionage were interned in camps.

The decision of 22 August

Vargas did not need long to make up his mind. The army, whose leaders – the War Minister, General Eurico Gaspar Dutra, and the Chief of Staff, General Pedro Aurélio de Góis Monteiro – had until recently admired the Wehrmacht, could no longer object when the Germans were drowning Brazilian soldiers. On 22 August the government proclaimed a state of war with Germany and Italy, and on 31 August a presidential decree declared a state of war throughout the national territory. History had repeated itself: in 1917, too, Brazil had entered the war against Germany after U-boats sank several of its ships. This time, however, unlike in the First World War, it was to send a division of its own to Europe. For President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had courted Vargas for years under the Good Neighbor policy, it was a major success. Brazil was the second large Latin American country, after Mexico, to enter the war because U-boats had sunk its ships.

Place in the war

For the Allies what mattered most was Brazilian territory. Parnamirim airfield near Natal, known as the “Trampoline to Victory”, became the main staging point on the ferry route for aircraft across the South Atlantic to West Africa, and from there to the Middle East and India. In the autumn of 1942 thousands of aircraft passed through it, including before the landings in North Africa in November. Recife became the headquarters of the American South Atlantic Force under Admiral Jonas Ingram, under whose command the Brazilian navy and air force escorted convoys. U-507 did not return from her next patrol: on 13 January 1943 she was sunk with all hands by an American Catalina flying boat operating from a Brazilian base. By the end of the war Brazil had lost more than thirty merchant ships and, according to Brazilian tallies, more than a thousand people.

On 8 February 1943 Brazil adhered to the Declaration by United Nations. Vargas, however, wanted more than the role of a rear base: a war that would give Brazil a seat at the victors’ table. The Brazilian Expeditionary Force, some 25,000 men, was in Italy from July 1944 and from September fought in the Apennines on the Gothic Line, while the Brazilian 1st Fighter Group flew P-47 Thunderbolts there. It was the only Latin American army to fight on land in Europe. The war against the dictatorships, however, undermined the Estado Novo itself: in October 1945 the army removed Vargas from power.