Brazilians in Italy

On 16 July 1944 the American troopship General Mann entered the port of Naples, taken by the Allies the previous autumn. After a two-week voyage from Rio de Janeiro, 5,075 Brazilian soldiers disembarked: the 6th Infantry Regiment from Caçapava in the state of São Paulo, reinforced by an artillery battalion, an engineer company and service units – the so-called 6th Regimental Combat Team under General Euclides Zenóbio da Costa. On the same ship came the commander of the whole force, General João Baptista Mascarenhas de Morais, with part of his staff. This was the first echelon of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force (Força Expedicionária Brasileira, FEB) – the only land force from South America to fight in Europe in the Second World War. By May 1945 some 25,000 men had passed through Italy in its ranks.

The arrival did not look the way it had been imagined in Rio. The Brazilians arrived almost without weapons or equipment, which they were to receive only on the spot, and no one in the port had prepared quarters for them: they spent the first hours – and, according to some accounts, nights – on the quayside and in a makeshift camp. Their grey-green uniforms resembled German ones, so – as the soldiers themselves remembered – some Neapolitans and Allied soldiers at first took them for prisoners of war. The press in Brazil, despite censorship, later wrote of this reception as an embarrassment for the organisers. Before the war began, therefore, the learning began: for two months the 6th Regiment re-equipped with American materiel and trained under instructors from General Mark Wayne Clark’s Fifth Army. It went into action for the first time in mid-September.

From breaking off relations to an expeditionary force

The Brazil of President Getúlio Vargas spent the first years of the war manoeuvring between the United States and Germany, with which it had important trade ties. In 1941 it leaned towards Washington: in return for a loan for a steelworks at Volta Redonda and arms deliveries, it agreed to American air bases on its north-eastern coast, from which the shortest route across the Atlantic to Africa ran. On 28 January 1942 it broke off diplomatic relations with Germany, Italy and Japan, and when in August U-507 sank ships off its coast with more than six hundred people on board, it declared that a state of war existed with Germany and Italy.

The declaration of war did not yet mean sending troops. For the first year Brazil’s contribution was limited to patrolling the South Atlantic with its navy and air force, in cooperation with the US Fourth Fleet. Vargas and his circle concluded, however, that merely providing bases and raw materials would not secure the country a place among the victors, nor an advantage over Argentina, with which Brazil had long competed for primacy in South America. Participation in the land fighting was needed. After talks with the Americans, the Brazilian Expeditionary Force was created by order of the Minister of War on 9 August 1943.

The original plans spoke of a corps of three or even four divisions, some 100,000 men in all. It soon became clear that this was unrealistic: the army had neither modern weapons nor cadres trained in modern warfare, and the Americans, who were to supply everything, saw no need to maintain so large and so uncertain a force. In the end a single infantry division was formed – the 1st Expeditionary Infantry Division (1ª DIE), organised on the American establishment, with three regiments: the 1st from Rio de Janeiro, the 6th from Caçapava and the 11th from São João del-Rei. Its commander, and at the same time commander of the whole force, was the sixty-year-old General Mascarenhas de Morais. Separately, the air force’s 1st Fighter Group was prepared, training in Panama and the United States on P-47 Thunderbolts.

A dictatorship against fascism

The Brazilian soldiers set off to fight fascism from a state that was itself no democracy. Since 1937 Vargas had ruled as a dictator under the “New State” (Estado Novo): without a parliament or elections, with press censorship, a political police and the 1937 constitution, nicknamed “the Polish one” (“Polaca”) because its author, Francisco Campos, had drawn among other things on Poland’s April Constitution of 1935. The government included men openly regarded as sympathetic to Germany – above all the Minister of War, General Eurico Gaspar Dutra, who was now responsible for the expeditionary force. Brazilian historians point out that this contradiction was noticed at the time: the opposition recalled that a country fighting for freedom in Europe denied it to its own citizens, and some in Vargas’s circle regarded sending the force more as a way of obtaining American weapons and prestige than as an ideological choice.

The delays led to the expedition being mocked at home. In 1943 a saying went around that “a snake will smoke a pipe before the FEB goes to the front”. When the force did set off, the soldiers adopted the joke: their shoulder patch became a green snake with a pipe in its mouth, and they called themselves the “smoking snakes” (cobras fumantes). In Italy they wrote “A cobra está fumando” – “the snake is smoking” – on their mortar barrels.

The voyage and the first weeks

The first echelon embarked in Rio de Janeiro on the night of 30 June–1 July 1944 in strict secrecy: the soldiers were brought to the port in closed trains, and the ship put to sea on 2 July. The General Mann crossed the Atlantic, still patrolled by German U-boats, under the escort of warships.

The Italy they reached looked different from the one people in Brazil had read about in the winter. Since the capture of Rome on 4 June the Allies had been advancing north, but the pace was slackening: Harold Alexander, commander of the Allied armies in Italy, had had to give up seven divisions, including the whole French Expeditionary Corps and the US VI Corps, for the forthcoming Operation Dragoon – the landing in southern France. Clark’s Fifth Army was thus losing men just as it was approaching the Gothic Line, the fortifications that Field Marshal Albert Kesselring’s Germans were building in the northern Apennines. The Brazilians, inexperienced as they were, were to fill part of the resulting gap.

First, however, they had to become an army capable of fighting. Their training in Brazil, still conducted largely according to French regulations of the interwar years, proved – as the veterans themselves later admitted – almost useless. After a few weeks in camps near Naples the regiment received American weapons, vehicles and equipment, and in August it was moved to the area of Tarquinia, north of Rome, and then on to Vada on the Tuscan coast. There it was placed under General Willis Crittenberger’s IV Corps. Support services also fell short at this time: there was a shortage of winter clothing, and medical services and supplies long depended on the Americans. Relations with the Allies did not always go well; Brazilian officers complained that they were treated as second-class troops. Clark, who decided to give the Brazilians a sector of their own, remembered them appreciatively after the war.

From the Serchio to Monte Castello

The 6th Regimental Combat Team went into action for the first time in mid-September 1944, on the western flank of the Fifth Army, in the valley of the Serchio north of Pisa. On 16 September it took Massarosa, two days later Camaiore, and then the hill of Monte Prano. The Germans were falling back here to prepared positions, so the first successes came at relatively low cost. At the end of October, in the Barga area, the regiment suffered its first defeat in a German counter-attack.

Meanwhile the rest of the division reached Italy: the second and third echelons, with the 1st and 11th Infantry Regiments, sailed from Rio on 22 September and arrived in Naples at the beginning of October; the fourth set off in November, the fifth, with replacements, in February 1945. In November 1944 the now complete division was moved into the Apennines, to the upper Reno valley on the border of Tuscany and Emilia. Facing it, on the ridge of Monte Castello, stood the German 232nd Infantry Division. Three attacks – on 24–25 November, 29 November and 12 December – broke down under fire from well-prepared positions, in rain and mud, without air support. The Brazilians, most of them men from the tropics, spent the winter in snow-covered trenches.

They took Monte Castello only on 21 February 1945, in Operation Encore, together with the US 10th Mountain Division, which had seized the neighbouring peaks the day before. In March they took Castelnuovo, and on 14 April, the first day of the Fifth Army’s spring offensive, Montese after heavy fighting. At the end of April, in the pursuit towards the Po valley, the division cut off Axis troops withdrawing from the Gulf of Genoa at Collecchio and Fornovo di Taro. On 29 April General Otto Fretter-Pico surrendered the whole German 148th Infantry Division, together with the remnants of Italian divisions of the Social Republic, to Mascarenhas de Morais. Within a week the Brazilians had taken some 14,700 prisoners, including two generals.

The Brazilian air force fought over Italy separately: the 1st Fighter Group, operating as part of the US 350th Fighter Group, flew 445 missions between November 1944 and May 1945, mainly attacking bridges, railways and transport columns behind the front. Its motto “Senta a pua!” (“Hit them hard!”) passed into Brazilian military tradition.

Losses and balance

Some 25,000–26,000 soldiers, including replacements, passed through Italy in the ranks of the force. According to Brazilian figures, about 450 of them were killed in action (most often given as 454 army soldiers), plus several airmen; several thousand were wounded, and thousands more were put out of action by sickness and frostbite. The division took more than 20,000 prisoners. The dead were buried in the Brazilian military cemetery at Pistoia; in 1960 their remains were moved to a mausoleum in Flamengo in Rio de Janeiro. The Brazilian navy and merchant marine lost more people in this war than the division in Italy – according to figures cited by historians, nearly 1,600, mainly as a result of submarine attacks.

Assessments of the force’s contribution vary. On the scale of the Italian campaign, one division among more than a dozen Allied ones could not decide the outcome of the fighting, and Brazilian tradition sometimes exaggerates the importance of Monte Castello. At the same time, the division arrived without experience, learned war at the front and survived a winter in the Apennines, and in the last weeks of the war accepted the surrender of an entire German division – something rare in Italy.

Place in the war

The arrival of the first echelon in Naples on 16 July 1944 completed Brazil’s journey from neutrality to taking part in the land war. It was the only Latin American state to send a division to Europe; Mexico sent only a fighter squadron, to the Philippines. For Vargas the force was to be a ticket into the circle of the victors and a source of American weapons, with which Brazil could become the strongest military power on the continent after the war.

The expedition, however, had consequences the dictator had not foreseen. When the soldiers returned home in the summer of 1945, the Minister of War, Dutra, by an order issued on the very day the first ship sailed from Naples, dissolved the force on its return, and its soldiers were demobilised or dispersed among other units; wearing the force’s insignia and forming veterans’ associations were also forbidden. Brazilian historians link this haste to the fear that the veterans of the war against fascism would become a political force against the Estado Novo. In the view of many of them, the contradiction between fighting for democracy in Europe and dictatorship at home hastened the regime’s fall: on 29 October 1945 the army removed Vargas from power, and in the December election Dutra became president. Mascarenhas de Morais was made a marshal in 1946. In Brazil the memory of the “smoking snakes”, of Monte Castello and Montese, has survived as one of the few memories in the country’s history of a war fought far from home.