Mexico declares war on the Axis

On 22 May 1942 the President of Mexico, Manuel Ávila Camacho, summoned an extraordinary session of Congress to obtain its consent to proclaiming a state of war with Germany, Italy and Japan. The immediate cause was the sinking of two Mexican tankers by German submarines within a week. The formalities took several more days: on 28 May the President laid the matter before both chambers of Congress, which approved it, and on 1 June he signed a decree whose first article stated that “a state of war has existed since 22 May 1942” between the United Mexican States and Germany, Italy and Japan. The date of 22 May is thus the date from which Mexico counted its participation in the war, even though the decision itself was finally taken a few days later.

The wording was deliberate. Mexico was not “declaring” war in the traditional sense but stating that a state of war had been forced upon it by aggression. Ávila Camacho spoke in Congress of the need for “legitimate defence” and made it clear at once that the country knew the limits of its military capabilities and would not conduct military operations outside the continent.

From expropriation to cooperation

Only a few years earlier such a step would have seemed unlikely. In March 1938 President Lázaro Cárdenas had nationalised the oil industry owned by American and British companies. Britain broke off diplomatic relations with Mexico, and American firms boycotted Mexican oil, which for a time was bought by, among others, Germany and Italy. Under its Good Neighbor policy, however, Washington did not resort to intervention, and in November 1941 the two countries concluded an agreement on compensation and economic cooperation.

From the start of the war Mexico had clearly condemned the Axis powers’ acts of aggression and recognised the Polish government-in-exile, but it remained neutral. When Ávila Camacho took office in December 1940, its neutrality became, as it was later described, a “feigned” one. In April 1941 the authorities seized Italian and German ships lying in Mexican ports, and soon afterwards banned the export of raw materials outside the American continent. After the attack on Pearl Harbor Mexico broke off relations with Japan, and a few days later with Germany and Italy. At the conference of foreign ministers of the American republics in Rio de Janeiro in January 1942, at which Brazil broke off relations with the Axis powers, the Mexican delegation was among the most ardent supporters of a common front against the Axis.

Two tankers

In the spring of 1942 the German submarines which since January had been attacking shipping off the American coast moved to the waters off Florida, the Gulf of Mexico and the Caribbean, where escorts and convoys were still lacking. Off the east coast the Americans had just begun protecting shipping with a makeshift system of coastal passages, and in April they sank a German submarine in their own waters for the first time, but further south ships were still sailing alone. Tankers of the state oil company Pemex plied the route from Tampico to American ports. Some of them were former Italian ships seized by Mexico.

One of them was the Potrero del Llano, built in 1912 as a British ship, later the Italian Lucifero, detained at Tampico in 1940 and taken over by Mexico in 1941. On the night of 13–14 May 1942, sailing unescorted with a cargo of oil for New York, she was torpedoed off the coast of Florida, near Miami, by Kapitänleutnant Reinhard Suhren’s U-564. The ship was sailing with an illuminated flag painted on her side, but according to German records Suhren took it for an Italian one and concluded that an Italian ship could not be sailing in that place and on that course, so that he had an enemy vessel before him. Thirteen or fourteen members of the crew were killed, depending on the source, among them three officers of the Mexican navy. The survivors were picked up by an American patrol vessel.

The Mexican government protested at once. As it no longer had relations with Berlin, the note was delivered through a third country. Mexico demanded satisfaction and guarantees of compensation by Thursday 21 May, warning that otherwise it would take “the measures required by national honour”. No reply came. On the night of 20–21 May, near Key West, Kapitänleutnant Hermann Rasch’s U-106 sank a second Mexican tanker, the Faja de Oro, formerly the Italian Genoano. She was sailing in ballast from Pennsylvania to Tampico. About ten men were killed.

A divided country

The government’s decision was not popular. Many Mexicans remembered the American intervention of 1914 and the loss of half the country’s territory in the 19th century, and part of the right sympathised with Franco’s Spain and the Axis powers. According to a poll by the weekly Tiempo, most of those questioned were against deeper involvement in the war. The government launched a propaganda campaign that made use of the accounts of survivors from the Potrero del Llano, and Cárdenas returned to government, taking over the Ministry of Defence in September 1942. The property of Axis nationals was placed under state administration, and some of them were interned.

War also required the defence of Mexico’s own territory. As early as January 1942 a joint Mexican–American defence commission had been set up, and Washington, fearing Japanese attacks on the Pacific coast, sought permission to station troops and bases on the Baja California peninsula. Mexico, sensitive to the presence of foreign soldiers on its soil, preferred to strengthen its own garrisons and coastal watch, receiving American arms and equipment in return. Compulsory military service was soon introduced as well.

On 5 June Mexico acceded to the Declaration by United Nations. In the following months U-boats sank several more Mexican ships, among them the Tuxpam, the Las Choapas and the Amatlán.

Place in the war

Mexico’s most important contribution to the war was economic. The country supplied the United States with oil, metals and strategic raw materials, and from August 1942, under an agreement known as the bracero programme, it sent hundreds of thousands of workers to American farms, and later to the railways as well, to replace Americans called up for military service. The programme outlived the war and ended only in 1964. Thousands of Mexican citizens living in the United States served in the American armed forces. In April 1943 President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met Ávila Camacho in Monterrey. It was the first meeting of the two countries’ presidents on Mexican soil in decades and a symbol of reconciliation between two states that for a century had not seen eye to eye.

At the front Mexico’s part was symbolic, but it fought under its own flag. In 1944 Fighter Squadron 201, known as the “Aztec Eagles”, went to the United States for training. From June to August 1945 its pilots, flying P-47 Thunderbolts, supported American and Filipino troops on Luzon and attacked targets on Taiwan. Several of them were killed. Mexico was, together with Brazil – which declared war on Germany and Italy in August 1942 and sent the Brazilian Expeditionary Force to Italy – the only Latin American country to send a combat unit overseas.

The two tankers sunk in May 1942 reset Mexico’s relations with the world. A country that a few years earlier had been in sharp dispute with Washington and London became an ally of the United States, and the war accelerated its industrialisation. Admiral Karl Dönitz’s U-boats, which were meant to cut America off from its resources, had in this way pushed yet another country of the Western Hemisphere into the Allied camp.