As we discuss in our "Countries in World War 2 Summed up in Less than 30 Seconds" series,
many countries which participated in the war don't get the recognition they
deserve. Often when people think of World War 2,
they think of the heavy-weights like Germany, Japan, Great Britain, the U.S., and Russia,
but what about a country like Brazil, the land of the Cobras Fumantes, the "Smoking Snakes."
While this South American country didn't declare war on Germany and Italy until
the latter half of 1942, they entered the war with a hiss, going toe-to-toe with more
militarily equipped enemies in both the Battle of the Atlantic and the Mediterranean Theatre.
When thinking of Brazil and its involvement in World War 2, it's easiest to think of it
as two distinct forces: the Brazillian Navy, and the Força Expedicionária Brasileira -- the
FEB -- which to English from Portuguese translates to the "Brazilian Expeditionary Force." The
Brazillian Navy, bolstered by portions of its air force, battled it out in the Atlantic, while the
FEB, a force of both army and air, fought in the Mediterranean, most notably on the Italian Front.
With these two stages of war and their Brazillian participants clarified,
let's plummet into the Atlantic for a closer look.
With German U-boats operating unopposed between Brazil and West Africa,
the U.S. negotiated with Brazil to construct air bases along their coast. Up until this point,
Axis hadn't been targeting Brazilian craft, anywhere, but, perceiving the construction of
the aforementioned American bases as a sign that Brazil had abandoned its neutrality,
they set them in their sights. In the first half of 1942, German U-boats put thirteen
Brazilian merchants ships under the waves, and later that year, one single German sub,
the infamous U-507, put five Brazilian ships under in a single day. These attacks,
which claimed the lives of some sixteen hundred civilians and sailors, inspired
the Brazilian government to make their opposition to Germany official, through a declaration of war.
While a Brazilian aircraft had attempted to open the guts of an Italian submarine, the Barbarigo,
before the devastation of the infamous U-507, the Navy and Airforce's primary mission following
Brazil's official commitment to the war was to protect Allied ships between the Atlantic and
Gibraltar. With Allied help, the Brazilian Navy took over six hundred convoys under their wing and
aided over three thousand merchant and military transport ships to their destinations and struck
at German subs over sixty times. Warring with enemies in the depths of the sea, the Brazilian's
lost over one thousand merchant marines and Navy sailors, though perhaps the greatest travesty
inflicted upon them was inflicted by themselves, when a crew member accidentally shot a 20mm gun
into the explosives stored at the stern of the warship Bahia during target practice.
She sunk in three minutes, eventuating in the death of more than three hundred men.
One particular Nazi-hunt that demonstrated the cooperation of the Brazilians and the Yanks was
the pursuit of U-199, a Type IXD unterseeboot, which, if you didn't know, quite literally
translates into "underseaboat." As U-199 came up the surface just off of Rio de Janeiro like some
terrible iron whale, an American PBM Mariner and two Brazilian planes, a PBY Catalina and a
Lockheed Hudson, attacked her, the Catalina opening her to the sea with depth charges.
You might be wondering what I mean when I said the "Cobras Fumantes," the "Smoking Snakes." Well,
before the Brazilians joined the war and flipped the meaning of this phrase on its head,
it used to mean something along the lines of "the FED will go to
war when snakes take to smoking pipes," similar to the adynaton "when pigs fly."
Once the FED did carve their way up through Italy, they continued to use, and sort of owned, this
phrase, writing it on their mortars and adopting the motif of a pipe-smoking snake on their badges.
Now, due to limitations in transport, the FED,
which was twenty-five thousand strong -- much reduced from the Brazilian government's
initial estimate of sixty-five to almost one hundred thousand, but still nothing
to laugh at -- was moved from Brazil to Italy and war in five sections.
The first section, made of around five thousand men, arrived in Naples in July of 1944 without
weapons and without a place to stay -- just how I will arrive when I go to Europe, except for the
"without weapons" part. Lingering in the cold, dusty stationing area, the Brazilian soldiers,
in their olive-green outfits which resembled more that of the United States, were actually
confused by some for German prisoners of war, so overall, their morale would have been pretty
low. Detailed in a prior agreement with the US, the FED were finally supplied with some
clothing fit for an Italian Winter, and some equipment fit for war, though this took time
and hindered FED training by the more experienced US Army. In fact, the Americans deemed the two or
so months of training that the FED received prior to their training practically worthless,
and, as you might expect, took command of the FED, much to the demoralisation of Brazilian officers.
In June 1944, this first section of the FED left Naples for Tarquinia, in the province of Viterbo,
Lazio, where they received arms, equipment, and command under the U.S. 5th Army. About a month
later, they moved closer to the fight, near to the confrontation line at the Arno River,
where they received some of their most crucial military training and regained
some of the morale that was stripped from them in their pants-down arrival to the Italian Front.
With the IV U.S. Army Corps dangerously short on manpower, a FED detachment was sent to reinforce
them. Their first mission was to relieve U.S. troops in the action zone between the Serchio
Valley and the sea. The Brazilians in this detachment were the first to taste war in
the Italian Front, and with that first taste, they hungered for more, penetrating some forty
kilometres into the Serchio Valley between mid September to the end of October, 1944. After a
succession of victories, from Massarosa to Barga, the FED were redirected to a base at the border
Tuscany and Emilia-Romagna, where they fought in the frigid mountains on the Gothic Line.
In another demonstration of cooperation between the Brazilians and the Yanks,
between February and March in 1945, the FED detachment toiled alongside the U.S. 10th Mountain
Division to -- after returning from brutal German counter attacks with lessons learnt -- banish the
Germans from crucial artillery positions perched in the Northern Apennines.
Monte Castello was one of such positions, and the battle for it didn't occur overnight, but
from November 1944 to February 1945, through the midst of a cruel winter and over jagged, crumbling
ridges and slopes. Here the FED and were fighting uphill against nestled defences -- artillery,
mortars, machine guns, rifles -- for four months, failing just as many assaults. After
a failed assault in which the Brazilians copped 150 casualties,
as opposed to the German casualty-count of only seventeen, a German captain told a FED captive:
"Frankly, you Brazilians are either crazy or very brave. I never saw anyone advance
against machine-guns and well-defended positions with such disregard for life... You are devils."
Much of the Allied victory in the final assault on Monte Castello,
called "Operation Encore," was credited to a Brazilian artillery division who cannonaded the
summit of Monte Castello and made passage for the rest of the FED. Overall, this particular
battle was of great symbolic significance to Brazil and the fighting spirit of the FED,
cementing their status as a force to be reckoned with in the remainder of World War 2 and beyond.
FED victories in the Northern Apennines granted the Allies passage into Bologna
and ramped them into the final assault on the Italian Front,
which ultimately lead to the unconditional surrender of the German-Italian Army and the
capture of more than thirteen thousand Axis toops by the Smoking Snakes alone.
Before World War 2, many Brazilian soldiers had never even endured anything close to the harsh
European Winter that was present in Italy upon their arrival. These men, the soldiers of the FED,
spent most of the trip there being ill, only to receive a sickly greeting by the allies in Naples
and sleep in a dust crater. They rocked up to the Italian winter without clothes and to war without
guns. They were told by the Yanks that their prior training was pretty much worthless and,
after a crash-course in fighting Nazis, were thrown into battle alongside experienced U.S.
troops. And, despite all of this -- despite them basically "winging it" -- they managed to punch
through crucial Axis holdings and help slingshot the Allies to victory in the Italian Campaign.
Brazil's international position following the war may have been different if,
as desired by the Americans, the FED had remained in Europe as part of
Allied occupational forces. But let's save the politics between Brazil and the U.S.,
both prior to and following their contribution to World War 2, for another video. There's a
lot of ground to cover there -- a lot going on under the iron covers of war.
I guess the triumphs of the Smoking Snakes' in the Italian Front sort of make up for
the self-destruction of the warship Bahia in the Atlantic. Sort of. But on that sinking,
and to wrap up this video... which World War 2 blunder do you consider to be the
most ridiculous? It doesn't have to be the largest or the most catastrophic,
per se, but more so the most... avoidable, or outright improbable.