Brazil and the United States during World War II and Its Aftermath

Negotiating Alliance and Balancing Giants

Frank D. McCann

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319929101
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Latin American & Caribbean History
• Index: History

The military alliance between the United States and Brazil played a critical role in the outcome of World War II, and yet it is largely overlooked in historiography of the war. In this definitive account, Frank McCann investigates Brazilian-American military relations from the 1930s through the years after the alliance ended in 1977. The two countries emerge as imbalanced giants with often divergent objectives and expectations. They nevertheless managed to form the Brazilian Expeditionary Force and a fighter squadron that fought in Italy under American command, making Brazil the only Latin American country to commit troops to the war. With the establishment of the US Air Force base in Natal, Northeast Brazil become a vital staging area for air traffic supplying Allied forces in the Middle East and Asian theaters. McCann deftly analyzes newly opened Brazilian archives and declassified American intelligence files to offer a more nuanced account of how this alliance changed the course of World War II, and how the relationship deteriorated in the aftermath of the war.

© The Author(s) 2018

Frank D. McCannBrazil and the United States during World War II and Its Aftermathhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92910-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. A Relationship of Unbalanced Giants

Frank D. McCann¹

(1)

University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA

Frank D. McCann

End Abstract

Brazil and the United States are the two giants of the Western Hemisphere in territory, population, natural resources, and industrial plant. They have never engaged each other in war, their governments have had relatively few disputes of the sort that fill the pages of diplomatic and military histories, and they have adjusted their relations to new regional and world conditions many times since José Silvestre Rebello presented his credentials to President James Monroe in May 1824 as the first representative of the independent Empire of Brazil. Though their relations have been peaceful for 194 years, and give every sign of remaining so, there has been a thread of tension running throughout the fabric of their relations.¹

The sources of this tension have been political, economic, and cultural, and they are also related to the differences between the identities and systems of the two countries. Though Brazil and the United States have many similarities, they are profoundly different from one another.

Similarities and Differences

First let us look at the similarities. They are both huge political entities, with their land borders measured in thousands of kilometers (miles), their long seacoasts supporting old seafaring traditions, and they both experienced a long struggle to occupy, control, and develop vast interior spaces. They both have deep traces of their colonial experiences in their national characters. Both reflect predominately European traditions that overran native cultures and land claims, but both display cultural traits influenced by native values and practices. Both used extensive slave labor and had their cultures significantly marked by African influences from their large African-descended populations. Both absorbed European and Asian immigrants. And their respective military institutions have played major roles in their own systems, though in very different ways. The Brazilian military stance is constitutionally defensive, although its military has intervened in politics to the extreme of taking control of the national government. The Americans have used their military to intervene in neighboring countries and international wars while avoiding direct interference in US national politics. Both countries share the common feature of having superficial knowledge and understanding of the other’s society. Brazil is seen from the United States through a Caribbean and Spanish-American haze, while for Brazilians the United States has a mythical Hollywood and TV image. Both see themselves as unique expressions of humanity. To make matters more complicated for American understanding, Brazilian governments and intellectuals, aside from some on the left, have not thought of their country as part of Latin America (which was a French cultural construct) until recently, but rather as a continental-size chunk of South America.²

Their differences are perhaps more salient. Brazil was born at the end of the medieval era and the beginning of the Renaissance in the Catholic heritage, while the United States grew from a colonial experience on the East Coast of North America related to the Protestant Reformation. The Portuguese monarchy kept Brazil closed to foreigners and foreign trade from 1580 to 1808, while the Americans had a lively international maritime trade from early on. Their intellectual ancestry produced different attitudes toward law; in the United States, whatever is not outlawed is legal, while in Brazil to be legal, a thing must be specified in law. This in turn has produced different attitudes toward government, Americans assume that they are free to act and so tend to ignore government and to resent its interference in their daily lives, while Brazilians seek permission, recognition, and support from the government. Or perhaps better put from the ever-present bureaucracy. Americans created impersonal, impartial mechanisms, such as the graduated court system, before which they seek to resolve their differences; Brazil has a similar appearing system of courts, but on a more personal level, Brazilians seek to settle problems via the intercession of friends, relatives, and patrons. The panelinha , an informal grouping of individuals who share common interests and personal ties, has “a significantly pervasive role in the brokering, clientelistic nature of the Brazilian political-governmental system.” Such groups are difficult to identify and study, but they are one of the unseen linkages “between various interests, organizations, and agencies” that maintain networks of influence throughout Brazil. Access to such networks is obtained by what the Brazilians call pistolão or the exercise of influence. The networks can be positive or negative, but their functioning can undermine the rule of law. Regulations and laws may or may not catch hold and endure (pegam ou não pegam), but they will likely be struggled against via what is known as the jeito or jeitinho, the overcoming or getting around annoying or inconvenient obstacles. Panelinha and jeito “serve as means for reconciling the modern and the traditional – certainly a continuing need for citizens of changing but not yet transformed Brazil.”³ Via the jeitinho, as Roberto DaMatta observed, “we do what we want and avoid open conflict with the law.”⁴

An extreme example of a jeito could be Brazilian Chief of Staff Pedro Aurélio Góes Monteiro’ s reaction to US Navy Secretary Frank Knox’s request in 1943 to discuss cooperation and to be briefed on Brazil’s war plans. In fact there were no war plans on which to brief the Americans, so Góes did a jeito by quickly gathering his staff officers for an all-night session in which they created ostensible war plans. The next day the general was able to expound on Brazilian plans as if they had existed for months or years.

The landholding patterns and their attendant social-economic and labor systems that grew out of these respective histories were also dissimilar. The Brazilian Land Law of 1850 reinforced the tendency toward large landholdings with slave or peon labor, while the American Homestead Act of 1862 increased the number of small family farms. Witness too the importance that the American Congress gave to education with the passage in 1862 of the Morrill Act that set aside public lands in each state for the support of public universities. That Act gave rise to the great state universities that have contributed so much to the development of the American economy and society. In Brazil the public universities were not established until the 1930s; the lack of public education for the masses acted as a drag on development. In 1940 Brazil’s white people were 47% illiterate , Negros were 79%, and Pardos (mixed) were 71%,⁵ while the American white population was 4% illiterate and the black 20%. The United States, in the decades after the Civil War, adopted racial segregation as a lamentable response to the abolition of slavery, while Brazil hid its racial prejudice behind a seemingly more tolerant miscegenation. After slavery was outlawed in 1888, the Brazilian elite gradually embraced the convenient idea that the country enjoyed a racial democracy, which made good press copy but was far from the truth. The two countries had been intimately joined by the African slave trade. Though it was illegal for US citizens and vessels to participate in the slave trade, they and American capital engaged enthusiastically in the dastardly traffic between Africa and Brazil.⁶

The two countries are continental in size, in 1940 Brazil had a population of about 41,114,000, while the United States had 132,164,569, but then much of Brazil’s territory was beyond the reach of the central government. In 1940, Brazil was still the land of coffee, it dominated world production. The American economy was heavily industrialized and moved by extensive coast-to-coast and regional railway networks which also linked population centers all across the land. With the exception of Minas Gerais, Brazil’s population was concentrated along its long coast just as it had been in the colonial era. And with the exception of the rail line from Rio and São Paulo to Rio Grande do Sul, the republic’s railroads ran from ports a relatively few miles into the hinterland to carry out regional products for export . The interior areas were tied together by mule train trails, rather than roads, which were few and far between. Even the “highway” from Rio de Janeiro to São Paulo was gravel in 1940. As historian Joel Wolfe observed, “It was not until Brazilians began to manufacture automobiles in the 1950s that they built the first major roads into the interior.”⁷

Another major difference between Brazil and the United States as the world skidded toward war was that the former was a dictatorship, while the latter was an elected representative democracy. Getúlio Vargas had come to power via a revolution in 1930 that toppled an oligarchy led by the elite of the state of São Paulo. He was the governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul bordering Uruguay and Argentina. His military allies were reformist officers committed to making the army a force for change and bringing Brazil into the modern world.⁸ Franklin D. Roosevelt came to the presidency in early 1933 in a type of electoral revolution that brought Democrats to power after a decade of Republican rule had plunged the country into the greatest Depression in history. In attempting to reconstruct their economies, the two chief executives felt a unity of purpose and a spirit of comradery. In 1934 Vargas had been elected president by the constituent assembly turned national congress after writing a new constitution . Economic difficulties and political disagreements stymied plans for rearmament and industrialization. By 1937 it was clear that Brazil could not pay on its national debt or on bonds sold abroad and also arm itself. The army was alarmed by its evident weakness in being unable to defend against persistent corrosive regionalism and rising international tensions. Brazilian politics entered into crisis as the 1938 presidential elections neared. Minister of War General Eurico Dutra was convinced that...