What was the Brazilian Expeditionary Force?

Why Brazil went to war

In June 1940, with Hitler’s armies three days from Paris, Getúlio Vargas, then ruling Brazil as a dictator, gave a speech aboard the battleship Minas Gerais in Guanabara Bay that alarmed Washington:

We are marching toward a future unlike anything we knew in economic, social or political organization, and we feel that the old systems and outdated formulas are in decline.

Many in Washington read it as a nod to Berlin. Vargas used the scare to bargain. The United States financed the Volta Redonda steelworks and got bases in Brazil’s Northeast, including Natal. In January 1942, at a conference in Rio run by the foreign minister Oswaldo Aranha, Brazil broke with the Axis.

The answer came from the sea. In August 1942 a single German submarine, U-507, sank five Brazilian ships off the coasts of Sergipe and Bahia. On the Baependy alone, which carried soldiers and their families, 270 people died; in all, more than 600. Crowds demanded war, and on August 22 Brazil recognized a state of belligerency with Germany and Italy.

“A snake would sooner smoke”

People said at the time that a snake would sooner smoke than Brazil send soldiers to war. On July 2, 1944, the first echelon of the FEB, the Força Expedicionária Brasileira, sailed from Rio for Italy. On their shoulders they wore a badge of a green snake smoking a pipe. About 25,000 went in all. Brazilians call them pracinhas, from praça, a private soldier. Many came from the interior and had never seen snow.

Monte Castello

Fighting in the Apennines under the US Fifth Army from September 1944, the Brazilians met a hill that would not fall. Monte Castello, held by the Germans from the heights, threw back their attacks in November and December. The FEB’s commander, General Mascarenhas de Moraes, argued for waiting out the winter and bringing up more troops, and the Allied command agreed. December passed in mud and ice, with patrols and sentries.

On February 21, 1945, alongside the US 10th Mountain Division, the FEB attacked again and by the end of the day held the hill. The old joke had become a boast: the snake has smoked.

Fornovo, and the way home

In late April 1945, near Fornovo, the FEB captured the entire German 148th Division. About 450 pracinhas never came home; their remains lie in the monument on the Aterro do Flamengo in Rio. Those who did come back carried an awkward question with them. Brazil had fought the dictatorships of Europe while living under one, and within months of the war’s end the regime at home fell too, as What was the Estado Novo in Brazil? tells.

The snake still smokes in Brazilian Portuguese. When someone says a cobra vai fumar, literally that the snake is going to smoke, they mean trouble is coming, and the usual explanation is that the phrase dates from the FEB’s war.