The Tango War Page 26

  On the seventieth anniversary of the end of World War II in Italy, members of the Alpini mountain fighting unit, each wearing the distinctive traditional capello with its black raven’s feather, placed a wreath of laurel leaves at Sommocolonia’s marble memorial to the fallen. Then young and old sat down to an outdoor banquet that finished with dishes made with chestnuts, an homage to how the townspeople survived when the food ran out. They recounted stories of fear and loss and valor. From a tower on a promontory overlooking the Serchio River Valley, three banners flew: the Italian Tricolore; the U.S. Stars and Stripes; and the blue orb of the nighttime sky set in a field of gold and green, the flag of Brazil.

  Twenty-five thousand Brazilians fought on the side of the Allies during the invasion of Italy, the only Latin American force to fight in Europe during World War II. Its veterans are fewer every year, and the Brazilian Expeditionary Force (BEF) is on the verge of being forgotten in Brazil. But their story is worth remembering.

  From July to December 1944, convoys of troopships sailed from Rio de Janeiro to Italy. U-boats threatened, and U.S. ships escorted the convoys for stretches on the ocean. Ninety-two-year-old Nery Prado recalled that a U.S. vessel pulled up alongside his ship in the mid-Atlantic to salute the Brazilians.

  “It was at the equator, before the American ship veered off,” Prado told me at his home in Curitiba, in southern Brazil. “All their men were on deck, dressed in white, and we were all on deck, too. We sang ‘God Bless America’ together, Americans and Brazilians.” Sitting on his living room sofa Prado sang it again, in Portuguese. “Deus salve America…”

  “It was something you never forget,” he said.

  The first five thousand Brazilians arrived in Italy in July 1944, weak from seasickness and dysentery, having zigzagged across the Atlantic avoiding submarines. They came ashore without weapons—an ignominious landing—because Allied planners had decided they would receive arms after arrival, not before. Worse, their green uniforms resembled the enemy’s. Neapolitans mistook them for German war prisoners and greeted them with jeers and foul language. The Brazilians might have expected to salve their hurt pride that night in decent barracks, but they were trucked to a “base camp” that turned out to be nothing but a grove of fruit trees at the foot of Mt. Vesuvius. They slept in the open air.

  Thus rose the first of the misunderstandings, differences in perception and operational behavior that would riddle the relationship between the Brazilians and the Americans. On the day the BEF arrived, a U.S. Army major reported, “The weather was very hot and calm.” The Brazilian commander, General João Baptista Mascarenhas de Moraes, referred to those first days as “terribly cold.” The diminutive Mascarenhas, who wore round, metal-rimmed glasses, was an old-school Brazilian officer whose expectations of a certain kind of welcome were clearly violated.

  Without familiar food, some Brazilians nearly starved in the first weeks until they could stomach GI rations, mysterious meats in dull gold cans, not the rice, beans, and manioc flour to which they were accustomed. When they received new uniforms, they found the American-size boots too big, and stuffed them with paper or cloth. Three months later, when they reached the district of the Barga commune called Fornaci di Barga, some enterprising soldiers took advantage of a break in the firing to have their footwear refitted by a cobbler in exchange for a ration of food.

  In his memoirs, General Mark Clark, commander of the Fifth Army to which the BEF was attached, wrote, “We did, however, get combat jackets and winter underwear for them quickly, and then they were properly prepared to go into the line.”

  To say the Brazilians were “properly prepared” with clothing, as Clark wrote, was not to say they were prepared, despite the general’s opinion, “to go into the line” against troops of German field marshal Albert Kesselring. One of Hitler’s most accomplished strategists, Kesselring commanded the Axis front in Italy with highly trained and experienced soldiers. Brazil’s most recent—and only other—overseas deployment had been three centuries in the past, in 1648, when soldiers from Portuguese-held Brazil were part of an expedition to drive the Dutch from Angola and take control of the slave trade that powered the sugar industry.

  As they prepared in Brazil to fight in Europe, troops had used weapons from the 1920s and 1930s such as single-shot Mauser rifles, World War I–era Hotchkiss machine guns, and Schneider artillery of the kind transported on the backs of mules. At an old royal hunting ground near Pisa, the men got a crash course in their new U.S. arms.

  * * *

  Mascarenhas and his troops faced a dangerous military situation in Italy. The Allies had secured Sicily, Monte Cassino, Rome, and most of the south, but German forces and thousands of Italians who had agreed to serve in the German army after Italy surrendered in 1943 held strong in much of the center of the country, and almost all of the wealthy north. Tens of thousands of Allied troops had just been taken away from Italy to prepare for the invasion of France, leaving the Allies short of men. Yet all of Italy north of Rome remained contested.

  The rest of Europe was in flames. On the day the first Brazilians arrived in Naples, a conspiracy to assassinate Hitler had just failed, and the Fuehrer ordered the mobilization of all Germans for the war. U.S. general George Patton’s tanks were advancing on German lines; the Russians were advancing on Warsaw.

  Incongruously, amid intensive instruction and exhausting exercises, the newly arrived troops reveled in extracurricular events, as if they could not leave behind a particularly Brazilian spirit of celebration. On August 19, when Winston Churchill arrived dressed in a lightweight suit and pith helmet, his ever-present cigar in his mouth, for a battlefield visit at a marshy, forested stretch of coast called Tiro de Bolo, the Brazilians stood in formation, resplendent in their new uniforms. A few days later they commemorated the Brazilian Day of the Soldier with songs and a dress parade. This proclivity for conviviality almost killed some troops who liked to gather informally around campfires at night despite blackout orders. More than once, the fires’ glow drew attacks from planes of the Fascist Italian Air Force.

  After three weeks of training at Pisa and the inevitable graduation parade, the Brazilians were thrown up against thousands of the most seasoned troops of Adolf Hitler’s Wehrmacht. “The German position in Italy was as strong as any previous time in the Italian campaign,” wrote the Fifth Army’s historian, Lieutenant Colonel Chester G. Starr. Mascarenhas feared his men would serve as cannon fodder.

  The Brazilians met the enemy at the Gothic Line. Built by fifteen thousand Italian slave laborers working under the Todt Organization, the engineering company at the service of the Reich, the Line was a snaking path of steel shelters and protective bunkers running 180 miles long and ten miles deep from just south of La Spezia on Italy’s west coast across the Apennines to a point between Pesaro and Ravenna on the east coast, on the Adriatic Sea. To halt the Allies’ advance north from Rome, Kesselring had the bulwark designed to be impregnable, with two thousand concrete emplacements for anchoring eighty-eight-millimeter antiaircraft and antitank guns, minefields, and defense positions carved into mountains. Of Kesselring’s twenty-seven German divisions and parts of six Italian divisions—half a million men—eighteen divisions were stationed on the Line.

  It was the landmines that took some of the first Brazilian lives. German soldiers fought skillfully and without quarter. By this time Wehrmacht veterans had fought dozens, if not hundreds, of battles, skirmishes, and firefights in Europe and Africa.

  Even off the battlefield, however, away from the enemy, Brazilians were thrown out of commission or worse because of inadequate preparation. Men who had never been inside a car suddenly found themselves behind the wheel of ten-ton trucks, driving mountain roads gone slick and muddy with rain; thirty-six drivers and passengers died in accidents in the first month. Seventy-one years later, a veteran named Eronides João da Cruz still wanted to insist on the valor of his fellow soldiers while lamenting their lack of training. “In all the action, Brazil
ians showed we were not weak, but at first, inexperienced,” da Cruz told me.

  And many were ill. Nery Prado remembers that of six teenagers who left their coffee-growing farms together to volunteer for the BEF, only he and one other passed a physical. “You have to be healthy to die,” he said ruefully. Yet medical screening in Brazil was inconsistent. To the consternation of Brazilian and U.S. medics, men who never should have been in Italy in the first place had to be treated for complications of conditions such as tuberculosis or hepatitis, or transported home.

  And language was a problem unforeseen—or ignored—by Brazilians and Americans. General Clark assigned his aide, Captain Vernon Walters of Connecticut, as liaison to General Mascarenhas. Walters had been raised in Europe and spoke several languages, including Portuguese. But the energetic young officer, who later would serve as an advisor to presidents from Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan, was only one man, often in demand by several officers at once. And he didn’t get much help in translating from the Brazilian soldiers, although thousands of them spoke not only their native Portuguese but also Italian or German or Japanese, the languages of their immigrant heritages, and many spoke French. Bilingual Brazilians became on-the-spot interrogators when German or Italian troops were captured. Only a handful spoke English, however, and most of them were quickly trained as radio operators. There were virtually no other Portuguese speakers among the Americans. The South Americans regarded their monolingual U.S. trainers as regrettably undereducated.

  * * *

  The Brazilians’ first skirmishes on the front north of the Arno River were true trials by fire. Nobody ran, but the Brazilians were clobbered. On September 18, the harried troops finally scored a victory—and at a critical point on the Gothic Line. Near Camaiore, a town located in a district of green plains in western Tuscany, Lieutenant General Euclides Zenóbio da Costa led the assault.

  Zenóbio, a fit-looking fifty-one with the commanding posture of a graduate of Brazil’s top military schools, had a reputation for bravery and the ability to get things done. He also commanded abiding loyalty from men who had served with him in Brazil—many followed him to Italy. On September 17, orders came to Zenóbio: take Camaiore.

  “He did not waste time,” wrote the Brazilian general chief of staff, Floriano de Lima Brayner. “[Zenóbio] commanded, with bits of recklessness, launching and directing the departure of the vehicles, not worrying about the dangers surrounding him.”

  The Brazilians routed the Germans. Liberating Camaiore “in Zenóbio’s pure and impulsive style” was a small victory in a major, ill-fated Allied offensive called Operation Olive. The plan was to storm the Gothic Line and break through to Italy’s important cities of the north before winter set in. By the end of September, however, Operation Olive was sputtering. The Allies were losing too many men, too much equipment. Every time the Germans seemed to disappear, they attacked with rearguard actions. Churchill had miscalculated: he did not believe the Germans would defend Italy.

  * * *

  The Brazilians matured as a fighting force in the valley of the meandering Serchio River, which flows through northern Tuscany for seventy-eight miles between the Apuan Alps and the Apennines. On one side of the vale rises the coastal range glinting with the white peaks from which Michelangelo took his marble. On the other, ancient settlements like Sommocolonia crown heights along the Apennine range called the backbone of Italy. The Northern Apennines, running from the Ligurian Sea south of Genoa southeast across the Italian peninsula nearly to the Adriatic below Rimini, were “the most formidable mountain barrier [the Fifth Army] was ever to face in combat operations in Italy,” wrote Starr, the Fifth Army historian.

  Unfortunately, the Brazilians arrived in the Serchio Valley just when torrential rains began, sweeping trucks from roads, threatening troops on foot with flash floods and the kind of mud that could swallow a man. With Zenóbio in the lead, men slogged their way up the river, town by town and bridge by bridge.

  On October 6, however, they took the district of Fornaci di Barga so fast that they captured its munitions and aircraft-parts factory before the Germans could blow it up. A German squad returned under cover of darkness to sabotage the place. A long firefight ensued, and four Brazilians died. But in the morning the factory was intact, in Brazilian hands.

  By this time the Brazilians were working in concert with the only Italian partisan unit that would remain undefeated during the war, organized by the legendary “Pippo,” Manrico Ducceschi. A student who had once attended the elite Alpini Cadet Officer Course, Pippo had the honor of being the Germans’ “most wanted” guerrilla resistance fighter. The Brazilians seemed taken aback at their first sight of the guerrillas, “armed to the teeth,” a partisan wrote, “but without uniforms of any kind.” The partigiani made reconnaissance patrols and reported their intelligence to the Brazilians. On at least two occasions they searched for Brazilian troops who had lost contact with commanders, escorting them back to base. Reports from the time say that of all the Allied units, the Brazilians, Latin in temperament, respectful of the Italian fighters’ local knowledge, worked best with the partigiani.

  From Fornaci di Barga a Brazilian patrol set out to reconnoiter the most valuable prize in the southern sector of the Serchio, just three miles away: Barga itself, a walled city with a distinctive cathedral that dominated the landscape, the finest example of Romanesque architecture in the valley.

  The people of Barga had been suffering death and occupation. The parish priest, Lino Lombardi, noted in his journal the day and time of every cannonade that burst in the hills, every shell that hit a house, every soul he buried in those terrible months in late 1944. Nearly sixty, with hair almost entirely gray and black-rimmed glasses that gave his round face an owlish look, the prete wore a wide-brimmed hat and flowing black cassock that flapped in the wind as he hurried among Barga’s steep narrow streets. His flock, he wrote, looked inconsolably grim, “like anyone with a loved one dying.”

  Farmers and townsmen hid at the sight of uniforms, afraid of being swept into the Todt Organization’s ranks of slave labor. Families mourned their dead young men who had been among tens of thousands of Italians sent by Mussolini to fight alongside Hitler’s divisions on the Russian Front.

  Not far away, German massacres of women, children, and the elderly, from twenty to seventy persons at a time, were taking place as warnings, or punishments. In a scorched-earth operation in August, in a hill town less than twenty-five miles from Barga named Sant’Anna di Stazzema, SS troops took reprisals for a partisan operation by going door-to-door, rounding up more than 700 residents, including 130 children, and murdering them and burning their bodies. In the town of Marzabotto, a Waffen-SS unit slew some 770 unarmed residents in an operation that took five days. Burying their bodies was forbidden. One day Lombardi and some parishioners went to an old estate amid olive groves and vineyards to give food to a “herd” of people who had been rounded up in German raids as slave workers. They were “a pitiful spectacle of men in clothes worn out and torn,” he wrote, “shoes almost gone, shabby and suffering … reduced to a semi-bestial state.”

  Beginning in July, the Black Brigade, drawn from Mussolini’s loyal Fascist troops, had occupied Barga. By autumn, they turned the town over to the Germans, who blew up the local aqueduct as they left town at the Allies’ approach and took positions in the surrounding heights. For towns like Barga, liberation could not come soon enough.

  At 12:15 p.m. on October 7, 1944, Lombardi, returning from saying Mass in an outlying parish, encountered the Brazilian reconnaissance patrol that had set out from Fornaci. The unit, Lombardi noted with surprise, was “composed of soldiers of the most various colors, from white to black, commanded by a dark non-commissioned officer.” Unless a man had fought in Mussolini’s conquest of Ethiopia or served elsewhere in Africa, an Italian may never have seen a black person before setting eyes on the Brazilians.

  Mussolini’s Racial Laws, in effect from 1938 to 1943, discriminated agai
nst Jews but maligned blacks too, considering them less than fully human. Publications like the slick government magazine La Difesa della Razza (The Defense of the Race) promoted Fascist myths of Italian “racial” and cultural dominance over Jewish and African people. For Father Lombardi, the first sight of his deliverers, Brazilian soldiers “of the most various colors,” was a symbol of what had gone terribly wrong in Italy itself.

  “I thought sadly about all the racial pride which in recent years had been one of the flagships of the Regime, and also about the fact that we, the people of an ancient civilization, were under [the Brazilians’] control, even though friendly, in the middle of a war,” he wrote.

  On October 11 at precisely 10:30 a.m., Lombardi noted “for the record” that the Brazilian forces entered Barga in jeeps, many of which, he wrote with delight, “were marked with the names of the Virgin and the saints and with sacred images.” Crowds lined the streets, visibly thankful at the promise of an end to their suffering. Partisans, some of whom had been in the town for two days, took a drier view of the grand arrival.

  Pippo’s lieutenant had already taken control of the city hall and overseen mild reprisals, setting Fascist sympathizers to work clearing rubble from the streets, shearing the heads of a few women deemed too friendly to the enemy. Now the partigiani looked appalled at the South Americans’ relaxed, triumphal demeanor, “exposed, in the open, without prudence, smiling and merry, almost as if they were in a parade.”

  Someone warned people to get out of the streets. German cannons rained fire. When shooting broke out again at midnight, Lombardi “jumped” from his bed and ran down to shelter with the thirty brasiliani who had bivouacked for the night inside the thick walls of the lower cathedral complex.