Death and Honor

The Argentine army was armed with Mauser rifles, wore German helmets, sent their senior officers to the Kriegschule in Germany, and had their headquarters ina handsome, enormous building—the Edificio Libertador—built by the Germans as a manifestation of their solidarity with the Argentines.

Its navy, however, largely British- and (to some degree) U.S.-trained, was sympathetic to England.

Moreover, there was a large Jewish colony in Argentina—including forty thousand Jewish gauchos—that was by no means sympathetic to Hitler, and there were large numbers of other European refugees who were decidedly anti-Axis.

The practical result of all this was that while pro-Axis Argentines did their best to see that German submarines not only managed to get fuel and supplies but were advised of departing British merchant ships so they could be intercepted and sunk, there were anti-Axis Argentines who did their best to keep the supplies flowing to England.

Things changed soon after the Japanese attack on the United States at Pearl Harbor. Brazil declared war on the German-Italian-Japanese axis in January 1942. That gave the U.S. Army Air Corps immediate access to Brazilian airfields, and the U.S. Navy to Brazilian ports and fuel.

B-24 bombers were soon prowling the South Atlantic just outside the Argentine and Uruguayan territorial limits. These aircraft had most of their machine-gun turrets removed—to increase range by reducing weight and drag—and their bomb bays loaded with special antisubmarine bombs.

This was not entirely a heartwarming manifestation of Brazilian-U.S. cooperation to fight a common enemy. American intelligence agents reported their strong suspicions that the artillery, tanks, and ammunition requested by Brazil of the “Arsenal of Democracy” were as likely to be used by the Brazilians against the Argentines as they were against the Axis.

A war between Argentina and Brazil, the two largest countries on the South American continent, was not going to contribute much to a war against Germany, Italy, and Japan. The flood of supplies to Brazil dwindled to a trickle.

And then American intelligence agents in Europe began to hear whispers of two secret German operations, which sometimes overlapped.

One was that it was possible for German Jews outside Germany to purchase the freedom of their relatives from Nazi concentration/extermination camps, followed by transport to Argentina and Uruguay.