The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

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  To the memory of my parents, James Cornelius McConahay, U.S. Navy, and Mary Thérèse Rakowski McConahay, U.S. Navy. They made the world a better place.

  INTRODUCTION

  STORMFRONT

  At a café on the Tiergartenstrasse, women meet over Black Forest cake and Apfelstrudel, planning a film night for their chapter of the NS-Frauenschaft—the National Socialist (Nazi) Women’s League. Outside the café, girls in pinafores, blonde braids bouncing, and boys wearing lederhosen pass the wide windows, returning from the Neue Deutsche Schule. Some of the youngsters look up to the sky in hopes of catching sight of “the Zepp,” the silver dirigible Graf Zeppelin, passing overhead. Newspaper vendors hawk Der Urwaldsbole and the Deutsches Volksblatt, and in an empty lot very young boys wearing swastikas on armbands practice marching under the tutelage of teens from the Nazi Youth Club and the Gymnastics Society. Hitler’s birthday is just around the corner. There will be parades! The party men will march in their uniform shirts, arms raised straight out before them, saluting like the Fuehrer …

  * * *

  These moments on a “Tiergartenstrasse” might be unfolding in 1930s Germany, but instead the afternoon scene is typical of a host of towns in southern Brazil, where a million ethnic Germans lived on the eve of World War II. Ethnic Italians and Japanese, too, resided in countries from Mexico to Argentina. As World War II loomed in Europe, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s greatest fear was that fascist—especially Nazi—subversion in Latin America would threaten the security of the United States. Of one hundred meetings of the Joint Planning Committee of the U.S. State, Navy, and War Departments in 1939 and 1940, all but six had Latin America at the top of the agenda.

  While covering the region for more than thirty years as a reporter, I sometimes heard tales with roots in the Second World War years. But under the pressure of writing about the civil wars in Central America and other issues of the day, I did not pursue them. My father, a U.S. naval officer who served in the Pacific, the Mediterranean, and South America during the war, had let drop over time intriguing bits of stories about Brazil, Uruguay, and Argentina. He mentioned that the U.S. base at Fortaleza was opened on Sundays to the entire local community, a day “For All,” as it was called, when Brazilians and Americans played their music for each other. He told of the time his crew was ordered to appear in as many different places as possible on shore leave at night in Buenos Aires to convey the impression that there were more Americans around than there really were—Argentina then was considered pro-Nazi. But when I finally found the time to pursue more details about his stories my father was gone, my questions about the war among many I never asked. I would have to satisfy my curiosity on my own.

  What I discovered was that a shadow war for the Western Hemisphere reverberated in every country and that Latin America influenced the global war. Powerful and glamorous figures known better in other scenarios played major and highly imaginative roles: Roosevelt; Nelson Rockefeller; Walt Disney; Orson Welles; the legendary Reich spymaster Admiral Wilhelm Canaris and his opposite, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover; and “Wild Bill” Donovan, founder of the precursor to the CIA. The Axis and the Allies competed for the hearts and minds of the continent’s people, for their sea lanes and natural resources—from oil and rubber to wolfram and industrial diamonds—to feed their war machines. Their spies operated out of embassies, corporate offices, dockside bars. Each side closely shadowed the steps of the other, like dancers in a tango.

  This book tells the story of the people behind the events that unfolded on the Latin continent during the global conflict. Not all the names are famous: they include families kidnapped in Latin countries and brought to concentration camps in the United States to be used as pawns in a little-known prisoner exchange program; Jewish families who tried to reach the continent to escape the Holocaust; Latin American–born businessmen and immigrant community leaders who had the misfortune to have German, Japanese, or Italian roots, making them vulnerable to Allied blacklists that froze their assets, and worse. They include princes of the Roman Catholic Church who laid down the clandestine escape routes that brought fascist war criminals like Joseph Mengele and Klaus Barbie to safety in South America. And the book tells the story of a scrappy, unsung force of twenty-five thousand Brazilians—the only Latin American unit to bear arms in Europe—who fought for the Allies in Italy, and how the Battle of the Atlantic, the longest continuous military campaign of the war, was joined by ships great and small in southern seas.

  Just as the tango can be danced fast or very slowly, even with one partner holding still while the other moves, the rhythm of the competition between the Allies and the Axis varied in each country. And the territory covered was vast—a distance of 6,640 miles from the Rio Grande river border in Texas south to the Argentine Antarctic. To do justice to the subtle intricacy of the interlinked maneuvers of this deadly contest, I chose to present the elaborate story of World War II in Latin America in connected narratives, like tiles in a mosaic that, seen together, give a picture of the whole.

  At this distance in time, since we know the outcome of the war, it is difficult to imagine how strong the Reich was before 1943, how grievous a threat to the Allies, how unsure anyone was about which way the conflict would go. In the run-up to the war and during the hostilities in Europe and the Pacific, the Latin American region was up for grabs.

  * * *

  In writing this book I came to admire the intelligence and energy of those who fought the war in many different ways, without receiving medals, often without recognition. I also came to realize that the era was not simply history but the taproot of issues we face today, such as the practice of extraordinary rendition in Washington’s “war on terror”—the kind of forcible capture and relocation that families like the Naganumas, the Sappers, and others suffered more than seventy years ago. It was the beginning of U.S. intelligence gathering and CIA operations of the kind that have saved lives but also meddled to disable governments inconvenient to U.S. policy. And the war years mirror painful discussions we have now on whom we invite into the country to be Americans and whom we shut out and why.

  People of Latin American heritage are by far the largest driver of demographic growth in the United States. In 2004 Latinos with roots in countries covered by this book surpassed the number of non-Hispanic whites in my home state of California, the nation’s most populous. Yet the lands from the Rio Grande to Tierra del Fuego are seldom in our headlines and histories. The long-standing assumption that nothing much happens in that vast region, despite its population of 650 million, continues. In the United States, lands south of the border are still viewed as, somehow, our “backyard.”

  It is time that the engrossing story of how World War II developed in Latin America is more widely known.

  PART I

  The Prizes

  1.

  THE FIGHT FOR SOUTHERN SKIES

  Images of South American citi
es burst forth on movie screens across the United States in the 1930s, sun-kissed and glittering as in Flying Down to Rio or swank with hippodromes and landscaped parks as in Down Argentine Way—the kinds of places an American girl like Betty Grable might go on vacation. The far-off cities, alive with the music of samba and tango or the blithesome voice of Carmen Miranda, materialized before audiences as exciting and inviting. The picture was romantic, and in many ways true.

  In Buenos Aires and Rio de Janeiro, cash did flow. Cars, buses, and trucks shuttled people and goods from the ports and around the streets in effervescent movement. The Uruguayan capital, Montevideo, the continent’s third-largest metropolis with European-looking buildings set among shady streets, prospered too, commanding commerce on the Rio de la Plata—the Plate River, named for silver, plata—upstream from Paraguay all the way down to where the wide river feeds the Antarctic seas.

  Drive an hour or two outside these waterfront centers, however, and the isolation of most South American towns hit home with the first flat tire on a rutted dirt road or the first experience of a highway that had become an impassable river of mud. Rail travel was uncomfortable, with schedules undependable. Everyone wanted to fly. In the grand finale of the immensely popular Flying Down to Rio film, dancers perform on the wings of aircraft swooping high over city and shore while enthusiastic crowds watch from below. What the Hollywood movies did not show was how thoroughly German planes were masters of the air above South America. It was easier for passengers from the southern continent to travel to the heart of the Reich than to the heartland of the United States. Most routes were flown by German- or Italian-owned companies, or local companies using German pilots, or pilots who were naturalized German-born citizens. In 1934, when Brazilian generals wanted to map the country’s remote interior, they contracted the new aerial photography unit of a German-controlled airline to record its every square mile. Whether the initiative for the mapping came from the Brazilians or in some way from the Germans is not clear.

  Germans, and thousands of Japanese immigrants in agricultural settlements, lived in six countries on the Amazonian littoral: Ecuador, Peru, Brazil, Venezuela, Colombia, and Bolivia. Few North Americans inhabited the resource-rich region, however, especially after Fordlandia, an Amazonian rubber-growing enterprise of Henry Ford, largely collapsed. An Associated Press editor sent his correspondent from New York on assignment to “tell us whether the South Americans are really our friends.” The reporter, John Lear, survived a 1942 plane crash in the Peruvian desert to report that at regular distances, “over an area larger than the United States, the Amazon was lined with airports cut from the wilderness by German technicians.”

  The United States was well into the war by the time Lear wrote that “at least several times a week, sometimes each day, German planes piloted by German flyers came down on these airports on a fixed schedule.” He noted that U.S. intelligence officers called the ubiquitous German pilots a threat to defense of the Panama Canal, only a short flying distance away. “Taking these planes from German hands would not deprive the Germans of their maps or flying knowledge of this almost unknown terrain,” Lear wrote.

  How did Germans come to be the virtual owners of South American skies? The answer lies partly in an unforeseen consequence of the Treaty of Versailles, which ended World War I after Germany’s military defeat. Signed in June 1919, Versailles, among its punishing terms, forbade Germany to have an air force. That ended the careers of many military pilots and eliminated an otherwise natural career path for German youth attracted to aviation. From their devastated homeland, German aviators joined thousands of entrepreneurs of all stripes in turning their eyes across the Atlantic to South America, with its reputation as a frontier region that offered fresh starts, especially where German colonies already existed.

  A GOSPEL OF FLIGHT

  Airlines, German-owned or not, grew in South America within a global atmosphere of enthusiasm for the potential of human conquest of the skies. The dreams began in 1903 with the Wright brothers’ first short flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Poignantly, it seems now, some early designers and pilots saw aircraft as a technology that would knit the world together and make war obsolete. The Pomeranian Otto Lilienthal, considered the founder of the science of wing aerodynamics and an inspiration to the Wright brothers, represented this “gospel of aviation.” In January 1884, Lilienthal wrote a letter to the Prussian naval officer Moritz von Egidy, a current of excitement rippling through his words.

  Numerous technicians in every nation are doing their utmost to achieve the dream of free, unlimited flight and it is precisely here where changes can be made that would have a radical effect on our whole way of life. The borders between countries would lose their significance … national defence would cease to devour the best resources of nations … the necessity of resolving disagreements in some other way than by bloody battles would, in its turn, lead us to eternal peace.

  In the United States men and women took to the air with what author Gore Vidal called a “quasi-religious” fervor. Vidal’s father Gene, an intimate of Amelia Earhart and President Roosevelt’s director of the Bureau of Air Commerce, served as an executive of three commercial airlines. Just as Henry Ford envisioned putting every family on the road with his Model T, Gene Vidal saw a day when the simple “Everyman’s Plane” would put everyone on the skyways. “Flight would make men near-angels,” wrote Gore Vidal, “and a peaceful world one.”

  * * *

  Brazil’s own air pioneer, Alberto Santos-Dumont, spent many evenings gazing at the starry skies above the coffee plantation where he grew up. Born in 1873, he read voraciously as a boy, especially Jules Verne. “With Phileas Fogg I went round the world in eighty days.” Santos-Dumont moved to France, where he joined the enthusiasts called aeronauts, who were exploring the new technology of aviation. In 1901, the young Brazilian became one of the most celebrated personalities of the day by circling the Eiffel Tower at record speed in a dirigible. (He made history another way, too: he asked his friend Louis Cartier to come up with a timepiece that he would not need to pull out of his pocket in flight, resulting in what would come to be called the “wristwatch.”) In those days before air traffic controls, Santos-Dumont could be spotted by morning drifting in his personal hydrogen gas–powered flying machine over Parisian boulevards, then lunching smartly dressed at his favorite café, Maxim’s.

  But Santos-Dumont was no rudderless dandy. He made the first controlled fixed-wing flight in France and developed a series of improvements for heavier-than-air craft, including a precursor to ailerons. He was showered with honors until his career stopped at age thirty-six, when he was stricken by multiple sclerosis. Tragically, perhaps affected by the depression that sometimes accompanies the condition, he burned his papers and drawings and hanged himself in 1932. Like the emblematic early Argentine flier Jorge Newbery, who died in 1914 and is interred in Buenos Aires, Santos-Dumont too lies buried under a massive statue of Icarus, in Rio.

  If you come to Rio, you may land at Santos-Dumont Airport—the aeronaut remains lionized in Brazil as the father of aviation. But it took German presence and know-how to establish the industry on Santos-Dumont’s native continent.

  * * *

  In 1919, a full five years before Delta, the oldest operating U.S. airline, began sending crop dusters over the Georgia cotton fields, Germans had already established the first carrier in South America. Called SCADTA (Sociedad Colombo-Alemana de Transportes Aéreos), the Colombian line flew German-made Junkers seaplanes from a base alongside an island in the Magdalena River near Cartagena. The money behind SCADTA, its pilots, and management all came from Germany after World War I. Some SCADTA pilots who had learned to fly in the war maintained their commissions in the Luftwaffe reserve.

  As adequate airfields were built on the mainland, SCADTA soon was flying passengers and cargo throughout the Andes, to the enormous satisfaction of Colombians. Their country was divided by three high mountain ridges that made land trav
el a long, slogging nightmare. Anyone who could afford it now took a plane.

  Six years after SCADTA began, the prosperous German community in Cochabamba, Bolivia, took up a collection to buy a modern, four-passenger Junkers F.13, the world’s first all-metal transport aircraft. With no more than the single plane, they grandly founded Lloyd Aéreo Boliviano (LAB), purposely choosing the name to echo “Lloyd’s of London,” the British enterprise with a sterling reputation for security. Soon a fleet of LAB aircraft linked Bolivian cities to points in Argentina, Uruguay, Chile, and southern Brazil.

  Given the size and wealth of the Brazilian German colonies, it was no surprise when an airline appeared in 1927 with the specific aim of serving teuto-brasileiros, the Germans of Brazil. Germans had been establishing agricultural settlements in South America since the 1850s; German businesses followed and thrived, with entire cities growing up around teuto-brasileiro industries such as cloth manufacture and meat processing. Sindicato Condor, a subsidiary of the German company Luft Hansa, provided overnight flights from Rio to other Brazilian cities, cutting days from overland journeys, and soon flew to Uruguay and Argentina. Luft Hansa also took a controlling share in the SEDTA (Sociedad Ecuatoriana Alemana de Transportes Aéreos) line of Ecuador, operated it exclusively with German pilots, and fought off U.S. airline penetration into the country.

  When the Bolivian LAB and the Brazilian Condor airlines joined forces in 1936, German hegemony in southern skies took another leap forward. The companies brought their respective passengers to a central hub, the Brazilian city of Corumbá on the mineral-rich Pantanal, the world’s largest wetland, where passengers spent the night. The next morning, passengers and cargo brought in by one company flew out on the equipment of the other, effectively giving each airline international connections neither possessed alone.