The Tango War

by Mary Jo McConahay

  It may be about this time that the Brazilians, noting the distinctive unit insignias worn on shoulder patches by Americans, Indians, South Africans, and others who fought with the Fifth Army, wanted one for themselves. The choice of an image was easy. A saying attributed to Hitler used to make the rounds in Brazil: “The Brazilians will fight when the snake smokes.” Thus the Smoking Cobras were born, their symbol a snake in pouncing position with a pipe in its mouth, smoke rising from the bowl.

  By all accounts the people of Barga were glad to be “occupied” by the Brazilians. An Italian historian who gathered postwar descriptions of the time concluded that the South Americans “created with their joyous presence in the city, a climate of euphoria absent for long months.” Women cooked pasta with tomato sauce and gave it to the soldiers, men handed out bottles of wine; the Brazilians, in turn, gave away so much of their own food and personal items that a provisioning crisis ensued. Part of the problem was their prodigal sharing with the partisans too, upon whom they counted for patrolling. “Our food improved,” wrote one partisan, because Brazilians “split [with us] the little food they had with them.” They also loaned partisans their Bren machine gun, a Tommy gun, ammunition, and hand grenades. Even today among Barga inhabitants too young to have experienced the war, faces glow and stories spill out at mention of i brasiliani. In a remark that signified how they had been incorporated into local folklore, the town mayor declared to me that months after the Brazilians left, children were born who grew up to have a remarkable capacity for soccer.

  THE LONGEST WINTER

  On three nights in early November 1944, the Brazilian soldiers crowded into trucks and made a seventy-five-mile drive east and north of the Serchio Valley, at times without headlights, on curves skirting precipitous cliffs. At dawn they arrived at new frontline positions.

  All around rose mountains white with the season’s first dusting of snow. The soldiers stared in wonder; the powder gave the heights an air of enchantment. It was the first snow most had seen. Eventually sleet, frozen mud, and icy boot-grabbing drifts that slowed every move would become menaces as hostile as any enemy, rotting feet, and burning skin. But the first snows were lovely to behold, if amazingly cold.

  The South Americans were charged with taking the 3,240-foot-high Monte Castello, perhaps the highest mountain many had seen. The mount had to be wrested from the Germans so the Allies could move on to the Po Valley and, finally, down to Bologna, the largest city of the north. “Bologna by Christmas!” was the Allied watchword. In his memoirs, Marshall Kesselring said Monte Castello was “of maximum importance for the possession of Bologna and the routes of communication toward the south, north and northwest.” Monte Castello was key to maintaining positions in the east all the way to the Adriatic. The Germans had defended it to the hilt with the concrete pillboxes and troops of the 232nd Panzer division.

  In November and December the Brazilians brutally—there is no other way to say it—hurled themselves against the mountain’s icy slopes. Monte Castello became their obsession, their white whale. “Frankly, you Brazilians are either crazy or very brave,” a German captain told a captured Brazilian lieutenant. “I never saw anyone advance against machine guns and well-defended positions with such disregard for life.”

  The Smoking Cobras had launched their first assault in a debilitated physical state, operating on their sixty-eighth straight day without rest. They lost twelve men, and another forty-five were so badly injured that they had to be evacuated. They charged the mountain again the next day, a frontal assault without reinforcements. The Germans picked off the Brazilians as if they were performing target practice.

  After acrimonious exchanges with U.S. commanders whom the Brazilians blamed—justifiably or not—for the failures, General Mascarenhas demanded control of the Allied attempt to take the mountain. His troops, after all, were in the lead. General Clark agreed. The risk was great, but the wiry, determined Mascarenhas was resolved to redeem the honor of the Smoking Cobras. He had to justify Brazilian presence in the European theater not just politically, but as a fighting force. But the next assault on November 29, the first under Brazilian command, went terribly.

  In the confusion of preparation, some units hadn’t received food and fought hungry all day. One new battalion was rushed into position without time to perform reconnaissance, so at daybreak they stood in full view of the Germans lined up on elevations. At one point a single enemy fragmentation grenade killed nine Brazilians. Far from redeeming themselves in American eyes or their own, the Smoking Cobras simply looked bad. Allied officers acknowledged their tenacity but began to doubt the viability of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force.

  Unbelievably, the Brazilians immediately set a date for what they characterized as their decisive assault on the mountain. They sent the attack plan to the U.S. high command, which gave its approval. At Zero Hour—6:00 a.m.—on the morning of December 12, incessant rain was turning the slopes into icy marshes. Thick fog hampered air cover and visibility for artillery fire. By late afternoon General Zenóbio ordered a retreat. Forty-nine men died, with another six missing in action. Recriminations flew. Washington had approved the attack plan, the Brazilians said. Brazilian commanders were incompetent, some Americans said.

  Worst for the soldiers, the bodies of fallen comrades lay scattered in the snow, unreachable because the territory was under enemy control. The Germans buried some of the dead; later a Smoking Cobras patrol came across a marker that read, in German, “Here Lie Three Brave Brazilian Soldiers.”

  There would be no “Bologna by Christmas.” It was the lowest point in the life of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force.

  The Smoking Cobras settled in for the kind of weather they had never known at home: freezing nights barely tempered by canvas tents. Trench foot was rampant—it caused peeling, bloody skin, and the foul odor of incipient necrosis. Enemy gliders dropped flyers. “Why have you abandoned your country, radiant and full of sun, and fight now here in the fog, the mud and the filth, awaiting a horrible winter, with its snowstorms and interminable avalanches? Is this worth the $95 you receive every month? A bullet-riddled body or a burial in Italy should be better paid.”

  The messages in Portuguese addressed the Brazilians as “comrades” and were signed “German soldiers.” At night, music meant to induce yearnings for home poured forth from the “Green and Gold Hour,” a Portuguese-language German radio show named for the colors of the Brazilian flag. Sometimes the announcer advised listeners that Americans “who are not esteemed by anyone in this world” had hoodwinked the Brazilian soldiers into crossing the sea while the Allies were poised to invade Brazil and capture its minerals and other natural resources. The transmission was required listening because it carried the soccer scores from home.

  In December, the Brazilians received their winter camouflage outfits—all white. One day they reported the puzzling arrival of a cargo of “long boards and some pointed sticks with rings on them.” Vernon Walters inspected the delivery and discovered a quantity of skis and poles for soldiers going out on patrol—in many places drifts were already too deep for walking. Eventually a designated ski instructor, Lieutenant Francis Sargent, later a governor of Massachusetts, would arrive to give regular lessons, but meanwhile the polyglot Walters, also an expert skier, was ordered to begin. He invented “a whole new Portuguese vocabulary to describe the various maneuvers and movements on skis,” he wrote. But after a few classes, the soldiers protested they could not descend the hills or stop. Their complaints were tested when a disabled B-25 with U.S. markings approached from the north, spit forth men on parachutes, went into a screaming dive, and crashed in flames. Walters told the Brazilians he was pushing off for division headquarters to report the downed paratroopers. “Follow me,” he ordered. All successfully made it down the hill.

  The Brazilians learned to ski halfway between Florence and Bologna, above BEF headquarters at Porretta Terme, a town on the Reno River known since Etruscan times for its thermal bat
hs. Shelling boomed nightly, and by day the Germans pounded surrounding roads so intensely that Mascarenhas brought in smoke machines so the enemy couldn’t see Allied traffic; nearly everyone suffered from burning eyes and mouths and a feeling of seared lungs. Most divisions had headquarters situated well behind the fighting, but the BEF headquarters was on the front.

  Nevertheless, when Lieutenant General Willis Crittenberger, commander of the Fifth Army’s IV Corps, visited Mascarenhas and suggested relocation, the Brazilian general would have none of it.

  “General Crittenberger, you are an American,” Mascarenhas said. “You have many headquarters in Italy. You can move them forward, sideways or backwards and no one is going to pay any attention. This is the only Brazilian headquarters in Italy and when I move it, it is going to be forward and not backward.”

  * * *

  General João Baptista Mascarenhas was a superb strategist with a supremely doughty personality, at home among the other Allied officers. But lower-ranking officers also embodied persistence and daring in that winter campaign.

  Lieutenant Max Wolf, a tall, blue-eyed lieutenant from the German south of Brazil, joined the BEF in the footsteps of his admired superior officer in the National Police Force, Lieutenant General Zenóbio, arriving late in 1944. Wolf was the son of an Austrian immigrant who owned a coffee-roasting plant. He had proven himself under fire in Brazil, having been severely wounded while fighting would-be government usurpers alongside Zenóbio in São Paulo in 1932. A thirty-three-year-old widower with a ten-year-old daughter at home, Wolf was one of eight hundred teuto-brasileiros, “German” Brazilians, in BEF ranks.

  During the ill-fated December 12 attack on Monte Castello, Max Wolf had held his position when most other new arrivals, terrified at facing the enemy within hours of reaching the field, had fired wildly, revealing their places and drawing fire. After the battle he volunteered to lead a four-man resupply unit carrying ammunition to advanced positions, collecting the wounded and dead on return. The next day Wolf accompanied a superior officer on a probing mission, insisting on walking ahead.

  “Captain, your life is more useful to the country than mine,” Wolf said.

  For the next weeks Max Wolf, charismatic and apparently tireless, led volunteer units to assess enemy lines, perform special missions, and engage enemy patrols. One day Zenóbio called for volunteers to reclaim the body of a fallen captain that was being used as bait by Germans—they fired on soldiers trying to rescue his remains. Leading a small unit under cover of darkness, Wolf brought back the dead captain. He gathered intelligence, took German prisoners, and once ferreted out an Italian civilian who had been orienting German artillery against the Brazilians with lights from his house.

  By late January, troops were calling Max Wolf the “King of the Patrollers,” a sobriquet he bore good-naturedly. On March 7, a Brazilian company crossing a field at night was surprised by explosions of consecutive mines, sending bodies flying, killing or wounding thirteen, and, not inconsequentially, felling telephonic lines that troops used to communicate with command posts. Leading three other volunteers, Wolf negotiated the minefield and repaired the lines. He had already received medals for valor from Zenóbio for previous actions. In the wake of the minefield action, the gravel-voiced U.S. general Lucien Truscott, who had taken over as Fifth Army commander from Clark, presented Wolf with the Silver Star.

  When Max Wolf took command of a new unit called the “Special Platoon” in April, other soldiers quietly assumed the squad was destined for “suicide missions.” However, photos show the company’s men looking relaxed, hearty and smiling. Brazilian news correspondents arrived at the front and wanted to interview one man: Max Wolf. He complied, but seemed unexpectedly shy in the spotlight.

  An iconic photo from the files of a Rio de Janeiro newspaper, shot on April 12, 1945, shows Wolf wearing a steel helmet and battle fatigues, arms akimbo, standing about a yard forward of his men, who appear at ease, some of them grinning, one carrying a bazooka, the others Thompson submachine guns. He is looking to the side, as if distracted, or preoccupied. The patrol was charged that day with gathering intelligence vital to Allied forces planning the giant Spring Offensive. Was the foe dug into place, or in retreat? They must find out.

  Two hours after the picture was taken, the Special Platoon cautiously approached a stretch of open fields dotted with farmhouses on the rolling outskirts of the town of Montese. Made of rocks and gypsum, fortresslike in appearance, the houses were sometimes used as defenses by Germans who hid behind or inside them; an approaching soldier could be met by machine-gun or rifle fire. On the other hand, the houses might be sheltering frightened, unarmed civilians. Or they might be holding Germans ready to surrender, which happened occasionally in these last months of the war.

  In an eerie midafternoon silence, Wolf dispersed his men on opposite flanks and walked ahead of them some 150 feet. He crossed a clean field with no cover. A long burst of machine-gun fire exploded from a farmhouse. Max Wolf fell face forward into the dirt, where snow had recently melted away.

  The Brazilian command reported his death without mentioning the fact that, as platoon leader, Wolf should never have been the one to take the risky position of esclarecedor, the one who walked ahead. Nor did the report suggest the episode was suicidal. Instead, it commended Max Wolf for “unexcelled bravery” in circumstances that “did not defeat his spirit, in which he neither flinched nor faltered.”

  * * *

  For many who survived the winter of 1944–45, bravery consisted in confronting obstacles less spectacular than those for which Max Wolf is remembered. “The war was about being cold,” said Pedro Rossi, who was a twenty-five-year-old artilleryman at the time. “So many lost their legs from the cold.”

  I met the former Captain Rossi by chance in 2015, standing before an eternal flame at a commemorative pool in a rolling, ten-acre monument to the Brazilians in Pistoia, twenty miles south of their old headquarters at Porretta Terme. Rossi, ninety-five, wore a straw hat against the sun but still held himself with military bearing. He was making his third return visit to the battlefields, he said, accompanied by his son and daughter-in-law. Together we crossed a field of headstones, each marked with the name of one of the 455 Brazilians who died in Italy, including Max Wolf. Rossi spoke of the vicissitudes of the weather that year, and still sounded amazed that he and his friends had pulled through. As we walked among the tombstones, however, his voice fell to nearly a whisper. “Those who died were the real heroes,” he said.

  On the edge of the field we stepped into a small museum and paused before a display of shells and arms. Rossi picked up a war-era machine gun and handled it gingerly, familiarly. He recalled the minutes before midnight on December 31, 1944. “We were young. It was New Year’s Eve,” he said, pointing the vintage weapon high. “So I fired into the air. A celebration, you see. And somebody from the others—a German—fired too.” He lowered the gun. “We were young.”

  As it happened, a few older officers had been entertaining the same idea that night, at almost the same moment, according to Vernon Walters’s account. Colonel Ademar de Queirós, operations officer of the Brazilian divisional artillery, ordered guns and mortars fired to welcome in 1945, the Year of Victory. Not to be outdone, the Germans launched a salvo so fierce it caused plaster to fall inside the Brazilian headquarters, demolishing a celebratory buffet. Officers dived for cover. Walters jumped under a table where he had just placed his contribution to the party, a large round of hard-to-obtain cheese. The shelling stopped. The phone rang. Chief operations officer Colonel Humberto de Alencar Castello Branco answered to hear de Queirós’s cheerful voice. “How did you like that fireworks display we put on?”

  “Ademar, never do that again,” huffed Castello Branco. “The whole German answer just landed on us. We’re lucky to be here to answer the phone.”

  The doggedness of Mascarenhas, Max Wolf’s audacity, and the perseverance of artilleryman Pedro Rossi, multiplied a hundred ways amo
ng Brazilian soldiers over that European winter, might stand for how the Smoking Cobras transformed themselves from an ill-prepared division operating with a sense of defeat into a force that would emerge from the war with justifiable pride. Combat itself was their training. The turnaround manifested itself, of all places, at their old nemesis, Monte Castello.

  Fifty Italian partisans joined the Smoking Cobras, increasing their effectiveness. The 92nd division, called the Buffalo Soldiers, black troops with white officers in a still-segregated U.S. Army—a fact that shocked the Brazilians—fought alongside them. And from the United States another unit arrived, trained to fight under the most difficult mountain conditions: the 10th Mountain Division of Colorado.

  The Colorado unit’s white-clad sports skiers, forest rangers, and outdoorsmen turned soldiers had already captivated the American public. They were featured on the cover of the Saturday Evening Post and the popular radio programs of adventurer Lowell Thomas, himself an avid skier. On February 18, the 10th surprised the Germans with a silent, fifteen-hundred-foot nighttime ascent of the Riva Ridge, considered unassailable day or night. Once in command of the ridge, they were able to take the heavily fortified Mount Belvedere, the highest peak in the Apennines at forty-nine hundred feet. With the heights taken, the way was cleared for yet another Brazilian assault on nearby Monte Castello.

  The men of the 10th, with their insignia of red crossed swords on a blue field under the bold word “MOUNTAIN,” shared their knowledge of survival skills with the Brazilians, such as how to use snowshoes and how to build a snow cave. Culturally, however, there was distance between them. One night a Colorado soldier listened amazed to the goings-on across the ridge. The Brazilians “must have been really happy because they were making all kinds of noise … as if they were going from one party to another,” he wrote. “The Germans would surely hear this outfit sooner or later.”