It probably should not be altogether surprising that when Admiral Jonas Ingram retired, the press should remember him chiefly as one of the best football players who ever tore an Army line to shreds. The press was aware that he had commanded naval forces operating out of Brazil during the war, but it was unconscious of anything that went on there except the destruction of a couple of blockade runners. There were no war correspondents, the place is as far from American newspaper offices as the South Pacific, and events lay under the double censorship that veiled antisubmarine operations and war-time diplomacy. Now that the shooting is over and things can be discussed above a whisper, nobody seems much interested.
This is an error. The campaign conducted by Jonas Ingram made history in more than one sense. That it resulted in the utter overthrow of the enemy forces was more or less incidental. The true achievement was to secure, on a basis beyond shock, the friendship and cooperation of the one country in the world we cannot do without. A globe will give some idea of Brazil’s importance to us in a strategic sense, but that is only part of it. During the war an air transport service was set up to bring strategic materials of Brazilian origin to the United States. It was the period of the rubber shortage, when every nerve was being strained to obtain the natural rubber, of which a small admixture with the synthetics was needed for most military purposes. There was plenty of natural rubber in Brazil, but so urgently were so many other materials needed, that rubber was only ninth on the priority list for transportation.
Jonas Ingram was so little the man on whom one would rest a priori expectations of success in diplomacy that there is evidence of an effort on the part of officials of both Brazilian and American governments to keep him from contact with President Vargas, who also bore the reputation of an explosive and unpredictable character. As a matter of fact, the Admiral more or less tumbled into the South Atlantic command by way of Crudiv 2—four of the old Omahas, sent out on Neutrality Patrol, with the specific job of keeping one eye on the Martinique French and another on Dakar.
As early as March, 1941, Admiral Ingram decided that he had more territory on this beat than one pair of legs could cover. On one of his trips north, he waited on Admiral King with the suggestion that all Caribbean naval matters could be more efficiently handled through 10th Naval District at San Juan, while he cruised the flowing triangle between Trinidad, the Cape Verdes, and the hump of Brazil. (At least that is the official account; a freehand version represents Ingram as protesting that “These French and Indian wars bore the hell out of me.”)
The result was a set of orders making San Juan the cruiser division’s base, with Recife and Bahia as replenishment ports. The antique Patoka, only vessel that could be spared, would be a combination station ship, tender and supply vessel, which meant that she would have to spend much time lying in Brazilian ports. With regard to her reception and that of the other American ships, all was doubt; with regard to the logistic situation in general there was no information whatever, except that the shipping situation was such that very little could be brought down from the States.
It was May when two of the cruisers steamed into Recife, and Admiral Ingram paid official calls on the local officials of that major city of the Brazilian north—the Interventor who governed the state, the commandant of the military area, and the city mayor. They were polite enough, but uncommunicative, an attitude explained by the date. Yugoslavia and Greece had just gone down, and Brazil is nearly a thousand miles nearer to the Nazi-dominated Continent than to a United States which at that point was evincing a lively disinterest in other peoples’ wars.
Moreover, the Admiral’s position was not unlike that of the man who came to dinner. Nobody had asked us to patrol the waters off Brazil or to set up even the kind of base facilities represented by the Patoka there. The papers were inclined to refer to the arrival under headlines speaking of “The American invasion,” and to our people as “parachutists.” Nor were matters eased by what the Admiral found. There were tanks for fuel, but no fuel; provisions were nonexistent except for fruits. The normal food of most of the local population was beans, rice, and fish, a diet which does not commend itself to American sailors; and the normal means of obtaining other supplies was by means of small coasters from other parts of the country.
In view of the fact that Hitler, now at the zenith of his power, might choose any moment to get tough, the military situation was not more encouraging than the rest. There was better than a fair chance of German surface raiders showing up; there was the chance that the hump of French Africa or the Cape Verdes would be used as bases for air attack; and there were the U- boats. To meet all these in an area larger than the Mediterranean, Ingram had three light cruisers (one of his ships was under extensive repair) and four of the 1850-ton flotilla leaders, with an aviation component consisting of his shipboard planes.
To cover his area the Admiral split the force into two task units of equal size and sent them in succession around a triangular course covering the area. The attacks did not materialize, and down to some time after Pearl Harbor the only event worth chronicling was the capture of the German blockade- runner Odenwald by the Omaha and Somers in November. The Nazi had the bad judgment to announce herself as a Philadelphia ship—in a heavy Dutchy accent—and then tried to scuttle; a U. S. Navy boarding party defanged the time-bombs, brought the Odenwald in, and well earned the substantial salvage money which the courts awarded six years later.
The key actions of the period, and in fact, of the whole operation, were meanwhile taking place on the beach—in the very brief periods when the ships could get their crews to the beach, never more than three days in succession. A pair of the cruisers would slip into Recife; Admiral Ingram entertained at a luncheon for the Mayor and the Interventor. The Milwaukee arrived; the officers gave a cocktail party for their skipper, who had been promoted, and Brazilians were invited. The Memphis arrived; Admiral Ingram accepted an invitation to the Country Club, another to the International Club, had lunch at the Agricultural School and a cocktail party at the home of a big industrialist. He made speeches, told stories, laughed readily and encouraged others to laugh. His officers were complimentary to the right women, and under the urging of the Admiral made rapid progress in Portuguese. The sailors made liberties, spending money freely. (The number of alligator bags purchased in Recife would reach from the earth to the moon, if laid end to end.) Business was never mentioned, politics were taboo—and the ships sailed with the morning tide.
One point behind all this is that Recife was already an old city with a university before the Pilgrim fathers sighted Massachusetts Bay. It is inhabited by a polite and gay people, yet with a sense of their own dignity and a distinguished intellectual tradition; it is probably the only town in the world where one can discuss the philosophy of Auguste Comte over cocktails, and one of the few where business may not be undertaken till coffee has been drunk and compliments paid. Ingram’s approach—and he saw to it that it was the approach of everyone in the squadron—was exactly calculated to reassure and to make friends. The Americans had not come, as some expected, to swing a big stick; they were visiting Recife to have a good time among equals.
It was not until some time after the sight of the American cruisers at Recife docks had become familiar that Admiral Ingram waited on the Interventor and told him the whole story with extreme frankness—why the Americans were in the South Atlantic, what they expected to happen, what they expected to do, and what they needed, chiefly food. The presence of the squadron (he said), with the whole power of the United States Navy behind it, could be a commercial as well as a military asset to the State of Pernambuco. He would deal with other Brazilians in the area only through Senhor Magalhaes (this was the Interventor’s name) and only with his approval.
It was more the manner of the Interventor’s reply than anything he said that made the American admiral aware that the “invasion” had established its first beachhead without casualties, but the practical action was not wanting. The State Secretary of Agriculture was summoned and an order issued that all members of the American forces were to enjoy wholesale cooperative association prices. The concession was not unimportant in itself, but it was far more important in marking the emergence of Magalhaes as definitely pro-American, for he was one of the more influential figures in the country.
Without his cooperation the establishment of the Recife base, which became the center of the whole South Atlantic war, would have been impossible. The base began with the arrival of a single chief storekeeper a week before Pearl Harbor, and a vigorous program of renting the big warehouses that lie along the Recife docks. At about that time the seaplane tender Thrush arrived at Belem, forerunner of a squadron of PBY’s for which the patrol had had urgent need since the beginning. They were to service from her and use the fields at Belem and Natal as well as Recife, Admiral Ingram having made arrangements with the states in which the other bases lie.
German submarines were already en route to our coast when the good-will Admiral Ingram had so carefully put together blew up in his face, and through no fault of his own. Someone in Washington was seized with the inspiration of dispatching three companies of Marines “to guard the airfields,” and the first thing anyone in Brazil knew about the matter was the notification that they were already on the way—by air.
A more maladroit step could not possibly be imagined. The United States was now a belligerent; Brazil was not. Yet we were sending an armed force into her territory to watch her airports, which were military as well as civil installations. As though this were not enough, there was also a personal factor. The commandant of the Northeast Air Zone, in which the three airports lay, was Brigadier Eduardo Gomes, one of the strongest and most positive characters in the country, an ardent patriot, as deep in politics as in his profession, who had previously expressed a good deal of skepticism about the purity of American intentions. This was invasion in its most unmistakable form. He said as much to Lieutenant Commander Hodgman, the American naval observer at Recife, and added that he would permit no armed foreigners to approach airfields in his jurisdiction.
Admiral Ingram, who might have straightened matters out, was at sea in the Memphis-, Ambassador Jefferson Caffery and Rear- Admiral Beauregard, the naval attaché, were in Rio de Janeiro, aware that something was wrong but unable to get specific information; and the Marine-bearing planes were rushing toward Recife at 150 miles an hour. Under the circumstances, Hodgman made the best deal he could, which was that the Marines should enter Brazil as tourists, with their arms in boxes, to be placed aboard the Patoka. The company that came to Recife was bunked aboard the same ship.
The incident, however dangerous, had the value of bringing to a head the whole interlocking question of bases and Brazilian cooperation. San Juan was too distant and too overloaded with the demands of the Caribbean to be a good base; Trinidad was incomplete, and the British there were overloaded with the demands of the immense tanker traffic through Curasao, and the expectation—fully justified—that the U-boats would be after it.
The German submarines got after traffic along the north coast of Brazil about the same time (early 1942), sank a couple of neutrals, and escaped the pursuit of two of Ingram’s destroyers. The result was an order from Rio freezing Brazilian shipping temporarily, with something of a promise that it might turn permanent. With American shipping in the state it was and with the shortage of local supplies at Recife, that meant the crippling of Ingram’s command for lack of logistics, if not its complete ejection from the South Atlantic.
Now up to this time all the Admiral’s arrangements had been local—very satisfactory on the personal plane (the Governor at Natal was completely won by an order that the American patrol planes should report their operations to him daily), but varying from place to place. It was now time for things to be placed on an integrated, national basis. Ingram decided to take the step against which he had been warned, and late in April he went to Rio to see President Vargas.
The president received him, standing by his desk at the far end of a vast room, across which Ingram approached attended only by an interpreter, while various officers of both nations waited at the door for the expected explosion. It came sooner than they thought—but it was an explosion of laughter, followed by another and another. The two ogres were telling each other stories!
Serious business followed. Vargas knew the Germans had already threatened to bomb Recife for the help the Americans had received there. He asked questions sharply and rapidly; their trend revealed that he was realist enough not to believe he could keep his country out of war if the Germans wanted to put her in. Finally came the key question —If he unfroze Brazilian shipping, would Ingram protect it?
Yes, said the Admiral, but he would not guarantee entire success. The deal was made on that basis, and as a bonus Ingram received the use of any airfield or seaplane base in Brazil, with all its utilities, housing for base crews, and a license to undertake new construction.
In a very real sense that interview marked the opening of a new era of cooperation between the two Americas, in which there was laid aside suspicion on the one hand and dollar diplomacy on the other. (Later, a powerful American company operating in Recife was fined by the city; they appealed for Ingram’s good offices. He told them to go to Rio; he was there to fight submarines and wanted nothing to do with their business.) It was just as well that the arrangement was made at this time and that when Admiral Ingram returned to the north, Brigadier Gomes appeared to offer the services of all the planes under his command and asked for American fighters to help. The Germans had already determined to make an object lesson of Brazil.
A word of explanation is necessary. Coastal shipping has for the Brazilian north an importance it possesses for few areas of the world. The seaport towns, supported by vast hinterland districts, are so islanded from each other that when, later in the war, an American base crew set out from Natal to Fortaleza overland, some 300 miles, they found themselves engaged in an exploring expedition- no one had ever covered that 300 miles before! None of these islanded districts, town and country together, produces its full requirements, whether of manufactured articles or food. Eliminate the coastal shipping, and any one of them can be pushed below subsistence level in a short time. This was precisely what the Nazis proposed to do.
They began with a small Brazilian liner on May 18, Ingram’s ships reaching the scene in time to tow her in and to counter-attack the U-boat. This U-boat was evidently a scout; in August, when the time necessary for its return and the sending out of a squadron had elapsed, a real, if brief blitz was launched. Five ships went down in as many days, with heavy loss of life. There was rioting in the cities, German establishments were sacked, and Brazilian public opinion, which had been decidedly apathetic, turned so anti-German that President Vargas’ war proclamation was cheered through the streets under Brazilian and American flags.
Thus one of Ingram’s problems was solved for him, but only at the price of saddling him with a much heavier one in administration and organization. Brazil brought to the war two light cruisers of 1909 vintage and six small minesweepers which made good escorts; just after the declaration, the U. S. Navy turned over to her a pair of PC’s. (There were three fine new destroyers of the Mahan type building for Brazil, but they would not be ready for a year.) The Brazilian Navy had no experience in anti-submarine warfare, a fact which Vargas realized so thoroughly that one of his first acts was to place Brazilian ships under Ingram’s over-all command. The Brazilian Air Force had good equipment, and that part of it under Brigadier Gomes had been operating for some time and was in a creditable state of efficiency. But it would appear that there were not only disagreements between Air Force and Navy, but also between both and Army.
On September 28 President Vargas summoned Ingram to Rio and made one of the most remarkable propositions in American history. The three Brazilian services, he said, were incapable of working in unison. He therefore proposed to place all three under Admiral Ingram’s operational control for the defense of Brazil; in effect, to make the American commander in chief of Brazil’s armed forces. This was so great a change from the days of “American invasion” that Secretary Knox, whom a fortuitous chance brought to Recife just as Ingram returned, simply refused to believe that the offer was sincere and wanted the Admiral to refuse. Ingram calmly informed him that it was already a little late for that; he had held a meeting with the three Brazilian chiefs of staff and worked out preliminary operations plans, which would have to stand or he himself be relieved.
As a matter of fact the appointment was not quite as startling as it looked. Gaetulio Vargas is still a figure of controversy, but one thing no one has ever doubted about him—his ability to keep in touch with the common people, a phrase which in the present instance may be taken to include the lower ranks of the armed services. He was perfectly aware that the American admiral had already achieved something almost amounting to a fusion of forces. American aviators ashore reported to the nearest Brazilian Air Force commander; in the forces afloat, the Senior Officer Present was in command, regardless of which flag he flew.
Nor was this all. Brazil has a large German colonization, on which the Nazis had been working industriously, and the fifth column was a source of much concern to the president, with particular reference to agents landed from submarines. This had already occurred to Ingram; he had sent officers all along the coast—himself among them—to organize the fishermen into what ultimately became a highly effective coast-watcher net. (There is a curious little parenthetical anecdote about this effort. The fishers were miserably poor, but they never would take a cent for board and lodging from the Americans, whom they treated as honored guests. But one of Ingram’s lieutenants discovered that the one thing a Brazilian fisherman wants above all else is a picture of his children, and after that officers hooking up with the coast-watchers always took a photographer along.) It is of record that every single German effort to land agents was frustrated through this cooperative network; and when American radio-locator teams came down, German resident agents operating radios from the interior were rounded up in wonderfully quick time.
During all this period down to the close of 1942, while the Brazilian ships were fleeting in and the new bases achieving efficiency, submarine contacts were rare; but in December the U-boats began to reappear, mostly working on the northern flank of the hump, and in January came the first kill. It was made broad off Fortaleza by a plane of VP- 83, which sank U-164. Another kill was recorded as definite the same day, out near the desolate rock of Fernando de Noronha, but the submarine seems to have escaped. Yet to illustrate the chances of undersea war, precisely the reverse incident occurred a week later. A VP-83 plane spotted a submarine twenty miles ahead of an extremely important convoy, and bombed after the U-boat had dived. Only a little oil came up and the evaluators set her down as undamaged; but it was U-507, and she was never seen again.
These contacts, with three made by the destroyers, left the Admiral not without anxiety, for he had already been advised that President Roosevelt would stop off at Recife on his return from the Casablanca conference, and President Vargas was coming up for a personal meeting. The forces in the South Atlantic were still below the safety margin; three new destroyers had joined, a couple of PG’s of the British corvette type, and a second patrol squadron, VP-74, but the last was composed of PBM’s, which gave constant trouble because their engines were ill-adapted to equatorial conditions.
It would seem that the Germans became aware of how slender was the protection for that immense coast and decided they could obtain important results through a relatively small expenditure of force. The January drive had netted them nothing, but in February what was apparently another pair of submarines appeared off Bahia, sank one ship and had five or six contacts, mostly with Brazilian ships or planes. March brought a group of four to the area on both sides of the mouths of the Amazon, which now apparently became a regular submarine patrol station. On March 9 one of these pairs got into a big northbound convoy and torpedoed six ships, of which three went down.
Italian submarines were working the ocean areas farther out; one of them, the Archimede, was sunk off Fernando de Noronha by VP-83 planes in April, and another produced one of the most incredible incidents of the war, when she returned to Italy and reported having torpedoed the battleship Maryland which was actually 6,000 miles away at the time. The submarine skipper was decorated at an immense public ceremony; it turned out that he actually had sunk a ship—but it was a German blockade-runner! Probably Italian subs accounted for the two ships sunk near Ascension Island in May; the same month saw three more torpedoings off the mouth of the Amazon, and one U-boat (U-128) sent down near Bahia by a plane from VP-74 and two of the destroyers.
In June the submarines set up a patrol station outside Rio, far to the south of Admiral Ingram’s area. His force had now been erected into Fourth Fleet, and that month he began to get the reinforcements so long needed—a fresh squadron of PBY’s (VP-94), two of Venturas, and one of B-24’s.
They came just in the nick of time; the Nazis had decided to conduct a major operation in the South Atlantic. Earlier in the year they had rearmed their submarines with the new and heavier anti-aircraft weapons and issued the famous order to stay on the surface and shoot it out with airplanes. May was the month of the big clash in the North Atlantic, with results so disastrous to the U-boats that the Führer himself spoke of it as “a lost battle”; 43 German submarines went to the bottom in that one month. The remainder were pulled off the North Atlantic run, and as conditions along the American coast had also become unfavorable, the heaviest concentrations were shifted to the Caribbean, the South Atlantic, and the Cape of Good Hope.
In all three areas, the results of previous operations (which had been essentially a campaign of harassment) up to this time gave promise that a really heavy blow could not be effectively countered. The strategy of their attack in the South Atlantic was to make heavy concentrations at the two ends of the line—off Rio and around the mouths of the Amazon, where muddy water and the presence of many wrecks made sound conditions bad—at the same time pressing the Bahia area just hard enough to force Fourth Fleet to extend its slender forces by furnishing convoys along the entire Brazilian coast, whose length is precisely equal to the distance from Los Angeles to the North Pole. Fundamentally the Germans were thinking in the old-fashioned terms of naval operations as conducted by ships alone, as though shore-based patrol planes had never come into the picture. The error was fatal; the bulk of Ingram’s strength, Brazilian and American, was in the air.
Already at the end of June a submarine alert had been established from Rio to Bahia. When there were simultaneous torpedoings in the south and off Belem during the first week of July, the whole coast was closed to independent shipping. There had been some detachments from Ingram’s forces and he had exactly one destroyer available for escort work; this was not enough, for a big convoy she was covering was attacked near Fortaleza on July 7, and three ships sunk. Next day two more went down from a convoy near Belem; and when a PBY attacked one of the two subs that had done the job, she was received with fire so well directed that the pilot was killed.
That marked the low point. The PBY called up a companion and the submarine (U-590) went to the bottom. The next three days saw several fleeting contacts, then there was a lull in which Ingram lifted his alert to clear the harbors of small coastal craft he could not escort. The submarines, apparently a new group, came back on July 19. Two of them beat off planes from the Caribbean Sea Frontier far in the north, but that same day a VP-74 plane sank U-513 well to the south of Rio. Two days later a VP-94 plane knocked off U-662 as she was trailing a convoy near the Amazon, and on the 23rd several planes of the B-24 squadron on a training flight near Fernando Noronha sent U-598 down and damaged her companion submarine so severely that she had to return to France with a full load of torpedoes.
There were a couple of sinkings well out at sea between that date and the final days of the month, when a third wave of submarines drew in toward the coast. South of Recife one pair began to trail the same convoy that had already cost the Germans the U-662. The local air coverage sighted both and summoned the Venturas; U-598 was sunk and her companion badly hurt. Two days later a VP-94 plane picked up U-199 not far from Rio harbor; she exhausted her bombs, damaged the U-boat, and called for help. It was midnight; Ingram himself went down to the airfield as Brazilian planes took off. Within the hour one of them was back, badly shot up, its pilot climbing out to salute.
“Sir,” he reported, “I have been attacked by a German submarine.”
“What do you intend to do?”
“Sir, I wish to take another plane out and destroy him,” replied the Brazilian, ineffably Latin and dramatic. He did it, too; and the campaign ended a week later, when two of the Venturas fought the U-604 all evening at sea, east of Recife, and the destroyer Moffett came up to finish her during the night.
The submarine blitz in the South Atlantic had cost our side fourteen merchant ships sunk; it had cost the Germans seven submarines, and three more of their raiders had been forced to return with damage and with all their torpedoes unfired. This was evidently not a paying proposition, and submarines were withdrawn from that part of the ocean—or at least that part of it where they could molest coastal convoys. During the remainder of the war there were a few more sinkings in the area and six more submarines destroyed—but all far at sea, all out in the area where the U-boats considered themselves safe from patrol planes. It had been one of the briefest campaigns on record, attack met so promptly by counter-attack that the losses speedily became ruinous.
How did this happen? The main reason is clearly the extremely good work of Fourth Fleet’s land-based air, and behind this in turn lies the high degree of autonomy given to the aviators by Admiral Ingram. This was not altogether a matter of his temperament as a commander, though that had something to do with it. He had no other choice under the strategic conditions of the operation. The area was too large for detailed orders from above; a staff at Recife could no more control the operations of a squadron at Rio than a commander at New York could direct the operations of one working from New Orleans (the distance is about the same). Moreover, Ingram had other things to think about— coordinating the activities of the Brazilian armed forces; logistics, which became a peculiarly onerous problem after the Brazilian army began concentrating near Recife for movement to Europe; the major oceanic convoys constantly passing through his area; the possibility of surface raiders (he used to worry about pocket battleships); and blockade-runners.
Dealing with the last, indeed, was another of Fourth Fleet’s major achievements. One was picked up in November, 1942—she had a motor torpedo boat on deck but was given no chance to use it—and another in March, 1943. In the last days of January, 1944, the Germans made a determined effort to jam blockade runners through with loads of much needed rubber and alloy metals, no less than four of them trying the run from Japan. One was seen by a plane and the word passed north; the British caught up with her in Biscay. The other three were all rounded up and sunk by the cruisers and destroyers of the Fourth Fleet—after which the Nazis abandoned blockade-running as they had abandoned submarine operations in the Fourth Fleet’s area.
A campaign that drives the enemy completely from the field is not far from the ideal in achievement; yet all things considered, the military success was the lesser part. For the first time a South American country had fought beside the great republic of the north in a major war, not as a merely formal ally, but a full cooperating partner, making an equal contribution within the area of operations. More important still, the end of the conflict was attended not by those bickerings that so frequently arise among allies after victory has been gained, but by a new atmosphere of friendship and mutual respect. Few officers have ever been so received in a foreign country as Admiral Ingram, at that time Cinclant, was when he returned to Rio in July, 1945, to report that the operation of the Fourth Fleet was concluded, and to hand over the keys of all American operating bases in Brazil. This is not unimportant to us in a world where Brazil is the one nation with an economy almost wholly complementary to ours, which can supply almost every strategic material we lack, and whose needs are exactly those we can supply.