“The Starving Jaguar, Brazil in 1943-1944” by Johanna Gelt, Ludwig Renn Military Academy, Free Socialist Raterepublik of Deutschland.

Excerpt from Chapter 1: “The situation as of 1943”

As 1943 began, the Amazonian giant of Brazil had found its path toward a quick and easy victory shut. With Buenos Aires no closer to being captured, the Guianas offensive was ground down by Venezuelan, South African, Cuban, Colombian, Nigerian, French African, and West Indies soldiers. With the hopes of cracking the Andes turned into an exhausting meat grinder, the country was at war in nearly every direction without a clear way out.

Deeply stressed, Salgado grew more erratic and unstable, frequently breaking into explosive rants aimed at his generals and administrators when things didn’t go his way. Hopes that others could take the reins were dashed by the fact that the enigmatic fanatic Cristiano Boaventura and the intellectual antisemite Gustavo Barroso squabble openly for power.

Cristiano Boaventura, O Diabo Verde as he was often called, believed that the aims of the war had shifted towards buying Brazil enough “breathing space” to ensure the survival of the integralist regime. Something that Barroso had rejected as defeatist, as Barroso believed, as did Salgado, that a final victory with Brazil having dominance over all of South America as a “Christian fortress” was not merely possible but inevitable. Boaventura, conferring with his brothers Rafael, Uriel, Miguel, and Gabriel[1] sought to contest this, but were overruled by the AIB inner circle as trust between the AIB and Guarda Verde started to fray in places.

Dutra, often regarded as the face of the regular Brazilian army believed that the time had come to seek terms with the Allies for a possible concentration of all Brazilian forces against Argentina, for which AIB hardliners, whom Dutra had clashed with regarding his spite towards Integralist attempts to Brasilianise Black and Native Brazilians, almost had him killed were it not for Salgado refusing to sign off on the orders. Nevertheless, Dutra and others in the rightist wing of the Brazilian military regarded a Brazilian victory against Argentina and Chile as not only possible but necessary, dismissing Boaventura’s limited aims as cowardice.

Mascarenhas de Morais, largely regarded as Brazil’s greatest commander of the war, had outright lent his prestige to shield a growing conspiracy against Salgado formed by Henrique Lott that believed that the Integralists had brought the country to ruin and had to be eliminated and an alignment with the allies sought. An eclectic alliance including everything from Communists to Monarchists, the Anaconda Group, named for the first word of its preferred codephrase, was hoping for a time to strike as they believed that the war could not be won.

However, even as the first “Hungry Summer” hit the country, brought about by a paucity in fertilizer and farmhands by the needs of the war, the situation remained somewhat stable.

The propaganda reels continued to play on the idea that this was a war of religion and the preservation of Christian virtue and Brazilian pride against atheism, degeneracy, and internationalism. The average Brazilian was led to believe that a triumph was around the corner, that once their invincible allies overseas had slain their foes, God would deliver such a victory to Brazil as well.

Salgado himself declared that the harsh times were but a test of Brazil’s faith in God, and that these meager hardships, when he acknowledged them as even existing, were simply the birthing pains of a marvelous victory to come. He insisted that the United Nations could not last, that the aberrant forces of wickedness that had brought London and Paris on one side and Moscow and D.C on another together would be dissolved away by the light of righteousness.

He would even make up anecdotes that “proved” the difficulties in the United Nations to assure his people that the situation would reverse, and increasingly spoke of miracles and signs of God’s will in this crusade, reading “secret messages intercepted by our agents through providence” that he claimed “proved” a fraying between Western Europe on one side and Russia and America on the other. Messages that were invented wholesale by the Integralist party for this stunt.

And in 1943, the situation in the world was still very much in doubt for the bulk of the world. Spain had been reunified under the Nationalists, the Caucasus was still embattled by the might of the German Army while Africa and the Middle East strained under the Italian and Turkish boot. Japan’s ambitions had yet to be seriously checked, with the futurist army of the Concordists still going from strength to strength. So to many, it was believed that the present difficulties were simply a bump in the proverbial road, and that smooth travels would be awaiting them.

While Peru’s two front war against José María Velasco Ibarra’s Ecuador and Bernardino Bilbao Rioja’s Bolivia supported extensively by Brazil through the large border with Bolivia and the far more tenuous border with an Ecuador bloated by its ill gotten gains seized from Peru’s northern provinces during its revolution remained firm and presently partaking in trying to destroy Peru by pincer, the Liberal Party of Colombia under its young president Jorge Eliécer Gaitán was starting to show signs of ending the country’s neutral stance.

Gaitán reviled the network of dictatorships that formed the so-called “Union of Sovereign Latin Nations” - comprised of Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia and Paraguay - and adopted a stance of “both London and D.C”, believing that “these democratic nations and peoples have more in common when faced with the dictators of Tokyo and Berlin than separates them.” Held back by a military reluctant to enter a war in favour of communism without certainty of victory, as the timetables for an expedient road to triumph ran out for the Axis, Gaitánist intervention seemed more and more likely, with a timetable set for a strike against Velasco’s Ecuador and an incursion into Brazil within the year, raising “two hundred and fifty thousand bayonets against Integralism”.

While Gaitánismo would one day be remembered for being one of many casualties in Premier Nixon’s “Which side are you on?” campaign against third way movements as “a half-measurist movement”, at this time, he enjoyed great prestige from both London and D.C as a man of compromise who had risen meteorically to straddle between the Red and Blue worlds, and this support had borne fruit in the shape of a surprisingly strong and decently equipped military that had been trained and furnished for modern warfare against both Brazil and its ally of Ecuador.

Diógenes Escalante, the recently established democratic president of Venezuela after Contreras stepped down and ended the military dictatorship over the country early in the decade, also decided that his country had stood aside for long enough. With a belief that Brazil would lose the war, his administration managed to garner support for an intervention in Venezuela’s legislature with the aid of Gaitan as well the Anglophilic establishment of the country. With Brazil’s desires for absolute supremacy over the whole of South America being made clear and with the British offering a condominium over British Guiana as well as further aid in refinery construction in Venezuela; the deal seemed irresistible. Venezuela would raise an army of a hundred and fifty thousand men for its intervention, with Escalante declaring that a crusade for Democracy would be waged against the “autocracies of the world who scorn governance by and for the people.”

Venezuela, already one of the world’s largest producers of oil, would continually increase its production of oil, single handedly providing 80% of the fuel used by the Franco-British Union in the war, with the remainder being produced by Arabia and Canada. The proceeds generated by this oil bounty were used to equip and train one of the single most modern armies in the new world, fully equipped with mechanized assets and trained to British standards. The potential entrance of Venezuela into the war as one of the allies threatened the entire northern sector of Brazil and imperil all U-Boat operations in the Caribbean, and could not be tolerated.

…

Brazil by 1943 reached its peak military scope of more than two point two million soldiers fighting on three fronts, in the North, in the West, and in the South. A monstrous drain on its manpower that had required a program of “youth work” to sustain by bringing young children as well as women and the elderly to work in the fields, while the roundups of “deviants” would keep the factories churning. With material shortages becoming more evident, the country that had made several impressive innovations in both mass deforestation as well as crucible steel was now starting to devour its own populace in earnest to escape the situation it had found itself in.

This led to an expansion of the Guarda Verde ‘s anti-deviancy campaigns to find more slave workers both within Brazil as well as occupied territories. Cristiano Boaventura’s General Order 2381 declared that “simply the air of homosexuality, transvestitism, political degeneracy, irreligiosity, heresy or any other sort of aberration is sufficient for correction”. Villages in occupied territories would find their populations gradually and then rapidly emptied to cut down trees, make charcoal, extract petroleum from the Chaco or the Brazilian interior, dig coal, press steel, manufacture guns, and more just to keep the country going. Quality suffered, with shoddy workmanship and often outright sabotage plaguing virtually every creation of Brazilian factories.

Wood and fabric aircraft, largely held to be obsolete in Europe and East Asia, had made a comeback in an attempt to get anything that could fly into the air by bulking up the numbers of the air force. While Brazil was not short in aluminium from its plentiful bauxite supplies, factories that could work the material into aircraft were relatively centralised and the need for aircraft was vast indeed. And while aircraft such as Hurricanes and Mosquitoes had shown that the swang song of the wooden aircraft had not come yet, these aircraft were met with the distribution of incendiary autocannon rounds to make them into what American pilots would morbidly call “Flying Viking Funerals”.

But it would be remiss to speak of this without mentioning the human cost. Of the USAT community, more than 2.2 million would be directly exterminated as part of the Lavender Holocaust in Latin America for so much as being reported to be even a “little off” as any excuse was made to find people to consign to the Guarda Verde’s work camps in Brazil; its allies of Ecuador, Bolivia, and Paraguay, and in their occupied territories. Many others, whether political dissidents but especially communists, those deemed to have ties to or any participation in resistance movements, expendable mouths to feed, atheists, the disabled, and more would also be consigned to perish in these facilities in a bestial process that would consume the lives of three million additional people in total.

It is without exaggeration that Salgado’s regime was the cruelest and bloodiest to ever disgrace the Americas, and it was only getting worse as the war turned more and more against it. The effort to squeeze blood from the proverbial stone required escalating cruelty and repressions that were increasingly wearing away at the very heart of Integralism, and while the Communist movement was broken by targeted repressions and massacres, dissidence against the emerald tyranny was rapidly mounting in many other forms, including conspiracies aimed at the very heart of the Integrated State.
…

For much of the war, Brazil made up for its lack of ability to match the Enigma or Purple Cipher machines of its ally with the highly secretive constructed language of the Guarde Verde; Uzumrik, which was created by the Boaventura family as a language to ensure that outsiders could not comprehend the mysteries of the Humble Knights of God. The army naturally noted the potential usage of the language, which also had its own bespoke character script, to conceal information, and Boaventura would dispatch those of the Guard trained in the language to manage and deliver important communications for the Brazilian army.

As the language was unknown outside of Brazil, intercepted communiques were so much gibberish even to those who had broken their ciphers. And the Guarda Verde’s insistence on only teaching the language to valued journeymen of their military cult ensured that interpreters would not be forthcoming. This greatly resembled Compact usage of Navajo as a secret code language impenetrable to Axis ears, and Allied usage of Kpelle for much the same purpose and had a similar effect. As this allowed for the concealment of important details regarding the Brazilian war effort, an unprecedented multi-national team of both Allied and Compact linguists would join the United Nations Cipher cracking program to reveal the lannguage’s secrets.

Working on carefully compiled phrasebooks and spywork as well as what could be gleaned from what prisoners of war they could gain with any inkling of the language; as most entrusted to learn the tongue were also loyal enough to take poison if at risk of capture and few were ever in a position to be captured in the first place; the Ganzir Project would work to surmount long odds. The task was daunting: linguistics work on such short notice could be nothing less, and the usage of Uzumrik in the battle of the Atlantic was providing the U-Boat armada with an extra line of secrecy that had frustrated admirals to no end.

But with the work of dedicated linguists such as John Ronald Reul Tolkien, George Dumezil, Larin Boris Alexandrovich, and William Chomsky would ultimately prove to be up to the task. Through many a sleep deprived night, they had managed to piece together enough to start working on “the Green Book” which would allow for United Nations operatives listening in on Brazilian transmissions to understand the information received.

This would allow them the benefit of, when combined with the supremacy in cryptography enjoyed by the United Nations, allowing their intelligence arm to have a complete picture of the medium term movements of the axis armies in Latin America that had so far avoided the scrutiny of the Allies and Compact. The missing link between the short term information provided by reconnaissance and the long-term information by embedded agents had been discovered, and it is not an exaggeration to say that this discovery shaved months off the war by ending the veil of secrecy that had existed around Brazilian movements and allowing for informed decisions to be made by commanders to a degree not possible before.

Excerpt from Chapter 2: “The Northern Front in early 1943”

However, cities such as São Luís, which had seen major growth during the 30s as part of Brazilian-Western European ties, would be targeted by the “Caribbean Aerial Offensive” dreamed up by Entente Air Force Bomber Command to strike at centers of production thought safe from the battlefront. While these bombing raids were sporadic by the standards of Europe, the sight of hundreds of long-range bombers descending upon Brazilian air space with munitions meant to level the ports of Brazil’s “northern jewel” were something that integralist propaganda could not cover-up.

Key to the choosing of the targets was the extreme importance of Brazilian naval bases to the European Stahlpakt’s naval strategy. With surface naval inferiority to the Red American and Blue British fleets operating in the Atlantic, reactionary naval strategies focused on surface raiders and submarines, both of which were greatly aided by the offering of safe harbor within the vast reaches of Brazil and the many naval pens carved into the coastline from natural harbors with the aid of conscripted or even enslaved labor. The Brazilian Navy; knowing full well how outmatched it was, sought to focus on a strategy of cooperative submarine warfare with the Third Reich and the Third Rome.

Nothing could be done about the resources heading across the Pacific save for entreating the Japanese, but the trip across the South Atlantic was a shorter and more direct way to get resources to the front, and the Caribbean was full of Allied and Compact shipping. So the theory went that they could utilize cheap submarines and harry these vital shipping lanes in tandem with the Kriegsmarine and the Regia Marina as part of a grand strategy and these bases were crucial towards its realization of Dönitz and Bernotti’s “America to Australia” grand strategy for the Axis powers to collaborate towards choking the sealanes of nearly the entire world with submarine warfare.

As hundreds of thousands of Brazilians were swept up in Boaventura’s targeted pogroms against the queer population, they would often die digging these naval bases in sweltering heat and unsurvivable humidity, creating what Admirals Dönitz and Bernotti often called “their saving grace.” From the very beginning of the war, these press-ganged hands would work the earth and concrete to provide fascist and reactionary ships with shelter and supplies in the country, while the jobless but acceptable poor would be given work to provide repairs and restocks of supplies.

With sea mines, aircraft, torpedo boats, and naval batteries warding the shore, it was highly risky to pursue these ships to their shelter. With these shelters, the crews could relax and their craft could receive crucial maintenance that would extend their range and allow them to better threaten shipping of supplies across the Atlantic. So popular were the stays in the comparatively pleasant weather of Brazil as well as a chance to enjoy the beer, women, and song that the sailors of the Kriegsmarine and the Regia Marina came to call the visits to the country on their patrol routes “the Brazilian Vacation”.

Northern Brazilian naval pens had been crucial linchpins to the Stahlpakt’s naval grand stratagem following the declaration of war by London upon the Third Reich and Brazilian Estado Novo and the loss of Allied neutrality. This allowed for a threefold increase in tonnage lost in the Atlantic Seaboard of the Americas and Africa versus what was observed later in the war once these facilities were lost. Of course, accounting for the general degradation of the strength of the European Axis at Sea and the increasing strength of Allied and Compact convoys.

It also permitted the increased usage of seamines by the Axis fleets. While troublesome to carry to the Americas from Europe, with supplies in Brazil, Submarines could disgorge enough mines to cause trouble for passing convoys. While rarely enough to stop a convoy outright, the disruption and delay caused was believed to be worth the relatively minor expense of producing the sea-mines for use by the submarine fleet operating in these waters.

Furthermore, the Brazilian Navy was also building and operating its own submarines, and while they often lacked the sophistication of their European counterparts, the presence was considered enough of a nuisance to prompt a strategic study on how to minimize and if possible, eliminate the “Barracudas” as the American navy referred to them (in contrast to the “Sharks” of the German, Italian, and Japanese submarine fleets).

Particularly infamous were the bases in the northern coast of Brazil, from which U-boats and surface raiders regularly would emerge and cause havoc in the Caribbean and the Eastern Seaboard of North America. Often referred to as the “Great Green Thorn in the Ass” by Rear Admiral Marcus Brown*[2], the architect of the American strategy for the Atlantic War, the Northern bases menaced everything from the supply of Texan and Venezuelan oil to the flow of West Indies sugar to battlefields in Europe, Africa, and Western Asia.

The Workers and Farmers Revolutionary Navy and Royal Navy required a strategy to withstand this surge in Axis submarine activity. With Comintern and Allied timetables requiring unrestricted flow of war materiel into Europe and Africa, it was an absolute necessity to weaken Dönitz and Bernotti’s grand stratagem as much as possible. In a moment of rare agreement, the American and Franco-British Naval Staffs agreed to begin conducting joint convoy escorts.

Armed convoys, composed of American and Commonwealth destroyers escorting cargo ships and transports of varying ownership, soon began crisscrossing the Atlantic. While there was some early friction between the two services, this strategy soon paved the way for dividends in the broader Atlantic War. While submarine attacks would still occur, the overall tonnage losses were kept significantly below quota by the combination of Entente and American capabilities. Merchant vessel sinkings would see a sharp decline by New Year’s 1943, a trend that continued for the rest of the war once joint convoys became the norm for guarding trade in the Atlantic and Caribbean.

The United Nations had a much tougher go at it when trying to deal with the root of the problem: the naval bases and sub-pens strung along the Brazilian coast. They were not without recourse, however. The previous year’s Natal Raid had shown just how vulnerable the Marinha do Brasil was. The continuing build-up of Axis submarines in the South Atlantic did nothing to dissuade the growing pressure of air raids and bombardments that would only ramp up through 1943.

While the Atlantic Fleet of the WFRN lacked the sheer weight of aircraft carriers of their Pacific counterparts, they still had enough to make the Marinha smart. These carriers would be responsible for much of the havoc that would occur in 1943 and even 1944. With not much of a navy to guard their coastline since the Battle of the Rio, the Marinha ‘s surface fleet would be reduced into a non-factor. Fuel for the submarines, communication centers, anything in a port that could be useful to the enemy: all targets for destruction. And to add further insult to injury for the Brazilians, they could be hit from all sides.

The Royal-cum-Imperial Air Force had begun practicing with grappled line mid-air refueling as early as the mid-1930s, when concerns over the loss of Canada and Continental Europe to the Red Tide and the need to possibly bombard both Soviet Russia and America directly from Britain became a pressing issue. The tests ended in 1939, partly due to the Imperial General Staff’s growing confidence in the armies of the Dominions and those of Britain’s allies on the continent, erstwhile and otherwise. Additionally, the experiments failed to produce a system capable of transatlantic flight. It did, however, produce a system capable of making the punishing round trip from the Entente’s Caribbean airfields to Brazil’s northern population centers and the industry built there to ironically, be safe from bombers in Argentina.

Making use of this mid-air refueling technique to extend their range with maximum bomb loads, one hundred and sixty-eight of the EAF’s Avro London bombers operating out of the Franco-British Antilles reached the port of Madeira. They met coast hugging boats meant to carry supplies to soldiers embroiled in the Guianas by 0715 hours on the 14th of February, 1943. This was the so-called “St. Valentine’s Day Raid”. Half of them would bombard munitions and fuel depots, the other half would continue on to bombard the iron and steel works within São Luís.

By the end of the raid, the Fonesca smelting facility and ancillary iron industry plants would be 57% destroyed, while the Cabral Ball Bearing Factory would be more than 46% destroyed. The primary fuel storage and munitions dump facilities that supplied the Northern Squadron were more than 73% and 64% destroyed, severely hampering the fleet’s mobility at port and denying crucial fuel and ammo to the Northern Fleet.

Many other buildings would be heavily damaged, and the lackluster anti-air presence led to none of the bomber formation suffering losses as they returned to join the twelve bombers that had been intended to join the strike but were forced to withdraw due to mechanical issues.

While smaller bombing raids had previously been attempted, the primarily Canadian-South African bombing force decided to escalate to large-scale strategic bombing in light of the vulnerability of North Brazilian industrial sites and the success of major raids. The Commonwealth Caribbean Air Force Command decided to unleash the “Brazilian Blitz” against the country from island bases as well as facilities built in allied Venezuela.

The EAF’s successful bombing campaign was followed three weeks later by the Entente Navy’s Operation Mainsail. With the Brazilian Air Force attrited by repeated bombings, the Admiralty was sufficiently emboldened to attack the Brazilian Navy at anchor. A squadron formed around the fleet carriers Audacious and Irresistible , escorted by the battlecruiser Beatty and a cadre of the new Minotaur -class light cruisers, attacked the Brazilian Navy’s northern squadron and German U-boats and Italian submarines at port in São Luís.

Utilizing torpedoes and dive bombing, the raid would sink more than twelve cargo ships, cripple or sink five destroyers and three frigates, and sink the squadron’s flagship, the Great War era armored cruiser Tordesillas (ex-Edgar Quinet) while destroying four Kriegsmarine U-Boats and two Regia Marina submarines in port.

The pace of bombing would only increase over the following weeks, as the CCAF refined their techniques into a bloody-handed art. The increasing strain and attrition wrought upon Brazilian industry - especially shipbuilding and repair capacities - severely thinned the density of Axis submarines and surface raiders across the Southern Atlantic. War planners in London and DeLeon were counting on this. Operational plans for the year were extraordinarily far reaching, including troop movements from Canada and the continental UASR across the Atlantic to Northern Africa and Portugal. Operation Torch, the Second Peninsular War, and the eventual liberation of France and all of North Africa, are in part owed to the decimation of Brazil’s naval logistics.

The air campaigns impacts were not exclusively so distant, however. In part was the CCAFs tactical operations in the fighting for the Guyanas.

Brazil’s invasion of the Guyanas, along with the near-simultaneous invasion of Uruguay, goes down in the history of military blunders along with the Roman defeat at Cannae and the ultimate defeat of the Commonwealth in Indochina. After the Entente’s declaration of war Salgado could have simply dug in on the border - there were no real road connections between Brazil and the Guyanas at the time. Instead, he ordered two full divisions across the Oyapok in what amounted to a fleet of rafts. While the Army and Green Guards had been able to establish a bridgehead within the first week of fighting, the ferocity of the operation presaged the brutality of the fighting to come. The Brazilians took nearly 20% casualties as a whole, with some units taking up to 50% casualties. Nevertheless, Salgado had a foothold in the Guyanas, and that foothold would expand as men and materiel were shoveled into it. The colonial troops seemed to melt away before the Brazilian Army, and Cayenne fell within the month.. At the helm of this force was Brazilian General Valdomiro Castilho de Lima, who was to be reinforced with several more Brazilian divisions. Salgado had opened a third front in a war that was already starving his country, but this one at least was making progress. At least until they reached the Maroni River.

Despite the promises coming from Rio de Janeiro, no reinforcements could disguise the simple fact that the Brazilian army was at the end of an impossibly long logistical rope. Furthermore, the terrain of the Guianas was far less simple to conquer than they had thought. Opposing him would be the Commonwealth Commander of the Americas, Sir Archibald Percival Wavell, commanding a force primarily of Africans and Caribbeans.This was the force that de Lima’s army ran headlong into at Paramaribo.

The southern border was virtually impenetrable to any serious advance, and Allied dominance in the air and sea had made attempted bypasses suicidal while the formidable Oyapok River bottlenecked logistics. However the initial impetus to block the Brazilian army entirely was vetoed by Union armed forces commanded by Field Marshal Archibald Wavell who, advised by his Caribbean counterparts and his Venezuelan allies, decided to instead allow the Brazilians to believe they had a chance if they could commit.

Making a feigned fighting retreat through Guianna, Wavell’s plan was to force the Brazilians to overextend so that his foe would commit as many of his troops as possible and then with General Alphone Juin’s African and Caribbean troops, pincer them against the Maroni and Suriname Rivers while amphibious landings and paratroopers would create a “vertical envelopment” to ensure no escapees. With the blessing of Imperial High Command, he would seem to play the part of a defeated foe being routed by an overconfident de Lima who was giddy with having any success at all.

However, Wavell had a trump card - forces from Escalante’s Venezuela and MacArthur’s American Havana ready to spring while Dutch forces evacuated to Veacruz and Aruba would make their dramatic reappearance. Being a military man himself, MacArthur would take direct command of the American exiles’ troops and launch Operation Vigilante to land troops on Plage des Hattes.

Making an opposed landing, Nimitz and MacArthur would overrun the Brazilian 38th “Brasilia” Regiment of the Greenshirts, the 39th Brigade of the Brazilian Army, and the 71st “Redemptor” Battalion of the Guarda Verde with the 1st Marine Division of the United States in exile and the 5th Imperial Marine Division, and the guns of the United States Navy and Imperial Caribbean Fleet on the 13th of April. The fighting would be fierce but brief, with the Brazilians retreating within twelve hours, regarding the attention of airpower and naval artillery to be simply too intense to withstand.

SAS Troops would be paradropped further behind to threaten the rear operating area of the Brazilian Army of the North which had grown into more than a hundred and fifty thousand men with another hundred and fifty thousand waiting in northern Brazil, a force with an utterly voracious appetite for supplies. With the experiences of facing the Brazilian army in the defense of Uruguay, Imperial High command regarded them as perilously vulnerable to deep penetrating raids by SAS commandos, who, frequently making use of glider droppable Hussar tanks and artillery pieces when fighting alongside regular paratroopers; could have an outsized impact on the campaign.

General de Lima, aware of problems to his rear, tried to reorient his troops to stop the incursions, but found his flanks pressed by formations shielded by the terrain of Guiana and his front met with redoubled offensives by Juin and Wavell. With the recapture of Marienburg in Suriname and his forces split in half by intensive air interdiction of river crossing supplies, he found himself in a suddenly desperate situation.

Trying to enact a breakout to save his troops, de Lima would face his Cannae on the Maroni with forces on all three sides and the Imperial Navy staring him down across the shore and the Commonwealth Caribbean Air Force Command initiating nonstop aerial operations against them. Hawker Tornados and Mosquitoes roamed at will over the skies, with constant attention by Spitfires and the longer range Goblins keeping the Brazilian air force’s interventions to a minimum.

Fighting was often intensely violent due to the Brazilian doctrine of maximalised ferocity and “dirty warfare”, with Brazilian special forces often hiding amidst civilian populations to try and infiltrate behind the lines of their foes and strike before exfiltration. Brazilian special forces, built along the “commando doctrine” of men trained to devote themselves entirely to warfare in both mind and body, were more known for their capacity for committing war crimes than the sort of continent conquering military success initially hoped for, but were able to strike at key supply bases established by the advancing allies, especially targeting the Venezuelans advancing from the west whom the Brazilians hoped to dissuade from a further escalation.

Of the four hundred total armored fighting vehicles available to de Lima, half were now destroyed or damaged, and replacements were not forthcoming even in the face of a wholly mechanized enemy which even included “crocodile” Daphne Heavy Tanks fitted with flamethrowers to rapidly clear out brush and flush Brazilian jungle warfare troops from cover.

Hoping to retreat to French Guyana while he still could, he committed the great majority of his strength eastwards, hoping to overwhelm Generalissimo MacArthur’s troops and the Franco-British Royal Marines dispatched to assist them. With sixty thousand soldiers facing just a quarter of their number at the battle of the Maroni, he had reason to be confident in victory.

Some in MacArthur’s general staff even told him to withdraw, such as his deputy Prescott Bush, currently in Havana while MacArthur lead the troops directly, but the decision to sail some of the shore defense gunboats and small, cheap corvettes meant to provide mobile medium and light artillery in defense of the reactionary exile state in case of invasion by the mainland down the Maroni river proved to be decisive.

The Brazilians, unable to contest the Allied naval superiority, found the guns of the corvettes USS Lee and Grant and six gunboats to be a thorn in their side they struggled to deal with. A thorn that let the exile’s military presence build up and close the jaws of the trap. Even as a fresh corps of the Brazilian Army plus a division of the Greenshirts and three regiments of the Guarda Verde were brought up to the North in the hopes of relieving the Brazilian forces caught in the cauldron with more on the way, Wavell had achieved his Guiana pocket and would not let it be broken.

However, Brazil, still mobilizing fresh reserves, sought to pre-empt the Venezuelan and Colombian intervention with incursions on their countries with soldiers mobilized to strike at the Colombian departments of Vaupes and Amazonas and the invasion of the Venezuelan state of Guyana from the south through the border town of Santa Elena de Uairén in the hopes of relieving pressure from the Guianas and allowing the hundred and fifty thousand trapped Brazilian soldiers to escape, all while a weapon long held in reserve had been prepared for Brazil’s final surprise.

The stage for Operation Zero had been set and a million men would battle for the soul of the northern fringe of South America.

Footnotes

[1] The Boaventuras are a very religious family
[2] Fictional African American Admiral *[WPA]: Works Progress Administration *[NBI]: National Bureau of Investigation