Brazil declares war on Germany

On 26 October 1917, at three in the afternoon, the Chamber of Deputies in Rio de Janeiro adopted a resolution which the Senate also approved unanimously at 5.40 p.m. “A state of war between Brazil and the German Empire, provoked by the latter, is recognised and proclaimed,” ran its first sentence. Congress authorised the president to take all the steps he considered necessary for national defence and public security, to open the necessary credits and to raise loans. The same day President Venceslau Brás signed Decree No. 3361, which gave the resolution the force of law. The largest state of South America, six months after breaking off relations with Germany, took its stand on the side of the Entente and the United States. Formally Brazil did not declare war; it merely recognised that Germany had brought about a state of war.

Macau

The immediate cause was the sinking of the steamer Macau. She was one of the German ships which had lain in Brazilian ports since 1914 and which the government had seized after the break in relations. Built in 1912 at a shipyard in Flensburg as Palatia, she now sailed under the Brazilian flag for the state shipping line Lloyd Brasileiro. She was on her way from Brazil to Le Havre with a cargo of coffee and cocoa. On 18 October, about 200 miles off Cape Finisterre, she was stopped by the German submarine U-93, commanded by Oberleutnant zur See Helmut Gerlach. According to Brazilian accounts the Germans ordered the crew to abandon ship, and Captain Saturnino Furtado de Mendonça rowed over in a lifeboat to the submarine and answered questions about the route, flag and cargo. The Germans detained him together with a steward and sank the ship by gunfire. The captain and his companion were never seen again. According to Brazilian studies four men in all were killed or went missing. U-93 was lost in the English Channel in January 1918, and her wreck was found only in 2003.

Brazil learned of the sinking from cables from London and Madrid. For the government it was already the fourth Brazilian ship sunk by German vessels, after Paraná in April and Tijuca and Lapa in May, and the abduction of the captain further outraged public opinion. In Maceió, Mendonça’s home town, and in other cities there were demonstrations demanding war.

The president’s message

Brás had returned to his duties on 12 October after a month’s absence. The government had in any case been moving steadily in one direction. On 1 June it revoked its neutrality in the American–German war and decided to use the seized ships, more than forty vessels, for its own shipping and for the Allies. Congress instructed the government to agree with countries friendly to Brazil on measures to defend shipping and freedom of trade. The foreign minister Nilo Peçanha, a former president, had replaced the pro-neutrality Lauro Müller in May and favoured the Entente from the outset. At the beginning of October the Brazilians negotiated with the Americans, French and British over the use of the former German ships, and Brás announced the creation from them of transatlantic lines to serve Brazil and its allies.

On the afternoon of 25 October the president sent a message to Congress. “We must face the truth and recognise at once that Germany is imposing a state of war upon us,” he wrote. He announced that, unless Congress decided otherwise, the government would order the seizure of the German warship lying in the port of Bahia and the internment of her crew, as well as of the crews of the seized ships. The war did not have unanimous support in Brazil. Senator Ruy Barbosa and the Liga Brasileira pelos Aliados had campaigned for it for years, but trade unionists, anarchists and pacifists, who had been behind the great general strike in São Paulo in July, accused the government of wanting to divert attention from the country’s problems. Even so, Congress passed the motion in a single day.

The first days of war

The German warship at Bahia was the gunboat Eber. In 1914 she had handed over her guns and part of her crew to the liner Cap Trafalgar and, disarmed, had taken refuge in the port of Salvador. On 26 October her sailors set fire to the ship and opened the sea cocks so that she would not fall into Brazilian hands. On 30 October President Woodrow Wilson, in a telegram to Brás, welcomed “the great Republic of Brazil” into the ranks of the states fighting Germany.

The war soon made itself felt. In the first days of November, in several cities, among them Petrópolis, crowds wrecked German shops, clubs, schools and newspaper offices. At the beginning of November the German submarine cruiser U-151 sank two more Brazilian steamers, Acari and Guaíba, in the roadstead of the island of São Vicente in the Cape Verde archipelago. The state of war also soon served the government as a pretext for introducing a state of siege and cracking down on its opponents, including the labour movement.

Brazil’s contribution

Brazil was the only state in South America to enter the war. Cuba and Panama had done so in April, and several more Central American states did so in 1918. Other neighbours, such as Peru and Uruguay in the same month, confined themselves to breaking off relations. The Brazilian army was not prepared to send troops overseas, and plans to raise a larger expeditionary corps were never carried out. At the inter-Allied conference in Paris at the end of 1917 Brazil committed itself to a more modest but real contribution.

The most important contribution was the navy. Brazilian warships took over patrols in the South Atlantic, and in January 1918 the Naval Division for War Operations (DNOG) was formed under Rear-Admiral Pedro Max Fernando Frontin. Two scout cruisers, four destroyers and auxiliary vessels sailed in August 1918 to patrol, under British command, the waters between Dakar, the Cape Verde Islands and Gibraltar. In West Africa they were struck by Spanish flu, which killed more than a hundred sailors, and they reached Gibraltar only at the beginning of November, a few days before the armistice. A medical mission went to France and ran a hospital in Paris, and army and navy airmen joined the British flying service. In 1918 a group of army officers and NCOs went to the Western Front, to French units. Brazil also chartered some of the seized German ships to France, valuable tonnage at a time when submarines were sinking hundreds of thousands of tons a month.

This contribution was enough to earn a seat at the victors’ table. At the Paris Peace Conference the delegation was led by the future president Epitácio Pessoa. Brazil kept the seized ships on favourable terms, and in the Treaty of Versailles Germany undertook to pay, with interest, for the coffee of the state of São Paulo which had been sold in Hamburg, Bremen and other ports at the beginning of the war, the money being held by a bank in Berlin. Brazil also became one of the founding members of the League of Nations.