World War II had great impact on Brazil. The war effort improved its port facilities, left it with new modem airfields from Belém to Rio de Janeiro, as well as refurbished railroads, stimulated manufacturing, agriculture, and mining, and a burgeoning steel complex. Its army, air force, and navy had gained combat experience and the latest equipment. Its foreign stature had reached new heights and its leaders foresaw an ever greater role in world politics. The war era laid the foundations upon which Brazil's remarkable development in the next half century took place.
In 1945, its then 40,000,000 people had ample reason to be proud of their country's contributions to the Allied victory. Oddly, even though Brazil hosted, at Natal, the largest United States air base outside its own territory, and, at Recife, the U.S. Fourth Fleet; and even though it tied its economy to the American war machine, sent its navy in pursuit of German U-Boats and provided an expeditionary force and a fighter squadron on the Italian front, Brazil in some mysterious fashion has been lumped in popular memory abroad as pro-Nazi. In January 1942, Brazil broke relations with the Axis at the Rio conference, and entered the war officially in August of that year, unfke Argentina, which declared war when Germany was collapsing in late March 1945. Even so, Brazil's image in the United States, and presumably the rest of the world, was muddled.
Read Full Article »