Growing Strength

Brazil's Foreign Minister Oswaldo Aranha last week rollicked through his first press conference since Brazil went to war. He was like a man who has just married off the last of a dozen daughters. He told the press that cooperation between the U.S. and Brazil for the defense of the vulnerable hump had for a long time been closer than most people knew. But Brazil had not been pushed into the war by the U.S.; she had made her own choice. When someone repeated Axis radio threats to turn Brazil's Independence Day (Sept. 7) into Sao Joao Day (which Rio celebrates with fireworks), Aranha nimbly cracked back: Brazil would make it a St. Bartholomew's Day for Axis airmen.*

Already thousands of Axis nationals had been crowded into Brazilian jails or were swinging picks and shovels in labor camps; all Germans were being moved from the hump, where sea and air patrols had been stepped up. Seventeen Axis ships had been seized and three of Brazil's largest Axis-owned banks--with assets of nearly $35,000,000--had been closed by presidential decree. A final step in severing the Brazilian Condor airline from German-owned Lufthansa had been taken: its property now belonged to the Government.

Forty-four planes, mostly trainers, in the largest flyaway delivery yet to come from the U.S., arrived in Rio. Brazil already has a small but smartly trained air force. The general staff (see cut) includes Deputy Chief of Staff Colonel Carlos Brazil, Colonel Vasco Secco of the Joint Brazil-U.S. Air Commission, Lieut. Colonel Raimundo Aboim, Lieut. Colonel Loyla Daher, Lieut. Colonel Carlos Coelho and Aviation Major Adil de Oliveira. The navy was augmented by six warships, built in Brazilian shipyards for Great Britain and now returned by Britain to its new ally. To help Brazil tune up its war program, U.S. Ambassador Jefferson Caffery returned to Rio from a vacation in the U.S. with prospective solutions for prickly Brazilian problems.

Though still snarling at the sight of anyone who might be German, Rio's populace was gradually quieting down. Police-car sirens shrieked through the streets at night as new spy suspects were rounded up, while huge searchlights swept the sky above Rio's harbor. But by day the streets looked half-deserted. Women were joining the Brazilian Assistance Legion, organized last week by Senhora Darcy Vargas, the President's wife; men were lining up to volunteer for the army. Two new recruits were Euclydes Aranha and Oswaldo Aranha Jr., sons of Brazil's great & good Foreign Minister.

Like Aranha, most Brazilians were feeling comfortably unperturbed, especially about the rest of the South American continent, excepting only Vichyfrench Guiana. All independent South American nations had accorded Brazil nonbelligerent status. Onetime Argentine President General Augustin Justo, who is pro-United Nations and who would like to be a candidate for the presidency in 1943, volunteered for the Brazilian army and was accepted as an honorary brigadier general. From Chile, whose President Juan Antonio Rios will soon visit the U.S., came hints of a break with the Axis before Rios leaves Santiago. If the Axis, as Aranha hinted, had forced Brazil into war to check growing hemisphere unity, it had once more shown its ignorance of other nations' psychology.

*On St. Bartholomew's Day in 1572 French Catholics, egged on by Catherine de Medici, began to slaughter 50,000 Hugenots.

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