Brazilian failure is often used as a framing device to reinforce the significance of the 10th Mountain Division’s battlefield exploits—a specialized group who earned its stripes succeeding where the Brazilians and other members of Crittenberger’s ragtag IV Corps had failed.
Despite their fleeting appearances in histories of the Italian campaign, it is easy to forget that numerically, at least, the experience of the BEF was nothing to balk at. The Brazilians spent more than double the amount of time on the Italian frontlines as the 10th—239 days to the 10th’s 114. During that time, they lost 443 soldiers and officers killed in action, sustained 11,617 casualties, and were responsible for capturing 20,573 Axis soldiers, bagging four entire Axis divisions in northern Italy during a two-day stretch prior to V-E Day.
Taken together, the wartime trajectories of the 10th Mountain Division and the Brazilian Expeditionary Force were more similar than different: Both were lauded within their own countries for their heroic deeds breaking the deadlock of the Italian campaign in the northern Apennines; both are remembered today as firsts and onlys—for the 10th, it was and remains the first and only American specialized mountain unit in operation; for Brazil, the BEF was and remains the first and only group of Brazilian soldiers ever to fight on foreign soil.
Similarly, both units felt they had something to prove by fighting in Italy.
For the 10th, it was whether the unit could overcome its “Johnny-Come-Lately” image by “winning acceptance from fellow combat men…and erasing the publicity-fostered and inaccurate ‘Quiz Kid’ reputation.” For the Brazilians, fighting among the Allies became a source of national pride, international recognition, and self-respect. “We had contact with Americans, British, and South Africans,” one Brazilian veteran wrote after the war, “and we saw nothing in them that made us feel inferior.”
On paper, the Brazilian experiment should never have worked. They spoke a language not understood by their allies; they depended wholly on the Americans for outfitting and training; and their fighting aptitude was unknown and broadly assumed to be nonexistent. Brazilian pessimists prior to the creation of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force argued it would be easier for a snake to smoke than for Brazil to enter the war—a phrase roughly analogous to the common English adynaton “when pigs fly.”