BRAZIL: Disaster

Across the triumphal homecoming of the Commander in Chief of Brazil’s victorious Expeditionary Force fell the shadow of Brazil’s worst naval disaster.

It was the Fourth of July. The ancient cruiser Baía was patrolling the South Atlantic along the route that Allied planes fly from Natal to Dakar. With four U.S. Navy technicians aboard, some of the Brazilian sailors were celebrating Independence Day. A stunning explosion rocked the Baía. Subsequent blasts literally blew her apart. Blue-bloused sailors were tossed into the waves. Commander Davila Garcia Albuquerque, his arm shattered by the explosion, shouted to his crew, “Save yourselves; I’m finished.” But few of them were able to. Three minutes after the first explosion the Baía sank.

Four days later, the British freighter S.S. Balfe came upon six of the Baía’s life rafts, pulled aboard the 22 miserable survivors who gave the world its first hint of the disaster. Later, other rescue vessels picked up a few more of the Baía’s 400-odd crew members, landed them at the port of Recife before a crowd of solemn men and weeping women. Only a handful were saved. The survivors believed that the Baía had struck a floating mine, exploded the magazine.