Excerpt from the book: “SENTA A PUA !”
Author: Cel Av Rui Moreira Lima
Copyright© Rui Moreia Lima 1980


I asked Lt Alberto Martins Torres which had been his best war mission. He squirmed a little but promised a written answer. In 1975 I received his ‘best mission’… and because it is a lively work, it will enhance the pages of my book. Here it is:
Collaborating with the 10th Mountain Division
(The part about the 10th Mountain Div. is below after 3 or 4 paragraphs)

… the missions that produced the biggest emotional satisfaction were those in which I could see my buddies Theobaldo Antonio Kopp, Othon Correa Netto and Armando de Souza Coelho, after being hit by the anti-aircraft fire, jumping by parachute and coming safely to the land, healthy and alive.
… as when, Armando, Keller, Menezes and me, very early on a certain morning, caught two German Divisions trying to cross a tributary of the Po River utilizing a pontoon bridge. We were able to destroy the bridge and to confine the Germans, by the destruction of the rear guard vehicles column. When we returned in the afternoon, with new airplanes, resupplied and rearmed, the two divisions already immobilized were surrounded by tanks of the 5th Army. In this mission Menezes was hit in the neck by a fragment from a 20 mm and our four planes ended up looking like “sieves” but they took us back.
With the view of a Brazilian aviator sympathetic with our suffering infantry brother, we could point to a certain mission, in the Apennines covered with snow, during which our objective was an important position of German artillery at the top of an elevation that for days castigated our soldiers and stopped their advance. It was Lafayette, Keller, me, and Pereyron. The German batteries having been silenced after our bombardment and by subsequent machine gun leveling attacks, we were moved by the vision of a swarm of Brazilian infantrymen climbing the white slopes to dominate the position. The contrast between maneuvering in Gericinó (Rio) on a Sunday with a Fla vs Flu* game going on and the “purple” cold under the German continuous fire, occurred to me at this moment. It was impossible to hold back an emotional smile behind the cold rubber of the oxygen mask.
And thus there is no end to the unleashing of the reminiscences. It’s a difficult job to speak about the “best”.
…and it is in the moment of his team action, in coordination with the land troops, that the fighter pilot is more enthusiastic with the results of the mission. It is the view of the immediate result. It is the satisfaction of clearing the difficult way for the foot soldier. It is the comfort of being able to employ his considerable offensive potential in benefit of his land buddy, less protected and who makes progress at the price of much suffering and with the loss of many lives.
Collaboration with the 10th Mountain Division The 10th Mountain Division was a North American elite division, carefully trained in the USA with up to date tactics and efficiency due to the experience of the first years of the war. Selected troops, magnificently equipped, with exceptional ‘esprit de corps’. It was destined to intervene decisively on the German South front, in the right moment. As its name indicates, it was trained especially for operations in the Alps of the north of Italy and the south of Germany and Austria. When Patton’s tanks executed their sudden stab to the east, virtually separating the German forces in the south from those of the north, the intention was to strike by the south, giving the coup de grâce in this sector. The main instrument to achieve this objective was the 10th Mountain Division. In a few weeks it succeeded in dividing the enemy forces of the north of Italy in two, in one overwhelming thrust to the north, in the direction of Brenner Pass. Even taking into consideration the progressive debilitation of the forces of the Reich by the 5th Army action, together with the FEB (Brazilian Expeditionary Force), and by the 8th English Army, it should be noted that the advance of the 10th Mountain was registered as the fastest of the whole European Campaign, surpassing even the one of General Patton and the famous blitz of the panzer in the beginning of the war.
As the 10th Mountain Division made progress in the plains of the Po, its mission became less difficult. During one of the missions, I witnessed hundreds of German prisoners formed in platoons marching in orderly fashion on the roads escorted by Americans of the 10th Mountain. The main part of the column was continuing to progress. When this division reached the first foothills of the Italian Alps, it began to face bigger obstacles, given that the topography was extraordinarily favorable to the maintenance of the German defensive positions, some of them with a clear cut advantage.
It was in one of these impediments to the 10th Mountain advance that we were given the task of intervening in its favor. The exact locale was the north side of Lake Garda.
Lake Garda is narrow and it extends many kilometers to the north squeezed between the mountains as a wedge. Its larger south part faces the north boundary of the Po Valley in the vicinity of Verona. On the east margin, the foot of the mountain plummets almost vertically into the cold blue water. The main north road is a notch in the rock on the right coast of the lake. On reaching the north extremity of the lake, the road goes down to the level of the valley that continues in the same direction. It is like Avenida Niemeyer in Rio de Janeiro, as it comes from Leblon along the granite slope that descends to Gávea beach, where today the National Hotel is located. Then we imagine that in the Hotel’s place there is a hill with a slope of about 150 meters above sea level a little away from the road. This hill has a steep face. On the slope’s top, the German bunkers, visible by those who would fly over them, but for the soldiers on the road they appeared as shooting positions carved like crevices in the rock. To those who came on the road from the south these positions appeared as undefeatable.
To reach the fortifications, it would be necessary to go around the hill and try to climb its north slope, however to do this, one would have to go about one kilometer, with the mountain straight up on one side and the German artillery comfortably installed on the facing hill. There, in the last curve of the road that still permitted them to stay out of the angle of fire of the enemy batteries, the 10th Mountain stopped. Stopped, detained by that miniature Gibraltar. A stop of almost three days because weather conditions did not permit the necessary air support.
We were flying with the Red Flight of the final phase of the campaign, Armando, Keller, Menezes and me, in the vicinity of Verona, looking for objectives. When we went west in the direction of Milan a little before the valley of Lake Garda, we heard a dialogue between Rover Joe and an American P-47 Flight. The leader was saying –“Sorry Rover Joe, but we could not reach the upper most north part of the lake because of the precarious visibility.” Rover Joe: - “Understood, thank you for the try.”
In this moment we saw appearing below a blanket of thick stratus clouds that covered the lake and the adjacent mountains, the four P-47s of the flight that we soon identified as Rover Joe’s interlocutor. Let us explain who Rover Joe is.
Every command of a corps of troops engaged in more important actions in the front, in which air support was necessary, was supplied with a movable radio station with fixed tuning on the same frequency of communication as the fighter bombardment flights. As a rule these stations were operated by aviator-officers, with knowledge of the resources and the eventual limitations of the fighter planes, who would coordinate actions of aviation with the requisites of the tactical situation of the moment, furnished by the command of the unit to which they were assigned. The generic name of these movable stations was Rover and each one took a second name such as Joe, Pete, Jack, etc. that specified a given station. In our case, Rover Joe was the movable station associated with the command of the 10th Mountain Division at that time. Later, I learned that the aviator-officer operating the station was Major Hugh D. Dow, operational officer of the 350th Fighter Group, to which our group belonged, our great friend and an old connoisseur of our style of operation.
As soon as we saw the American flight appearing in the mist under the thick clouds and when we felt that the dialogue with Rover Joe had finished, we spoke: “Rover Joe, here is Jambock Red – We are to the south of Lake Garda - in what way can we help you?” Rover Joe: - “Jambock Red, we have a problem here in the north point of the lake. Is it possible that you could get here – the meteorological conditions are not tops – ‘Over!’” It is necessary to say that, at that moment, we did not know what the situation would be. We would know only when we arrived.
We penetrated into the valley of the lake under a blanket of clouds. The ceiling could have been from 500 to 600 meters, ample enough, and the visibility was about 2,000 to 3,000 meters. “Excellent” conditions for eyemeter navigation…Thus, everything looked very dark from the middle to the end of the lake as the valley became narrow, with the mountains piercing the clouds, however, in reality the radius of visibility was more than 3,000 meters and was always the same as we continued to penetrate. The bad impression of stormy weather was more psychological than real because of the thick ash color of the clouds that could be seen ahead.
When we reached the north part of the lake, Rover Joe saw us and exulted: “Very good Jambock Red, the problem is this: We are here on the east margin of the lake, on the road, without conditions to advance because of the German artillery on the hill at the end of the lake….” Rover Joe gave us the precise coordinates of the German fortifications. In the reconnaissance of the area we distinguished perfectly the German positions and we could see along the road the immense American column standing still, with her vanguard positioned before a curve, beyond which they would be seen by the Germans. The situation was crystal clear.
We verified that the front of the casemates were carved into the rock itself and faced the road. They had bigger openings in the back on the gentle ridge facing the north which were unprotected, considering the purpose of these positions. This was its vulnerable point. We attacked in a low angle nose dive – due to the ceiling limitation – from the north to the south, with two 350 lb. bombs in each plane. We aimed at an angle toward the rear patio of the casemates where we saw the big openings. They were formed in an L shape. Six bombs touched this point; two of them went level above the ridge of the mountain and went down into the flat ground. For those who are acquainted with snooker, the target point was like a ‘pocket.’ Later we made many horizontal strafing gun passes, now from the south to the north, concentrating the fire on the rock crevices, in the place where the batteries were located. On this second phase of the attack we were coming in 'cobrinha' (snaking) or in the same level as the crest of the hill, where the target was, parallel to the lake coast and above the road where the American Division was concentrated. With the ammunition gone, we returned and right then and there we harvested our prize: The 10th Mountain Division blockaded there for more than 48 hours, would reinitiate its movement toward the north. Rover Joe was effusively transmitting his encomiums and thanks in a not very proper language. His enthusiasm was understandable. That action was relatively routine for a trained and experienced fighter flight and did not involve greater risks than the ones inherent in the action itself and, moreover, was without significant participation of concentrated anti-aircraft fire. However, for him** a brother in arms, aviator, and fighter pilot, tied to a land vehicle and having watched the transitory powerlessness of the daring elite division, that intervention was the consecration of his very being as pilot.


* Flamengo v. Fluminense soccer match. Lt Torres is a fan of Flamengo, his only defect.
** An allusion to Major Hugh D. Dow. (Shot down during a bomb mission and captured by the Germans. Freed on April, 1945, returned to air base in Pisa) Major Hugh D. 'Rowdy' Dow came to Rio de Janeiro in 2007 to receive a triibute from the FAB (Brazilian Air Force) and to see some of his friends.
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Sometime later, in the south of Germany and the north of Italy, with the hostilities already ended, we got two testimonies about that mission, one from Major Hugh G. Dow and the other from the mouth of a soldier in the 10th Mountain Division. We travelled on the Lake Garda road, as part of two groups assigned to effectuate the location and documentation of the bodies of our companions shot down and killed, and I, as always, was the multilingual translator. I stopped the jeep at the point where the fortifications could be seen at the top of the north cliff and asked an American soldier with an emblem of the ‘10th Mountain on his sleeve:
“What is that over there?” pointing to the cliff.
He informed us in a succinct and colorful narrative, in his jargon of off-duty soldier, the reason why the war had, for the time being, ended for him:
“Those were the artillery positions of the … Germans. We were stuck on that road at the edge of the lake and could not stick out our necks beyond that curve without getting … hammered by the Germans. One day, four … little planes came over and finished them off. Then we went ahead.”