The Lost Battleship of the Atlantic
80 years ago this month: Here we see the Great War-vintage Brazilian dreadnought São Paulo in Recife, in March 1944, with the old battlewagon at this point in her career reduced to a role as a harbor defense ship.
Laid down by Vickers, Barrow-in-Furness, on 30 April 1907 just 13 days after her sister, Minas Geraes, was laid down at Armstrong in Elswick, the 20,000-ton beast carried a full dozen EOC 12″/45 guns, which were also used on a dozen battlewagons for the Emperor of Japan.
Protected by a 9-inch armor belt with as much as 12 inches of armor on the CT and turrets and capable of 21 knots, these two Brazilian battleships were the opening salvo in a Latin American dreadnought race that saw Argentina and Chile order a pair of even larger and more heavily armed ships from U.S. yards (the Rivadavia-class) and Armstrong (Almirante Latorre-class), respectively.
By WWII, the race had petered out and the once-mighty floating war engines were vestigial sea monsters of another era. Tame dragons kept around to impress the neighbors in the next kingdom.
Chile had only received one of her battlewagons, Latorre, after it had served in the RN as HMS Canada during the Great War, seeing action at Jutland. After 1933, the old vet was in mothballs although she was brought back out for neutrality patrols during WWII.
As for Argentina, her two battleships, Rivadavia and Moreno, last refit in 1924, were also in and out of mothballs and only occasionally used for the occasional state visit and retained, much like Latorre, to enforce a sense of armed neutrality in WWII.
With that, only the two Brazilian ships saw WWII service with the Allies, although of the sort of limited flavor depicted in the above image. Two days after Brazil declared war on German on 21 August 1942, São Paulo was moved to Recife while Minas Geraes was sent to Salvador, with both fulfilling a harbor defense role.
Battleship São Paulo a Brazilian naval base circa 1942.
When it comes to their fates, Minas Geraes was scrapped in Italy in 1954, Moreno in Japan in 1957, Rivadavia in Italy in 1959, and Latorre in Japan into 1961– with elements of her used in the restoration of Togo’s Vickers-built flagship, Mikasa.
But what of São Paulo? The mighty Brazilian battleship vanished at sea in November 1951 with an eight-man caretaker crew aboard her while being towed to the breakers in Europe.
After a six week search, she was declared lost and has never been found.
I’d like to believe that she is an armored Flying Dutchman of sorts, still roaming the waves of the Atlantic, an everlasting crew of steel ship sailors lost in those waters from the Falklands to the Barents Sea running gunnery drills and holding court for Poseidon.
