"Goodmorning Midnight ... I'm coming home" - The last acts, June-July 1945
Once it was clear that 8 Army would be able to secure a permanent hold in the north, the main transport formations were returned to Europe. 5A was shifted to the Azores and then launched an attack on Rio de Janiero, by 2 June the Soviets were ashore and quickly sought to break out.
In sequence, 21A arrived on 10 June and 2TA on 21 June as the Soviets quickly built up.
In the north the Brazilian army had had the advantage of the dense terrain and the very limited room for manouver. In the centre and the south, the low hills and open plains presented ideal terrain for Soviet armour. To make the situation worse, the bulk of their army had been deployed to stall 8 Army on the Amazon.
Even so it took 5 and 21 Armies till 18 June to break out the initial landing zones. Once this was achieved, 21 and 2 Tank Army struck southwards as 5 Army screened the Brazilian units retreating westwards and commenced the slow business of moving north. By 10 July, the Soviets controlled the bulk of the population centres and by the 13th the Brazilian junta fled to Buenos Aires.
Left without leadership, the Brazilian army melted away as 8 Army forced the line of the Amazon and moved south to join up with the spearheads of 5 Army.
In southern Brazil, elements of 2 Tank Army engaged the advanced units of the Argentine army at Apulcarana on 3 July. Utterly unprepared for the ferocity of modern war and with their command and logistic capacity pounded by the VVS they fell back.
(elements of 2 Tank Army in South Brazil)
By the 19 July Soviet paratroopers seized Monte Caseros just over the Argentine border and 6 Argentine divisions were trapped and destroyed on the Paraguayan border. The lead elements of 2 Tank swept over the bridges secured by the paratroops into Argentina and quickly approached Buenos Aires from the north.
(the new T-44s saw very limited action in Brazil - enough to convince Stavka that the design was flawed and instead to focus on developing the T-54/5)
In the meantime, 3 Army continued its campaign on the west coast. The main Peruvian naval base at Huarez was taken on 3 July. By the 4th, a total of 6 Guards Rifle Divisions attacked Lima overwhelming the defenders by the 10th.
To the south Ica fell on 20 July and with that Peru surrendered.
Quickly several divisions were transported to Santiago just in time to stop the Argentine units from overunning the last defense lines.
Faced with veteran Soviet forces, they broke off the offensive and, on 26 July a joint Soviet-Chilean offensive drove them back from the outskirts [1].
Eager to finish the war, Stavka had decided on one last naval invasion. 10 Army was enshipped from Bordeaux on 18 July and sent first to Rio and then landed south of Buenos Aires.
(10 Army at Bordeaux, originally due to deploy to Mexico but instead won the final victory of the Great Patriotic War at Buenos Aires)
Lead units attacked the city garrison on 27 July and by the 29th they fell back to spare the city any more damage.
Soviet units entered the city on 1 August and on the 2nd Argentina surrendered.
The Great Patriotic War was over.
Stavka was stunned by the speed of victory in Latin America. With the exception of the Nicaraguan battles, Soviet losses were light (28,112) as were those of their opponents (36,810) as the mostly conscript armies were ill prepared for Soviet operational tactics and unwilling to die for unpopular regimes.
From 7 June 1941 to 1 July 1945 the Red Army had lost 3,202,481 in direct combat losses, Germany and their allies 6,199,128 (2.3 million of whom were lost in 1944 alone when their main armies collapsed).
The immediate post-war period saw a number of adjustments as Soviet military rule ended in Persia, Brazil, Turkey, Vichy France, Portugal and Slovakia. For various reasons Yugoslavia, Greece and Peru remained under military occupation as the Soviets came to terms with the sheer scale of their victory.
The next 20 years were to be as challenging as the four years of total warfare from 1941-5.
[1] An unremarkable action except that a young Chilean Captain, Augusto Pinochet was killed in the battle and became a national hero as well as a symbol of Chilean-Soviet friendship.
End note - I'll do one or two posts on the post-war era and events.