Play as · WW2 1939 · L1 · Neutral → Allied

Colombia - September 1, 1939

Colombia in 1939 is a neutral republic that happens to live at the front door of the most important piece of infrastructure in the western hemisphere. Eduardo Santos, newspaperman and president since 1938, governs the calmer stretch of the Liberal Republic - the reformist decade that followed forty-five years of Conservative rule - with an economy built on coffee, a modest oil industry at Barrancabermeja on the Magdalena, and a national temperament that has not been much interested in European quarrels since it stopped having civil wars. The country is still absorbing the fact that Panama left it in 1903 with American assistance, and it has recently settled a small, humiliating jungle war with Peru over Leticia. What makes it strategically consequential in 1939 is geography and nothing else: the Caribbean coast at Barranquilla and Cartagena sits directly on the sea lanes feeding the Canal, and the San Blas approaches are a few hours' flying from the locks. The strategic identity is a bystander whose front yard is a chokepoint.

Starting position

The starting board is geography plus a nervous ally. Colombia's own means are limited - an army of some fifteen thousand with the Peru war fresh in its memory, a coastguard navy, and an air force that exists mostly on paper - and its economy is a coffee exporter's economy, prosperous when New York is buying and precarious when it is not. The oil at Barrancabermeja, worked by the Tropical Oil Company under a concession that reverts to the state in 1951, is a useful export rather than a strategic reserve, and platinum from the Choco is worth more per ton than its tonnage suggests. What draws Washington's attention is not any of that but the airline: SCADTA, founded in Barranquilla in 1919 by German emigres and the oldest carrier in the Americas, flies German-built aircraft with German pilots along the Magdalena and out to the Caribbean coast, well within reach of the Canal Zone. Pan American bought secret control of it in 1930, but its crews and management stayed German, and to American planners a fleet of aircraft in German hands next to the Canal is the most concrete Axis threat in South America. There is also a German commercial community, a small Nazi party organisation among it, and a Colombian political class that resents being told what to do about any of it. The pieces are the coast, the coffee, the airline and the neighbour who cares more about your territory than you do.

What turns the campaign

Colombia declares neutrality in September 1939 and spends the next two years being pulled out of it. The first battle is the airline, and it is fought entirely between civilians: through 1939 and into 1940 Washington presses, Santos manoeuvres, and in June 1940 the German staff of SCADTA are removed en masse and the company is reorganised into what becomes Avianca - the earliest and cleanest Allied victory in South America, won without a shot and over Colombian sovereignty as much as over Germany. Everything after follows the hemispheric current. Colombia signs on to the inter-American defence understandings, admits American basing and patrol arrangements on the Caribbean coast and the San Andres islands, breaks relations with the Axis after Pearl Harbor, and finally declares war on Germany in November 1943 when a submarine sinks the schooner Resolute off San Andres and neutrality becomes untenable at home. No Colombian formation fights in this war - the country's expeditionary moment comes in Korea, not Europe. The campaign therefore turns on the same problem throughout: how much sovereignty a small state trades for security guarantees it did not ask for, from a great power whose last major intervention in Colombian affairs cost it Panama.

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