Villa and Zapata: A History of the Mexican Revolution

by Frank McLynn

  Still Villa proceeded cautiously, not attempting tasks beyond his strength, but making sure he enhanced morale and discipline by cleverly planned strikes. In June he briefly occupied the town of Casas Grandes and in August he defeated a force of I,3oo rurales under Felix Terrazas. Finally, in September, he felt strong enough for a major attack on Huerta. On 26 September the guerrilla leaders of Chihuahua held a `summit conference' at Jimenez. They decided that the city of Torreon, a nodal point on the Mexican railway system and the funnel through which Huerta sent troops north from Mexico City, should be the target - but who should be generalissimo? Chao and Urbina had claims as well as Villa.

  Urbina had effectively ruled himself out by not being able to control his men. The revolutionaries could not afford another Durango-style fiasco, when the city was taken apart by a drunken, plundering, indisciplined canaille; the middle classes and the Americans were already edgy enough. Chao had the advantage of being Carranza's choice, but only because the `First Chief' in Sonora was already jealous of Villa. According to legend, Villa and Chao settled their respective claims when the two men confronted each other in `high noon' fashion. Villa ordered Chao to stand down, Chao went for his gun but found himself outdrawn by Villa: a blurred reflex to the hip, a lightning draw, and then Chao looked down the barrel of Villa's pistol: thus the legend, at any rate. The sober truth is that Chao was not acceptable to most Chihuahuans. He was an outsider (born in Tampico), an intellectual schoolmaster with no charisma. Villa was the man for the job, and the revolutionaries knew it. Despite some sulks from Tomas Urbina, who thought he should have the position, the warlords unanimously elected Villa as supreme chief of the reorganised Division of the North.

  The federals faced the attack with confidence. Having confined them to the major towns, Villa was now doing exactly what they wanted: fighting them on their own terms: 2,ooo regular troops plus another i,ooo colorados and militiamen, all well-armed and equipped, were dug in, waiting, as they thought, for the villistas to commit suicide. They reasoned that although Villa had 6-8,ooo men, he had no experience of commanding large numbers; and had not the so-called First Chief Carranza already failed to take Torreon? With another federal army advancing from the north to catch the rebels in a pincer movement, the defenders looked forward to an abortive siege, followed by ambush and massacre of the crestfallen revolutionaries as they trooped north. The one factor the federal commander, General Francisco Murguia, had not taken into account was that most of his men were press-ganged conscripts from Mexico's `deep south', fighting in an unfamiliar land against men imbued with revolutionary elan.

  Murguia had placed artillery on the hilltops commanding the approaches to Torreon, intending to rip the attacking revolutionaries to pieces. Villa got round that obstacle by sending commando forces by night to take each hill in turn. With the artillery in his hands, he was ready to turn the tables. He sent his vanguard into the suburbs and Murguia foolishly responded by sending a small force of around 500 troops to flush the rebels out. This was at once `eaten up'. Realising that his van had been defeated and his artillery captured on the heights, Murguia succumbed to panic and decided to decamp. To cover his flight, he sent a subordinate general to retake the hills; this assault seemed at first to be making some headway, but when the commander sent back for reinforcements he discovered to his astonishment that Murguia had already flown the coop. Murguia was later court-martialled and convicted of cowardice.

  Villa's victory at Torreon made him incontestably a major figure. The arms and materiel he captured there were enough to equip his army for months: he seized I,ooo rifles, boo grenades, half a million cartridges and six machine-guns, plus a huge, railway-mounted three-inch cannon named El Nino (The Child), which became the mascot of the Division del Norte. As he now also possessed forty railway engines and vast amounts of rolling stock, captured at the junction's marshalling yards, Villa also had a mechanised and mobile army. To complete his triumph, the federal force supposedly advancing from the north to catch him in a pincer managed to maul its own infantry with `friendly fire' and then failed to take the town of Camargo, held by a small number of villistas.

  Villa was determined that Urbina's infamous sack of Durango would not be repeated in Torreon. Some of his vanguard, entering at night, looted and pillaged, but Villa quickly restored order at daybreak. His men were prepared to take tough discipline from him, as he was an inspired commander with a genius for night fighting, who had just achieved what everyone thought was impossible; there was the added bonus that he was no oligarch but `one of us', a man of the people. The discipline of the villistas amazed and delighted the townspeople and the foreign residents. The US consul in Torreon reported that less than 5 per cent of the expected financial losses expected from looting had actually been sustained. From other Americans there came similar plaudits; at this moment Villa's stock in the USA was sky-high. However, local businessmen were less enthusiastic, as Villa levied forced loans of three million pesos from bankers and other plutocrats in Torreon. The banks tried to bamboozle him by writing cheques drawn on US banks, but Villa's intellectual advisers warned him these would not be honoured in the USA. It took an explicit threat of death to make the bankers disgorge.

  The dark side of Villa manifested itself in the execution of prisoners, reinforcing the spiral of brutality that would besmirch the campaigns against Huerta. This had been a rare occurrence in 1911, but that had not been a collision of regimes. Both sides this time were in a grim fight for survival: Huerta's habitual brutality had already been matched by Carranza's `Juarez' decree that to appear in arms against the `Constitution' was an express act of treason, punishable by death. Villa did not bat an eyelid over ordering hundreds of men to the firing squad, and liked to carry out his executions openly, in broad daylight, rather than skulkingly at night as most commanders did. However, he reserved to himself the prerogative of mercy. On one occasion Tomas Urbina wanted to execute a group of musicians who had been pressed into service as federal bandsmen, but Villa insisted that there could never be too much music and recruited the men for his own army.

  After Torreon Villa no longer needed to operate as a guerrilla but could face Huerta in open battle. For a while Huerta considered that Villa's victory was a fluke, that the Centaur of the North was simply a lucky individual, as his prison break the year before seemed to suggest. Moreover, he counted on factionalism among the rebels to do his work for him; after all, not even Madero had been able to hold his motley alliance of heterogeneous elements together, and it was likely, as soon as the rebels sustained their first defeat, that the entire ramshackle revolutionary coalition would collapse.

  Huerta's hopes at first looked like being realised for, flushed with victory, the overconfident Villa next ordered a frontal assault on Chihuahua City. As his more cautious advisers such as Juan Medina warned him, this was a mistake. The federal commander there was no Murguia, the city was well supplied with superior artillery, and most of the defenders were Orozco's colorados. After three days of wasteful charges, Villa broke off the attack. He was now in a difficult position, because unless he maintained forward momentum, his own men might start thinking, with Huerta, that Torreon was a fluke. It was vital to bring off another coup. As a commander, Villa always disappointed when he held good cards, but was at his best when cornered with his back to the wall or when written off. This he now proved by bouncing back from the defeat at Chihuahua to an amazing exploit at Ciudad Juarez, when he managed to rerun the story of the Trojan horse.

  An attack on Ciudad Juarez was the only meaningful option left to him, but it was a tough nut to crack. Much better defended than in 191 1, Juarez always carried the danger that any military operations there would provoke US intervention, especially if anyone on the American side of the border was hit by stray bullets. There was also the roving federal army - the one that had failed to take him in the rear at Torreon - still at large in Chihuahua, no one knew exactly where. An attack on Ciudad Juarez was a huge gamble, but Villa
had an ace in the hole he had never possessed before - locomotives and rolling stock he had captured at Torreon. His ingenious mind at once saw a way forward.

  While some of his men skirmished on the outskirts of Chihuahua City, as if intending to renew the attack, Villa's main force had intercepted two coal trains at the Terrazas station, emptied the cargo and loaded on his own elite corps. With his cavalry following just out of sight, Villa steamed towards Ciudad Juarez. At each station on the run north Villa took the telegraph operators prisoner and had them ask for instructions from headquarters, putting himself on the line and pretending to be the federal officer in charge of the train. At every halt the story was the same: he was returning north to base as the line south was blocked by `the bandit Villa'. The repeated `all clear' was answered by the reiterated `return to base'. At 2 a.m. on the night of 15/16 November 1913, while most of the federal troops in the city were asleep or in bars, brothels and casinos, Villa and his men steamed into Juarez. Disembarking, they took the federals completely by surprise. The signal was given to the cavalry by rocket flare, and within an hour all strategic points in the city - barracks, arms depot, racetrack, casinos, even the international bridge - were in Villa's hands.

  This amazing exploit made Villa world-famous. He won further plaudits by his treatment of the federal commander General Francisco Castro, who was allowed to depart unscathed to the USA. Aware that Castro was the same man who had interceded for his life with Huerta in 1912, Villa had already given strict orders that the enemy general was not to be harmed. However, even after such a victory (a signal triumph in more ways than one), he could not rest on his laurels. Huerta still thought that Villa was just a gambler whose luck would sooner or later run out, so sent a fresh army north to retake Torreon. Orders also went out to the garrison at Chihuahua City to sortie and go over to the offensive; 7,000 men under Orozco went north. Villa now had to decide whether to dig in and defend Ciudad Juarez or move south and strike the enemy before they could strike him.

  Villa decided to go south, following the railway line. His reasoning was twofold: he lacked the food, ammunition and other resources to withstand a protracted siege in Ciudad Juarez, and he did not want to give Huerta the chance to play the American card by firing over the border and bringing the Marines pouring across. He decided to make his stand at Tierra Blanca, a railway junction some thirty miles south. He knew this was a gamble. He was slightly inferior in numbers to the enemy, and at least i,ooo of his 5,500 effectives were armed with no more than knives and machetes - and a good many were women and young boys - while the federals had an awesome superiority in artillery; the villistas had little more in the way of heavy firepower than two Mondragon 75mm field guns. There was no question of somehow achieving a moral or psychological advantage over Huerta's fighters, as most of them were Orozco's colorados who, knowing the certain fate that awaited them if defeated, would fight to the last man.

  Fighting began on the night of 23 November, but it was on the morning of 24 November that the dreadful two-day engagement of Tierra Blanca really began. By all the laws of warfare, Orozco and the federals should have won the battle easily. They had superiority in every area, especially artillery and ammunition, while Villa had no reserves, no grand strategy and not even any real tactics; it later transpired that he had not coordinated the movements of his various commanders. The opening barrage from the federals devastated the villistas, who lacked the firepower to respond. For a long time Villa was on the brink of defeat, on the defensive, trying to conserve scarce ammunition, his left dangerously exposed to enemy cavalry trying to work round the flank, the right being devastated by machine-gun fire. Their infantry lavishly supplied with Mausers and machine-guns, the federals advanced boldly.

  However, the federal commander Jose Salazar paid the price of overconfidence. He should have lain down a blanket artillery bombardment, then launched an all-out attack, which would surely have carried the day, but he sent his infantry in too soon, and they were caught by a felicitously timed charge by one of Villa's commanders with 300 cavalry. Taken aback, the federals retreated to their initial positions, thus handing the initiative to Villa. For the rest of the day Salazar and Orozco rested on the defensive and at night formed themselves into a tighter inner perimeter.

  Before dawn on the 25th Villa ordered a general advance and a flanking movement by the cavalry, while he sent one of his newest aides, Rodolfo Fierro, south behind the enemy to blow up the railway line. The villista infantry advance petered out that morning in the face of fusillades from machine-gun nests, but at noon Villa's cavalry appeared on the enemy flanks, forcing them to evacuate their positions and retreat to the troop trains. This was just what Villa had been hoping for. Suddenly there was a tremendous explosion from the enemy rear. Fierro had worked round behind them, and now sent a runaway locomotive crashing into the sidings behind the federals. An old exponent of mkquina loca, Fierro had packed the engine with dynamite and percussion caps, generating a thunderclap explosion that threw the enemy into panic. As the demoralised federals tried to cut and run, Villa at last brought his artillery into play, adding to the casualties. There ensued terrible scenes of slaughter as white flags were ignored, and hecatombs of colorados were butchered where they stood. All those captured, including officers, were executed. That evening Villa threw a huge fiesta to celebrate.

  With this victory Villa became undisputed master of the state of Chihuahua. At a cost of 300 casualties (federal losses were at least i,ooo) he acquired a further four locomotives, eight field guns, seven machineguns, horses, rifles and 4,000 rounds of ammunition. He controlled Ciudad Juarez and the border traffic and, in addition, the federal General Mercado hastily abandoned Chihuahua City, heading in panic for the American border, together with Creel and the Terrazas - but not before hanging all political prisoners from poplar trees. The city's oligarchs had begged and pleaded with him to stay, offered him huge sums of money and reminded him of the likely arrival of a relief column, but Mercado had had enough, especially as he could no longer control the orozquistas, who had turned to banditry and were intimidating the oligarchs. The terrified Creel-Terrazas-Mercado convoy fled across the desert on foot, in cars and on horseback, strewing the wasteland as they went with discarded baggage, supplies and ammunition. On i December Villa entered Chihuahua City, where he received the tumultuous ovation of the crowd from the balcony of the state palace.

  Tierra Blanca was a striking triumph of the moral over the material, of elan over technology, morale over materiel, but to more thoughtful observers there were some worrying pointers to the future. Villa won the battle through luck rather than talent and committed every mistake in the textbook. He did not direct the battle firmly enough, but left too much initiative in the hands of individual commanders; he weakened his front when sending reinforcements from one sector to another; he had no notion of reserves and threw all his men into the attack; and he had no idea how to handle his artillery or how to minimise the impact of that of the enemy. These faults would be fully exposed in the future, but for the moment they were overlooked as Villa was master of Chihuahua.

  Villa's triumphs were viewed by Carranza in Sonora with mounting jealousy and concern. Here was this peasant bumpkin, as Carranza saw him, succeeding in Chihuahua where he had failed, refusing to recognise his overall authority and winning more and more converts. The USA did not even recognise the `Constitutionalists' as bona fide belligerents. It was essential for Carranza to create or discover his own military hero. His favourite general was Pablo Gonzalez, possibly the most incompetent commander in the entire history of the Revolution. Not only had the lacklustre Gonzalez made no progress in the north-east against the target cities of Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo, but the leaders of Coahuila refused to accept Carranza's designation of him as commander-in-chief in the north-east. The local leader, Lucio Blanco, so despised Gonzalez that by October 1913 the two revolutionary factions in Coahuila nearly came to blows and started their own civil war. Blanco, a leftist
and therefore hated by Carranza, who loathed all men of the Left, eventually moved out of the state altogether so as not to take orders from Gonzalez.

  Carranza therefore steadily advanced the career of Alvaro Obregon, his one truly able commander, trying to build him up as a counterweight to Villa. The 33-year-old Obregon had had a remarkably chequered career. Born in 188o, the last of eight children, he was brought up in genteel poverty by his mother, Cenobia Salido, and three sisters in the town of Huatabampo. His father, Francisco Obregon, who died when Alvaro was three months old, had been a wealthy Sonora landowner, but most of his estate was confiscated by Juarez in i 867 as a punishment for Francisco's support for Maximilian. The next year a disastrous flood devastated the part of the estate that had been left. The Obregon children turned to pedagogy: Alvaro's brother Jose and three of his sisters were all schoolteachers.