by Frank McLynn
By now the Constitutionalist armies in the north-east had advanced as far as the oil port of Tampico,where the USA maintained a strong naval presence to protect its investments in the oil fields. On 9 April, possibly because they were jittery about the approach of the rebels, possibly through simple incompetence, the federals arrested a landing party from an American warship. Although the local Mexican commander then apologised fulsomely, the problem was that the arrested crew was from a ship flying the US flag and had been on 'US territory' - the intercepted ship's whaleboat - when they were apprehended. Admiral Henry Mayo, commanding the Fifth Division of the Atlantic Fleet off Tampico, decided to teach the `greasers' a lesson. He sent an officer in full military uniform to demand a public written apology, the arrest of the culprits and the firing of a 21-gun salute to the US flag. Historians have speculated that Mayo, frustrated by the boredom of cruising on the Mexico station, simply wanted to get into action - any action.
Since the demand was considered steep, the local Mexican commander referred it to Mexico City and, when run to ground in one of his drinking dens, Huerta point-blank refused to comply, Wilson welcomed the pretext to remove Huerta by force; Huerta thought he could harness antigringo chauvinism into a national crusade. Attitudes hardened on both sides. The denouement took place not, as expected, at Tampico but farther down the coast, at Veracruz. On 18 April Wilson issued orders for the interception of the German ship Ypriranga, which was bearing arms for Huerta from Europe to Veracruz, and to prevent all further deliveries by seizing the customs house there. When he received the order, Admiral Frank Fletcher, commanding the Fourth Division of the Atlantic Fleet, expecting no resistance, decided to carry out the operation without waiting for Mayo to come down from Tampico. However, General Joaquin Maas, with i,ooo men - mainly cadets from the Veracruz Naval Academy - did resist.
Fighting began on 21 April; at first the Americans, assailed by accurate sniper fire and a battalion of heavily armed convicts released ad hoc, made heavy weather of their task. By 22 April 3,500 Marines were ashore, but still facing stiff opposition. The US warships Chester and Prairie then opened up with their three-inch guns and blasted the defenders out of their bolt-holes. By evening Veracruz was in American hands at a cost of nineteen American dead and forty-seven wounded, as against Mexican casualties of more than 200 dead and 300 wounded. Within days the occupying forces had grown to 6,ooo: they spent the time mopping up pockets of resistance and winkling out defiant snipers.
Many Americans thought Veracruz was the prelude to a general annexation of Mexico, that the Mexican Revolution would end, like its French counterpart, with the tramp of invading armies. The Hearst press ran its predictable, jingoistic campaign, whipping up prejudice against the lesser breeds south of the Rio Grande. However, Wilson, who had won overwhelming support from both houses of Congress for the occupation of Veracruz, was now deluged with letters of protest, not least from the business community, when the possibility of wider involvement in Mexico loomed. Those who urged Wilson not to get sucked into the Mexican maelstrom stressed both the absence of compelling US interests there and resentment that white North America might end up governing and financing another set of `niggers'. There was no need for such overreaction; Wilson's aims were always limited to getting rid of Huerta. Ironically, the Veracruz action helped him rather than the Constitutionalists, for Washington once again sealed the border, cutting off arms supplies to the rebels.
Wilson was in any case given pause by the strength of Mexican opposition in Veracruz, the violent anti-gringo riots and the stoning of the American embassy in Mexico City, and Carranza's vociferous denunciation of US intervention. However, although Huerta tried to whip up anti yanqui sentiment, his propaganda campaign was wrecked on the shoals of public apathy. In so far as there was anti-American sentiment in Mexico, it was directed at diplomatic and consular officials, not the representatives of American business or other economic interest; few American residents received so much as a scratch. Rebel commanders refused offers from the federals to unite against the common foe. While Carranza and Zapata were incensed at the American action, Villa was complaisant, both grateful for the diversion and anxious to burnish his image in the USA. The US Marines stayed in Veracruz on a kind of hygiene campaign. They made all prostitutes undergo medical examinations and weeded out pimps; they cleaned the streets and the market daily with sea water, set up public urinals, regulated sewage and drainage and implemented a campaign to wipe out the mosquito. It was said that for a short time Veracruz became so clean that the vultures could no longer rely on their usual pickings and flew away elsewhere in seach of carrion and garbage.
Huerta used the occasion of the US occupation of Veracruz to make sustained overtures to Zapata: he proposed an amnesty if the zapatistas would accept his authority and fight the American invaders. Zapata told his inner circle that the US occupation made his blood boil, but he would never collaborate with Huerta; if the Americans invaded his patria chica, he would fight them on his own. Baulked, Huerta tried to work around Zapata's flank by making the same proposals to his subordinate commanders; Zapata told his chiefs that all such overtures from Huerta must be reported to headquarters, and repeated that the only terms he would accept from Huerta were unconditional surrender.
Frustrated at his inability to play the anti-gringo card, and likewise at all attempts to drive a wedge between the revolutionaries of north and south, Huerta tried to make sure Zapata would have a warm welcome at the gates of Mexico City by promoting a campaign of vicious newspaper propaganda, portraying the zapatistas as crazed, peyote-drugged, genocidal war criminals. Huerta's jackal-like organs alleged that Zapata and his men crucified prisoners on telegraph poles and cactus trees, that they staked out victims over ants' nests and smeared them with honey, or sewed them up inside wet hides and left them to suffocate as the hides dried in the sun. A peculiar atrocity, attributed to Zapata himself, was staking out a man on the top of a fast-growing maguey cactus. The idea was that during the night the thorn-tipped stalk of the plant would grow a foot or more, boring inch by inch through the flesh of a victim who died in dreadful agony. Needless to say, all these tales of atrocities are apocryphal. Zapatistas shot their prisoners without mercy, as did federals, villistas and carrancistas, but if anything the villistas were the most savage, as they went in for mutilation, gouging out eyes, cutting off ears, tongues and noses, severing genitals. The huertistas were equally barbaric, trading atrocity for atrocity, war crime for war crime. None the less, it was Huerta, with his control of Mexico City's media, who won the propaganda war, in the process whipping up foreign residents and observers into a froth of panic and paranoia.
Huerta's attempts to set one group of revolutionaries against another - Zapata versus Carranza, Carranza versus Villa - were far less successful. Zapata was convinced from the earliest days that Carranza, opposed as he was to land reform, was at best another Madero - an idea Felipe Angeles was peddling for his own purposes to Villa. One of the earliest direct contacts between Villa and Zapata came in the autumn of 1913 when Villa wrote a friendly letter to say that he was fully in favour of land reform in Chihuahua. Zapata replied with a cautious but statesmanlike missive, making a tentative offer of alliance, expressing his confidence in Villa, provided always that he would embrace the Plan of Ayala, but most of all warning him against Carranza. He told Villa that, if and when the two of them captured Mexico City, there would have to be wholesale purges; Madero's mistake in 1911-13 could not be repeated.
Zapata's advice seemed well grounded, for Villa's first personal contact with Carranza left him with a bitter taste in his mouth. On 17 January the two had conferred amicably enough by telegraph, with Villa accommodating and deferential and Carranza, taking this as his God-given right instead of an exaggerated gesture of cordiality, replying patronisingly and condescendingly. Then, in March, Carranza moved his headquarters from Sonora to Ciudad Juarez and the first face-to-face meeting took place. It was not a success. Carranza behav
ed as if he were a missionary among the Bangala in darkest Africa. He reacted with a fastidious stiffness when Villa gave him the traditional abrazo or bear-hug. Villa, laughing and joking, ran up against a brick wall of po-faced stolidity. Resignedly he told his aides that Carranza was `no Maderito'. In private, to his intimates, he was more forceful: Carranza was a sonofabitch, a hy"o de puta. Later he reminisced: `I embraced (him) energetically, but with the first words he spoke my blood turned to ice. I saw that I could not open my heart to him. As far as he was concerned, I was a rival not a friend. He never looked me in the eye and during our entire conversation emphasised our difference in origin ... He lectured me on things like decrees and laws, which I could not understand. There was nothing in common between that man and me.'
Villa started 1914 with a mopping-up operation to expel the Terrazas and their federal protectors from Ojinaga. For a month General Mercado's army lived a starveling, tatterdemalion existence in the blackened bomb craters and pitholes of Ojinaga's feculent slums, eking out a bare subsistence on a diet of dried meat and corn husks, supplemented by whatever they could buy across the border. On the US side of the frontier Presidio joined the lengthening list of boomtown beneficiaries: El Paso, Douglas, Laredo. When Carranza's protege Panfilo Natera failed to dislodge the federals with a flying column, Villa moved north with the main army and drove the 5,ooo-strong enemy on to US territory, where they found a kind of haven at Fort Bliss refugee camp. When Huerta heard of the loss of yet another army, he swore that he would shoot General Mercado if he ever came back from Mexico. However, Mercado was not much more welcome at Fort Bliss; Collier's Magazine expressed the cynicism of many in the USA by running a fullpage cartoon of the camp with the caption: `If you're tired of Revoluting, try our rest cure. Uncle Sam foots the bills.'
It was mid-March before Villa opened his long-awaited campaign against Huerta in the south. He moved down with an army of 16,ooo, all in trains, including a hospital train able to handle 1,400 wounded at any one time. All communication between Chihuahua City and the rest of the world was suspended, and all trains and motorised transport were impounded, so that the federals could not be tipped off. He was supremely confident, having at his side the much-admired Felipe Angeles, friend of Madero, brilliant intellect, master of ballistics and mechanised warfare, and shrewd reader of human nature. Villa's first target was Torreon, the nodal point of the railway and road network in northern Mexico.
Once he had recaptured Torreon from the rebels, Huerta had tried to make it an impregnable fortress that would dominate all approaches to the capital from the north. The garrison was io,ooo strong - a huge number even for an army in the field - all entrenched behind strong defensive positions. Huerta had good reason for believing its commander General Jose Velasco when he pronounced it impregnable, and by now Huerta and his generals had convinced themselves, or reconvinced themselves, that Villa had simply been lucky in 1913 and had been up against second-rate commanders.
Villa, however, approached the coming battle with insouciance. His huge anaconda of a mechanised army snaked across the desert and halted at Yermo, on an arid, treeless plain where only cactus grew. Away to the east stretched the desert and to the west the peaks of the Sierra Madre were clearly visible. For three days the mighty Division of the North was stalled at Yermo, uncertain where its great leader was to be found; it turned out Villa had been up all night at the wedding of a compadre and arrived at the front flustered and bleary-eyed. Having ascertained that his twenty-eight cannon were in good working order, he ordered an advance on the federal outpost at Bermejillo, forty-three miles south and twentyseven miles north of the ultimate target, Torreon.
Villa's cavalry surprised the federals at Bermejillo, a town of adobe houses, driving them out in short order and then killing more than ioo in a five-hour running fight on the road south. Meanwhile Urbina at Mapimi and Benavides at Tlahualilo had also been in sanguinary encounters. Having taken the outer perimeter of Torreon's defences, Villa pressed on, but found it harder and harder to make inroads the more the enemy fought on interior lines. The villista attack all but petered out in ferocious fighting at Gomez Palacio, eight miles north of Torreon, and especially around Cerro de Pila, the rocky barren hill that dominated the town. To start with, Villa's pioneer corps and maintenance gangs had to make good miles of destroyed rail track, which prevented the artillery, hospital and supply trains from keeping in close touch with the combatants. Then the villista vanguard indulged in its customary idiocy of making a premature charge against prepared positions without waiting for artillery support; predictably, they were mown down in droves.
Had the federals advanced at this point, with panic-stricken villista survivors of the frontal assault colliding with their own men as they fled, throwing away valuable rifles and ammunition, they could have scored a great victory. However, they stayed in their trenches, fearing a trap. Villa was at last able to restore order and soon Angeles reported that the railway line was prepared and his artillery within range. There followed a pile-driving slugging battle of attrition on the outskirts of Gomez Palacio, which Villa claimed was the hardest fight he had ever been in. Clouds of smoke and the stench of burning flesh wafting over from the town soon told Angeles that his artillery bombardment was having the necessary effect, but this was war to the knife in every sense; casualties were enhanced by the barbarous federal practice of poisoning all fresh water, including that in the irrigation ditches in the fields.
In this battle Villa clearly showed that his earlier successes were no fluke. He made up for the technical superiority of the enemy artillery by carefully staged night attacks; in the nocturnal gloom the edge given the federals by their more accurate gunnery was whittled away by villista snipers crawling up to take out the gunners at close range. The federals wasted ammunition by blazing away at shadows in the night when they had no clear targets, while Villa's sharpshooters had a close-packed line of troops to fire at. The losses in these night attacks were ultimately disastrous for federal morale, for they were pounded ceaselessly by artillery during the day then at dusk had to deal with a sinister unseen enemy.
The key to Gomez Palacio was the Cerro de Pila. Having softened up the defenders by a non-stop bombardment all day, on the night of 25 March Villa sent the cream of his troops in assault waves against the hill. The federals fought like dervishes and beat off six bruising attacks, inflicting heavy casualties. Finally, on the seventh wave, they buckled. Terrible scenes of hand-to-hand fighting took place in the darkness as the attackers stabbed through embrasures with bayonets, guessing where the enemy bodies might be located; reached through loopholes to wrench rifle barrels from the hands of amazed federals; or lobbed dynamite bombs into machine-gun nests. However, the saga was not yet over. Incredibly, after such feats of heroism, the triumphant villistas were left stranded as their commanders failed to rush in the expected reinforcements. Soon the federals counterattacked from Torreon and after a further two hours of savage carnage, Villa's men fled from the hill, some weeping in frustration that all their valour had been for nothing.
In Mexico City the Huerta press talked up the retaking of the Cerro de Pila as if it were a victory on the scale of Cannae or Austerlitz. They failed to mention the dismal sequel. Next day the villistas again bombarded the hill, Angeles personally sighting the artillery after wheeling it into new positions to compensate for defective shells sent down from Chihuahua City. Then at night Villa ordered in his men again. The expected killing barrage from the defenders did not materialise; the defenders had pulled out from the hill, abandoning it and Gomez Palacio to Villa. It had been a close-run thing. After five days of battle, the villistas had finally won because their nerve held better, but it had been touch and go: often, crazed by thirst and lupine with hunger, the villista morale had seemed about to go into free-fall. Then the personal magnetism of Villa had worked its magic. He was everywhere, inspiring and exhorting his men, and even on one occasion forcing them to turn back and face Gomez Palacio when th
ey were fleeing in panic.
Having lost nearly i,ooo dead and more than 3,000 wounded, Villa tried to secure a negotiated surrender from General Velasco in Torreon, but Velasco refused. Now the struggle concentrated on the hills around the city. First Villa had to beat off a relieving force of 2,000 federals who approached suddenly from the north-east to his stupefaction; angrily he demanded to know why Carranza's pet Pablo Gonzalez had not taken the most elementary precautions to prevent this happening. Then the battle for Torreon city began. Villa threw everything at Velasco. Angeles wheeled up his artillery and blasted away at point-blank range; villista dynamiters crawled virtually into the mouth of enemy cannon to deliver their deadly charges; amateur aficionados of nitroglycerine could be seen carrying sticks of dynamite wrapped in cowhide, chomping on huge cigars which they used to light the fuses.
On 30 March Velasco tried to break the circle of Hieronymus Bosch horror by requesting a 48-hour truce, so that he could bury the dead and tend the wounded. Villa consulted Angeles, who told him that federal morale was at snapping point and the requested truce was a delaying tactic to enable reinforcements to arrive. Villa therefore rejected the offer, even though he was concerned about his own level of casualties. Angeles's judgement was vindicated. Velasco had lost all his best officers and was secretly in despair that none of his counterattacks had succeeded. Sensing that his opponent was about to cut and run, Villa did not block the exits from the city but left an escape route along the railway to Saltillo. On i April, to save face, Velasco endured another blistering bombardment from Angeles, but next day, taking advantage of a blinding dust-storm that produced nil visibility, he made an orderly withdrawal east. Above the dust Villa saw plumes of smoke: were the enemy simply burning their dead or were they destroying their arms dumps? He soon got his answer. On 3 April his men advanced unopposed over piles of dead and entered the stricken and deserted city.