Revolutions - 9.20- The Guns of Veracruz

Episode Date: January 21, 2019

Wherein Pancho Villa is infected with a fatal case of hubris.  Sponsor: harrys.com/revolutions

Hello, and welcome to revolutions. Episode 9.20, the guns of Vera Cruz. When the Aguas Calientis Convention met in October 1914, its goals were to lay the groundwork for Mexico's political, economic, and social future, but most especially it was to prevent a civil war between Pancho Villa and Venestiano Kranzah. This is when they were meant to beat their swords into plowshares. but instead of coming together, they fractured apart, kicking off the bloodiest and most violent phase of the Mexican Revolution, a fratricidal civil war between dueling revolutionary

factions. In the grand tradition of fratricidal civil wars between dueling revolutionary factions, now being called the constitutionalists on the one hand, those are the guys who stuck with Carranza, and the conventionists on the other, those are the guys who went with Via and Sepata, the two sides actually proclaimed many of the same principles and goals. And yet there they were about to blast the hell out of each other with murderous venom. The question is, why? A great deal of ink has been spilled trying to explain the split between the constitutionalists and the conventionists. The old class theory is that the lines ran between the middle class bourgeois Z, who went for Carranza,

and the peasants and cowboys and ruffians who went for Villa and Sepata. But that theory has broken down in the face of plenty of evidence that both sides had their fair share of peasants and cowboys and urban middle classes. A lot of the original Mataristas, for example, including Francisco Madero's brother Raoul, were staunch viistas because they believed that Caranza was a dictator in the making. Politically, you could say that it was a fight between centralists and federalists, that Caranza believed strong central leadership was the only thing that could secure the revolution, while Via and Sepata believed it. could only be secured by ditching strong central leadership and its dictatorial tendencies. Except that as much as this is obvious in retrospect, it was hardly a major issue in the propaganda war, and VIA certainly had no coherently expressed ideology to speak of. Economically, you could point to a conflict between capitalists and socialists,

except that everyone now espoused worker rights and land for peasants. Carranzas were about to see won the near universal support of the organized urban work classes. But both sides also courted had backers inside the business community. So then one is tempted to say, well, maybe Via and Zapato were running a popular progressive movement and Carranza was a conservative, except that the Caroncistas tended to be far more aggressively reformist and modernist and anti-clerical. Meanwhile, the Zapatistas were positively atavistic in their goals. They did not want to move forward. They wanted to go backward. and Caranza's propaganda did a pretty good job of painting Via as the dumb tool of a looming counter-revolution.

It wasn't true, but a lot of people thought that it was. So not unlike attempting to explain the murderously bitter divide between the mountain and the Girondin and the French Revolution, no one theory or explanation really holds up under scrutiny. So a lot of this comes down to personal rivalry, geographic origin, and just old loyalties. The Sonorans stuck with Caranza. The guys from Chihuahua stuck with Villa. Morelos and the South were religiously loyal to Sepata. And around them, people tended to follow the alliances and chains of command from the fighting over the previous year.

And outside of these dedicated revolutionary partisans, most of Mexico was ready to go with just whoever won. Now, there were three big reasons why it would be the constitutionalists who ultimately won. First was the nature of their organizational structure. Remember, Cranza had built his organization from the top down. He was the governor who had gone into revolt and everybody else worked for him. Thus, the constitutionalists tended to operate in a more classic pyramid command structure, with superiors giving orders and subordinates following them, and it was all far more centralized and unified. Via, on the other hand, had built his army from the ground up. The division del Norte had begun as an alliance of separate chiefs, with Via merely elected to lead them in battle. So the conventionist coalition tended to be far more of a coalition rather than a hierarchy, and his two most important pieces, via's Division del Norte and Sopatra's liberating army of the south, worked almost completely independently of each other. And that's to say nothing of the fact that neither listened to the supposed president and leader of the convention's government,

Ullalio Gutierrez. Gutierrez had been a compromise candidate first proposed by Obregone and the convention, and he now sat around the presidential palace in Mexico, city, wondering if he was even on the side he wanted to be on. And within days, he was in seditious talks with Obrgon to switch sides. So this contrast between the unity of the constitutionalists and the disunity of the conventionist is going to play a pretty big role in what happens next. The second big thing was the matter of economic geography. When the war broke out at the end of 1914, the conventionists actually controlled the majority of Mexico in a

contiguous mass from the American border down to the Guatemalan border. The constitutionalists, on the other hand, were forced to hole up in a number of isolated cities. But critically, when I say isolated, I mean from each other. Most of these cities that they held happen to be either ports or cities on the U.S. border. That meant that resupply and rearming was never going to be a problem for Carranza and Obrugan. They were also going to have the money to pay for everything because controlling the ports meant controlling the customs duties, and on top of that, they controlled some of the most lucrative export-oriented areas of the country. They had Tempico and its oil fields. They controlled coffee coming out of Chiapas. They controlled Henneken coming out of the Yucatan.

Via, on the other hand, had fewer things to sell and fewer places to sell it. Many of the ranches they controlled in the north now had much smaller herds because they had sold so much during the fat times of 1913 and 1914, say nothing of the fact that that flooded the American market, so now they were getting fewer dollars per head. So even though the conventionists controlled much more territory in terms of acreage, the constitutionalist territory was probably twice as lucrative, and again, always open to the doors of world trade in a way that the conventionists just never were. Finally, the third reason was the Americans, whose support, either by default or design, went to Caranza and the Constitutionalists, and that helped tip

the balance decisively in favor of Caranza and the constitutionalists. To expand on this last critical factor, American policy had been leaning towards Caranza for a long time, but it isn't quite as simple as saying the Americans wanted Caranza to win. There were still staunchly pro-VIA Americans in Mexico and in Texas and in Washington, D.C. VIA had gone out of his way to cultivate American support, he had always protected American property from his confiscations, and he had been the one revolutionary leader not to condemn the United States for the occupation of Veracruz. As late as December 1914, Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan was still singing Via's praises. But there were also Americans who despised Via and supported Caranza,

the most important of them being John Lind, Wilson's special envoy in Mexico, who had been promoting Caranza to President Wilson from the beginning, and who had been in direct contact with Carranza's son-in-law in Veracruz over the summer of 1914, arranging what both men hoped would be the eventual handoff of Veracruz to Caranza. Inside Wilson's cabinet, too, there was a general feeling that a cultured and educated ascendado like Caranza was a far safer bet than a wild man-like Via. They didn't care for Caranza's uppity nationalism, nor his occasional anti-Yenki diatribes, but far better him than a bunch of barefooted Zapatistas in the presidential palace. I should also mention before we move on from this, though, that there were also business

and political interests in the United States who supported neither the constitutionalists nor the conventionists, and who were engaged, pretty deeply engaged actually, in plots to stage another counter-revolution to bring back the old Porfurian order. Among all of these groups, though, there was a growing consensus that, that the Americans needed to pull out of Veracruz sooner rather than later. Very few credible voices wanted the United States to get further embroiled in a Mexican civil war, or even worse, kickstart a second Mexican-American war, especially now that Europe had gone and started World War I.

Have I mentioned that World War I has started? No, shoot. Well, it did. Started about six months ago. With the Aguos Calientis Convention coming together in October of 1914, It seemed like there was about to be a legitimate sovereign government to hand the keys of the city to. But then the convention produced not a unified peace, but a fractured civil war. The supposedly sovereign conventionist government claimed their supposed sovereignty over Mexico,

but it was Carranza's forces that controlled the state of Veracruz. With the alternative being continuous occupation and then probably, eventually being forced into a shooting war, the pro-Karanza elements inside the United States got their way, and the Americans decided to leave Veracruz in the last week of November 1914 by default giving it to the Constitutionalists. Veracruz was a very big prize for Caranza. After all, it was Mexico's biggest port and brought with it, first of all, customs revenue, badly needed cash that would help further finance the Constitutional's war. But there was something even more immediately valuable.

In the six months, the Americans had been running Veracruz. Arms shipments had been continuing to arrive. Most of them coming from American sources, but some, at least until the outbreak of World War I, arrived from Europe. The American occupying forces dutifully offloaded these arms, consolidated them all in a warehouse complex, along with other arms that they had rounded up from army barracks and munitions depots and the Mexican Naval Academy. Historian John Mason Hart did the yeoman's work of tracking down the details of what the Americans crammed into these warehouses from overlooked and forgotten records inside those warehouses, because the records of all the activity and ammunition storage, maintained by the Americans, was carefully screened out when it came time to deposit everything in the National Archives. But we now know for sure that when the Americans pulled out, they left behind a warehouse filled floor to ceiling with all of the following. machine guns, artillery pieces, grenades, dynamite and blasting caps, bullets, cartridges, shells, shotguns, pistols, rifles, barbed wire, blasting powder, bayonets, and even a few swords.

And this was not old leftover civil war surplus. This was the newest and most advanced weaponry of the age, and it was enough to comfortably outfit an army 13,000 strong for a prolonged campaign. In the final week of the American occupation, when it was known that they were about to leave all these weapons behind and that they were about to leave all these weapons behind and that would go to Caranza. Five ships laden with even more weapons were unloaded 24 hours a day in continuously changing shifts. Then, on November the 23rd, 1914, the American occupation authorities left the keys on the table,

they boarded their ships, and they sailed away. Carranza now controlled the guns of Veracruz. Now, one thing the Americans did not leave behind, though, is the 2.6 million pesos worth of customs money they had also diligently collected during their six-month occupation. This money was deposited in a bank in New Orleans, and Carranzo was told he would be able to open a line of credit against these funds as long as he behaved himself, specifically as long as he protected Americans and other foreigners,

and took no reprisals against Mexicans who had collaborated with the occupation of Veracruz or against any of the now 15,000 refugees in the city, most of whom came from old conservative families who were enemies of the revolution. Carranza took the deal and he took the money, though this was studiously kept secret from everybody. So this was all a boon to the constitutionalist forces. But for the moment, the conventionists still had all the momentum. At their meeting outside Mexico City, the meeting we ended on last week, Via and Zapata had agreed that Sapata would go off and capture Puebla City,

while Via would go after Obrugon's armies that were gathering in and around Veracruz. But right at the outset of this quote-unquote coordinated campaign, it was anything but. Via was slow to deliver on the grandiose promises he had made about supplying Sepanta with ammunition, an artillery, and trains to haul everything around. It took repeated complaints from Sapata to get the necessary equipment. But then, when the artillery finally showed up, the small constitutionalist garrison evacuated Puebla City and Sapanta entered without firing a shot. But never liking to be far from home,

Zapata almost immediately went back to Morelos and just kind of chilled out. His lack of interest in anything outside his home state was almost pathological. But in his defense, the fall of Huerta had brought peace to Morelos for the first time in nearly five years. Everyone was exhausted. They believed they had now won. And they wanted to get on with the business of actually doing what they had been fighting so hard to do. And that was carryout revolutionary land reform. But as I said just a minute ago, though Sopanta was the most consistently focused on the matter of land redistribution, he could no longer claim that mantle all to himself.

The convention had, after all, ratified the principles of the plan of Ayala, and now even Karanza, who hated the idea, had concluded that he would lose the support of both the people and his generals if he did not embrace some kind of land reform. So on January the 6th, 1915, Karanza announced his own national plan for land redistingement. distribution. The plan said that professional survey teams would go out, analyze the titles of asciendas, and, where appropriate, peel off, divide up, and dole out small parcels of land landless. But unlike Sopanta's goal of restoring ancient communal ownership, Caranza's plan was much more traditionally liberal, really hearkening back to the days of his hero Benito Juarez, where the idea was to take national lands and divide it into individual parcels that would then be privately owned by individuals. There was not going to be the possibility of communal land under Caronza.

But parcel distribution would be open to all comers. So Caronzo was now able to say that, of course, he too was a revolutionary reformer fighting for land injustice. At this same moment, Caronzo was also able to secure another claim to being the true popular revolutionary, when he decisively won the support of urban labor. Now, I haven't talked much about urban labor because there weren't that many urban workers in Mexico. The country was overwhelmingly rural and agrarian, with minors making up the bulk of the quote-unquote industrial working classes. But there were urban industrial workers, and a union had been founded in 1912 called the Casa del Obrero Mundial, or the house of the world worker. Known shorthand as the Casa or the C-O-M, they had done a pretty good

job organizing urban labor. The urban workers did not share much in common with the landless peasants in terms of their needs or their worldview or their goals, and indeed many workers feared the invading hordes of peasant revolutionaries as much as the rich boys on the rich side of town. The union leadership of these workers also tended to be more modern and socialist and anti-clerical, further pitting them against the traditionally religious peasants. So to secure the support to the 50,000 or so members of the Casa, Carranza offered them a bunch of concessions and even encouraged them to strike for better pay and more rights. In exchange, the Casa promised to raise men to fight under Caranza's banner, and 6,000 men quickly signed up for service, forming the so-called red battalions that were about to go out and add some much-needed manpower for the war against Pancho Villa.

And it would be Poncho Villa they would be fighting. Everyone else, including Zapata, was of secondary importance. General Obrugan knew that the key to victory would be defeating the undefeated Division del Norte, which, luckily for Obrigon, we are now arriving at the tragic part of the legend of Poncho Villa, when that which had made him great is now going to destroy him. The reckless Elan, the macho self-confidence, the stubborn bravado, all that was about to blow up in his face. By January of 1915, Via had come to buy his own hype. and basically was now infected with a fatal case of hubris.

Where he formally took the advice of professional soldiers, most especially Felipe Anhalis, he now listened only to himself. Via had once trusted Anhalis's judgment so much that he let Anhalus drop the battle plan for their great victory at Zacatechus. But now, Via ignored Anhalis, who was telling him that though it looked like the constitutionalists

were the ones backed into a corner, in the long run, their position was actually quite strong. Anhalis recommended striking now at Veracruz and crushing Caranza and Obergoen before it was too late. But Via dismissed Obergoen as a real threat. He called Obrugone the perfumed one and instead decided to divert his attention to constitutionalist armies operating around Guadalajara in the west and Monterey in the east. This change of focus was Via's first great mistake. Obrugone scrambling to reorganize his forces and utilize all the guns he had just gotten from the Americans, was bracing for an attack any day now. He was shocked and thrilled when he was

told Via wasn't coming. It gave Obrugone precious time to prepare and plan. Now, Via was not merely being dumb and pig-headed here, though he was being kind of dumb and pig-headed. Enemy forces in Guadalajara threatened to block his access back to his home base in the north, which he simply could not tolerate. And as for Monterey, well, controlling Monterey meant controlling the coal fields of northeastern Mexico. And remember, it was lack of access to coal that had been the thing that had ground Via's last campaign to a halt. Plus, from Monterey, the next step would be Tampico and its oil fields. So while Annalis was right to suggest plunging the knife into the heart of Cranza right now, Via wasn't necessarily wrong about what he thought he was trying to do. The real

out-and-out self-destructive wrongness of Via doesn't come until a bit later. So Via divided his army in two. He took half to Guadalajara and entrusted Anhalis to go capture Monterey. And as much as he opposed the idea, Anhalis followed orders. He deftly executed a campaign through Saltio that saw him standing victoriously in Monterey just a few weeks later. Via meanwhile had easily taken back Guadalajara and then joined Anhalis in Monterey. So far, everything is still well in hand. Also now well in hand were compromising letters from provisional president, Laleo Gutierrez to the constitutionalist offering to defect. Via blew up when he saw these letters

that had just been accidentally left behind, and he ordered Gutierrez executed for treason. Down in Mexico City, Gutierrez was tipped off and he skipped town. And when he skipped town, he was joined in his defection by a few other high-ranking officers and about 10,000 men who had been stationed in Mexico City with them. This led obviously to a shake-up in the conventionist government, since the president just defected to the other side, and they had to hastily replace him with a 29-year-old staunch supporter of VIA, named Roke Gonzalez-Garza. But with their forces now dispersed across Mexico

and the troops that were supposed to be garrisoning the capital now gone, Mexico's city was defenseless. The conventionist government abandoned the city for the relative safety of Kornavaka, and on January the 28th, Obrugon re-entered the capital, capturing it for the second time. Obergon had no intention of sitting around Mexico City, though. This was not a war that was going to be defined by who controlled the national capital. It was going to be defined by a showdown between Via and Obergon, somewhere out there in Mexico.

Obrugan now had a firm plan of how to defeat Via. As I've said, he was a self-taught general. Obrugone not only read military history and manuals, but he also talked to foreign officers about recent innovators. about recent innovations in strategy and tactics. And boy, were there ever a lot of recent innovations in strategy and tactics, because now Obrgon had the opening campaigns of World War I to study. And what Obrugone learned from six months of World War I battles was how much the nature of war had changed.

The era where land wars could be won by courage and cavalry charges, basically the core of Poncha via success, was now over. A new era had arrived, a cold and cold and industrial era defined by trenches, barbed wire, and machine guns. Obrugone had also studied his enemy, both from afar and close up, and he was convinced that he could lure via into a trap. So he pitched Carranza on a plan to march north and goad via into a fight. Caronza was not thrilled about the idea.

The principal flaw being that Obrugan was proposing to take 12,000 to 15,000 men up north into enemy territory, and their supply lines back to Veracruz would be badly strained. If they were cut off, Obergon would be surrounded in enemy territory. He would run out of ammunition and he would get slaughtered. Obrigon was aware of this risk, but assured Kranza that he could provoke VIA into a decisive battle and destroy him before that became a problem. The one big fear that Obrugone had was what if Anhalis sees through this trap and convinces Via not to take the bait. On March the 10th, 1915, Obrugone led his army out of Mexico. city north towards the Bahia, loaded to the gills with the guns of Veracruz.

The conventionist government came down and retook the capital, but again, Mexico City was of little strategic value to anyone. Via was still riding high when Obrugan set out to meet him. His forces in the northeast were in control of the coal field and were now threatening Tampico. Now, annoyingly, after Villa had departed Guadalajara, a constitutionalist army had moved back into the city. But Via promptly marched back over and changed.

shooed them away like so many nets, and it fueled his sense of casual invincibility. But that battle in Guadalajara would be his last great victory. Obergon then entered the Bahia, the cradle of Mexican independence, and chose as the location for the great looming showdown, the city of Salaya. Salaia was perfect. It was filled with irrigated farmland, crisscrossed with ditches that could be further dug out to hinder via's vaunted cavalry. Anhalis advised Via that the best thing to do would be to draw Obergoen further north to extend his communication and supply lines even further, then cut him off and annihilate him, and if nothing else, at least don't let him pick the fuel to battle. But Via refused to listen.

He thought such games would make him look weak and cowardly, like he was trying to avoid a fight. The Division del Norte had always gone looking for the enemy. that is what his men expected him to do. Via just didn't understand the merits of a strategic retreat. And then, as if the gods really were intervening to punish Via for his hubris, Anhalas fell from his horse and was too injured to accompany the army when Via rode off towards Salaia to grapple with Obrugone. Now, I'm not sure Anhalas's presence would have really made a difference given Via's current attitude, but it certainly removed the only thing resembling the voice of reason.

So that brings us to the great turning point of the Mexican Revolution, a three-month campaign in Central Mexico between April and July 1915 that decided the fate of the Mexican Revolution. Four great battles would be fought over these three months with about 50,000 men total participating in the action. Pancho Villa will lose all four battles, and thus he will lose the Mexican Revolution. Now this did not have to be so. Both sides had their strengths and weaknesses. Sometimes those weaknesses were the same. Both sides were running on limited supplies of ammunition, and both generals feared running out of ammunition in the middle of the battle.

Obergon commanded probably 12 to 13,000 men at the beginning of April 1915. Via outnumbered him, with numbers reported anywhere from 20 to 40,000, but the conservative side probably being closer to the truth, at least at the beginning. But Obergoen was armed with more advanced and better weapon, So, on paper at least, the pluses and minuses kind of added up to the two sides being equal. The most decisive factor, though, was that Obrgon's cool professional competence, if never exactly rising to the level of genius, was being pitted against Via's reckless machismo. As Via approached Salaia, his tactical and strategic mistakes started multiplying.

He did not, for example, even bother to scout the area or attempt to pick the field of battle. He just went to wherever Obergon was. He also made no effort to reconnoiter or cut off the telegraph and rail lines that linked Obergoen back to Veracruz. He certainly underestimated Obergoen, who remember he's calling the perfumed one in a not-so-suddle dig at at Obergoon's manhood. It just did not occur to via that he was being led into a trap, nor that even if he was being led into a trap, that he wouldn't be able to just fight his way out like he always had.

in probably the most damning indictment of Via's generalship. After the fighting in Selya had ended, Obrugone cabled back to Caranza, quote, Fortunately, Via directed the battle personally. Ouch. On April 6, 1915, Obrugon opened the first battle of Salaia with a mistake of his own.

He sent a 1,500-man advance force to a assyenda that he thought was unoccupied, but which turned out to be, in fact, very occupied by the bulk of Via's forces, who then immediately attacked and overwhelmed this little advanced force. Obrugone, no coward himself, personally led an armored troop train up to rescue and evacuate these men. But while engaged in this action, he spied an opportunity to lure VIA into the trap he had so carefully laid, because waiting in the fields of Selya just a few miles away were a network of trenches, lined with barbed wire and machine guns and manned by sturdy infantry. Predictably, Via's cavalry came chasing after Obrador Gones' retreating force,

riding into the fields at full speed, where they ran right into this wall of trenches and machine guns. Via's cavalry endured heavy losses while inflicting almost no damage. Via then became stuck in a terribly unimaginative place. Cavalry charges had won nearly every battle Via had ever fought, and so he just needed to keep at it, and eventually the cavalry would break through just like it always had. This is probably an exaggeration, but it is reported that Via sent no less than 40 charges against Obergaon's trenches and machine guns, and only once in one place did they briefly crack the line.

By the end of the day, Via was running out of ammunition, and what was left of his bloody and exhausted army retired for the night. The next day they woke up to a sudden counterattack by Obrugone's infantry that sent them falling backwards. The Division del Norte was dealt their first defeat in open combat. Via managed to learn nothing from this defeat, and he blamed it principally on a shortage of ammunition. So a week later, after rearming and resupplying, he went back to work on April the 13th with the same simple idea. My brave and glorious cavalry will eventually overwhelm the enemy. But in that week, Obrugon had only dug in D'Obedergoan had only dug in deeper and had concentrated even more machine guns. Further, Obergoen held back 6,000 cavalry of his own

in a forest out of sight that Via did not even know about. Obergoen had studied Via, and he knew that Via never used reserves. Everyone in the Division Del Norte always went out all at once. So the second battle of Selya was two more days of relentless slaughter. Now this was a near-run thing for Obergoen. He too was running low on ammunition, and had to be running low on ammunition, and had Via, or more precisely Via's ally Zapata in the south, done anything to cut the rail lines back to Veracruz, we'd be sitting here talking about what a dummy Obergoen was for marching into enemy territory and allowing himself to be surrounded and annihilated. But that never happened. On April the 15th, Obergoen sent in his 6,000 fresh cavalry reserves, and that was the end of

that. The division Del Norte broke and fled in disarray. Of Via's army, 3,000 wound up dead, another 6,000 were taken prisoner. They also left behind 32 cannons, 5,000 rifles, and 1,000 horses. Of the prisoners taken, Obergon asked the officers to step forward and identify themselves after promising that they would not be shot. About 120 step forward, they were immediately lined up against a wall and shot. Via, meanwhile, retreated northwest in the direction of Leon with his senior staff in what was left of his army. He then called in all hands from the various armies he had campaigning out along the coasts,

and within a week he had as many as 35,000 men back under his command. At this point, Anhalus rejoined Via and implored him again that the situation could be salvaged if they retreated north and overextended Obergone's lines. But again, Via wouldn't do it. He wouldn't quit his bravado. He told Anhalas, if by attacking today I am beaten, by attacking tomorrow, I shall win. So, instead of retreating and regrouping, Via planted himself and prepared for another battle. He did, however, learn at least one lesson from Selya, and admitted that he may have to defeat

Obergoen at his own game. So Via entrenched 15 miles of road near the town of Trinidad. He hoped to turn the tables and forced Obrugone into his waiting arms. But Obrugone was too smart to take this bait, and he too entrenched along that same line at Trinidad. On May the 7th, what is somewhat erroneously called the Battle of Leon, but should more accurately be called the Battle of Trinidad, began. And it would go on for the next 38 days and 38 nights, a little World War I in miniature playing out in Central Mexico. Both sides dug in and only made strategic jabs around the edges with no full frontal assaults on either side. Via showed some discipline. Obrugone was all about discipline.

but they were both starting to hear it from the officers and men under their command that this way of fighting was cowardly. It was not what they wanted to be doing. So it was really going to come down to who would lose their patience first. I will let you guess who it was. That's right, it was Via. Obrugone had been under pressure himself and promised his generals that on June 5th, if Via had done nothing, then the Constitutionals would launch an attack. But Via snapped first. Three days before Obrugone's deadline, Via launched a wide offensive aimed at coming around Obrugone's rear.

But Via's forces were unable to crack Obrugan's lines, and a critical part of Via's offensive got bogged down, and the whole operation turned into a bloody fiasco. But this offensive nearly saw the end of Alvaro Obrugan. On June the 3rd, he was surveying the battlefield from the Tower of Anasienda when it was hit by a shell. The explosion tore Obrugon's right arm off. He was hustled out of the blast zone, but as he lay there, one arm gone and in agony, he thought he was bleeding to death and that this was the end. So to cut to the chase, he pulled out his pistol, put it to his head, and pulled the trigger. But the night before his aide had cleaned the pistol and not reloaded it, so it just went click. The medics then patched obiter going up, and he managed to escape without it getting infected.

So he lived. The lost arm was then fed. and later embalmed, and would become a potent symbol of Obrigon's sacrifice and patriotism. It was a huge part of his propaganda machine, a reminder of the sacrifices that he had made for Mexico. I should also note that in the future, Obrugone always made sure to tailor his suits, not to conceal the lost arm, but to highlight it. He never wanted anyone to forget that he represented courage and sacrifice and patriotism. So Obrugan lived, and his men fought on, and they went ahead with their plans that they had already laid for a June

the 5th offensive, which was now thankfully a counterattack against a much weakened opponent. So they charged out and once again broke Via's army and sent it flailing backwards. Historians love attaching the name Waterloo to anything that resembles someone's final great defeat. But historians of the Mexican Revolution can't agree on whether to call the battles of Salaia, via Waterloo, or the Battle of Leon, via Waterloo. whichever Waterloo you prefer, it had now come and gone, and it was with a massively depleted and utterly demoralized core that Via stumbled back north. He still refused to give up, however,

and he gathered what was left of his remaining strength, and he made one last stand at Aguas Calientes, site of the convention that just six months earlier had made him one of the most powerful men in Mexico. But in July of 1915 they stood there in Aguas Calientes, they faced their enemy, and for the fourth time in a row, the Division del Norte was battered and broken and scattered. Via ran back to Chihuahua. The Division del Norte, who was destroyed, it no longer exists. And Poncho Villa would never again be a major force in national politics. Now, this is not to say that Poncho Villa is giving up. Poncho Villa was a lot of things, but he was not a quitter. He had started out, leading a small guerrilla force of loyal men as he played the Robin Hood and the avenging angel of the North,

and he certainly was not going to give up now just because he didn't have an army anymore. In fact, we haven't even gotten to the thing that makes Poncho Villa most famous in the United States, practically the only thing that people know about him, that in March of 1916, he invaded the United States, which led to the second invasion of Mexico by the United States, as General Pershing is going to spend a year leading around a U.S. army trying to hunt via down. So next week, the war will go on. But after this great turning point, Carranza and Obrugan and the Constitutionalists are clearly in line to win that war. Of course, laying the groundwork for the next fratricidal civil war of the Mexican Revolution.