The Great War: The North American Front, page 1
The Great War
The North American Front
H. Will Pasto
Copyright © 2014 H. Will Pasto
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 1499516762
ISBN-13: 978-1499516760
Other Works by H. Will Pasto
Life in Eden
The Wall of Althasia
Crossing off the Bar
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FORWARD
PROLOGUE
MEXICAN ARMAMENT
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
WAR
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
PUSHBACK
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY FOUR
CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE
CHAPTER TWENTY SIX
CHAPTER TWENTY SEVEN
CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT
CHAPTER TWENTY NINE
CHAPTER THIRTY
CHAPTER THIRTY ONE
CHAPTER THIRTY TWO
CHAPTER THIRTY THREE
AFTERMATH
CHAPTER THIRTY FOUR
CHAPTER THIRTY FIVE
Author’s Notes
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I would like to thank George Scott for his assistance in military history and tactics. I’d also like to thank John Pasto for his help with naval warfare and chorography. Finally, I’d like to thank the Cartography Guild; they had a mapmaking contest last summer pertaining to drawing an alternate history map. I didn’t win, but this book resulted from my work on that map.
This is a work of fiction. While some historical characters are used, none of the other characters are meant to represent any person, real or imagined. Any similarities are completely coincidental.
FORWARD , Twenty-First Edition
Forty-six years ago my father published the book that was to become one of the seminal works on the Great War in North America. He is an interesting man. He’s a historian, an author, and a novelist, however, when he wrote this book in 1971 he was no novelist, and although this book reads like a novel, it’s not a novel—the events in this book are factually accurate. He always has admitted that he had to use a bit of literary license on the actual conversations, but he believes it captured the spirit of what actually happened without reading like a dry historical manual.
This book has been published and republished twenty times since it first hit the bookshelves in 1971, and Enrique Perez, Ph.D., my father, still feels it is his finest work. This year, 2017, will be the centennial of when the Great War arrived in North America, and this book is about three men, two of Enrique’s grandfathers and one of his great-uncles all three who fought in the war, but on opposite sides.
Olivia Smith-Perez, Ph.D.
Department of History
Georgetown University
Washington, D.C.
PROLOGUE
Mexico won her independence from Spain on September 27, 1821 and it seemed that ever since she had been sparring with her neighbor to the north, the United States. At its greatest extent, Mexico stretched from Panama to the Oregon Territory, but that started crumbling in 1835 when Texas and the Yucatan both succeeded from the republic. That probably would not have happened if Mexico had a stable government, but no one south of the Red River believed that Texas would have remained a wayward province had James K Polk not had aspirations of imperialism. This led to the Mexican-American War ten years later which cost the nation Alta California, over a third of its territory.
For the next six decades Mexico struggled through one dictator after another while the Americans exploited the country’s natural wealth and did everything they could to keep it weak and subservient. The start of the twentieth century saw the Americans truly become an imperial power. They took the Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Cuba from Spain. They occupied Nicaragua. They instigated a rebellion in Columbia and helped the Isthmus of Panama declare independence before then cutting that new country in half to build a canal.
In 1910, President Porfirio Díaz refused to allow Francisco Madero González, a young and popular opponent, to run against him for President, prompting Madero to rebel. Madero finally succeeded in defeating Díaz with the help of some charismatic rebels, Venustiano Carranza de la Garza, Álvaro Obregón Salido, Pablo González Garza, Emiliano Zapata Salazar, and José Doroteo Arango Arámbula, who went by the pseudonym of Francisco “Pancho” Villa.
Madero was able to defeat the Federal forces and forced Díaz to resign in 1911, but he was only able to serve for sixteen months before being ousted by a coup by one of his generals, Victoriano Huerta Márquez. Huerta was strongly supported and aided by the American ambassador to Mexico, Henry Lane Wilson, and after the brutal murder of Madero, the Mexican people turned against the man would later be known as both the Jackal and the Usurper.
Within days of Huerta’s ascension, Carranza reorganized the rebel forces against him, calling themselves Constitutionalists. The Constitutionalists had a number of stunning victories in the northwest states of Sonora and Chihuahua and started pressing south towards Mexico City. At the same time, the agrarian reformer, Zapata, continued his single-issue rebellion in Morelos, just south of the capital.
Once again, the imperial America, now led by a new president, Woodrow Wilson, chose to interfere with Mexico. Wilson refused to recognize Huerta and enacted an embargo on arms entering the country. During this intervention, a few incidents happened that forever changed the relation between the two countries.
On April 9, 1914, nine American sailors from the USS Dolphin, a gunboat and temporary flagship for Rear Admiral Henry Mayo, sailed too close to the fighting in Tampico and were captured by the Federal Army garrison. When the mistake was realized, they were immediately released, but Mayo demanded both an apology and a salute to the American ships. When the Mexicans refused, Wilson asked Congress for permission to invade Mexico.
On April 21, ships from the Atlantic Fleet landed troops in Veracruz, supposedly to prevent the German cargo ship, SS Ypiranga from landing with arms for Huerta. After two days of fierce fighting, Old Glory was raised over the city.
This event, and the complete inability of the Federal Army or Navy to stop it, finally galvanized the Mexicans in a common goal: to prevent the Americans from invading Mexico ever again. Mass defections of Federal troops and generals occurred and in early June, the closest supporters of Huerta, General José Refugio Velasco, his Defense Minister, and Francisco Carvajal y Gual, his Foreign Minister, informed the President that he had lost all support. On June 6, Huerta was allowed to go into exile and Carvajal assumed the presidency.
Carvajal immediately invited all parties to the capital and opened a constitutional convention. Attending were Carranza, Villa, González, and Obregón for the Constitutionalist faction, and Carvajal, Velasco, and General Gustavo Maass, former commander of the Veracruz garrison, supporting the Federal faction. Also present were the Mexican Congress and most of the state governors—all were invited, but some were unable to attend. Noticeably absent from the convention was Emiliano Zapata; he was invited as well, but he refused to lay down arms, publically stating that all Federal officers should be hanging from the end of a rope.
He continued to organize the state of Morelos and he gathered his army in Cuernavaca, only seventy miles south of Mexico City. When Carvajal learned of this, he informed the delegates that if Zapata marched on the capital, it would most likely prompt the Americans to invade from Veracruz, in order to protect American interests, and occupy the heart of Mexico. Since no one wanted American involvement, Carranza assumed overall military command and launched a bold attack. Villa loaded his Division of the North, 45,000 men strong, on trains in their encampment in Ojo de Agua, and they rode through the capital city southwest towards Cuernavaca. Meanwhile, and with no fanfare, Obregón took his divisions, 25,000 men, west to the city of Toluca and then southeast through the mountain passes to enfilade Cuernavaca from the west. Velasco also attacked with 20,000 men, heading southeast through Totolapan and around Yautepec de Zaragoza before striking Cuernavaca from the southeast.
Zapata’s attention was completely on Villa, whom he viewed as the worst kind of traitor for abandoning the cause of the peasants. He suspected the size and force of Villa’s army and marched his own out of the city to capture the high ground along the border of the Federal District, but Villa, using the rail line between the cities reached it first and dug in. He put his infantry just forward of the crest and his artillery just behind and above the infantry. He also cleared out every tree for fifty feet in front of his lines, leaving the enemy nowhere to hide if they charged.
Zapata remembered fondly Pancho Villa’s cavalry exploits in Chihuahua, and remembered how much Villa loved being on horseback, so he positioned his infantry to combat any cavalry tactics. The men were positioned behind trees and rocks, spread out so a single cha
rge could not displace them. Zapata had no artillery, but he assumed that no one else would carry heavy guns into the mountains either. What he had discounted was Villa’s fondness for railroads and what he learned since Chihuahua.
Villa also interspersed machine gun nests in his lines to resist any charge by the Zapatistas. Once in place, Villa stopped. He did not fire a single volley into the Zapatistas lines and did not make any charges. Finally, at 3pm, June 30, 1914, Zapata ran out of patience and ordered a charge on the Villistas’ lines. The charge up the mountain was slow, the average slope to reach Villa’s position was easily twenty degrees, and by the time Zapata’s men got to the clearing, they were moving no faster than a crawl.
At 3:22 a horn blew and every machine gun opened up on the fully exposed Zapatistas; Villa was ruthless and waited until they were twenty feet away from his lines. The shock felt by the charging infantry was utterly demoralizing and many died on the spot. Many more died trying to make their way back to the trees and only a small handful of the three hundred men Zapata charged with returned to their lines. What none of them even considered once the counterattack started was to continue with the charge.
Despite the decisive victory, Villa ordered his men to avoid any counterattack until he gave the signal—he was waiting on the other two armies to get into position, and the line fell silent again.
Early on July second, Villa received word that both Obregón and Velasco were within sight of the city, and were ready for a diversion. Villa had been scouting the Zapatista position for days and now he felt reasonably sure where all Zapata’s positions were.
At 5:30am on July 2, every gun in Villa’s position started firing from their sheltered positions. He had carried twenty 4.7-inch howitzer and thirty 3.8-inch field guns. The howitzers started raining shrapnel down all along Zapata’s lines forcing his men to dig deeper into the ground. Villa also ordered two guns to aim at the Zapatista command tent.
At 6 a.m., the artillery of the other two armies started shelling the Zapatista lines from due west and east by southeast, and the spirit of the peasant warriors broke. Unknown at the time, Zapata was killed by the first shell aimed at his tent, and his second-in-command, General Gildardo Magaña Cerda, was not up to the task of holding his army together.
At 6:30, an hour after the shelling started, the guns fell silent and the infantry from all three armies charged in. In the melee that followed, ten thousand Zapatistas fell and almost five thousand of the combined Federal/Constitutionalist troops, but by 4pm, Magaña had enough and ordered his men to lay down arms. By 6pm, all fighting had stopped and Magaña was in the custody of Obregón.
The Zapatistas soldiers were marched into a field north of the city and held at gunpoint by Velasco’s army who also marched into Cuernavaca and took possession of the capital and the state. Carvajal made Velasco the military governor of Morelos and ordered Magaña and his top officers to be brought to Mexico City for trial and sentencing.
The generals sent to crush the Zapatista rebellion were given specific orders to capture Zapata and return him to Mexico City for trial, and ever since the battle, rumors have persisted that someone, probably Carranza, gave someone, probably Obregón, secret orders to kill the rebel. Even though it was quickly established that Villa’s artillery actually killed Zapata, the rumors persisted.
When Magaña arrived before Carvajal, he was given a simple choice: he could either reject the rebellious ideals of his former superior, declare Zapata’s Liberation Army of the South to be dissolved, and accept the legitimate government of Mexico, as will be established at the convention, or he could continue to insist on rebellion. If he chose the former, he and his officers would be granted a full pardon, his soldiers would be paroled and allowed to return to their families, and he would be welcomed into the conference as a full and equal member, taking the place that was offered to Zapata. Unsurprisingly, Magaña accepted the first choice and took his seat at the Convention of Mexico City insisting that he would push for the agrarian reforms that Zapata started his revolution over.
Almost completely unnoticed in Mexico, it was carried on page 22 below the fold, was the news from Sarajevo in the Austro-Hungarian Empire that the crown prince, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was assassinated. The only note made by the Austrian embassy was to fly the flag at half-mast.
On July 27, 1914, the Republic of Mexico had its first stable constitution since 1857, and this one set strong limits on how someone could actually become president. The president could hold only one six year term, there was no vice-president, no one currently in a Federal position could hold the office and if there was a vacancy, the Senate would appoint an interim president and call for a special election to fill the remainder of the president’s term. Anyone who had been interim president or filled the term of a former president would be forever ineligible to hold the office again. There was also a provision aimed at the United States that stated no foreigner may participate in any way in the political affairs of the republic and that no foreign nation may hold territory recognized as sovereign Mexican soil.
This last provision was violated immediately when Carvajal hired German nationals as military consultants to help modernize the army and navy. The Germans had supported Mexico for some time and as a means to increase their global power, they were happy to help the Mexicans become a regional power, especially in exchange for Mexican silver and copper, both of which were going to become scarce and in high demand with the upcoming war.
On July 7, while Mexico was trying to finish compiling their new constitution, Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, the German ambassador in Mexico City, met with Carvajal and informed him that their military advisors were being recalled home in preparation for war, but he had arranged for a small handful to remain to finish their assistance, and to maintain friendship between the countries. When the fourteen Germans, along with Bernstorff, set sail from Puerto México for Hamburg. The hold of the ship contained a large amount of Mexican silver and copper as a partial payment for the expertise provided as well as payment for the old battleship SMS Rheinland, which was now reflagged as the ARM Benito Juárez.
Carvajal was very aggressive in preparing Mexico to stand on her own. He gained recognition from Woodrow Wilson and the rest of the international community, and on September 30th, an agreement was brokered by the ABC Countries, Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, where the United States agreed to vacate Veracruz by the end of the October. During the negotiations, Mexico did not mention the buildup of her armed forces...and the United States didn’t ask about it either.
MEXICAN ARMAMENT
CHAPTER ONE
Epiphany: Wednesday January 6, 1915 Hermosillo, Sonora, Mexico
“My dear,” Jorge Perez Castro said softly, again, “I must go. I legally joined the Federal Army. This isn’t the same Federales that Huerta,” he spit on the ground when he said that name, “used to subjugate all of us. Among other things, this army pays. Pays in silver, no less. I already gave my mother fifty pesos, which is another reason I must go. Besides, the war is over and the Americans have left our country. I will be perfectly safe. Very soon, a professional soldier will be a respectable and honored profession.”
Francisca Vasquez Vargas pouted, Jorge loved it when she did that—he thought it showed her best features and made her look almost pure-bred Spanish. She knew the last bit was the real reason he was joining the army. Jorge grew up on an independent farm south of Hermosillo on fifty acres that were barely able to produce enough to feed the family, much less provide an income. He was sixteen when his father died, thrown from a horse, and his older brother inherited the farm. If Jorge actually thought about it, he would realize that his brother taking over the farm was a good thing, finally it became profitable, and more importantly, Miguel insisted that Jorge continue with school and actually make something of himself in this new century.
Francisca was of a completely different breed. The eighth of ten children from a family that owned a large hacienda in the foothills northeast of Hermosillo. She was never lacking anything. She had a line of tutors from Europe and never set foot in one of the public schools in Hermosillo. The Vasquezs were wealthy and respected in Sonora and for most of the children, it was expected they would marry into their station...and be happy about it.
