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Post by garyzaboly on Jul 24, 2010 14:47:05 GMT -5
Gary: I have read an account recently of Henry V's siege of Harfleur. During that siege the French sotied several times for exactly the reasons you describe. So yes, the action at the sugar mill could indeed be for any of these purposes. It could also be for something like Herb suggests, a recon patrol. In fact it could very well be a standing recon patrol that went out every night, with the only difference being that this one was detected and therefore reported. I just wish that the language of the day had been less flowery or romantic and much more specific. Repelled by our advance. I can recall similar language from a Confederate report on the Battle of Ox Hill (or Chantilly). What that little phrase did not tell you was that in this particular instance it was a full blown engagement between two army corps that cost a 1000 lives. It's indeed a shame, Chieftain, that the Alamo siege is one of the worst documented important sieges in our history, notwithstanding all the accounts that have come down to us. On a day by day basis, we are left with very little to work with.
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Post by Chuck T on Jul 24, 2010 15:20:55 GMT -5
Yes it is
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Post by Herb on Jul 24, 2010 15:28:45 GMT -5
I don't think there is too much that can be determined with what little we have, though I feel that a recon patrol is the most likely, I wouldn't bet a donut on it! ;D The two things that seem least likely to me are the second reinforcement, or Walter Lord's diversion for J.W. Smith. The problem with the diversion is that the gunfire would alert every Mexican in the surrounding area and make Smith's getaway even more difficult. Nothing in stone, just my 2 cents.
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Post by jrboddie on Jul 24, 2010 15:45:59 GMT -5
I know we are down to speculation at this point but I wonder about the objective of a recon mission. I'm not a military man but think that such a party would have some specific goal in mind. For example:
Could this be an escape route? Is an attack coming? How soon? How much force will be coming from the north?
In other words, there would be little value in risking lives to get information that can not be acted upon in some way. For the garrison, that meant helping them break out or improving their defences in some way.
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Post by Chuck T on Jul 24, 2010 18:00:51 GMT -5
Of the three possible objectives of a recon patrol, your second and third could very well be what they had in mind for the mission. As I said earlier this could have very well been a routine patrol that was carried out every night. It just as well might have been a one of a kind. We have no way of knowing.
I think that a lot of the mystery stems from Travis himself - the commander. I have no idea why someone gave him a commission as Lieutenant Colonel of Cavalry. Perhaps is was simply the fact he could read and write. Maybe it was a combination of the latter and the fact he owned a horse. It certainly was not the fact that he had a great deal of military experience. That is where the problem in trying to figure him out partially lies.
I find that Herb and I are generally in agreement. Not always of course. I think that stems from the fact that while we differ in the branches of the Army we served in, we were still tutored in the same basic doctrine. That doctrine is not new. Some of it goes back as far as Gideon, Sun Tzu, and Alexander the Great. Our present organizational construct in the U S Army can be directly traced to the Legions of Rome. The end result is a common starting point.
With Travis we cannot be sure that his thought process was confined in this manner. Sometimes that is very good indeed. It is said that one of the people responsible for helping Montgomery win El Alamein was a stage magician only a few short months before. A lot of military inovation has been done by people with no previous military experience. All this said the only harm done by these folks is to people like us who are trying to figure out their thought process well after the fact with only very few, and sometimes suspect, details to go on.
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Post by Chuck T on Jul 24, 2010 18:41:01 GMT -5
One additional comment on Travis to illustrate the point I made above about his thought process. After the attack on the morning of 25 February he sent out a party to burn the jacales that the Mexican attack had used for cover. My training tells me that the jacales would have been destroyed, to clear fields of fire either before or concurrent with strenthening defenses inside the compound. Once fields of fire are cleared then the strengthing of your position is and ongoing process until such a time as you displace.
Some might say, and have, that it would be unwise to destroy this property and possibly displace those living there unitil the enemy was in sight. The enemy was in sight on the afternoon of the 23rd and these buildings could have been torched on the way into the Alamo.
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Post by garyzaboly on Jul 25, 2010 4:54:28 GMT -5
Of the three possible objectives of a recon patrol, your second and third could very well be what they had in mind for the mission. As I said earlier this could have very well been a routine patrol that was carried out every night. It just as well might have been a one of a kind. We have no way of knowing. I think that a lot of the mystery stems from Travis himself - the commander. I have no idea why someone gave him a commission as Lieutenant Colonel of Cavalry. Perhaps is was simply the fact he could read and write. Maybe it was a combination of the latter and the fact he owned a horse. It certainly was not the fact that he had a great deal of military experience. That is where the problem in trying to figure him out partially lies. I find that Herb and I are generally in agreement. Not always of course. I think that stems from the fact that while we differ in the branches of the Army we served in, we were still tutored in the same basic doctrine. That doctrine is not new. Some of it goes back as far as Gideon, Sun Tzu, and Alexander the Great. Our present organizational construct in the U S Army can be directly traced to the Legions of Rome. The end result is a common starting point. With Travis we cannot be sure that his thought process was confined in this manner. Sometimes that is very good indeed. It is said that one of the people responsible for helping Montgomery win El Alamein was a stage magician only a few short months before. A lot of military inovation has been done by people with no previous military experience. All this said the only harm done by these folks is to people like us who are trying to figure out their thought process well after the fact with only very few, and sometimes suspect, details to go on. Travis had had marginal experience in earlier Texian-Mexican encounters as a commander of foot soldiers, but he DID have plenty of active field experience in late 1835 as a commander of mounted troops. His greatest moment in fact was capturing a Mexican army horse herd (some 300 mounts, and a few mules) many miles south of Bexar, and moving them north to hand them over to Austin. He had also led mounted patrols south to burn grass that Santa Anna's army would need, and had also been deployed on scout and guard duty. The Texian army, inexplicably, decided afterwards to appoint him an Artillery officer. He refused, stating that he preferred the cavalry. When he found himself leading just a few mounted men men to San Antonio in 1836, he wanted to quit, rightly feeling that a lieutenant colonel of cavalry should be in charge of many more troopers. I'm not convinced that the sortie towards the sugar mill would have necessarily been a mounted one. During the 1835 campaign to take Bexar all sorts of operations were done on foot by the Texians, often in broad daylight. Ditto elsewhere during the siege of the Alamo itself. Looking at the Alamo siege through the lens of the modern military, at least from the Texian point of view, may give us some misleading ideas. The garrison, for all the varying military experience some of the men might have had, were still rank amateurs, and the officers couldn't make them work, really ("the men here will not labour," noted Jameson back in January). Not burning the jacales close to the walls until the Mexicans had almost surrounded them is one good example of this. So too is the fact that they did not dig a workable well inside the compound until February 23!
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Post by Chuck T on Jul 25, 2010 9:33:55 GMT -5
Gary: I think you are correct about whatever happened at the sugar mill. It was most likely a dismounted operation. I would also lean towards the view that is was probably a small party engaged in what could be one of two or three different types of operations.
We also don't know if it actually happened in the immediate vacinity of the sugar mill, or if the Mexican troops engaged were stationed at the sugar mill and had outposted the position by placing them a hundred or two hundred meters in front of their position on the Alamo side of the river.
So the only thing we can say with a fair degree of certainty is that Mexican troops belonging to the unit stationed at the sugar mill encountered an unknown number of defenders that were engaged in an undertermined type of mission, to the northwest of the north wall of the Alamo..
I also don't dismiss out of hand that it may have been a mission to support a preplaned break in. But that begs the question - by who, and if it was a attempt why are there no outside the garrison accounts of the attempt?
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Post by Rich Curilla on Jul 25, 2010 11:39:35 GMT -5
I'm fascinated by this discussion and have sat here poised and ready to put in my two cents regarding trying to process this action of non-military people through modern military thinking, but I see you all have finally addressed that very well. And yes, Travis did have some experience and successes as a commander. I have to assume however that his Byronic and legal mind had other tugs and pushes than Caesar's Gallic Wars. Could he have brought "stage magician" talents to the field? Likewise quien sabe? My feeling however is that his achievements during those 13 days would have leaned more in that direction.
Who was present in the garrison who would have had solid military training or knowledge and would he have been consulted by Travis? Bowie was ill; Rose left (if he was there). I would even question Bowie's professional military prowess. He was great with militia out in the open, but would he have excelled in sophistocated siege warfare?
A note on the action of the 25th. (even though this ain't the place), I'm questioning what exactly the defenders sallied and burnt and did the jacales still surround Plaza de Valero or were the nearest ones (as Filisola said) at the south end between the plaza and Alameda St.?
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Post by Herb on Jul 25, 2010 12:14:01 GMT -5
A couple of points, related to the above posts, There are certain constants in military actions in the gunpowder age. The formost of these is the commander's dilemina of how to close that final 300 yards between his troops and the enemy. What has radically changed is SCALE, because of obvious things weapon's ranges, communications, etc. much smaller forces operate in much larger spaces. An example is Gettysburg, the Union line on the second and third day was occupied by about 80,000 men. A modern commander would be hard put to place more than 5 platoons in that space or about 150 - 200 men.
At this level, the tactical concerns, are very much the same, and the commanders will reach very similar dispositions when it comes to key terrain - but the number of men employed will be dramatically different.
The Gifted Amateur, still exsists, but because of this dramatic change of scale, the gifted amateur will generally be found at much lower levels or on staff. Battalion commanders, lieutenant colonels, today will often control the same space that a 2 star general. division commanders, controlled in WWII, or an Army Commander did in the Civil War. Because that space involves coordination and control of all the various arms and just as importantly logistic considerations that dwarfed his historical predecesors' much more education and training is required.
Again, the problems of how to cover that final 300 yards, how to get to that point, and so on, haven't really changed. The options have simply mutiplied, and the man making the decisions, is generally much more junior in rank.
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Post by Herb on Jul 25, 2010 12:23:49 GMT -5
I'm not convinced that the sortie towards the sugar mill would have necessarily been a mounted one. During the 1835 campaign to take Bexar all sorts of operations were done on foot by the Texians, often in broad daylight. Ditto elsewhere during the siege of the Alamo itself. It really goes even beyond that, Texians really did not start conducting true mounted operations until the Rangers received their Patterson pistols from the Texas Navy. Up until that time, their mounted operation were those of "Mounted Rifles" ie ride to the battle site then fight as infantry. The plain fact was up until then the Texians were inferior and more importantly knew it to their mounted enemies.
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Post by garyzaboly on Jul 25, 2010 13:47:44 GMT -5
We would have to examine the biographies of the garrison members to see just how much real military experience was possessed by them. Crockett, for one, had participated in at least three sizable engagements in the Creek War (and was of course well versed in scouting---in an eastern forest, anyway). Bowie no doubt gave advice, even while abed; we have Tejano accounts that state he was still cognizant enough during most of the siege to talk to people intelligently. There had been a hell of a lot of fighting around Bexar just a few months earlier, and those veterans of that campaign still with Travis could justly call themselves veterans. Of course all this doesn't make them experts at withstanding a siege.
Even if Jameson had military manuals, he had trouble getting the men to work until everything exploded on February 23rd. As so often happens in our history, it took a sudden crisis for action to be taken.
Just what the purpose of that sally to the sugar mill was is difficult to gauge. But since it occured on the very night of the day that Santa Anna received his reinforcing division, I would lean towards it being an attempt to try to set the enemy back a day or two by creating whatever havoc they could. If a courier was also sent out at the same time, more's the better. But we just don't know.
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Post by Rich Curilla on Jul 25, 2010 14:05:01 GMT -5
Just for some specific terrain information, here's what Filisola said in describing the environs in relation to the Siege of Bexar.
"All the land surrounding the city and the banks of the river are covered with thick woods and a sort of brush with which the fields have filled up for lack of cultivation. This lends the greatest facility to enemy ambushes and offers a great danger to those people." [from Filisola, Woolsey, Vol. II, p.82]
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Post by Rich Curilla on Jul 25, 2010 14:13:35 GMT -5
If we are looking at the Molino Blanco, any sally from the north wall would have had to cross six or eight fence lines or overgrown remnants of fence lines and several acequia laterals to even reach the river bank across from the mill. Taking Filisola at his word, those fields would be choaked with spiny scrub growth and very difficult for infantry or cavalry to cross. Even the closer mill downstream had similar obstacles, if for about half the distance.
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Post by Chuck T on Jul 25, 2010 14:17:15 GMT -5
I could, were I to set my mind to it, probably go through every available thing we know about the siege of the Alamo and be very critical of many of the actions Travis took or failed to take. That said, I believe he did a rather remarkable job, given his limited experience and assets.
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