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Post by Herb on Aug 13, 2010 21:58:53 GMT -5
Allan, those are some great questions, but they require a little work, and I'll work on providing some answers tomorrow. Though, I'll take an opening stab. The official afteraction reports of the time didn't have an established/official format, but they did pretty much follow a pattern. Sesma's report definitly fits that pattern, and is a good place to start. Although its 25 years later the Official Records (OR) of the Civil War is almost totally after action reports, it's something like a 100 volume collection and holds virtually every afteraction report of both sides of the Civil War. It can be found at most good university libraries. and of course through interlibrary loans. It is a great place to look if you really want to understand the difference in these reports from other correspondence, offical or otherwise. You'll also see the significant time factor involved in the preparation of these reports. There is a significant deal of politics in these type of reports, and you have to spend sometime in them to begin to understand the parts that are reliable and the places where generals are using "spin". The things that usually are reliable are the maneuvers described, wihich is what they are best used for. Casuality reports both friendly and enemy, on the other hand, seem to be almost always exaggerated in the writing officer's favor. While out and out lies are somewhat rare, half truthes and not telling the whole story are very common. Personally I like diaries and documents not meant for publication best, They usually don't have the detail of the afteraction reports, but obviously since they are usually not met for publication, they don't normally have any political spin to them at all and seem more oftenthan not to be the truth (at least as that person sees the truth). But as these private documents (unless its the commanders personal diary) don't deal with the same scope or level of detail, you really need to use all of them to paint an accurate picture. While it is irrelevant to the debate in this topic, modern after action reports in the US Army do have a format they follow called the Battlefield Operating Systems or BOS. While it's much more organized I think it's much more bueraucratic then the old style. And, while it's more usable for future operations it's significantly less useful as a historic tool. More tomorrow.
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Post by stuart on Aug 14, 2010 7:18:48 GMT -5
Again endorsing Herb's post. Sesma's report is a good example of the sort of thing you can expect to find, but it does need to be read carefully; it will be fairly reliable in describing what a particular unit did, but not why, and even less reliable in what it says about neighbouring friendly and unfriendly units. Sesma for example reports a triumph, but those successive reinforcements fed into the fight indicate it wasn't quite the walkover he'd like to suggest. Its all a matter of experience, you soon get to know how to read them to understand what was really going on.
By way of an uncontroversial example a favourable inspection report on the Madras European Dragoons in 1771 noted that they went through their exercise "tolerably well" and "went through the firings and evolutions with spirit and tolerable exactness", and that while most of their horses were in "very good order, a few were "rather too fiery, and some appear vicious". In other words he gave them a pass mark, despite the fact their drill was atrocious and their horses were untrained and uncontrollable.
As to the gaps, this is where we have to treat diaries with a certain tolerence. The additional detail is invaluable but of course the writer's personal knowledge is limited to what he himself can see and hear; knowing this he'll naturally fill gaps and seek explanations from others - which is why we have all this nonsense about the authenticity of the DLP diary. Most of what's in there is what he himself witnessed, but like anybody else if he missed something he asked around and filled the gaps with material he believed to be accurate but couldn't personally vouch for
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Post by garyzaboly on Aug 14, 2010 7:36:25 GMT -5
Wolf,
I completely disagree with the "apples and oranges" dismissal of my presentation of evidence that contradicts the assumption that "protocol" in the Mexican army did not allow for the dissemination of after-action reports to other commanders, or even to a public arena. In fact, I believe I'm right on-target.
The argument has been this: would any subordinate's after-action report of the March 6th assault, aside from Santa Anna's, have been copied and sent out in a courier's mail pouch, to other commanders as well as to the Mexican government and/or newspapers? Would this have been done in other regions of the conflict as well?
Based on the evidence, YES! There were in fact official action reports flying all over the place during the Mexican campaign of 1836. These were:
* Copies of reports sent by Santa Anna to his commanders
* Copies of reports sent by Santa Anna to the government
*Copies of reports sent by Santa Anna's commanders, and their subordinates, to him
*Copies of reports sent by Santa Anna's commanders, and their subordinates, to the government
*Copies of reports sent by Santa Anna's commanders, and their subordinates, to the Mexican newspapers
* Copies of reports sent by Santa Anna, his commanders, and their subordinates, to General Francisco Fernandez, who was stationed on the Rio Grande and acted as a kind of depot for official correspondence.
So these second---and possibly even third and fourth copies---of a variety of military reports, from simple logistical summaries to personal accounts of battle actions, were being widely dispersed during Santa Anna's campaign, often in public spheres.
To say with any surety that NO copy of a March 6th after-action report, other than Sesma's, and possibly Morales's, will ever be found in a Mexican archive, is blatantly presumptuous, and it's a presumption I would never commit myself to make.
The impression has been given that any such report Santa Anna received would have been kept by him under essential lock and key. What I've tried to do here is present actual evidence to the contrary, not just theories or hunches or opinions culled from modern-day experiences. I would call the latter approach often interesting, especially when discussed around a campfire, but it provides none of the hard documentation responsible historians require to prove salient points about conditions and actions occurring almost two centuries ago.
The March 15 Sesma account of his capture of Gonzales is a perfect example that refutes the initial point (made early on here) that all inter-army reports were held by the commander of the section and, if lost in a battle or fire, etc., tough cookies, History! My counter-point, made with actual documentation, proves that this was not the case at all. And to say that Sesma's March 15 report is not a battle action and was printed just to glorify Santa Anna and his section's progress (or that it does not qualify as an after-action report), is trying to divert the real issue.
In fact, Mexican newspapers---and afterwards, the U.S. papers that reprinted them---were full of such reports, both after-action, "official" battle reports, as well as reports detailing such mundane achievements as seizing an abandoned enemy town. These reports were written not only by the section commanders, but by some of their subordinates as well. The campaign territory they cover is immense: from Ft Lipantitlan to the Mexican army's retreat from Texas in the late spring. Many of the reports echo Sesma's March 11 report by noting the heroism of certain soldiers, for instance, or men who died gallantly while defeating the enemy---just as Sesma did. Even Cos's second in command, Colonel Ugartechea, wrote reports from a besieged Bexar in 1835 that were published in Mexican newspapers, detailing some of the actions there.
I have done an immense amount of research in this area, and much of the results of that labor will appear in my new book, which will see print next year. I guess this is why I am so adamant about this issue, since the original contention made in this thread simply flies in the face of the evidence.
If Santa Anna's "March 6" report was not an "official" report as he himself called it, it's the only one he did write in 1836 that describes the Alamo battle in any detail, much as we may find that exasperating. Even EL NACIONAL (issue no. 79, 1836) introduced it by stating:
"The official reports and other documentation that we insert below need no comment."
Clearly his "March 6" report was considered the "official" one at the time.
By the way, I must add this about the Mexican newspapers: they haven't been researched worth a d**n. Nor do many of them exist anymore, and many others remain widely scattered and hidden. We simply do not know how many more "after-action reports" were published in them during the Texas campaign. By the example shown in the few copies that do survive, published they indeed were.
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Post by garyzaboly on Aug 14, 2010 7:46:25 GMT -5
Also...and not unimportantly, since "protocol" of all European-based armies of the day was to make copies of official reports and letters, we can't simply say that because the originals, or copies, may have been captured or lost in a battle, that duplicates do not exist, or were not sent, elsewhere. An example is the certified copy Ramon Caro made in Bexar on 6 March 1836 of Santa Anna's attack orders of 5 March, now in the Archivo Historica, SEDENA. And many more examples exist, Tom. From after-action reports to lists of captured armaments. And you could not get more technically ponderous than Santa Anna was in these orders, yet they too saw print in Mexican newspapers.
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Post by garyzaboly on Aug 14, 2010 7:56:13 GMT -5
I've tried to be very specific about what catagory of documents and what specific documents in that catagory, I've been talking about. these are not normal letters or correspondence, they are not administrative reports, they are not logistic reports, they aren't status reports. These are afteraction reports explaining in detail how commanders executed their orders to accomplish the attack on March 6th. They include the Mexican initial maneuvers/actions the enemies (Texians) reactions and the Mexican counteractions etc. They describe maneuvers, they cite officers/soldiers by name that performed with courage or exceptional diligence, etc. etc. Please reread Sesma's report to see exactly the type of report that I'm talking about. Anything less is not an afteraction report and would not be handled with the procedures I've described. THERE IS A DIFFERENCE. And again I respectfully submit, Herb, that what you say here goes against the known facts. Urrea's report on his defeat of Fannin's square, for instance, was just that: a detailed survey of his manuevers, the actions of his men, the bravery of several of them, the movements of the enemy etc. This report not only went to Santa Anna and other commanders, but found its way into the Mexican papers. My argument is simply this: if ALL these other military reports could thus become so widely disseminated, in both private and public communications, why assume that any March 6 after-action report would have been prohibited from the same protocol, and that the chance of finding 2nd and 3rd copies of it/them is unlikely?
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Post by garyzaboly on Aug 14, 2010 8:23:18 GMT -5
Let a real novice chime in with a few questions. In what ways do the more formal reports differ from other reports, several of which have been mentioned? If the official post-battle reports are submitted according to an established protocol, do they also follow (generally speaking) a format of some kind? What are we likely to see in such reports or learn from them, beyond what other evidence tells us? Naturally, ANY document is important and worth searching out, reading and evaluating, so I understand that it is not possible to give hard and fast answers to this question; I'm guessing that any officer's report will include important info, even if it doesn't do any more than confirm previously-seen sources. How does info in these reports compare with the kind of things we see in more informal documents, such as letters or diaries? Again, there are no hard and fast rules about what kind of information you are most likely to find in any of these things, but it would seem likely that the officers involved would say more in diaries or even private correspondence (if they were sure it would STAY private) than they might say in a formal report. I'm not sure where this gets us, but if we are going to game out what missing documents may, in fact, existed at one time and/or still exist somewhere, why not speculate on which documents are most likely to yield the most valuable information? Hence, my question about what the official reports are likely to have contained. Are they typically static, statistical exposition of facts, such as numbers of troops, troop movements and locations, battle descriptions, casualty figures, etc., or might they also include opinion or personal views about the battle? Allen Allen, It's very simple. Just read Sesma's March 11 report about his actions in defeating the garrison fugitives outside the walls. Or Urrea's report of the battle of Coleto Creek, or of his defeats of Grant and Johnson and King. These and a number of others are the ones most readily available in current publication form. And most of them saw print in 1836 too. The "opinion" they usually contain includes the standard glorification of the achievement to His Excellency's good name, or to that of the Mexican nation in general. But their main value is in detailing the numbers of troops involved, the tactics, the geography, etc.
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Post by Jim Boylston on Aug 14, 2010 9:43:32 GMT -5
Have any after-action reports about the Alamo battle from any subordinate officers that were captured at San Jacinto been located? Those specific reports all seem to be missing. What is the possible reason? That's what this discussion has been about from the outset, but it seems people are debating at cross purposes.
No one has ever disputed that some Mexican reports from the Texas campaign are in the Mexican archives, or in some archives somewhere. When this discussion began, Wolfpack and Mark were debating the likelihood of why these reports were missing and where they might be found.
Jim
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Post by Herb on Aug 14, 2010 10:28:10 GMT -5
Let a real novice chime in with a few questions. In what ways do the more formal reports differ from other reports, several of which have been mentioned? If the official post-battle reports are submitted according to an established protocol, do they also follow (generally speaking) a format of some kind? What are we likely to see in such reports or learn from them, beyond what other evidence tells us? Naturally, ANY document is important and worth searching out, reading and evaluating, so I understand that it is not possible to give hard and fast answers to this question; I'm guessing that any officer's report will include important info, even if it doesn't do any more than confirm previously-seen sources. Allen Allen, to continue what I started last night. There are and were a myriad of types of military correspondence, probably the three most common types are Reports, Orders, and Letters of Instruction (similar to orders, but not quite to that level - usually more broad than orders and more about providing guidance). Speaking broadly there are three categories of reports, Operational, Administrative, and Logistical. Starting with the obvious Administrative Reports usually deal with personnel issues - an example would be the "monthly returns" (how many men by rank in each company) the Mexican Battalions sent to their higher headquarters. Another example is the Surgeons Report found in Hansen page 378 . Logistical Reports would include everything dealing with supplies, ordinance, etc examples are Ampudia's reports on the captured ordinance and the ammunition expenditure during the battle (Hansen p376 and 377). Both Admin Reports and Log Reports are broadly speaking more often than not staff (vs command reports). They are normally prepared by the staff and move through staff channels. They almost always go out through multiple channels and from an Army in the Field will go directly to the War Ministry. Unlike today, most armies at this period had bureaus in the War Ministry that were responsible for administering and meeting the requirements of the Army in the Field. These bureaus were generally under the direct control of the Minister and operated totally outside the Army chain-of-command. Operational Reports are totally different animals. They are Commander to Commander (while the staff may help the commander prepare them - in no way or they staff documents). There are three general categories of operational reports. After Action Reports, Status Reports, and Situation Reports. A Situation Report is the way a subordinate reports during operations. It will include such things as where he is, where the enemy is, what the enemy is doing, what the friendly forces are doing, etc. Simply what the situation is in that commander's area of operations. The Sesma Report from Gonzales is basically a situation report. A status report is fundamentally a more detailed situation report. Besides the information in a situation report in it; it will include some key administrative and logistical information. Especially if it will impact on future operations an example would be if the unit had a shortfall on ammunition. While this information would be also going out in logistics reports, a status report is a commander to commander report. The subordinate is telling the higher commander, I may not be able to accomplish future missions if this requirement is not met. The higher commander can then bring his greater authority and prestige to bear to resolve the problem or revise plans. An After Action Report Is what at least from my perspective most of this topic has been dedicated to. After Action reports are usually detail specific and the higher the level of command the more time it takes to prepare (for example when the Union Army attacked at Chancellorsville in May 1863, both Lee and Jackson's Headquarters were both still working on reports on the 1862 battles). There is another type of quasi report that I refer to as a bulletin (from the French use during the Napoleonic Wars). Very obviously news of what happened on battlefield had to be relayed to the seat of government far sooner than the weeks/months it would take for a formal after action report to reach the capital. A summary of the action would be prepared and immediately sent to the capital. Over the course of the Napoleonic Wars people came to understand that these summaries were unreliable and often beared little semblance to the more formal after action reports. A common saying developed: "To lie like a bulletin." IMO, Santa Anna's letter of March 6th was nothing but a bulletin. Allen, the above is not all inclusive, but it is a broad overview. I hope it addresses some of your questions. I also have to apologise, I didn't always use the proper historical terms throughout the above, in most cases I think the modern terms are more illustrative (eg situational report vs dispatch).
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Post by alamonorth on Aug 14, 2010 10:39:32 GMT -5
SEsma ( as translated by Roger Borroel) in an August 23 letter wrote "Commanded the first column was Colonel Morales who was able to give to the government the dispatch that I carried to his Excellency, the General-President-in-Chief.The second (column was commanded by General Cos, but his second was General Amador and consequently was able to report with accuracy upon the individuals that were in it" Does anybody have any idea what kind of documents Sesma is referring to?
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Post by Jim Boylston on Aug 14, 2010 10:49:30 GMT -5
SEsma ( as translated by Roger Borroel) in an August 23 letter wrote "Commanded the first column was Colonel Morales who was able to give to the government the dispatch that I carried to his Excellency, the General-President-in-Chief.The second (column was commanded by General Cos, but his second was General Amador and consequently was able to report with accuracy upon the individuals that were in it" Does anybody have any idea what kind of documents Sesma is referring to? Hard to say, Ken but, again, Sesma and Morales weren't captured at SJ, so anything in their possessions...it's anyone's guess what happened.
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Post by Herb on Aug 14, 2010 11:21:28 GMT -5
SEsma ( as translated by Roger Borroel) in an August 23 letter wrote "Commanded the first column was Colonel Morales who was able to give to the government the dispatch that I carried to his Excellency, the General-President-in-Chief.The second (column was commanded by General Cos, but his second was General Amador and consequently was able to report with accuracy upon the individuals that were in it" Does anybody have any idea what kind of documents Sesma is referring to? Ken, I think the date of this letter is significant. It is the same date that he signed the copy of his March 11th after action report. My personal thoughts are this particular letter (Hansen, pp 372-373) bears out my claim that no after action reports of the March 6th battle were submitted before this date. As the senior surviving/still serving officer that was at the Alamo, he is doing three things on this date. He's providing his own missing after action report to the War Minister, and in the second letter citing the officers that he knew of that performed well during the battle. Finally and most importantly he's telling the War Minister, from whom he can acquire substitute after action reports from for the column commanders that were captured at San Jacinto.
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Post by Jim Boylston on Aug 14, 2010 11:50:50 GMT -5
No one on this thread is suggesting that any efforts to locate documents anywhere be curtailed. The discussion initially revolved around whether or not after-action reports were likely to be found in Mexican Archives or more likely to be discovered elsewhere, if at all, and why.
It's also presumptuous to assume that any researcher worth his salt would be affected by remarks on an internet forum and then decide that looking in the Mexican archives was futile. What is posted here is, in the grand scheme of things, insignificant.
Enough has been posted on this train of thought.
Move on.
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Post by Kevin Young on Aug 14, 2010 12:19:40 GMT -5
No one on this thread is suggesting that any efforts to locate documents anywhere be curtailed. The discussion initially revolved around whether or not after-action reports were likely to be found in Mexican Archives or more likely to be discovered elsewhere, if at all, and why. It's also presumptuous to assume that any researcher worth his salt would be affected by remarks on an internet forum and then decide that looking in the Mexican archives was futile. What is posted here is, in the grand scheme of things, insignificant. Enough has been posted on this train of thought. Move on. Actually, it has inspired some of us to look at the Mexican archives further...
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Post by TRK on Aug 14, 2010 13:09:50 GMT -5
And, as you said privately, Kevin, for the researcher interested in the administrative side of things, there will be a whole raft of lessons to be learned from the paper trails of the documents and how they made their way from Texas to various waypoints en route to the City of Mexico, and thence, in some cases, to the various military departments. Just wish some of these officers didn't have such scribbly handwriting ;D
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Post by alamonorth on Aug 14, 2010 13:13:50 GMT -5
I totally agree with Kevin. To paraphrase Star Trek, "Mexican Archives the final frontier" and is in fact the route that we have to take. Hansen's monumental work is the colt 45 of Alamo research, the great equalizer. Most of us graybeards have spent time, money and frustration over the past 40 years putting together our research libraries that Hansen's volume has made virtually wasted time. Then of course Hansen does not have everything we have accumulated. Yes there will be philosophical, methodological and political issues that have to be resolved in continuing our research on the Alamo. I will just end this diatribe by quoting the great scientist Huxley " The highest object that human beings can set before themselves is not the pursuit of any such chimera as the annihilation of the unknown, it is simply the unwearied endeavour to remove its boundaries a little further from our little sphere of action"
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