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Post by Chuck T on Jul 8, 2011 19:16:32 GMT -5
Rich: One of the reasons I dislike getting into these discussions is that inevitably comes down to polictics, 19th Century considerations of honor, solemn resolutions and the like. In this particular case you can also include the reluctance to give up probably the largest artillery park in a thousand miles. All of them are good reasons, and I have no heartburn with those who chose to follow those instincts.
The only reason that I would choose another course of action were it me, and on my own responsability, is that none of the above mentioned factors is worth a hill of beans unless you win. The only way for the Texians to have a hope of delaying Santa Anna and winning is to fight an unconventional war. To do otherwise is like going into a game of chance knowing the dice are loaded against you. When you surrender mobility and allow yourself to be pinned to one piece of terrain, you have already lost. The ball goes over to the enemy side of the court never to be returned. Those are the things that should be thought about on the military side of the house, and if need be cold hard decisions must be made.
I don't think you fully understand Stuart's meaning in the use of the word lifeboat, and I am not going to put words in his mouth. He will come forth.
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Post by Rich Curilla on Jul 8, 2011 20:18:35 GMT -5
Quite possibly, but I am not really debating a point here. I am just pointing out what I see the individuals involved to be struggling with. My own hindsight vs. their dealing with the facts at hand.
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Post by Herb on Jul 8, 2011 20:31:16 GMT -5
Personally, I largely agree with Rich's assessment. The defenders did what they intended to do when the Mexican Army showed up. That said, imo, they had little choice in the matter, given their failure to establish security to give them early warning. I'm not to sure other than abandoning Bexar and the artillery, they had any better options even with early warning.
I hate the idea of giving up mobility, to fight a war of posts, especially when the other side has all the advantages for that type of fight. But, given the terrain and the Mexican advantage in cavalry, I think a mobile fight might have been even more disadvantageous. If the garrison's small cavalry force opposed every river and stream crossing from the Nueces on, they might have given the test of the garrison (if they abandoned the artillery and stores) time to reach the colonies, but what then?
Would Santa Anna have still divided his army into multiple columns?
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Post by Herb on Jul 8, 2011 20:49:25 GMT -5
The problem with all the missions to include Goliad was they were simply not forts. While perfectly adequate as refuges from lance and bow equipped Indians (what the mission walls were designed for). They were totally inadequate against a modern period army. The walls provided an illusion of security that was simply nonexistent. Th earthen redoubt thrown up overnight at Bunker Hill provided more real protection than the mission walls.
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Post by Chuck T on Jul 8, 2011 21:43:50 GMT -5
Herb: That is why I have stressed in every post so far the need to make this decision toward irregular war early and be prepared by 1 February. By making an early decision there would be time to aquire the horseflesh through whatever means to get the sick and wounded safely away. destroy the ordnance, and cache the required supplies for such a campaign. Further I would not wait until Santa Anna reached San Antonio to start. He would start being harassed fifty to seventy five miles out. There would be stay behind forces left after he passed to do the same thing to unexpecting follow on forces. In theory all this could be done, had the right people been in command in San Antonio. They were not so the point is largely mute.
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Post by Kevin Young on Jul 8, 2011 22:12:27 GMT -5
The problem with all the missions to include Goliad was they were simply not forts. While perfectly adequate as refuges from lance and bow equipped Indians (what the mission walls were designed for). They were totally inadequate against a modern period army. The walls provided an illusion of security that was simply nonexistent. Th earthen redoubt thrown up overnight at Bunker Hill provided more real protection than the mission walls. Remember the term presidio should not be translated as "fort" (fuerte) but "place of the garrison." That said, La Bahia did withstand the longest siege in Texas history during 1812-1813. That was before the dramatic re-fortification work undertaken there in late 1835 early 1836.
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Post by stuart on Jul 9, 2011 2:50:10 GMT -5
Ah the joys of being six hours out of sync with everybody else...
If we're going back to first principles on this one that means Matamoros and disagreeing with Hiram. The fact it all went pear-shaped is probably the best excuse for false hindsight in this business. Texas wasn't the only part of Mexico which was at odds with the Centralista regime and at the outset a lot of people in Texas from Stephen Austin on down saw that another Zacatecas would best be avoided by making common cause with the other Federalistas. They weren't necessarily prepared to buy into Grant's Republic of Northern Mexico/Rio Grande, but providing a Federal Volunteer Army to send south and so keep any fighting way below the Nueces had to be a good idea. In the event of course it failed, but at the time it looked like the best option.
The next option was to defend the frontier, at which point they ask which frontier. In those days it wasn't the Rio Grande but the Nueces and neither was going to stop anybody. If the Department of Bexar was going to be held that meant San Antonio de Bexar itself. That was why Bowie, Travis and the rest of them resolved to stand and fight - leaving aside the impracticality of getting all those useless guns out. The trouble was they figured on doing so with a lot more men who never showed up. Withdrawing into the Alamo was a sensible decision in the circumstances but they were not the circumstances Bowie and Travis envisaged.
Instead Houston, rather more realistically, saw the frontier as the Guadalupe or better still the Colorado and was probably happy enough to surrender the predominantly Tejano department of Bexar in order to secure the Anglo departments of Brazos and Nacogdoches.
Then we come to the guerilla option, which was never considered at all outside of John Wayne's version. Apart from the practical difficulty of finding enough horses to conduct that kind of warfare against troops who were themselves past masters of the black art, guerilla campaigns don't succeed by themselves. When they do work it is by weakening the enemy sufficiently to be taken down by your conventional troops.
Effectively that was exactly what Sam Houston did do in the end. He kept avoiding battle, always pulling back while the Mexicans became overstretched, chasing down different elements of the insurgents so that by the time Santa Anna finally pinned him down with his back to the San Jacinto River and nowhere else to run, the two armies were more evenly matched than at any other time in the campaign.
I'm going on a bit I know, but I think this is important. The Texians were never in any shape to even contemplate let alone execute a guerilla campaign west of San Antonio and if they'd tried it they would have been whipped, just as Grant was. East of San Antonio and you start to get in amongst the Anglo settlements and we're talking about the Runaway Scrape - that was forced on the Texians, but can you see anybody proposing evacuation as a war winning strategy?
So we come back to the two options actually discussed. The best was the Federalist one. Repudiate the Central Government and support the Federalistas to keep the war down in the interior. The other was to sit tight, hold the frontier and holler for help from the US. Whether they could have best held the Camino Royal at, Bexar, Gonzales or further back on the Colorado - or whether it would have been another Medina is a a whole big question in itself. The problem is that they failed to sort themselves out in time and effectively Bowie, Travis and their men were hung out to dry while the politicians squabbled.
Thus, when Santa Anna turned up unexpectedly instead of the reinforcements they'd been begging for, they had no alternative but to throw themselves into the Alamo and hope that somebody would come and rescue them.
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Post by Hiram on Jul 9, 2011 14:33:14 GMT -5
I don't think you fully understand Stuart's meaning in the use of the word lifeboat, and I am not going to put words in his mouth. He will come forth. Chuck, I imagine that Rich and I both understand Stuart's use of the word "lifeboat,' but simply choose not to accept that particular word in this specific instance.
I've been scanning a few dictionaries looking for a definition of lifeboat which does not contain the word "rescue," and have yet to find one. Therein rests my problem with the analogy. The Alamo garrison is not waiting or hoping to be rescued, they are holding their position in the hope that additional forces will arrive that will be sufficient to prevent the Army of Operations from reacquiring complete control of the area and moving troops forward into the interior of Texas.
I understand that the Alamo affords the garrison more protection than the Bexar. I understand that the garrison is aware that their position in the town is untenable with the arrival of the Mexican vanguard. So yes, the town (or ship) must be temporarily abandoned, so that makes the Alamo the best option at the moment. But the town is not completely lost (or sunk), it can potentially be retaken a second time by the Army of the People, and thus if reacquiring possession of Bexar is within the realm of possibilities, the Alamo is not a "lifeboat," it is a fortified compound that commands the town, and with ample reinforcements could train the artillery on the enemy and force the issue a bit.
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Post by Chuck T on Jul 9, 2011 21:45:44 GMT -5
Hiram: Yes I think it was intended to be a temporary refuge, awaiting reinforcements and better days. I have always looked at what Stuart says though with the meaning that while they intended to hold the town, the surprise delivered by Santa Anna precluded that and they took up alternate positions (the lifeboat). Same intention - different position.
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Post by stuart on Jul 10, 2011 2:26:57 GMT -5
Hiram: Yes I think it was intended to be a temporary refuge, awaiting reinforcements and better days. I have always looked at what Stuart says though with the meaning that while they intended to hold the town, the surprise delivered by Santa Anna precluded that and they took up alternate positions (the lifeboat). Same intention - different position. That is indeed my basic argument. Bowie, Travis and the others wanted to defend Texas on the "frontier", at San Antonio de Bexar rather than Gonzales or even further east. They wanted the army brought forward for a battle there and while Jameson at least was enthusiastic about the idea of turning the Alamo into a proper fortress I very much doubt that anyone envisaged the decisive battle would be fought by way of a siege, but would be a proper one in the open - along a river line or some other advantageous ground in the near vicinity. The trouble was the army never came, Travis and his men were too few to fight a battle and didn't have enough horses to get away let along conduct a guerilla campaign and therefore had no alternative but to throw themselves into the Alamo and holler for help.
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Post by Hiram on Jul 10, 2011 20:29:42 GMT -5
We agree on all matters in this instance, in terms of what the Alamo compound offered the Bexar garrison. I simply choose to avoid the word "lifeboat" because of how the word is defined in every dictionary, i.e. using the corresponding word "rescue." I'm trying to avoid sounding like my English 4 teacher, so I'm going to just leave it at that.
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Post by Paul Sylvain on Jul 20, 2011 9:30:37 GMT -5
You know, I just had the strangest thought about the significance of the Alamo.
Even though trying to hole-up and defend the Alamo (and Goliad for that matter) was doomed from the start, and was not the wisest strategy militarily, IMO it ultimately set things in motion for Santa Anna's defeat. The movies and legend play on the notion that the defender's hoped to make the Mexicans pay dearly for each of the Alamo's defender's lives in the final assault. Well, that may not have been the case immediately after the smoke cleared, but certainly subsequent decisions by Santa Anna, which you could argue were the result of the battle and chase for Houston, seem to have made the "we'll make 'em pay dearly" statement prophetic.
One wonders if "cut, slash and run" without a 13-day siege would have yielded the same result. Then again, if you could have joined the 400-plus men from Goliad and the 180-plus men from Bexar with Houston's force, in such tactics, they could have possibly give Santa Anna a run for his pesos. We'll never know, because it's just another "what if" armchair debate, but I'm thinking without the mistake of holing up in, and trying to defend, the Alamo, perhaps we'd be needing passports to visit Tejas today? One never knows.
Paul
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