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Post by loucapitano on Oct 13, 2011 15:53:01 GMT -5
All of you guys raise excellent points, and the parallels to Berlin are interesting. Then again, military history is rife with great sieges won and lost for all sorts of reasons. e.g. Rorke's Drift. To me, the choice came down to trying to figure out what route Santa Anna would take to invade Texas. Those who knew a little about Santa Anna's personal background might have figured he would favor the San Antonio route. Others may have thought a coast invasion more likely. In fact, he did both. The question was whether to meet the Mexicans by fortifications near the points of entry, or cede territory until a proper Texan army could be raised. Santa Anna most brilliant move was to risk a winter march and arrive in Texas months before he was expected. After that, he was not so brilliant and let a pitifully weak garrison maul his army and slow it down enough to allow Houston to raise that Texan army and defeat him.
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Post by davidpenrod on Oct 14, 2011 15:51:36 GMT -5
Lou, I'm not sure the Texans and their Tejano allies were bound together by a common view of Santa Anna's intentions. As you know, a central command authority didn’t really exist in the Texas “Army.” Houston was the Drunkard in Chief but nobody paid attention to him (how could you respect a man perpetually discombobulated by whiskey-laced eggnog? If you’re gonna drink whiskey, man, drink whiskey and not some syrupy concoction served at office Christmas parties!).
Competing Texas war factions held and actively pursued competing military agendas. Clearly, Travis viewed Bexar as Santa Anna's principal vacation travel destination (the waters there were known for their revitalizing and recuperative qualities) while those geniuses Smith, Johnson, Grant and Fannin held other “ideas” – invading Mexico, for example.
However, the reason Urrea was in Goliad and Fannin and his men were massacred there is actually quite complex, kind of like the cowlick in Santa Anna’s hair. It can all be boiled down, like really good beef gravy, to just one word: Comanche.
The fact is, if not for those genocidal heathens from Wyoming, none of it would have happened - not the Alamo, not Goliad or San Jacinto, not even Tom Landry. When Santa Anna arrived in Bexar in February 1836, neither Travis nor Fannin had given or gave any thought to the possibility of a separate armed column covering Santa Anna’s exposed flank – a sound military assumption on their part but arrived at without benefit of sound military reasoning.
Believing the perfidious foreigners and pirates in Texas incapable of fielding an effective military force and therefore of defending themselves – all evidence being to the contrary (Cos’s experience in Bexar, for example) – Generalissimo Antonio de Padua María Severino López de Santa Anna y Pérez de Lebrón (as he was called by his closest amigos and confidants; otherwise known to everybody else as El Gabong), decided to ignore Von Clausewitz and his admonition to concentrate instead of dispersing your forces before the enemy. Santa Anna also decided to surpass the great feats and derring-do of his mentor and all around fun guy, General José Joaquín de Arredondo of the Spanish Colonial Army. Arredondo was Alexander the Great to Santa Anna’s Julius Caesar. The Texans, of course, were the Gauls and the Alamo was Alesia.
Santa Anna had been trained as a professional turncoat and semi-professional soldier by the Spanish. The prejudices and presumptions he brought to Texas in 1836 had been planted in him in 1813 during an expedition against Tejano insurgents and Anglo-American filibusterers. As a lieutenant in Arredondo’s army, Santa Anna had fought courageously at the Battle of Medina against the morons and dopes of the Gutiérrez-Magee Expedition. Following the decisive Spanish victory at Medina, Arredondo had summarily executed hundreds of Tejano and American prisoners. He subsequently marched on the rebel’s lair, San Antonio de Bexar. He assembled in the plazas the wives, children, extended families and friends of the massacred insurgents and magnanimously executed them all, their corpses and body parts festooning the trees and shrubs of the Rio San Antonio like Christmas ornaments.
To finish off the campaign, Arredondo decided to split his small force into several smaller forces and fan out across eastern Texas from Bexar in a genocidal sweep to the Louisiana border. He murdered hundreds of Tejanos along the way and herded approximately 15,000 Tejano and Anglo-American settlers into Louisiana, including Jose Francisco Ruiz and Jose Antonio Navarro, future signers of the 1836 Texas Declaration of Independence.
Arredondo’s ethnic cleansing of Texas had set an example for Santa Anna, who had participated in it all, but he had also planted the first seeds of the Texas Revolution and Santa Anna's humiliating defeat. Arredondo had turned Tejanos like Ruiz and Navarro against central authority and, worse yet, left behind a population vacuum in Texas that was happily and rapidly filled by a bunch of pesky, horse-mobile Comanches. These wily devils, with their Bison-horn headdresses and uppity attitudes, were mounted on Spanish mustangs acquired while they had been encamped on the Wind River in northwestern Wyoming. That’s about 2,000 miles from Texas.
After moving into eastern Texas, the Comanche launched a series of devastating, bloody raids against Bexar and other Mexican towns as far south as Coahuila across the Rio Grande. The gringo Filibusterers had been a nuisance but they were pinky-raised tea drinkers compared to these scalp and gut carvin’ Comanches. The Spanish and their successors were unable to beat ‘em – comparatively speaking, Arredondo was a limp-wristed, tutu wearing funny boy.
In fact, Spanish-Mexican civilization actually retreated before the Comanche and things were looking very bleak indeed until an American lead miner and failed banker from Potosi, Missouri offered to establish and settle colonies of American frontier-types in the depopulated regions of Texas. The central government in Mexico City saw a good thing when they saw it and this Ozark hill-billy’s offer to form a human shield between those horse-borne troublemakers and metropolitan Mexico was just too good to pass up.
Fifteen years after the first American settlers from the Ozarks arrived in Texas (that’s right, folks, Texans are hill-billys), and 23 years after the rampage of Arredondo that had led to their arrival, Santa Anna decided to follow a counter-insurgency policy similar to Arredondo – an innate humanitarianism and sense of fair play, however, would prevent Santa Anna from shooting and bayoneting the wives and children of the dead rebels – but unlike Arredondo, whose little force never exceeded 1,800 men, Santa Anna had an actual army at his disposal and it numbered between 5,000 and 7,000 men.
So instead of fanning out from San Antonio in separate self-supporting columns as Arredondo had done, Santa Anna decided to fan out from the Rio Grande in separate self-supporting columns. The key phrase here is "self supporting" and not "mutually supporting" because Urrea's column could not support Santa Anna's and vice-versa if either one got into trouble - like at San Jacinto. And that’s why Fannin and his men were massacred.
Because of the Comanche.
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