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Post by Jake on Jan 3, 2008 15:56:38 GMT -5
Actually, Stuart, my trusty field fortification books don't indicate how to build a tambour. In fact, tambours, like lunettes, are more characteristic of permanent fortifications like Ft. Pulaski, rather than quick field-works.
Mark, don't you think you've become a little too in love with this theory, when you start questioning actual evidence like the ditch segment shown by Labastida on the west side of the tambour in order to defend your position? Keep in mind what we're arguing about is whether the parapets of the tambour had a stockade wall through which the guns fired -- we both agree this was a gun position, that it had ditches and parapets, that it had gun platforms, that it had guns. Our difference is over whether there was a stockade at the top of the parapet.
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Post by Jake on Jan 3, 2008 10:59:50 GMT -5
Stuart: Sort of "would the last person leaving please insure the gate is closed"? I don't think it was necessarily weak -- a barbette position is as strong as the crew manning the guns. We could work up several scenarios of alternative event sequences for the tambour -- very annoying not to have the slightest idea in reality as to what happened there, other than that it seemed to go quickly.
Mark: Two things I forgot yesterday. First is Filisola. Filisola's book, in its two versions, was apparently written by a ghost writer, whose name I forget, and much of the descriptions of things in the book are apparently based on interviews with persons who were there, rather than eyewitness accounts by Filisola. The detailed description of the defenses match the Labastida plan so well that I suspect it is actually written as a descrption of the Labastida plan, rather than of the battlefield itself. In other words, I'm hesitant to accept any description by Filisola as independent evidence ... although I will use it if I get desperate enough.
Second point: Labastida's plan shows the ditch going across the south face of the tambour, and then back up towards the northwest for a short distance before it ends at the side of the little gateway on the west side of the tambour. If you look at the archaeological report, you'll see that the place where the section of ditch was found on the west matches the section that Labastida shows running northwest. If Labastida's plan is correct, that ditch would end just beyond the section found by archaeology. So Labastida's diagram agrees with the archaeology.
So, Mark -- could you summarize in a few short points what your position is about the stockade on the tambour now, to close out that sub-thread of argument?
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Post by Jake on Jan 3, 2008 0:59:06 GMT -5
I did say, "The several post-holes found by the excavations do not fit the pattern one would expect for such a stockade, and would more likely be for revetment palisades along the sides of the platforms, or simply random post holes from any time." So I checked the report, and found where they speculated about the possibility of the origins of the post-holes, and that was their main suggestion -- not a stockade wall. I didn't bring it up before because I thought the "post holes from any time" covered such a range of possbilities.
And it's fairly common for archaeologists to get a general date of a post-hole by what falls in it.
If Labastida wanted to show other details on the tambour, he could have drawn it bigger, sinche size doesn't matter on a schematic. That indicates to me that he drew enough to get across what he wanted to.
But as you say, we've beat this one to death.
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Post by Jake on Jan 2, 2008 23:43:50 GMT -5
Mark No, I included the remarks about the facing because it had been discussed, not because you had said it -- just indicating the unlikelyhood of that particular version of possibility.
Sounds like you've made a good case that the post-holes weren't revetment holes. However, they don't look to me like they follow any particular alignment that would make sense for a stockade along the top of the parapet, and they don't have any artifact associations to make them of colonial or battle period. The archaeological report suggests they might be associated with planting in the later nineteenth century, and without artifacts I don't see how you can argue that they're not. Wanting them to be something is not the same as having evidence they are something. So these holes, without any other evidence, don't make your case for a stockade along the top of the parapet. They just make a line of holes at an odd angle to the parapets.
As to Labastida's inaccuracies about defenses: none of the cannon he shows up against a wall or stockade includes an embrasure, while on the other hand he shows no cannon where he shows gun platforms -- this seems to me to be not so much inconsistency as it is a specific graphic convention. Sounds to me like he doesn't feel the need to show embrasures where he shows cannon. If he showed cannon in the tambour, then I'd have to agree that there was an enclosing structure -- I think that if he doesn't show embrasures, and he doesn't show a cannon, there's no embrasure. But he shows no cannon, no wall line, no embrasures. According to the way he shows other cannon positions, that makes this a barbette.
But explaining the features of the tambour remains a process of offering explanations for shading on a map, and the best explanation remains the one closest to standard military construction for this sort of feature.
As to Sanchez-Navarro's map: In the article about Sanchez that Jack Jackson and I wrote for Southwestern Historical Quarterly a year or two ago, I included a brief discussion of the relationship between his maps and his other material. I don't recall how much detail I went into then, but I'll summarize it here. I think Sanchez drew a rough sketch of the view of the Alamo from the top of the Veramendi building, and took some notes about the defenses, but did not draw a map while he was there. I think he constructed the maps he drew from his notes and the rough view from the Veramendi Palace. I think, therefore, that you can't trust the details of the plans, although you can trust much of the detail of the written descriptions and the general characteristics of the Veramendi view. So yes, I'm dismissing much of the details on the plans -- I don't think they're evidence. That's just my opinion, though -- certainly no way to prove that, but it seems to explain the odditites of Sanches's various drawings, plans, and descriptions.
Enough of this right now -- I have to get back to destroying your arguments about the first permanent church.
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Post by Jake on Jan 2, 2008 19:27:39 GMT -5
You have to wonder what the engineers for Cos (actually, it was Ugartechea and Mendoza who directed the fortification) had in mind for the south gate. I suspect what Mahan said, about pulling out light guns quickly from such a position, was what was intended, and perhaps that's what happened -- Morales threatens and clearly is going to come right over the parapets, so guns pulled, gate slammed, and nowhere for Morales to go but over the southwest corner?
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Post by Jake on Jan 2, 2008 13:01:09 GMT -5
Well, I'm finally back where I have my heap of research notes and material, and I can resdpond to Mark's discussion back on Dec. 21 (#73).
Mark, I've never argued that the Labastida plan was an accurate map of the Alamo. I've argued that it's an accurate schematic of the Alamo defenses. To quote myself in the "Archaeological Evidence for the Defenses of the Alamo" article in AJ: "As a result of the archaeology ... we can say that the Alamo defenses followed the standard military field fortification practices of the 1830s, and that they were fairly accurately recorded by the Labastida plan, but not on any other known map." No, Labastida's plan is crap if you want an accurate survey of the place (I had to reconstruct one from a huge mass of deed records, instead), and all your points about how untrustworthy the plan is as an accurate map are quite correct. But the archaeological evidence indicates his depiction of the defenses are accurate schematics -- and therefore we should give his evidence priority, and differ from him only if we have sound evidence to do so.
Now, as to what he shows: You say, "a close study of Labastida shows nothing, either en barbette, or embrasures." But that's incorrect. Look at his index on the right edge of the map. Items ... oh, maybe I see part of your problem. Nelson, p. 53 (2nd revised ed.), has trimmed off the index on the right side. So most of you who don't have access to the full copy of the plan can't see this. Well, there are a few copies of the full map on the net somewhere. The last several items say: "J. Bateria a barveta [battery in barbette]," where J marks the southwest corner battery; "L. yd. atronerada [idem {the same thing -- that is, a battery} embrasured]," marking the northwest corner, where Labastida shows an embrasure through the north wall and the west wall of the gun position; "M. yd. id. [the same -- that is, an embrasured position]," marking the north wall position, with three embrasures through the wall; and "N. yd. a barveta," marking the northeastern corner battery in the north courtyard.
So, as you see, Labastida indicates embrasured gun batteries where he shows embrasures, and no embrasures where he indicates barbette batteries. So your argument that he shows nothing is incorrect, and your argument that the engineers building the Alamo defenses wouldn't use a barbette battery are also incorrect.
You say, "from a military perspective, making an earthwork loweer than three feet is relatively useless, as it provides virtually no protection for the crews serving the guns..." In that you are half correct -- I'll quote Mahan at you here (p. 82 of my copy of the 1836 edition): "The advantages of the barbette consist in the commanding position given to the guns, and in a very wide field of fire [because the gun isn't restricted to the field of fire through the embrasure]; on these accounts the salients are the best positions for them. Their defects are, that they expose the guns and men to the enemy's artillery and sharp shooters." So you are correct that a barbette position exposes the crew to enemy fire -- but commanders are perfectly willing to accept that risk to their men in order to obtain a wide field of fire, so these batteries weren't "useless." And as we have seen, several of the batteries of the Alamo were indeed built that way.
Now, as you say, Labastida does not mark the tambour as either barbette or embrasured -- he only marks the main gateway itself through the Low Barracks as "A. Entrada." But he shows the ditches around it, and he shows something that we both have accepted as embankments. So we come down to how each of us interprets these shaded markings inside the ditch. As I said above in my quote from the Alamo Defenses article, the evidence of the ditches we have looked at (as well as the evidence of the physical changes to the church in order to build the gun battery position inside it) demonstrates that the builders of the defenses were following standard military procedures. What would be a standard military approach to a tambour?
The sizes of the actual structure as indicated by the archaeological traces of the ditch allows two standard barbette gun platforms within a standard earthen parapet. You say that "the earth from this ditch would have formed an earthen parapet much higher than the 2.75 feet high berm you suggest...," but here you misunderstand me. I say that the difference between the top of the gun platform and the top of the parapet is 2.75 feet, the standard military height for a battery in barbette with light guns (large guns would get a four-foot parapet), but this says nothing about the height of the platform above the ground surface. That height would be whatever the amount of earth works out to make it.
To me, the shading indicates two gun platforms, one on the east side looking along the south face of the south wall, and the other in the south salient looking generally south. Both, in my interpretation of this, would have light guns firing in barbette, and if the crews needed cover when enemy fire became intense, they could step back down the ramps into the northern part of the tambour. Mahan says "light guns, particularly howitzers, are the best for arming barbettes; because ... when his [the enemy's] batteries are opened against the salients, the light pieces can be readily withdrawn."
There's no indication of a stockade wall around this position at the top of the parapet on Labastida's drawing, nor any indication of this in the archaeology. The several post-holes found by the excavations do not fit the pattern one would expect for such a stockade, and would more likely be for revetment palisades along the sides of the platforms, or simply random post holes from any time. So I have to interpret your stockade as speculative -- I will remain with the standard military structure of a barbette gun position for the tambour.
Oh, and there's no evidence for adobe bricks or stones for this structure. Besides, rammed earth was the standard material; making adobes added a lot of unnecessary time for nothing gained; and there's no trace of stone or adobe rubble in the ditch, so rammed earth is by far the most likely.
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Post by Jake on Dec 21, 2007 18:37:31 GMT -5
I was just talking to Gary Foreman on the phone -- he made a good point: you don't leave a major outwork like the south gate tambour while going after a main defense position on the wall. So my scenario of a feint doesn't sound all that good -- one shot with grape from one of the tambour guns and the whole assault is gone.
So now I'm thinking a combined sw corner and tambour attack. One thing about this: Mark Lemon shows the tambour with a palisade defense above the earth parapets, but I don't agree with that. Labastida shows the tambour as en barbette -- that is, the top of the parapet is at gun height, not embrasured. To say that a differrent way, the parapet is low enough for the guns to fire any direction, which is very low for the people manning the guns -- no protection for them, as there is with embrasured guns. And the spacing and layout of the guns as shown on Labastida's plan supports the idea of this as explicitly a gunner's position, not a sort of gunnery and small-arms position. A gateway on the west side of the tambour up against the wall, wide enough for horsemen and cannon to move through, and the main gate itself blocked down to about a ten-foot gap on its west edge. If -- big if -- everyone was asleep in the tambour, troops could be on it and over the parapets in seconds from the ditch and behind the Charli/Losoya house. Lord help you if the gunners wake up before you get to them, though.
So, thinking using Gary's suggestions, I propose that both the sw corner and the tambour were Morales's target, but from the southwest and west, from the cover of the ditch and the house. I don't think he would have actually moved up due north against the tambour guns, sw corner gun, and the gun in the palisade wall.
Of course, somebody could have just dropped a packing crate of scabbards sometime in April, '36, and not cleared them all up.
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Post by Jake on Dec 21, 2007 16:13:03 GMT -5
I saw a complete rig of Brown Bess, bayonet, scabbard, and other bits on display in the Tower of London earlier this year -- it looked like all you did was slide the scabbard and bayonet off your belt and put it on the musket. But without actually handling one, I wouldn't know for sure.
I took a great photo of my camera flash in the glass of the display case, too. Most informative.
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Post by Jake on Dec 21, 2007 13:27:56 GMT -5
All the ditches around Valero were huge. The one that ran through the Plaza along the inside of the west wall was maybe ten feet wide, going by Giraud's plan showing it (by the way, this, and its replacement outside the west wall, moved there apparently in late 1835 as part of the fortification of the Alamo by the Mexican Army, would have been called a "desague," with an umlaut-type mark over the "e", meaning you pronounce the "u," or "zanja," a drain, rather than an acequia). The main one that runs just east of the church was much larger when it was operating to water the Valero fields -- the present stone-lined ditch occupies the middle of the original ditch. And the "secondary" ditch that ran even farther to the east (see the plan of San Antonio in Nelson's Illustrated History, p. 83 of the second revised edition) was as large -- important for you guys arguing about the "Breakout."
The thing is, when these were operating ditches, they were kept fairly well cleaned out, but usually had weeds and brush along the sides, and you could have a platoon crawling/swimming down them without being seen, especially in the dark. I think it unlikely that everyone who went out of the Alamo at the end would have been seen and killed, and the reports of a few surviving escapees supports this.
Even early on these ditches were large -- the earliest one we have at Valero is described in my "North Wall" report. It was five or six feet across, but shallow in the area we saw it, only about 2 feet deep.
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Post by Jake on Dec 21, 2007 11:26:44 GMT -5
I have some information about this from the Radio Shack excavations.
Let me first pause and publicly eat crow for a moment: I apologize abjectly for not having finished the Radio Shack report, but I can say, finally, that other things having been cleared up, I will be getting that report to the CAR in '08, which will free me up to finish the Mission to Fortress book, finally after 25 years.
That painful necessity being done -- on the Battle surface in the Radio Shack, one of the very curious things was, from the acequia along the west wall all the way to the west wall itself, we found a scattering (maybe thirty or forty) of funny little brass things, like flattened cones with round knobs on the point, each about two inches long and the knobs about 1/4 inch across. In a few cases the brass knobs were gone and little lead shot balls had been soldered on instead. One of the arms/armaments people, I think Kevin whatshisname, identified these immediately as the brass finials on the bayonet scabbards for Brown Bess bayonets.
OK, so what happened to produce this? My conclusion is that these are from Morales's men, dropped here as part of the assault on the southwest corner -- although Radio Shack is a bit north of the corner itself, it's still within the area where Morales's troops would have milled about as they came up on the wall. Way I see it, they used the acequia some way (the thing was large, about 10-12 feet across and 5-6 feet deep -- we had the whole thing in cross-section), and came up out of it abruptly as they attacked the corner. The Charli/Losoya house just south of the corner would have helped in this as well. I think they had the bayonets fixed, but left the scabbards on them to keep down reflection off the blades, and when they began the last run to the wall, they stripped off the scabbards and dropped them (knowing the quartermaster would give them fits about it later).
That in turn indicates that a) the Morales troops came at the southwest corner from the south and west, from the acequia and the cover of the Charli/Losoya house (why the hell didn't Travis knock down that house, or cut down the big pecan tree towards the north end of the west wall?); b) the retaining of the scabbards until the last moment suggests that this was the intended target all along, and that any movement towards the south gate defenses (tambour, rather than lunette) was a feint.
Ok, so I'm beginning to be impressed by Santa Anna.
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Post by Jake on Dec 29, 2007 11:29:02 GMT -5
One cool thing about the Mahan book is that the illustrations were drawn by J. E. Blake, who some of you will recognized as the guy who drew a plan and a perspective view of the Alamo in the 1840s.
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Post by Jake on Dec 29, 2007 11:23:54 GMT -5
Wow, you guys really take this stuff apart. Let me clarify several things for you. 1. The U-shaped, 9-inch wide ditch had post-molds visible here and there in it -- we could see the posts were set in vertically. 2. The row of posts outside this trench to the south were also visible post-molds, of what appeared to be split posts -- that is, they were round on one side and flat on the other. They were either driven into the ground, or set into individual holes we couldn't see. They were just about against the south face of the U-shaped ditch with its line of posts. 3. The impression we had was that the posts in the U-shaped ditch were set so that at intervals there was a two-inch gap between these bigs posts, and the split southern posts were set to cover these gaps on their south side. 4. Jack believed firmly in the six-foot-wide palisade with two rows of posts and earth fill between, in spite of my pointing out to him the evidence in the ground, and he elected to write the report so as to support that view (you can imagine what it must have been like for him to have to put up with a smart-ass like me, not even a paid excavator on that one). In other words, he left out all the information about the posts and split posts in the south row, and the lack of any post-molds in the northern, two-foot-wide ditch. There was a lot of battle trash in this ditch, by the way, as though it was open at the time of the battle. 5. Jack's field notes and unit plans are not in the CAR archives. He apparently did not turn them in to be filed. So I can't get a copy of my plan drawings of my units looking at the ditch and the posts in front of it. I would have to draw a reconstruction, as best I remembered it.
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Post by Jake on Jan 22, 2008 18:56:47 GMT -5
Just for your info, guys, Sanchez in his daily journal considered the final assault to begin on the night of the 5th, so Allen's thinking about that is correct. I'll look into his journal for earlier days and see if he mentions anything odd about March 1 or 2. I think Sanchez came into Bexar on March 2, himself.
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Post by Jake on Jan 4, 2008 23:54:32 GMT -5
Tom: Andrade's thing is 13 pages long, and a copy is available in the DRT library, as part of a larger volume called _Documentos para la historia de la Guerra de Tejas_ (Mexico City: Editora Nacional, 1952), only 500 copies printed. Strange collection of stuff. I'll pass on more about the other documents in it if you're interested (heck, I could just take it apart and copy the whole thing for you).
Actually, there's a lot of good stuff in the Andrade reports collected in the Andrade document. If I get a chance tomorrow, I'll type in some of it. Well, here's a sample (sorry I don't know how to do accents on this): p. 10 -- "los heridos del Alamo despues de dos meses esta'n muriendo en los hospitales por la absoluta falta de medicinas, a' pesar de haberlas pedido hace mes y medio al comandante general de Matamoros, quien no me ha contestado, y de haber tomado la providencia de pedir a' la Bahia, dos facultativos estrangeros de los que quedaron prisioneros y que han tenido hasta ahora bastante acierto, siendo probable que hubieran salvado a' muchos si hubiera habido medicinas."
Here's the section Allen was talking about: p. 11 -- "Como en el Alamo hay varias piezas de artilleria en mal estado y de calibres irregulares, de las que se cogieron al enemigo; hara' V.S. que el comandante de artilleria las inutilice a' fuego, verificando lo mismo con las armas de mano que no sean de una conocida utilidad: por lo que toca a' las municiones y proyectiles de la misma clase, hagalos en la noche echar al Rio, o' tome con ellas la providencia que estime mas oportuna y de el resultado que se desea, y que a V.S. no es desconocido." Dated Goliad, May 18, 1836
Not much else on the actual destruction of the defenses of the Alamo in the Andrade stuff. More than half the volume is the _Diario de las Operaciones Militares de la Division que al mando del general Jose Urrea, hizo la campana de Tejas_, and about half of that is his supporting documents.
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Post by Jake on Jan 16, 2008 11:51:44 GMT -5
Wow, what a picture, Mark -- the Brits forming ranks and volley firing against the Mexican Army coming over the walls. Rork's Drift in San Antonio -- makes the hair stand up on your neck.
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