by Ed Strosser
By mid April, Daza gazed upon his poorly equipped, untrained, and untested army and declared them ready to whip the Chileans. He paraded his force before the gushing citizens of La Paz, turned left out of town, and headed to the coast, 250 miles away.
Chilean leaders quickly realized that any large-scale movement of troops in the region must go by sea. The desert was too harsh, few roads existed, and supplying an army was a daunting challenge entirely dependent on control of the coastline. Sotomayor ordered naval commander Rear Admiral Juan Williams Rebolledo to move against the Peruvian navy. But the admiral proved irresolute and refused to attack, despite knowing the Peruvian fleet was a sitting duck, its two ironclads in dry dock in Callao, hundreds of miles to the north, with their boilers dismantled.
Rather than attack his defenseless enemy, Admiral Williams established a blockade off the Peruvian port of Iquique, in the heart of guano territory, where the Peruvian army was assembling. His strategy was to economically squeeze the Peruvians by preventing any of their guano from leaving the country, forcing them to either come out and fight away from the protection of their shore guns, or watch their army wither.
Admiral Williams, after delaying so long, suddenly decided to sail north and attack Callao. His clockworklike plan dissolved along with his element of surprise. By accident Williams now learned from an Italian fishing boat that his prize, the two Peruvian ironclads, had left port four days earlier — the two fleets unknowingly passed each other at sea going in opposite directions. The enemy had done what he was planning — but Williams had missed it. And even worse, the Peruvian ironclads bore down on the two old ships Williams had stationed outside Iquique. The Chilean admiral turned around to rush back to their aid.
But he arrived too late. On May 21, the Peruvian Admiral Grau aggressively attacked the two aging Chilean ships. After much futile firing from his poorly trained sailors, Grau resorted to ramming his ironclad Huascar into the Chilean wooden ship Esmeralda. Knowing his ship was doomed, the Chilean commander Captain Arturo Prat gave the order to board the enemy, but in the din only one sailor followed. Peruvian sailors cut them down in seconds. After a second ramming failed, another Chilean boarding party leapt onto the deck of the Huascar, only to suffer the same fate. Finally, a third ramming put the Chilean ship on the bottom. The other Peruvian gunship Independencia chased after the tiny Chilean ship, the Covadonga, whose shallow draft allowed it to hug the shore. The Independencia followed in hot chase, unaware of the dangers lurking beneath the water. Suddenly, the ship struck a large rock, tearing a huge hole in her hull, a mortal blow. With his two ironclads, Grau held out hope he could defeat the Chileans, or at least threaten the Chileans’ naval dominance enough to keep their troops at port. But now with only one ship, the Huascar, those hopes were dashed on the unseen rocks under the Pacific. The war was already over for Peru and Bolivia. Everyone knew it but them.
The disaster pushed Admiral Grau to even greater heights of aggression. He raided up and down the coast with his one remaining ironclad. The Chilean people became noticeably testy over this turn of events. Admiral Williams was fired, and the entire cabinet resigned. Incredibly, Peru seemed to be winning, but this was merely an illusion. Chile, with its new nitrate-rich region safely in hand, stocked up on European arms.
Finally, on October 8 the Chileans caught up with Grau. The Chilean ironclad Cochrane locked horns with Grau’s Huascar, killing the Peruvian admiral with a shell straight into his bridge. The Chileans towed the Huascar into Valparaiso as a prize. Now they had almost won the war. Almost. The Bolivians and Peruvians still didn’t know.
The following month the Chileans gathered their invasion force to deliver the knockout. The invasion on November 2 did not go as planned, however. The Chileans didn’t arrive until after daybreak, and the captain in charge of the landings was, allegedly, drunk. Fortunately, they were fighting the Bolivians, many of whom deserted, apparently led in flight by their generals, and victory was secured.
The inept allies planned a counterstrike with two main forces. Bolivian dictator Daza and 2,400 men, including his prized battalion of Colorados, were poised to swing into action after months of training. On November 10 Daza set out on a desert march south to join forces with General Juan Buendia and his Peruvians in typical haphazard, uninformed style: he didn’t bother to check rations and planned to march during the hot daylight hours. Instead of food and water, Daza issued his troops cash, apparently believing they would find a few dozen well-stocked bodegas on the way. After four days of brutal marching, Daza had gotten only halfway to his goal when he stopped at the Camarones River, which means “shrimp” in Spanish. Ten percent of his troops had deserted along the way. Daza hit the panic button. He realized he was taking the huge risk of losing the support of his Colorados with his stupid foray into the desert, opening up the possibility that the troops he had armed for the war could be used against him back home. Defending his power was more important than any coastline to him. Without ever finding out the location of his allies or the enemy, he turned around and marched back. Daza realized the fight was not really worth dying over and became a refusenik in his own war. Bolivians honored him with the nickname of “The Hero of the Shrimps.”
General Buendia, with his 9,000-man army of Bolivians and Peruvians, however, refused to quit. The Chileans marched into the interior with 7,000 troops and waited for Buendia. Allied incompetence was still raging unabated. The Chileans sent in reinforcements on the railroad right under the allies’ noses; Buendia’s column stopped within sight of the enemy in broad daylight, under the brutal sun, in the stinking nitrate fields.
On November 19, both sides waited for the other to start the battle. But some thirsty Peruvian and Bolivian troops wandered out to fetch water from a well right under the Chilean guns and suddenly decided to attack. Without orders. An alarmed Buendia had little choice but to order a general advance. Chilean artillery drove off the attack. Sensing it was safer in the rear, the allied cavalry galloped away from the battle, followed by most of the Bolivian infantry.
A shrouding fog, typical in the area, descended upon the fleeing army and hampered their ability to get as far away from the Chileans as possible. Their leader had not bothered to bring along maps of the area nor a compass, further hampering the army’s ability to flee the battle in good order. When the sun rose the next day, the hapless allied troops found themselves still in sight of the enemy on the San Francisco hills — they had simply marched in a circle. Now that they were able to see around them, the troops finally scrambled away from the Chileans, and the parched remnants of Buendia’s army staggered into the Peruvian province of Tarapacá on November 22. The map-carrying Chileans shadowed them from a safe distance.
Unable to defend themselves, the Peruvians abandoned the port of Iquique the following day. They had now lost their last remaining guano port and any ability to sell their only valuable export. The allies regrouped in Tarapacá. The Chileans, believing the soldiers were demoralized and ready to topple, launched an attack, but the allies outnumbered them two to one. Each Chilean thrust was thrown back. Fighting died down in the afternoon as the heat rose and the water levels in the canteens fell. Over five hundred Chileans were killed that day. Even though they resumed their retreat, the allies savored this minuscule taste of victory, their first… and last.
The loss of all the guanolands rocked both losing countries. Even before the loss President Prado had sniffed defeat in the air. He turned over command of the Peruvian army to Vice Admiral Lizardo Montero and fled to Lima, to “organize” the war effort. There, however, riots over the abysmal state of the war trapped him in the presidential palace. On December 18 he figured out how to fix the problems: fire his cabinet, take a chunk of government gold, kiss his family good-bye, and hotfoot it over to Europe to “buy more arms.” In a letter to Daza, Prado said he was fleeing for the good of the country, personal reputation be damned. He was right — his reputatio
n took a beating.
Now chaos erupted in Peru. Not only was a foreign army camped on its soil, not only had the country suffered a catastrophic defeat, not only had it lost its sole valuable resource, not only was its army commanded by an admiral, but the country now had no leader. Vice President de la Puerta assumed command, but at the age of eighty-four he was in no condition to lead the war. On December 21, into the leadership breach jumped Nicolas Pierola, a former pirate and ever-lurking power grabber. He wrangled the support of some troops and led them against soldiers loyal to de la Puerta, but the aging VP had no stomach for a fight, and the cream of Lima society convinced him it was best for Pierola to take over. Pierola quickly established a much more efficient constitution that handed himself all the power and eliminated potential ambiguities such as the legislature. He also tacked on the unfortunate title of “protector of the indigenous race.” To bolster his hold on the country, Pierola created his own army. While he redirected new arms to his favored army, he slowly strangled the regular army under Admiral Montero, his archrival.
Sill locked in the death spiral with its ally, Bolivia dabbled in its own version of political twister. Unearthing a plot by Daza to pull his troops completely out of the fight, the Bolivian army leaders on December 26 appealed to Admiral Montero for help in removing Daza. But the Peruvian did not want to start a mini civil war within the Bolivian army camp based in Peru, so he gracefully declined to lend his troops. He did, however, agree to a sneaky plot. On December 27, Daza boarded a train to meet Montero. A few hours later Daza’s chief of staff and coup leader ordered Daza’s Colorado troops to stack their arms in their barracks and head to a river for a relaxing bath. While they splashed in the river, troops loyal to the coup locked up the barracks and took control of army headquarters.
Word reached Daza that he had been double-couped out of his posts of army and government leader. Panicking, he asked Montero to put down the coup. Montero, having lived through his second coup in a week, was now an expert in sidestepping such upsets and declined to get involved. Daza rushed madly about: he jumped on horseback, fled to the coast, and started the well-worn trek to exile in Europe.
As the two former dictators slunk off to their European futures, the leaders in Bolivia appointed General Narcisco Campero as provisional president. Trained at France’s military academy at St. Cyr, Campero’s new title came with the dubious prize of leading the feeble Bolivian war effort.
To compound its avalanche of problems, the Peruvian economy was officially in shambles. The country had lost its guanolands and virtually all exports were halted by the Chilean blockade. The one bright spot was that it still outclassed Bolivia’s economy. Chile had control of the seas, conquered all the guanolands, and signed deals to sell vast quantities of bird poop to them, parlaying the money into fresh arms.
As 1879 closed, the allies had suffered naval, military, political, and economic defeat. But true to their undying spirit of incompetence, they didn’t know enough to call it quits.
Chile wanted to end the war but couldn’t, at least not until they had a treaty that officially awarded them the conquered guanolands. While the war had achieved more than they could have imagined, Chilean pride was hurt by the defeat at Tarapacá. They didn’t want to end the war on a down note. Sotomayor reorganized the army, pumped up the number of troops, and prepared to attack again.
On February 26, 1880, the Chileans landed at a town called Ilo, one hundred miles north of the Peruvian town of Arica, and sent the defenders fleeing into the desert. The road to Lima lay wide open for a strike to end the war, but the Chilean president Pinto got cute. He wanted to defeat the allied army based in the southern Peruvian city of Tacna, take possession of that region, and exchange it with the Bolivians for agreeing to quit the war. The Chileans struggled with the difficult terrain, searing heat, and lack of water along their long march to Tacna. As they assembled their army outside Tacna, Sotomayor suddenly died of a stroke.
The allied army of 9,000, under the direct command of the new Bolivian dictator, Campero, defended Tacna on a mesa north of the town, holding a strong defensive position. The Chileans scouted them and withdrew to prepare their offensive. The allies, however, mistook this as a sign of Chilean weakness and mounted a surprise predawn attack. But once again, the troops got lost in the dark and struggled back to their positions just in time to absorb the surging Chilean attack at dawn on May 26. They beat off the Chileans successfully until a Peruvian officer decided that a temporary lull by the Chileans to rearm was a retreat, and repositioned his unit on the exposed slopes. A quick Chilean counterattack cut them down, and this blunder snowballed into yet another devastating defeat.
Two thousand Chileans had been killed and wounded, one quarter of their forces, but their allied opposition had been crushed. Campero led one thousand Bolivians on the long march home, through blistering desert and icy mountains, where he learned he had been formally elected president of his beleaguered and defeated nation. Meanwhile, his hardmarching men died in droves along the way and had to endure the further humiliation of being disarmed at their own border to prevent them from rioting when told the government would not pay them for losing the war. The Bolivians had ignominiously quit the war they had started, and now they let the Peruvians carry the fight for them. Admiral Montero trudged home to Lima with his victory-challenged fighters, now smothered in defeat. The Bolivians were done, never to be heard from again.
The Chileans now focused on the Peruvian town of Arica, the port that connected La Paz to the Pacific by train. The defenders installed large guns to defend the town from a naval invasion; they dug in on the land side to counter the inevitable attack from the Chileans marching down from Tacna. The Peruvian defenders planted newfangled land mines all around the town, which had the unintended effect of imprisoning the Peruvian troops who feared patrolling near the minefields. When the Chileans captured the proud designer of the defenses, he was uninhibited by any sense of loyalty and happily revealed the exact locations of the mines. A daylong bombardment by the Chilean fleet signaled the start of the attack. Two days later, after the Peruvians refused to surrender, the Chileans easily sidestepped the mines and stormed the trenches from the land. The Peruvians were decimated, and their inevitable surrender arrived even before the morning dew had burned off.
Now Chile stood tall. It had conquered the entire Bolivian coastline along with Peru’s nitrate region. They had indeed cornered the market on bird poop.
The logical move for Bolivia and Peru was to finally give up. Logic, however, was not an abundant natural resource in these two countries. While Bolivia watched with waning interest from its distant mountain perch, the Peruvians slogged it out with the enemy mano a mano. The Chileans were desperate to get this whole thing over and return to their beloved guano mining. Their navy blockaded Peru’s coastline to squeeze the remaining life from Peru’s economy. After failing to buy some new warships in Europe to turn the tide of war, Peruvian president Pierola finally agreed to a peace conference. The Chileans demanded they keep the conquered nitrate territories and required the allies to pay them for the privilege of getting smashed. In return they would cede a chunk of Peru’s coast to Bolivia as a consolation prize. In essence, Peru would be agreeing to lose money, territory, and prestige. Perhaps still believing they were as important and powerful as in the days when Peru held the seat of the Spanish Empire in the new world, they rejected the deal. Their losing effort would continue.
The Chileans, running dangerously low on victory medals, now planned a march on Lima, the Peruvian capital. Forty-two thousand Chileans landed on the coast and marched toward the Peruvian duct-taped defenses outside the city. The defenders scraped the bottom of the barrel and formed ten reserve divisions of troops grouped by their civilian jobs. Thus the retail merchants, decorators, hairdressers, economists, teachers, and others with normally peaceful jobs all had their own divisions and their share of the city’s defense. Even so
me of the Altiplano natives with blowgun darts and poison arrows pitched in. When you are defending your capital with hairdressers and guys with blowguns, one must begin to realize that hope has fled the field.
The Chileans punched through the Peruvian hairdressers, shrugged off the flesh wounds from the dart guns, and capped their victory with a spree of looting and killing stragglers. Pierola ordered his soldiers to turn in their weapons and go home. Lima was now wide open. As the Chileans moved in to loot on January 16, 1881, Pierola took his government into the hills, becoming the second Peruvian leader to flee in the war. He bugged out so quickly he didn’t even have time to cart along the state papers or raid the treasury for some traveling money. A South American dictator actually fleeing and leaving money behind? Yes, indeed. The Peruvian elite, despite complete incompetence from the beginning of this disastrous war, were determined not to give up their ill-gotten lordship over their remnants of the Spanish Empire.
The Chileans occupied Lima and installed a lawyer by the name of Francisco García Calderón as Peru’s new president, expecting that he would repay the kindness by surrendering. The Chileans allowed Calderón to raise a small army mainly to protect himself from some of his angrier citizens. The Chileans found out, however, that he was not the pliable puppet he appeared to be. Infected with the illogic of the office, Calderón found a way out of signing a total surrender when the U.S. diplomats insisted that Chile could not keep any conquered territory unless the losers refused to pay war reparations.
