by Frank McLynn
Villa took the bait. As troop train and vanguard withdrew in confusion and rout that was half real and half simulated, Villa thought he could take advantage of the chaos and land a knockout blow. He ordered a massive cavalry charge, which ran straight into the machine-guns and barbed wire of Obregon's prepared positions. Casualties were enormous, and a wiser man would have pulled back and reconsidered. However, Villa the gambler was playing double-or-quits and launched attack after attack by his unsupported horsemen - the classic mistake made by Ney at Waterloo. He did not even identify a weak point in Obregon's front and try to punch a hole there, but simply ordered wave after wave of his vaqueros to charge across a broad front. Such was the sustained pressure that at one point Obregon's defences did seem likely to buckle and he fired off a typically hyperbolic cable to Carranza: `I will consider it my good fortune if death should surprise me as I strike a blow in the face of its fatal onslaught.'
The attacks petered out at nightfall but resumed at dawn the next day with even greater ferocity. Having ordered ten massive cavalry charges on the 6th, Villa surpassed himself on the 7th by sending in no less than thirty charges from dawn till noon, many of these attacks impeded both by flooded fields and piles of dead horses. Once again Obregon's line came close to cracking. The legend is that Obregon ordered his I I-yearold bugler to call retreat, just when the villistas had taken a salient; Villa's men then obediently abandoned the points they had just taken with such bloodshed. By the afternoon of 7 April the Division of the North was exhausted, and at this very moment the ammunition for their Mauser rifles ran out. Obregon then called up his cavalry, unused hitherto, to deliver the coup de grace. Villa had nothing to oppose them with, as he had foolishly kept no reserves to cover a possible retreat. Caught in a pincer movement, the villistas fell back in disorganised rout to Irapuato, leaving z,ooo dead in the dykes and polders of Celaya.
The bankruptcy of Villa's generalship was clear for all to see: he had not reconnoitred the field of battle, had kept back no reserves and had committed the most elementary mistake in the book by charging defensive positions with unsupported cavalry. As Obregon gloatingly put it in a cable to Carranza: `Fortunately Villa directed the battle personally.' Villa himself blamed the defeat on lack of ammunition, but a more telling factor might have been the significant desertions from his ranks to Obregon on the second day of the battle. Obregon had scored a great victory but, because both sides in the Mexican Revolution habitually lied and claimed victory even after near-annihilation, and because Villa's reputation was so high, Obregon's claim to have defeated Villa was widely disbelieved both in Mexico and abroad. Needless to say, both sides claimed they had been heavily outnumbered, but were probably roughly equal at 1I-12,000 apiece.
It was obvious now that Villa should finally have taken Angeles's advice and retreated north, there to secure his supply lines, re-equip himself with ammunition and unite with the troops recalled from other fronts. However, he obstinately refused to accept that Obregon was the better general. At first he tried to lure Obregon out of Celaya by quixotically suggesting a pitched battle on a plain outside Celaya, but Obregon, holding all the cards, treated the idea with the contempt it deserved. By now there was chaos in the villista chain of command, with orders sent not received or disregarded, promised reinforcements not arriving and, above all, dissension between the professional army officers, who could see the sense of Angeles's prescription, and the gung-ho vaqueros of the villista old guard, who had learned nothing from the first battle of Celaya and attributed the defeat of the cavalry charges to a fluke.
On 13 April Villa attacked Celaya again. This time he had 20,000 men to hurl at the enemy defences, but Obregon's numbers had risen too, to about 15,ooo, among whom were several crack regiments sent by Carranza as reinforcements. More ominously, his defences were even more formidable this time, with far more barbed wire and machine-guns at his disposal. Once again he kept a reserve of 6,ooo cavalry hidden in a nearby forest. To have any chance of making a dent in these defences, Villa needed to employ Napoleonic tactics, probe for the weak spot and then throw everything he had at it, in a classic demonstration of concentration of force. Instead, he simply did what he had done at the first battle of Celaya and sent in wave after wave of suicidal cavalry charges.
The villistas did everything they could in terms of valour, willpower and grit; taking terrible punishment, they pressed attack after attack. So ferocious was the onslaught that by 14 April they seemed to be making inroads. Suffering heavy casualties, Villa's men rolled back Obregon's Red Battalion (recruited from the proletarians of Mexico City) on their left and came close to encircling the enemy. Obregon sent another of his melodramatic cables to Carranza: `We have no reserves of ammunition and we have only sufficient bullets to fight a few more hours. We will undertake every effort to save the situation.' Eventually, the carrancistas held the line against crazed, courageous and suicidal attacks. Two things especially helped them. The villista artillery was of poor calibre in every sense, and tended to rain its shrapnel on the town of Celaya instead of Obregon's trenches; and on the evening of the 14th heavy rain and mud brought Villa's advancing infantry to a standstill.
Timing his move to perfection, Obregon waited until dawn on 15 April before unleashing his cavalry, which he had kept in reserve far behind the lines, some five miles east of Celaya. Obregon's horsemen swooped down on demoralised villistas, exhausted after forty-eight hours non-stop fighting. This time defeat turned to utter rout. In their panic the men of the Division of the North left behind thousands of dead, wounded and captured, plus large numbers of horses, field guns and small arms. A count by Obregon's jubilant men turned up 3,000 villista dead, untold wounded, 6,ooo prisoners, I,ooo horses, 5,000 rifles and 32 cannon. Obregon spoiled his great victory by a signal act of treachery. Terrified villista officers had put on privates' uniforms to avoid detection, so Obregon announced that there would be amnesty for all enemy officers; they should have no fears about declaring themselves. One hundred and twenty men were taken in by his weasel words, declared themselves, and were at once consigned to the firing squad.
Obregon, psychological oddity that he was, seemed to get no particular pleasure from his victories but only from his jousts with death. In many of his lugubrious verses he explains that he cannot enjoy the beauties of nature because of thoughts of death. Two of his poems are indicative:
And:
It was amazing that Villa still felt able to fight on after such a defeat, and even more so that his men were still prepared to follow him; this speaks volumes both for his charismatic appeal and his boundless selfconfidence. Angeles, who had been in hospital in the north after a fall from his horse, now joined him and once again urged him to retreat north, if not to Chihuahua then at least as far as Torreon. Villa, who seemed to have learned nothing from his two crushing defeats and still attributed them to bad luck, announced that he intended to make a stand at Trinidad, outside Leon. Angeles warned that Villa was in danger of being outflanked and asked him at least to promise not to use cavalry attacks, but to stand on the defensive. Once again Villa rejected his best general's advice.
Villa withdrew north in good order, using his cavalry as a screen between him and Obregon's advance guard, and summoned reinforcements and fresh supplies of ammunition. At the end of April Obregon's troop trains moved north-west into a broad desert valley flanked by sierras, at the other end of which was Leon and Villa's army. Within four miles of Leon, Obregon's vanguard was surprised by 6,ooo villista horsemen and fled in confusion back to the main force. Obregon decided to form a solid square around the railway station at Trinidad - actually an uneven rectangle ten to fifteen miles long, a kind of melange of Wellington's lines of Torres Vedras and the trenches of the western front in Europe. The scene was set for the climactic battle of Trinidad, a patchwork affair of pitched battles, skirmishes and probes in which the advantage tilted one way and then the other and which claimed 5,000 lives. A 38-day battle, which began on 29 April and
ended only on 5 June, Trinidad has variously been described as Villa's Waterloo or his 1812 campaign.
This time Villa did not at first launch waves of unsupported cavalry, but dug in along a twelve-mile front from Leon to Trinidad. The two sides faced each other across a no-man's land, making the early stages of Trinidad a bizarre parody of the dreadful battles of the western front. At first both sides skirmished and probed, with Obregon hoping that Villa would order another frontal assault, but Villa refused to oblige. Obregon began to fret. He was concerned that his supplies of ammunition would run out if this war of attrition continued, or that his lifeline to Veracruz would be cut. He was particularly worried, for there were signs that Zapata was beginning to bestir himself and attack along his flanks. However, Zapata never did the one thing that would have turned the war for Villa. He never attacked Veracruz. Zapata's few attacks on Obregon's flank were actually a gesture of desperation: he feared that Villa would be decisively defeated and that Obregon and Carranza would then turn their wrath on him.
Even without Zapata's help, Villa should have been able to defeat Obregon, for the Sonoran had made one of his few bad mistakes by occupying a static position in the middle of a desert. A general of ordinary talent could have surrounded Obregon's extended square, cut it off from Veracruz and starved it out. Villa neither did this nor did he heed Angeles's advice, which was for the villistas to retreat to Aguascalientes, forcing Obregon to pursue until his communications were stretched taut, at which point it would be an easy matter to sever the supply line. However, after nearly a month of probe and counter-probe Villa was impatient. He told Angeles that his credibility depended on hanging on to Leon, that he must therefore attack: `I came into the world to attack, even if my attacks don't always achieve victory and, if by attacking today, I get beaten, by attacking tomorrow I shall win.'
Villa accordingly ordered 35,000 men on an all-out frontal assault. The inevitable cavalry charge rolled back Obregon's right wing, but the villistas took heavy losses, including a dreadful incident when 300 of their men were shot dead in five minutes by cohorts of Obregon's sharpshooters. Both sides were being continually reinforced during the battle, Villa from Leon and Obregon from Veracruz. Obregon had to use all his powers of persuasion to prevent his commanders from breaking out from the trenches and going over to the offensive. `Keep the shape, don't lose the shape,' became a constant refrain as Obregon inspected his rectangle. Finally on 22 May, after four massive villista frontal attacks had been beaten off and a surprise cavalry raid on Obregon's rear had also been contained, Villa sounded the retreat. For a week there was further probing and skirmishing. Then the arrival of yet another munitions train from Veracruz allowed the carrancistas to re-arm and reload ready for a counteroffensive. Obregon finally bowed to the entreaties of his commanders. He promised them he would attack on 5 June.
Obregon was dubious of the wisdom of going over on to the offensive, but at the last moment Villa got him off the hook. On 2 June Villa attacked, spurred on to a last effort because his men were becoming demoralised at the continuing trench warfare which was new to them. Again ignoring Angeles's advice, Villa used his reserves to assail Obregon in the rear. The villista reserves took the town of Silao and gutted it, but they failed to capture the key strategic centre of Santa Ana hacienda, the pivotal point of Obregon's planned offensive. A terrible slugging battle developed around the hacienda, with the villistas taking huge casualties, failing to make inroads and progressively becoming demoralised.
It was now that Obregon's fantasies of death nearly became reality. Anxious for an overview of the battlefield, he ascended the bell-tower of the hacienda. The tower immediately came under fire, and one of the shells tore off Obregon's right arm. Blood poured from the wound and he was convinced it was mortal. He took out his pistol to give himself the coup de grace, cocked it and pulled the trigger. There was a click, then nothing. It turned out that his aide-de-camp had cleaned the gun the day before, had removed the bullets from the chamber and neglected to replace them. Obregon's men bound up the bleeding stump and rushed the general to hospital at Trinidad, where the surgeons were able to staunch the haemorrhage and save his life.
With or without Obregon, his army was sure to win on 3 June 1915. His deputy and second cousin, Benjamin Hill, carried out his plan to the letter. After beating off the attack at Santa Ana, Hill launched his counterattack at dawn on 5 June. Obregon's cavalry reserve routed the villistas on both right and left wings, leaving the road to Leon open, and his army swept in, reoccupying Silao and taking Guanauato, together with 300,000 cartridges, 3,000 rifles, six field guns and twenty machineguns. Casualties in the 38-day battle included more than io,ooo villista dead, wounded and missing as against no more than 2,000 of Obregon's forces. Villa was badly beaten but not yet finished. He retreated towards Aguascalientes, meanwhile ordering Fierro to raid behind enemy lines and paralyse rail traffic.
Fierro proved an inspired guerrilla commander. Just for a day or two it seemed that he might pull Villa's chestnuts out of the fire, for Obregon had to detach regiments from his pursuing army to deal with this new threat. Fierro actually recaptured Leon by sending a forged cable to the garrison commander, ordering him to abandon the city. He then collaborated with the zapatistas to take Pachuca and brutally severed the communication line with Veracruz, showing how incompetent Villa had been hitherto. Had Villa sent Fierro on this mission in April, he would almost certainly have won the Celaya campaign. Long-term, however, the Fierro raid backfired. Fierro himself was caught and defeated shortly after severing the Veracruz lifeline, and meanwhile the threat to Obregon's ammunition and supplies galvanised him to make a rapid assault on Aguascalientes.
Villa's only chance now was to pursue a Fabian strategy, avoiding battle while he waited for the Fierro diversion to produce results, or at the very least digging in at Aguascalientes. Instead, despite plummeting morale in his ranks, Villa got it into his head that Obregon was already dangerously overstretched, and on 8 July he attacked outside Aguascalientes. When Obregon formed square, Villa stupidly assaulted him headon, dissipating his resources in more unwinnable charges. Obregon stayed on the defensive until io July, then counterattacked. He was completely successful and broke through on both flanks. Once again defeat became a rout, again tons of materiel and hundreds of men were lost, and the villistas were so panic-stricken that Obregon's men were able to dine off hot stew left simmering in pans by the fleeing enemy. Carranza had won the civil war and Obregon was now the important man in Mexico. The tattered remnants of the once proud Division del Norte fled north to Torreon and Chihuahua.
Why did Villa lose so massively in 1915 when everyone thought he was sure to prevail? His personal and military inadequacies were never so clearly on display. He made a number of obvious strategic blunders: fighting on several fronts at once; failing to attack Veracruz; failing to employ Fabian tactics and lure Obregon into the deserts of the north. These were compounded with tactical errors: failing to reconnoitre the terrain at Celaya; foolishly attacking across a wide front; not taking into account the impact of machine-guns and barbed wire. He never interrupted communications with Veracruz and never kept a reserve. A man of parochial vision and limited reading, he had not learned any lessons from the battlefields of the First World War, as Obregon had, and was too arrogant to listen to the advice of those who had absorbed the principles. Above all, he mindlessly ignored the best military mind in his army, Felipe Angeles, and then disingenuously claimed he had lost the battles of Celaya and Trinidad only because he had listened to him.
Obregon cautiously advanced north, always conscious of his supply lines, mentally clocking up the miles he had advanced in his computerlike way. By the end of i9i5 he had notched up the famous 7.227 kilometres marching that formed so large a part of the Obregon legend - eighty-five against Orozco, 3,498 against Huerta and 3,644 against Zapata and Villa. He was well aware that he was in effect the new Santa Anna, Juarez or Diaz of Mexico, that Carranza could rule only wit
h his say-so or acquiescence. At thirty-seven he was the same age as Diaz when the liberals finally defeated Maximilian in 1867 and, as with Diaz towards Juarez, Obregon felt that the credit for the victory over Villa was his, not Carranza's. However, he still feared that he had only scotched the villista snake not killed it.
Zapatistas enjoy the unusual luxury of a meal in Sanborn's restaurant, Mexico City, December 1914
The meeting in the Presidential Palace, Mexico City, December 1914. On both occasions Zapata looks suspiciously at the camera, as if it contains a hidden weapon
The American forces occupying Veracruz, 1914
Villa in happy mood
Zapata also in happy mood (for him)
Felix Diaz: a thorn in the side of all Mexico's leaders for an entire decade
Orozco, not long before death at the hands of the Texas Rangers
`The bearded one': Venustiano Carranza, president, autocrat and control freak
At the battle of Celaya the one-armed Obregon was king
The women of the Revolution: soldaderas ready for action
