Battle of El Ébano

Battle of El Ébano

Part of: Mexican Revolution

Constitutionalist planes at El Ébano

date	March 21 to May 31, 1915
place	El Ébano , San Luis Potosí , Mexico
output	Victory of the constitutionalists

Parties to the conflict
Conventionists	Constitutionalists
Commander
Manuel Chao Tomás Urbina	Jacinto B. Treviño
Troop strength
up to 15,000	significantly less
losses
high	low in relation to those of the opponent

The Battle of El Ébano was fought during the Mexican Revolution between a Conventionist army commanded by Manuel Chao (1883–1924) and Tomás Urbina († 1915), as well as a constitutionalist force led by Jacinto B. Treviño (1883–1971) was led, beaten. It lasted from March 21st to May 31st, 1915 and ended with a victory for the constitutionalists, who prevented their opponents from attempting to take possession of the Mexican oil-producing areas and the important oil export port of Tampico .

Starting position and process

After the overthrow of General Victoriano Huertas (1850-1916), the commander-in-chief of the Mexican army, who had come to power in February 1913 through a military coup against President Francisco Madero (1873-1913), the politically very heterogeneous coalition of his former opponents began who viewed themselves as “constitutionalist”, that is, as loyal to the Mexican constitution, would quickly fall apart again. The divergent ideas of Venustiano Carranzas (1859-1920), the governor of Coahuila , who claimed "executive power" in Mexico after the victory over Huerta, Pancho Villas (1878-1923), whose División del Norte had contributed decisively to the overthrow of Huerta However, who otherwise only had a rather vague political program to offer, and Emiliano Zapatas (1879–1919), who primarily wanted to implement land reform for his clientele, ultimately did not agree. After Villa refused to take part in the convention of governors and generals in Mexico City called by Carranza for the beginning of October 1914 and negotiations on the entry of the Zapatistas into the Carranzas camp had failed, there was an armed conflict between Villa and Zapata on the one hand and Carranza on the other hand. To Carranza's surprise, however, the convention he had convened was not prepared to grant him the required “executive power” alone. The convention adjourned to resume its sessions in Aguascalientes and then turned completely against Carranza there. The Convention confirmed Villa in his position as commander of the revolutionary army it commanded and appointed a provisional president. Carranza then voided the Convention's agreements and announced that he would continue to serve as the highest executive body in Mexico.

In the civil war that followed between "Conventionists" and "Constitutionalists", Carranza initially turned against Villa, the strongest of his opponents. Its armed forces and sympathetic regional revolutionary contingents controlled large parts of north, north-west, north-east and west-central Mexico at the end of 1914 / beginning of 1915 and had put their opponent militarily on the defensive. Carranza had the advantage over Villa, however, through control of the Mexican oil production areas in the Huasteca region and the most important Gulf ports - in view of the change in the global economic situation caused by the outbreak of the First World War - now an important resource and, associated with it, the correspondingly larger income to be able to dispose of. In order to take possession of these resources, Villa sent a force under Manuel Chao, which was later reinforced by a further contingent under Tomás Urbina, to this area.

The fighting that began now concentrated on El Ébano, which controlled access to the Mexican oil production region and was besieged from March 21, 1915 by the Villistas , as the followers of Pancho Villas were called. The defenders of El Ébano were clearly inferior to the attackers, who at the height of the fighting comprised around 15,000 men. However, in Jacinto Blas Treviño González, a graduate of the Chapultepec Military Academy , they had a commander who was to prove himself to be a master of the defensive in the more than two months of the attrition battle. Against in trenches well entrenched Carranzistas that could also be based on the results of its aerial reconnaissance in the defense that scored Villistas with their frontal attacks , no significant successes and territorial gains. Neither the former schoolmaster Chao, nor Urbina, who had proven himself to be a capable guerrilla in his home state of Durango , found ways and means to “crack” the sophisticated defense system of their opponent. Finally, at the end of May, Treviño's troops took the offensive and put the decimated and worn out Villistas to flight for good .

Losses and Importance of the Battle

In the fighting at El Ébano, the defending Carranzistas inflicted around seven times more losses on the attacking Villistas than they suffered themselves. Michael J. Gonzales describes the unsuccessful attempt to wrest control of the oil production areas from Carranza as Pancho Villa's “worst setback” before his great defeats in the battles in Bajío, Central Mexico . Earlier than in the much better known Battle of Celaya , in the villa and his main opponent Álvaro Obregón (1880–1928), who was to prove to be Carranza's most important military support, met directly, the Battle of El Ébano revealed the fundamental weakness of the military tactics used by Villa and most of his military leaders. The strategic combination of trenches, machine guns and barbed wire , which Obregón and the other officers of Carranzas now used, virtually "newly" introduced in Mexico based on the European model , Villa and most of his subordinates knew nothing to oppose. Their rigid adherence to cavalry attacks and frontal attacks on enemy troops protected by trench systems including barbed wire entanglements and machine-gun nests ended in the decisive battles of 1915 with predictably heavy defeats. At the end of 1915, Villas División del Norte was eliminated as a competing force in the struggle for power in the state and he himself had sunk back to the status of a guerrilla leader.

References and comments

1. ^ Friedrich Katz: The Life and Times of Pancho Villa. Stanford, Calif .: Stanford Univ. Press, 1998, ISBN 0-8047-3046-6 , p. 487.
2. ^ ^{A b} Alan Knight: The Mexican Revolution. Volume 2: Counter-revolution and Reconstruction. Cambridge University Press 1986 (Reprint 1990, University of Nebraska Press: Lincoln), ISBN 0-8032-7772-5 , p. 312.
3. ↑ Michael J. Gonzales: The Mexican Revolution 1910-1940. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque 2002, ISBN 978-0-8263-2780-2 , p. 145.
4. ↑ For the reasons for Villas defeat cf. also Katz (1998), pp. 487-498.