The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History's 100 Worst Atrocities (59 page)

THE WESTERN WAY OF WAR

T
HE FIRST HALF OF THE TWENTIETH CENTURY WOULD SEE THE PEAK OF THE
West’s dominance over the rest of the world. Many reasons drove the rise of the West—capitalism, geography, monotheism, smallpox, and lactase (the enzyme for digesting milk)—but only war concerns us here. At first glance, it may seem that superior weaponry gave the West its edge, but in many fights, the Western armies were more poorly armed than the enemy. Native Algerian gunsmiths built rifles that were better than the arsenals of the French who conquered them, and wealthy Oriental armies often purchased the newest guns from Western manufacturers like Krupp, Enfield, and Winchester long before the poorly funded European armies they faced. Western armies won their wars because they were consistently superior in attitude, support, and discipline.

The way the West fights its wars is distinctive and coldly efficient, and you can trace a common tradition that began with the Greek phalanx, progressed through the Roman legion and the British bayonet line, and continued with the American landings at Normandy and Iwo Jima. First, war is openly declared. Then soldiers go into battle under banners or in uniform, with weapons visible, in massive force. The fighting aims to overwhelm the enemy and achieve a clear, decisive victory as quickly as possible. The war ends with a formal peace treaty.
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Western soldiers are expected to be disciplined professionals. They are drilled repeatedly so that coordination between all of the men becomes mechanical. Courage is not defined by reckless single combat, man-to-man, but by standing unflinchingly beside one’s comrades.

It’s no coincidence that World War I and the Napoleonic Wars are the only giant megadeaths on my list in which more soldiers died than civilians. The Western way of war is so horribly destructive of armies that it takes an extra-special effort to even get close to killing that many civilians. In fact, Western warfare historically has been so deadly that a Western army often lost more soldiers winning a battle against another Western army than losing a battle against native forces. For instance, the United States lost more soldiers winning a battle against poorly equipped Southern rebels at Nashville than when it was wiped out by the Sioux at Little Bighorn. In successive South African wars, the Boers (1899–1902) killed more than five times as many British in battle as did the Zulus (1879), despite the latter’s legendary ferocity and stunning victory at Isandlwana.

Although European soldiers are probably no more or less merciful than those of any other culture, Western philosophy of war-making tries to avoid killing civilians and focuses on getting rid of combatants first. Killing civilians is considered a distraction, a minor injury against the enemy, like stepping on someone’s foot instead of going for the jugular. Showing mercy to prisoners of war is also encouraged for practical if not moral reasons. It gets huge numbers of enemy soldiers out of the way without the trouble of cornering and killing every last one. The goal in a Western war is to neutralize the threat, not to kill for the sake of killing.
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The rules by which civilized countries are supposed to wage war were codified by the Hague Convention in 1899, which tried to cleanly divide everyone in the war zone into the belligerent and the harmless. As long as the former fought in uniform, and the latter—civilians, prisoners, wounded, doctors, and reporters—kept their heads down and did not fight back, then nonbelligerents were considered off-limits.

Articles 25 through 27 of the Hague Convention allow the bombardment of defended cities, which was fine in 1899 when bombardment meant lobbing a few shells randomly into a besieged town in order to pressure the defenders into surrendering. Civilians were usually too far away to be hit, so cannon fire killed far fewer people than hunger did in a city under siege, but then the invention of aircraft made it possible to rain fire and death down on any city that contained a militarily useful object—a radio tower, rail yard, factory, or power plant—anywhere behind enemy lines, far from troop concentrations.

Under the Western way of war, the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima is justified as a legitimate act of war, while the 1983 suicide bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut is condemned as terrorism. The key difference is that one was performed openly against a declared enemy who had the opportunity to fight back or surrender, while the other was sneaky. Other philosophies of war-making would condemn Hiroshima as an attack against a mostly civilian target and justify Beirut as a military target.

The Western way of war faded during the late twentieth century because the West has never figured out how to beat guerrillas. From Napoleonic Spain, to Algeria and Vietnam, the most effective way to beat Western armies has been to avoid fighting them on their terms.

The traditional response to guerrilla war has been to drop all of the protections that noncombatants are guaranteed by the laws of war. If you can’t tell the difference between rebels and civilians, then
everyone
is the enemy. An army facing guerrillas will shoot hostages, burn houses, arrest family members, destroy property, torture prisoners, and herd entire populations into heavily guarded camps in the hopes that the people realize that supporting the insurgency is too dangerous. It rarely works.

MEXICAN REVOLUTION

Death toll:
1 million
¹

Rank:
46

Type:
failed state

Broad dividing line:
poor vs. rich

Time frame:
1910–20

Location:
Mexico

Assassinations:
Carranza, Madero, Villa, Zapata

Last man standing:
Alvaro Obregon

Who usually gets the most blame:
everyone

Scratch Díaz

In his three decades as dictator of Mexico since 1876, Porfirio Díaz had turned the country into his personal estate. The army answered only to him. All business depended on his good graces and passed through his hands one way or another.

The only potential rivals to Díaz were big rural landowners who operated as feudal lords. The son of one of the largest estates, Francisco Madero, had been educated abroad and now had all sorts of liberal notions. The 1910 election for president was just for show. It was not supposed to be contested, but Madero entered the race, which forced Díaz to fight back. Díaz arrested five thousand known malcontents—Madero included—before they could ruin the election. Díaz announced his overwhelming reelection, and exiled Madero to the United States, where he called for the people of Mexico to rise up and throw out
Díaz.
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They didn’t need much encouragement. Revolution was in the air, and the election fight had highlighted the vulnerability of the Díaz regime. The hacienda system of agriculture kept Mexican peasants indebted, landless, and hopeless, which sparked a revolt in the southern state of Morelos under the Indian anarchist Emiliano Zapata. A northern uprising coalesced under the flamboyant bandit Pancho Villa, supported by small ranchers, unemployed cowboys, and other flotsam and jetsam of the cattle-herding economy. The northern uprising spread through the state of Chihuahua, until the rebels took the border town of Ciudad Juarez after a hard battle in May. Then, as everyone geared up for a tough fight toward the capital, Díaz surprised them by resigning and going into exile.

Scratch Madero

After Francisco Madero returned and took his place as president, he proved to be more conservative than his supporters had hoped. Mexico was now filled with huge numbers of armed peasants and workers who had hoped to see the wealth of Mexico redistributed to its people, but Madero wanted only to bring elections and free-market capitalism to the country. The revolution splintered. Zapata maintained his own socialist enclave in Morelos beyond the reach of the central government. Meanwhile, annoyed at how slight Madero’s reforms were, one of the principal generals of the revolution, Pascual Orozco, rebelled in the north in March 1912.

Victoriano Huerta, a protégé of the former dictator Porfirio Díaz, was in charge of the army sent to put down Orozco. By October, a brutal campaign of attrition had broken Orozco and sent him fleeing to the United States, so Huerta returned to the capital to scheme with Mexican conservatives and the U.S. ambassador (who was probably acting without authority from Washington). After watching President Madero flounder incompetently for about a year, Huerta led a military coup against him in February 1913. Madero surrendered to the junta, so Huerta had no excuse to kill him publicly and legally, but as Madero was being transferred between jails, his car overshot its destination and stopped. Madero’s escort dragged him outside and shot him dead, then peppered the car with bullets to make it look like a rebel ambush.
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Scratch Huerta

In November 1913, a rebel alliance against Huerta formed in northern Mexico between Governor Venustiano Carranza of Coahuila, Pancho Villa, and Alvaro Obregon, a small-time planter and politician who was starting to display natural military talent and rise through the ranks. For the next half year, rebel armies consolidated and expanded their territory.

The new American president, Woodrow Wilson, refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Huerta government and supported the rebels instead. Tensions escalated between the two governments such that when local authorities in Tampico insulted some American sailors in April 1914, American troops seized the port of Veracruz, which cut off Huerta from the lucrative customs duties that supplied around a quarter of the government’s revenue.

As the rebel armies closed in, Huerta resigned in July 1914 and fled abroad. A few years later, he arrived in the United States and hooked up with his previous enemy and fellow exile, Pascual Orozco, to plan a comeback; however, as they were scheming, Texas Rangers moved in, killing Orozco and arresting Huerta for violating American neutrality laws. Huerta died in jail before the Americans figured out what to do with him.
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Convention

With Huerta gone, Obregon occupied Mexico City on behalf of the revolution in August 1914. Carranza declared himself president, but now that they had beaten their common enemy, all of the revolutionaries started squabbling. Eventually, factions from all over Mexico gathered in neutral territory at the resort town of Aguascalientes to iron out their differences. The convention filled the office of president with a harmless nonentity and enacted much of Zapata’s radical agenda, which aimed to redistribute the large landed estates to the poor.

Everyone but Carranza fell into line with the Aguascalientes Convention, which was unfortunate because the United States really wanted Carranza, a moderate centrist, to be president. Although the American people had a certain fondness for Pancho Villa, the U.S. government decided that Carranza would be more likely to stabilize Mexico—plus he had no plans to confiscate and redistribute foreign-owned property. In November 1914, the American troops pulled out of Veracruz and gave it to Carranza, who used it as his base to resume the civil war.

In December 1914, Zapata arrived in Mexico City from the south, and Villa arrived from the north to hold the city for the Conventionists. The contrast between the two rebel forces became obvious during this joint occupation of Mexico City. Zapata’s men were well behaved and disciplined. Then Villa’s bandit army arrived and began dragging prominent citizens out of their homes to be shot against any convenient wall. After a few such examples, they extorted money from everyone who wanted to escape a similar fate.

In January 1915, Carranza moved out of Veracruz and won a convincing victory against the Conventionist forces at Puebla, which seems to be where every army on the road from Veracruz to Mexico City fights a decisive battle. Carranza arrived in Mexico City and claimed the presidency in July 1915.

Obregon switched sides, bringing a large new force to fight for Carranza against Villa. Zapata took his army and returned home to hunker down in Morelos, so the new government focused on getting rid of Pancho Villa. In a string of battles, Obregon pushed back Villa, until finally Villa gambled everything at Celaya in central Mexico. Convinced that dash and courage would be enough, Villa sent wave after wave of his troops charging uselessly against Obregon’s trenches, which broke Villa’s Division of the North beyond all hope of repair. The survivors were driven hundreds of miles across mountains and scrubland back to Villa’s home turf, eroding his thousands down to mere hundreds. After the federals had chased Villa all over the northern desert without catching him, Carranza decided to ignore him.

Scratch Villa

Sooner or later, every phase of the war seemed to converge on the northern border. Controlling the towns along the U.S. border let the rebels contact outside supporters, raise hard cash, and smuggle guns. Because so many border towns were split down the middle between Mexico and the United States, Americans often gathered on rooftops to watch the Mexicans fighting in the southern half of town, and the Mexicans had to be especially careful not to accidentally shoot across the border and provoke a massive American response.

In November 1915, Villa attacked Carranza’s forces in the heavily fortified border town of Aqua Prieta, but this time the Americans allowed the Mexican government to move reinforcements along railroads in the United States where Villa couldn’t stop them. Then when Villa tried to overrun the federal trenches with a night assault, his men were exposed and blinded by enemy searchlights plugged into power stations on the American side.
⁵
Infuriated by these violations of strict neutrality, Villa stopped a random passenger train at Santa Isabel in Mexico, pulled all of the Americans off, lined them up, and shot them.
⁶

In 1916, Villa crossed the border to raid the United States and ended up in a firefight with the U.S. Army garrison in Columbus, New Mexico. After stocking up on American weapons and provisions, he retreated back to Mexico. To put an end to this menace once and for all, a large American expeditionary force invaded Mexico. They chased Villa all over the northern desert without catching him and finally gave up after about a year.

Villa remained at large but became increasingly irrelevant until a 1920 pardon allowed him to peacefully retire. Three years later, his enemies ambushed his car and riddled him with machine-gun fire.

Scratch Zapata

During the Mexican Revolution, soldiers routinely changed sides whenever the mood struck them. Sometimes they switched quickly in order to escape the summary executions that all sides usually inflicted on captured officers. At other times it was more of a carefully considered career move. When Colonel Jesus Guajardo, one of the federal army’s star cavalry officers, was thrown in jail for drinking on duty, Zapata sent a note asking if he’d like to come over to his side. The federal commander intercepted the note and threatened Guajardo into conspiring with the government. So far, Zapata had kept to himself, but he was still a rebel who needed to be eradicated. Guajardo pondered the situation and came up with a surefire plan.

When Guajardo returned to duty, he staged a mutiny with his cavalry. To boost his credibility with Zapata, Guajardo attacked his own side, the federal garrison in the town of Jonacatepec, killing several and driving the rest into headlong retreat. To prove he was serious, he even followed his victory with the massacre of fifty prisoners. Impressed by his ruthlessness, Zapata now trusted him and agreed to a meeting. As Zapata rode into town among Guajardo’s men, they raised their rifles to fire a salute but shot him dead instead.

Scratch Carranza

In March 1920, Obregon mutinied against Carranza and marched on the capital. Carranza fled toward Veracruz on twenty-one trains with 20,000 soldiers and a fortune in gold coins. The loyal General Guadalupe Sanchez in Veracruz was supposed to protect the government after they arrived, but he switched to the winning side and set out to intercept Carranza. After Sanchez ambushed, derailed, and destroyed the fugitive government’s trains, Carranza fled with a small squad on horseback. That night, exhausted and lost, he was discovered and shot dead while he slept in a peasant’s hut.