The Training Ground (20 page)
Taylor’s army had been just half the size of the Mexican force at the start of the day. To lose so many men, in such a short time, was appalling. Even Grant, who idolized Taylor in so many ways, labeled the battle plan of September 21 “ill-conceived.” As he walked back to Walnut Springs, he was overcome by an unexpected sense of loss. And he knew, like the rest of his fellow soldiers, that more death was to come.
Monterrey, Day Two
S
EPTEMBER 22, 1846
A
few short hours after Grant returned to his tent, American prospects took a sudden turn for the better. At three in the morning, Worth ordered the five hundred regular soldiers and Texans camped at the base of La Independencia to quietly begin making their way up the eight-hundred-foot-high hill. Worth’s men faced the demanding chore of capturing two separate fortresses. First they would attack a small redoubt known as Fort Libertad; the second target would be the Bishop’s Palace, also known as the Obispado.
Longstreet was among them. The night was cold and wet, with a howling wind making conditions nearly unbearable. For three long hours the clandestine force climbed in pitch-blackness and pelting rain. They uttered not a sound, lest the Mexican sentries hear them. The steep hill was covered with thick bushes and rocks. Just before sunrise, a heavy fog slipped in, further concealing the Americans. By the time the rising sun burned off the mist and gave them away, they were just a short sprint from the summit.
Worth’s men were crouched fifty yards from Fort Libertad when the sentries first spied them. The Mexicans fired immediately. The Americans pressed carefully forward, holding their volley until they were closer to the fort rather than firing and being pinned down while reloading. Finally, the Americans loosed a salvo and then immediately followed it with a bayonet charge. In the ensuing hand-to-hand combat, Mexican troops either died fighting or turned and fled to the safety of the Bishop’s Palace, on a low rise 350 yards southeast.
Made of thick squares of gray stone, with flying buttresses and lofty parapets, the castle was a daunting sight. Twice, the Americans attempted to charge the Bishop’s Palace, and twice the Americans were repelled. There seemed no way to penetrate the Mexican defenses.
The solution turned out to be simple and yet ingenious. When it became clear that musket fire alone would not drive out the defenders, a twelve-pound howitzer was disassembled at the base of La Independencia and hand-carried up to the American position. The sum of the gun’s parts weighed 1,757 pounds, and not a single piece was designed to be manually transported up a steep hillside. But once the howitzer reached the top, those bulky pieces were reassembled into a cannon, and every single bit of firepower implied by that considerable heft was aimed squarely at the Bishop’s Palace. “Which piece, with great skill threw shrapnel shells [shells filled with musket balls] right into the palace and the open work in front,” wrote Meade.
The besieged Mexicans could see just a few skirmishers — advance scouts — and that gun emplacement. The American force appeared small and easily beatable. Mexican cavalry and infantry soon ventured back out of the castle, eager to drive the Americans off their mountain. The Mexicans had no clue that three full regiments of American infantry rested behind an earthen brow near the twelve-pounder. Their job was to remain hidden so that the Mexicans would underestimate the size of the American force. This tactic, in part, was the brainchild of the West Point instructor Dennis Hart Mahan, America’s leading military theorist. Mahan advocated using pickets in front of a main column to draw out the enemy, whereupon the main column would charge and the pickets would fall back and join their ranks. Mahan could not possibly have imagined how that scenario would play out in the fog on the summit of La Independencia: instead of Mexican infantry pickets on foot, lancers on horseback charged out from the castle. The main column of Mexican troops was the infantry regiment right behind them. But while the strategies were somewhat alike, sharp differences soon made themselves clear.
When the lancers had advanced halfway toward the American position, they were suddenly stunned to see twelve hundred U.S. soldiers rise from their hiding place in the rocks and rush toward them. “You never saw such a surprised set of fellows in this world as were those lancers,” Dana wrote Sue. “They turned their horse’s [
sic
] tails and struck off like quarter horses for the city, leaving some twenty or thirty of their fellows on the ground.”
Now the Americans turned their attention to the Mexican foot soldiers, who had also turned to run for their lives. Most of them raced for the protective walls of the Bishop’s Palace, rather than for Monterrey, hoping to get inside before the Americans. The pursuit became a footrace, contested “so hotly that they entered pell-mell with the enemy into the palace before they could close their doors on the position for defense,” Dana recalled.
By 3:00 p.m. the battle was won. Four pieces of artillery inside the Bishop’s Palace were captured. Like the cannons captured atop La Federación, they were reaimed down onto the Mexican positions inside Monterrey. Few prisoners had been taken: those enemy soldiers who were able had fled — and those who did not run for their lives were dead, clubbed with muskets, shot, or killed by swords.
With the American flag raised over the Bishop’s Palace, Taylor’s army officially controlled most of the easternmost, and all the westernmost, points in the battlefield. The Mexican army was trapped in between. Now, all Taylor had to do was squeeze the jaws of this vise, and the battle would be won. “I felt confident that with a strong force occupying the road and heights in his rear, and a good position below the city in our possession, the enemy could not possibly maintain the town,” Taylor noted optimistically.
To capture Monterrey, Taylor’s army would have to reenter the deadly streets and alleys. To the Americans it looked painfully simple, yet this was the showdown General Ampudia had been waiting for all along.
The Mortar
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EPTEMBER 23, 1846
J
ust after midnight, Worth’s sentries atop La Independencia and La Federación heard commotion on Monterrey’s western outskirts. When they looked more closely, however, the streets seemed deserted. Worth ordered Meade to quietly investigate. “The general sent me forward on a reconnaissance, to ascertain what batteries the enemy had in our direction. In doing this, I ascertained the enemy had abandoned all that portion of the town in our direction, and had retired to the central plaza of the town, where they were barricaded, and all the houses occupied by infantry.”
Meade had made an amazing discovery: all of Ampudia’s perimeter fortifications, with the exception of the Black Fort, had been abandoned in favor of making one final stand at the very heart of the carefully engineered defensive bastion. His troops would focus their activity around the main plaza, a large, square open space that looked very much like a military parade ground. The buildings fronting the plaza were almost all just one story high, with protective shutters that opened from the inside, metal barricades over many windows, and those flat roofs and parapets so perfect for concealing Mexican marksmen. The only multistory building was the cathedral, with its three-story bell tower, which formed a perfect lookout position. Solid masonry walls had been erected across all the streets leading into or out of the plaza, with cannon portals that resembled the openings on the side of an old-fashioned man-of-war. For maximum destructive effect, those guns would fire rounds of grape.
Worth changed his plans accordingly. “Two columns of attack were organized,” the general wrote, “to move along the two principal streets in the direction of the great plaza, composed of light troops, slightly extended, with orders to mask the men whenever practicable, avoid those points swept by the enemy’s artillery, to press on to the first plaza, get hold of the end of the streets beyond, then enter the buildings, and, by means of picks and bars, break through the longitudinal section of the walls, work from house to house, and ascending to the roofs, to place themselves upon the same, breast-high with the enemy.”
The Second Dragoons had been kept out of the fighting, instead acting as couriers, riding their horses back and forth from Taylor’s camp at Walnut Springs to Worth’s position west of the city. Thus Worth was able to plan his attack knowledgeably, using the information about street fighting that had been gleaned after Garland’s debacle. Instead of marching in columns, advancing street by street, the Americans would attempt to advance house to house — from the inside. Most homes shared a common wall, so advancement was as laborious as knocking a hole in the stone and then clearing the next house of enemy occupants. Battering rams, sledgehammers, pickaxes, and even small cannons were assembled for the job.
Couriers weren’t the only soldiers making the circuitous loop from Walnut Springs to the Saltillo road. On the morning of the twenty-third, an artillery squad came dragging the ten-inch mortar used during the first day of the battle, giving Worth a gun capable of inflicting enormous damage. Worth planned to station the piece somewhere inside Monterrey and then rain mortar shells down on the main plaza. The location he had in mind was a smaller plaza, known as the Capella, which, by resonant coincidence, housed a cemetery.
Worth had already shifted the bulk of his force to the summit of La Independencia, the summit offering the shortest downhill route into the city. His infantry now began picking their way down through the rocks and grass, even as his twelve-pounder and the captured Mexican cannons opened fire from the Bishop’s Palace.
Like it or not, it was time to enter the trap.
A
S A LONE
dragoon galloped back through the muddy cane fields with the results of Meade’s reconnaissance, a small group under Jeff Davis’s command probed the Mexican defenses on the other side of town. There, too, the Americans discovered that the enemy had retreated. “On the morning of the 23rd we held undisputed possession of the east end of Monterey,” noted Grant, who was then moving back into the outskirts with the Fourth.
Taylor had finally ridden Old Whitey into the city — with elements of the Second Dragoons riding alongside as his personal escort — and set up a command post in La Tenería. American estimates showed that there were seven thousand Mexican regulars in the plaza, with at least another two thousand local conscripts. Ampudia also had forty-two cannons at his disposal, with ample ammunition. “Our artillery,” Taylor noted wryly, “consisted of one ten-inch mortar, two 24-pound howitzers, and four light field batteries — the mortar being the only piece suitable to the operations of a siege.”
And while it was obvious that the Mexicans had pulled back into the plaza, it soon became clear that their retreat was not total and that they also occupied defensive positions in many streets along the way. The Third and Fourth infantries encountered heavy fire as they moved carefully forward, remaining outdoors in order to travel more quickly. “The streets leading to the plaza,” Grant wrote, referring to the Mexican defenses, “were commanded from all directions by artillery . . . the roofs were manned with infantry, the troops being protected from fire by parapets made of sandbags. All advances into the city were attended with much danger.” He added: “A volley of musketry and a discharge of grape shot were invariably encountered.”
The constant cannon fire and musket shots were deafening. Oftentimes the American soldiers could not hear their officers’ commands and instead relied on visual cues: a line of men abruptly changing direction, signifying a new point of attack; the commander waving his saber, motioning for his men to follow him into battle; a fellow soldier keeling over from the musket shot they never saw coming; or, most horrifically, an entire group of men ripped open and dismembered by a burst of grape.
Death came from all angles at all times. One American soldier estimated that there were “a thousand musketeers on the housetops, and in the barricades at the head of the street up which we advanced, and at every cross street, and you may form some idea of the deluge of balls poured upon us. Onward we went, men and horses falling at every step. Cheers, shrieks, groans, and words of command added to the din.
“I sat down on the ground with my back to the wall of a house. On my left were two men torn nearly to pieces. One of them was lying flat on his back with his legs extending farther in the street than mine. Crash came another shower of grape, which tore one of his wounded legs off. He reared up, shrieked, and fell back a corpse. I never moved, for I was satisfied that one place was as safe as another.”
One group of regular soldiers and Texas Rangers managed to find an extremely safe place in the form of a small market. “We reached a corner house of a block,” wrote one of the regulars. “It was a corner grocery full of wine,
aquadenta
and Mescal. On the opposite side of the street we had to cross was another one of those infernal fortified stone walls.” Up the street, the Mexicans were bayoneting American wounded, crying out loudly and defiantly as they did so. Sensing that their situation was getting desperate, the soldiers in the market proceeded to get “crazy drunk.” Only then did they throw open the door and make a dash for the wall. “Our foes met the rush with so heavy a fire that the air seemed to rain balls. Bullets striking on the stone, pavements and walls, ricocheting and glancing from side to side, as we staggered on. At least a regiment of infantry came up a side street, poured their fire in our flank, and then charged us with bayonet. All fought now on his own hook, and fought more like devils than human beings, with axes, clubbed rifles, sabre, and Bowie knife.”
That action took place on the hotly contested eastern side of Monterrey. Davis and the First Mississippi were close by — cold, wet, tired, hungry, and miserable from sleeping in the open and not eating for almost two days and nights. Now they maneuvered street by street, under that same “murderous fire,” until the main plaza was in sight. The Rifles were low on ammunition and depleted by casualties, and orders soon arrived for them to retreat from what was clearly a vulnerable position. Obeying that command was not so easy. “The enemy was behind us,” Davis noted plainly, with a nod to the artillery battery with a gun aimed squarely down their escape route. He decided to personally test the Mexican response. “If only one gun was fired at me, then another man should follow; and so on, another and another, until a volley should be fired, and then all of them should rush rapidly across before the guns could be reloaded. In this manner the men got across with little loss.”
G
RANT WAS ALSO
navigating his way through those streets with the greatest caution, paying particular attention to the rooftops. He watched as five of the Third Infantry’s twelve remaining officers went “toes up” in the withering crossfire of musket and grape, and he could hear the cries of Mexican soldiers exhorting one another in the heat of battle. There were female voices, too; as the men of Mexico fought for Monterrey, it was the local women who carried fresh bullets to the rooftops. “A young woman, Dona María Josefa Zozaya, appeared amid the soldiers fighting on the roof of the home of Sr. Garza Flores. She gave them courage and passed them munitions; she showed them how to face down danger,” noted one of the Mexicans.
Many of those female voices were far more anguished. In one home, two Mexican women, fearful of their young daughters’ being raped, pleaded for the Americans to “spare the senoritas and use them as we wished,” wrote one soldier about entering a home. In another, the cries were not of a woman but of a young child, sobbing at the sight of his mother, killed by a random shot. “In every house,” the soldier lamented, “fearful sights told of a town taken by storm.”
Meanwhile, lack of munitions threatened the Third and Fourth’s forward advance. The shortage could hardly have come at a worse time. They were deep inside Monterrey, just a single block from the plaza. Colonel Garland needed to get word back to General Twiggs that reinforcements and ammunition were urgently required. He asked for a volunteer, someone willing to travel back out of the city alone and get the message to Twiggs. It was Grant who stepped forward. The heat of battle and concern for his fellow soldiers had turned the passive observer of Palo Alto and timid company commander at Resaca de la Palma, without warning or plan, into a brave-hearted warrior.
Grant’s horse that day was named Nelly. He had dismounted once they were inside the city and led her carefully through the fields of fire. But now was not the time to walk. He needed to gallop Nelly back out of town to bring help as quickly as possible.
All of his years on horseback had prepared Grant for this act of daring, and he relied on his skill to devise an unconventional plan. “I adjusted myself on the side of the horse furthest from the enemy, and with only one foot holding to the cantle of the saddle, and an arm over the neck of the horse exposed, I started at a full run.” Nelly galloped down the street, Grant clinging to the side of her. “It was only at street crossings that my horse was under fire, but these I crossed at such a flying rate that generally I was past and under cover of the next block before the enemy fired,” he recalled. “At one point on my ride, I saw a sentry walking in front of a house, and stopped to inquire what he was doing there. Finding that the house was full of wounded American soldiers, I dismounted and went in.”
Soldiers and officers lay about the floor. One of the officers, an engineer named Williams, had been shot in the head. The bowels of a nearby lieutenant spilled from his body. Grant promised the men filling the small home that he would report their location and return with help. Then he ventured carefully back out into the fray.
Dead-running Nelly through the streets of Monterrey, Grant succeeded in reaching Twiggs. But his gallantry was in vain — Garland had once again retreated. His advance position a block from the plaza soon fell back into Mexican hands. As for the wounded soldiers to whom Grant had promised relief, their position was overrun. None of them survived the battle.
O
N THE OPPOSITE
side of the city, Worth began firing a single mortar round into the main plaza, one every twenty minutes. The shells, wrote one soldier in position a few blocks away, “rushed over our heads with a strange roaring scream.” Each round consisted of a hollow iron cannonball filled with gunpowder. Each explosion killed between six and ten Mexicans. This show of force was meant to simultaneously unnerve Ampudia’s men and underscore that they were, in fact, pinned within a relatively small quadrant. American soldiers weren’t yet capable of penetrating the plaza, went the message, but the parabolic lob of an exploding mortar shell could reach it quite easily. Ongoing Mexican attempts to silence the mortar with cannon fire from the Black Fort proved futile.
Reaching the Capella, that smaller city plaza where the mortar was positioned, had involved a bloody and vicious fight. Following the lead of a small advance unit, Worth’s men had breached the city that morning, spreading wide as they did so; instead of attacking down just one street, American soldiers filled six different avenues. Whenever fire was encountered, they entered private homes and tore down connective walls, slowly making a passage to the heart of the Mexican force. One of the Texas Rangers fighting under Worth later recalled how “the street fighting became appalling — both columns were now closely engaged with the enemy, and steadily advanced, inch by inch. Our artillery was heard rumbling over the paved streets, galloping here and there as the emergency required, and pouring forth a blazing fire of grape and ball — volley after volley of musketry, and the continued peals of artillery became almost deafening. The artillery of both sides raked the streets, the balls striking the houses with a terrible crash, while amid the roars of battle were heard the battering instruments used by the Texans. Doors were forced open, walls were battered down, entrance made through the longitudinal walls, and the enemy driven from room to room, and from house to house, followed by the shrieks of women, and the sharp crack of Texan rifles. Cheer after cheer was heard in proud and exulting defiance, as the Texans or regulars gained the housetops by means of ladders.”