A number of other bloggers, all of whom know their Texas history much better than I do, have mentioned the siege and battle of the Alamo in 1836.
I only can add this, from T.R. Fehrenbach’s Lone Star.
pp 212-13The tactics used [by the Mexicans} were the standard Napoleonic techniques; attack in columns, cavalry on the flanks and in reserve, batteries to soften the enemy before the charge. Two weaknesses here, however, glared; Santa Anna lacked sufficient guns to give the enemy a sufficient Napoleonic blasting, and his heavy cuirasiers could not hurl their shock against thick limestone walls. The assault had to be infantry in column, bearing bayonets and scaling ladders. Probably, no marshal of France would have faulted the organization or the charge. But neither Napoleonic marshals, nor Santa Anna, had ever assaulted American rifleman ensconced behind high walls.
Nor could they know that British army instructions of the time warned that American riflemen, behind breastworks, could be attacked frontally only at unacceptable cost. British officers had seen the Sutherland Highlanders shot to a standstill, and battalions chopped to pieces, before the massed cotton bales at New Orleans in 1815. There, Jackson, and men like these at the Alamo, had commenced firing at the unheard of distance of three hundred yards. At one hundred yards, a British, or Mexican, musket could not hit a man-sized target one time in ten.
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Marksmanship was hardly an American, rather a Western tradition. The Tennesseeans, Kentuckians, and all the others shot and seldom missed. On the frontier men got guns at about the age of seven; and a boy or man who missed with a single-shot weapon usually went hungry, or lost his hair.
In the end, Santa Anna and the Mexican Army won the battle. The cost to the Mexicans was almost 1600 dead and 500 wounded. Texan casualties were 182. None survived the battle.
American and Texian riflemen had held out against a superior force and inflicted tremendous casualties. Their sacrifice bought precious time for the fledgling nation and a little over a month later, at the Battle of San Jacinto, the Mexicans were surprised and defeated in eighteen minutes, effectively ending the war.
Such is the tradition of the rifleman in American history.
Hello TOTWTYTR,That’s quite interesting. You’re basically attributing the Pyrrhic character of our defeat at the Alamo to our citizen-soldiers. As you know, Fehrenbach has extolled the virtues of legions. Perhaps the Americans at the time felt that our national survival was at stake?Fehranbach is, in my view, an excellent historian. He wrote a definitive history of the Korean War – as well as an interesting science fiction-based alternative history of the Alamo.Cheers,Jeff Deutsch
I don’t know that it was a call for national survival. I think more it was a call for assistance for a natural ally to the US. Plus it called to the adventurous nature of the Scots-Irish borderers from the then frontier lands of Kentucky and Tennessee. Either way, the cost to the Mexicans was high both at the Alamo and later on from a national perspective. I just started “This Kind of War”, which was recommended to me by Mule Breath. Not until reading the foreward did I know that Fehrenbach was an Army officer and served there.
Mr. Fehrenbach has a weekly column in the local paper:http://www.mysanantonio.com/opinion/columnists/t.r._fehrenbach/tr_fehrenbach.html
“At one hundred yards, a British, or Mexican, musket could not hit a man-sized target one time in ten. “Yup. Make marksmanship a vital suvival skill for a man (or woman), then give him the first reliable rifled long-arm in history, and you get some very effective hunters and soldiers. The Brits were screaming about American riflemen and snipers as far back as the Revolutionary War. And twenty years after the Alamo, both Union and Confederate snipers were picking off the enemy at ranges up to a mile.
Good point, Wolfwalker. Although it does seem that the more agrarian south had an edge early on in the marksmanship department.