Ed Strosser - Stupid Wars - A Citizen's Guide to Botched Putsches, Failed Coups, Inane Invasions, and Ridiculous Revolutions

By mid April, Daza gazed upon his poorly equipped, un­trained, and untested army and declared them ready to whip the Chileans. He paraded his force before the gushing citi­zens of La Paz, turned left out of town, and headed to the coast, 250 miles away.

Chilean leaders quickly realized that any large-scale move­ment of troops in the region must go by sea. The desert was too harsh, few roads existed, and supplying an army was a daunting challenge entirely dependent on control of the coastline. Sotomayor ordered naval commander Rear Admi­ral Juan Williams Rebolledo to move against the Peruvian navy. But the admiral proved irresolute and refused to attack, despite knowing the Peruvian fleet was a sitting duck, its two ironclads in dry dock in Callao, hundreds of miles to the north, with their boilers dismantled.

Rather than attack his defenseless enemy, Admiral Wil­liams established a blockade off the Peruvian port of Iquique, in the heart of guano territory, where the Peruvian army was assembling. His strategy was to economically squeeze the Peruvians by preventing any of their guano from leaving the country, forcing them to either come out and fight away from the protection of their shore guns, or watch their army wither.

Admiral Williams, after delaying so long, suddenly de­cided to sail north and attack Callao. His clockworklike plan dissolved along with his element of surprise. By accident Wil­liams now learned from an Italian fishing boat that his prize, the two Peruvian ironclads, had left port four days earlier — the two fleets unknowingly passed each other at sea going in opposite directions. The enemy had done what he was planning — but Williams had missed it. And even worse, the Peru­vian ironclads bore down on the two old ships Williams had stationed outside Iquique. The Chilean admiral turned around to rush back to their aid.

But he arrived too late. On May 21, the Peruvian Admiral Grau aggressively attacked the two aging Chilean ships. After much futile firing from his poorly trained sailors, Grau resorted to ramming his ironclad Huascar into the Chilean wooden ship Esmeralda . Knowing his ship was doomed, the Chilean commander Captain Arturo Prat gave the order to board the enemy, but in the din only one sailor followed. Pe­ruvian sailors cut them down in seconds. After a second ram­ming failed, another Chilean boarding party leapt onto the deck of the Huascar , only to suffer the same fate. Finally, a third ramming put the Chilean ship on the bottom. The other Peruvian gunship Independencia chased after the tiny Chilean ship, the Covadonga , whose shallow draft al­lowed it to hug the shore. The Independencia followed in hot chase, unaware of the dangers lurking beneath the water. Sud­denly, the ship struck a large rock, tearing a huge hole in her hull, a mortal blow. With his two ironclads, Grau held out hope he could defeat the Chileans, or at least threaten the Chil­eans’ naval dominance enough to keep their troops at port. But now with only one ship, the Huascar , those hopes were dashed on the unseen rocks under the Pacific. The war was already over for Peru and Bolivia. Everyone knew it but them.

The disaster pushed Admiral Grau to even greater heights of aggression. He raided up and down the coast with his one remaining ironclad. The Chilean people became noticeably testy over this turn of events. Admiral Williams was fired, and the entire cabinet resigned. Incredibly, Peru seemed to be winning, but this was merely an illusion. Chile, with its new nitrate-rich region safely in hand, stocked up on European arms.

Finally, on October 8 the Chileans caught up with Grau. The Chilean ironclad Cochrane locked horns with Grau’s Huascar , killing the Peruvian admiral with a shell straight into his bridge. The Chileans towed the Huascar into Val­paraiso as a prize. Now they had almost won the war. Almost. The Bolivians and Peruvians still didn’t know.

The following month the Chileans gathered their invasion force to deliver the knockout. The invasion on November 2 did not go as planned, however. The Chileans didn’t arrive until after daybreak, and the captain in charge of the land­ings was, allegedly, drunk. Fortunately, they were fighting the Bolivians, many of whom deserted, apparently led in flight by their generals, and victory was secured.

The inept allies planned a counterstrike with two main forces. Bolivian dictator Daza and 2,400 men, including his prized battalion of Colorados, were poised to swing into action after months of training. On November 10 Daza set out on a desert march south to join forces with General Juan Buendia and his Peruvians in typical haphazard, uninformed style: he didn’t bother to check rations and planned to march during the hot daylight hours. Instead of food and water, Daza issued his troops cash, apparently believing they would find a few dozen well-stocked bodegas on the way. After four days of brutal marching, Daza had gotten only halfway to his goal when he stopped at the Camarones River, which means “shrimp” in Spanish. Ten percent of his troops had deserted along the way. Daza hit the panic button. He real­ized he was taking the huge risk of losing the support of his Colorados with his stupid foray into the desert, opening up the possibility that the troops he had armed for the war could be used against him back home. Defending his power was more important than any coastline to him. Without ever finding out the location of his allies or the enemy, he turned around and marched back. Daza realized the fight was not really worth dying over and became a refusenik in his own war. Bolivians honored him with the nickname of “The Hero of the Shrimps.”

General Buendia, with his 9,000-man army of Bolivians and Peruvians, however, refused to quit. The Chileans marched into the interior with 7,000 troops and waited for Buendia. Allied incompetence was still raging unabated. The Chileans sent in reinforcements on the railroad right under the allies’ noses; Buendia’s column stopped within sight of the enemy in broad daylight, under the brutal sun, in the stinking nitrate fields.

On November 19, both sides waited for the other to start the battle. But some thirsty Peruvian and Bolivian troops wandered out to fetch water from a well right under the Chil­ean guns and suddenly decided to attack. Without orders. An alarmed Buendia had little choice but to order a general ad­vance. Chilean artillery drove off the attack. Sensing it was safer in the rear, the allied cavalry galloped away from the battle, followed by most of the Bolivian infantry.

A shrouding fog, typical in the area, descended upon the fleeing army and hampered their ability to get as far away from the Chileans as possible. Their leader had not bothered to bring along maps of the area nor a compass, further ham­pering the army’s ability to flee the battle in good order. When the sun rose the next day, the hapless allied troops found themselves still in sight of the enemy on the San Fran­cisco hills — they had simply marched in a circle. Now that they were able to see around them, the troops finally scram­bled away from the Chileans, and the parched remnants of Buendia’s army staggered into the Peruvian province of Tarapacá on November 22. The map-carrying Chileans shadowed them from a safe distance.

Unable to defend themselves, the Peruvians abandoned the port of Iquique the following day. They had now lost their last remaining guano port and any ability to sell their only valu­able export. The allies regrouped in Tarapacá. The Chileans, believing the soldiers were demoralized and ready to topple, launched an attack, but the allies outnumbered them two to one. Each Chilean thrust was thrown back. Fighting died down in the afternoon as the heat rose and the water levels in the canteens fell. Over five hundred Chileans were killed that day. Even though they resumed their retreat, the allies savored this minuscule taste of victory, their first… and last.