So, there we were, watching that venerable John Wayne flick. The Alamo (Yeah, yeah, I know. But to quote another John Wayne movie, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”) DesertRoomie suddenly asked, Why were they there? What could they hope to accomplish?" Knowing a bit I answered that Houston’s army was a ways north trying to get organized and they were buying time, delaying Santa Anna to give them that time. Besides, they thought they were going to be reinforced. “Okay,” she continued. “Why then did Santa Anna take the bait? Why didn’t he just go around? It looks like there’s plenty of room.”
There she had me. I suppose he didn’t want to leave several hundred troops behind to keep the Texians off of his rear, but he lost four to six hundred assaulting the place. I looked in Wiki and it just mumbled something about the value of using Bexar as a staging point. Or maybe it had something to do about avenging his brother-in-law whose army got pushed out of the area.
So, any experts out there? What persuaded Santa Anna to invest the Alamo?
The Alamo was loaded with artillery which the Texans were loath to abandon and the Mexicans were eager to acquire. At a more basic level, to quash a rebellion, you have to kill or capture the rebels. You can’t leave 200 of their best men (about 10% of the Texan “army”) sitting in a heavily fortified cannon-laden citadel in the heart of your territory. The Mexicans would have had to deal with the Alamo sooner or later; they chose sooner.
Becase from a strategic point of view, you don’t leave an armed enemy fortification at your back. The Alamo could then harass Santa Anna’s supply lines as he pushed deeper into Texas.
Neither side was really following the optimal plan. The Texans were going to be cut-off and outnumbered if they stayed - the smarter option for them would have been to withdraw and link up with Houston’s forces. Santa Anna’s best option would have been to leave a detachment of troops at the Alamo to bottle up the defenders inside and march the main part of his army to catch Houston and the main Texan army.
The result was that the Texans got killed in a battle where they were outnumbered at least six to one. And Santa Anna wasted a bunch of time capturing a secondary objective and ended up losing the war.
She just doesn’t understand the importance of machismo & appearing heroic on the battlefield.
There really doesn’t seem to be any other significant reason besides these emotional ones.
It would have been an enemy strong point left behind, but that has been done for eons. It’s called a siege. It uses up some of your troops in surrounding the castle, but the rest are free to proceed into enemy territory, large unimpeded.
Still, the idea of bypassing enemy strong points and gong around doesn’t seem to have become mainstream until WWII. Largely by the US ‘island-hopping’ strategy in the Pacific theater. (There were some others: Hitler avoided prolonged fighting over the French Maginot line by going around it, and Eisenhower avoided Hitler’s Atlantic Wall by going around it. But both subsequently forgot that, and got their forces bogged down fighting over strongpoints that they could have gone around (Hitler at Stalingrad, Eisenhower at Caen). It was just a part of conventional military training to go for pitched battles with the enemy, destroying as much as possible of his forces. The ‘total war’ strategy of destroying the enemy’s economy, homeland, and morale was just not part of their thinking.)
General Sam Houston actually had ordered the Alamo to be abandoned. He knew the Texans were not able to defend it, and it had little strategic importance. Bowie was actually sent there to salvage the artillery pieces Houston’s army needed. Instead, Bowie became one of the two commanders at the Alamo.
As Cecil pointed out, there was no unified command structure. The Texans had no food or water, and had little ammunition. If they were expecting a fight, they certainly didn’t act like it. Many were asleep when the Mexican army finally came, and had to be roused up.
Santa Anna could have easily bypassed the Alamo. He could have come up the coast to fight Houston’s army which would have kept the Mexican army better provisioned. Instead, he chose to take San Antonio because his brother-in-law was forced to surrender the city the year before.
The battle of the Alamo hurt both sides. The artillery that Houston wanted fell into the hands of the Mexican army. The defeat of the Texans caused general panic. Yet, the battle gave Houston’s army time to prepare. Santa Anna, in moving his army to San Antonio stretched his supply line and outran his own artillery which would had been very helpful in the battle.
This was a band of maybe 150 armed men with few supplies, in an old mission with wooden walks, in a city of little strategic importance for the Mexicans.
As qazwart mentioned, Travis had been ordered to leave the city to Santa Anna and regroup with the main force, which he didn’t do, for whatever reason. It’s been of some debate how much his disobeying orders may have helped Houston’s forces or not (on the one hand, it did buy Houston some time to prepare, on the other hand, the defeat of the Alamo, at around the same time as the string of defeats the Texians were suffering in the Goliad campaign, pretty much caused mass panic amongst the settlers.)
Eh, it predates WWII, it’s just that the strategy is familiar to us from WWII. The German “storm” or infiltration tactics at the end of WWI emphasized bypassing strongpoints and leaving them for follow-up troops to mop up. Sherman did it in his campaign up to Atlanta, and on his March to the Sea. Hell, Sun Tzu tells us not to attack where the enemy is strong.
It’s especially telling in this case that the Texans were so ill-prepared. Not only did their lack of food and water mean they would have folded quickly in a siege, it also negated any threat they might have posed to break out and conduct operations in the Mexican rear – you need supplies to begin a campaign of maneuver. The Alamo posed little threat if bypassed.
While I do buy into the machismo theory – a Mexican general with visions of being a conquering hero versus the biggest egos in Texas? That’s gotta be a clash of testosterone – I’d also hazard a guess, without reading any additional account of the battle, that Santa Anna had another reason, if he were asked: winning the small fight at the Alamo would bolster the morale of his men before the bigger battle looming against Houston. Stonewall Jackson would later put this concept famously, but it was understood long before him, of course:
In theory, both sides would learn the outcome of the battle, and Mexican morale would be raised as easy victors, while the main Texan army under Houston would be at least a little concerned that some of their men had already been crushed by this oncoming army. The Alamo looked like easy pickings and a cheap way to gain an advantage in the upcoming main fight.
I guess the psychological impact shouldn’t be underestimated either. I don’t have any sympathy for Santa Anna, but Houston’s troops at San Jacinto, shouting “Remember the Alamo!” and “Remember Goliad!” had some scary bloodlust going on.
No reason to have sympathy for Santa Anna–“Merciless in Victory, Craven in Defeat.” He fled from the battle site & disguised himself. Upon capture, he was recognized by his silk underwear. Sam Houston let him live; partially to encourage the other Mexican forces to leave Texas.
Every year, there’s a re-enactment of the battle at the battleground–near Houston. Recent years have seen more “Mexican” re-enactors. On at least one occasion, a special ceremony was held for the soldados (many conscripted) who made the long trek from Mexico (through unseasonally cold weather) & died by the hundreds.
I’ve used Wikipedia to refresh my memory, but my studies of Texas History began long ago, with several years spread throughout my public schooling. (And some assistance from Texas History Movies!) Of course, later studies have filled in the blanks & countered the “facts” that were either legends or lies. A fine recent book on the Revolution is Texian Illiad. And this site is a great source on the Alamo–which had quite a history before That Battle.
I’m just countering the idea that the Alamo could have been ignored by Santa Anna. I don’t know if the 2 week time frame was significant or not. And no, you don’t spend your time attacking, you lay siege and wait for them to surrender or become too weak to fight back, or conduct a reasonable assault which provides victory in a day or two.
If we want to frame it in terms of nineteenth century military theory, Santa Anna failed to follow schwerpunktprinzip - concentrate your forces on the focal point of the campaign.
But, the Mexican army didn’t even have to go near the Alamo. Santa Anna’s target was Sam Houston’s army. Because Santa Anna went to San Antonio, he couldn’t move his army by a coastal route which would have been easier to supply and less arduous than trudging through the dessert.
A good general doesn’t get distrcted. We saw this with Sherman’s march to the Sea. General Hood did his best to distract General Sherman, and Sherman did dispatch some troops to deal with Hood, but despite a large army to his rear, he kept marching to the sea. He didn’t turn around to fight Hood.
The main reason Santa Anna wanted to attack the Alamo was to take revenge. San Antonio was the last Mexican garrison to fall to the Texans in the previous year revolt, and that garrison was led by Santa Anna’s brother-in-law.
I don’t think the approach to San Antonio is a desert. One ugly-ass stretch of land, true, but I don’t think troops would be lacking for water or forage. Come to think of it, that route might be healthier than marching through the mosquito* and alligator-infested marshes of the coast.
(*ETA: I was going to say “malarial” marshes, but I’m not sure if malaria was a problem in that region. Anyway, mosquitos the size of the end of one of your fingers are never fun.)
The doctrine “you don’t leave a castle in your rear” or “you don’t leave a fortress in your rear” is an ancient piece of military strategy. It’s also a famous point on which many historical commanders have blundered.
I can point to several incidents especially from 1740-1945 where this happened (1740 marked the beginning of the War of the Austrian Succession), many different times armies have wasted vast resources due to a commander that did not understand the caveats of this concept.
Really, even dating back to the 18th century and prior, the doctrine of not leaving a fortified enemy position in your rear essentially only comes into play if:
There is reason to believe leaving said fortification will threaten your supply lines in a significant manner. (In essence, imagine a situation in which you bypass a fortress and then the troops from that fortress become agents of chaos and impede your ability to resupply and keep supply because they use the fortress as a base of operations to attack your supply chains, conduct small scale warfare and et cetera.)
The fortification is in fact the major objective of your campaign. For example if the whole war is about capturing a specific location because you hope to annex it during peace negotiations, you will need to actually take said objective. Historically it was much more difficult to get things ceded to you in peace settlement if you did not control them.
A third reason that is outside the realm of military strategy would be general political reasons. For example near the end of the Second Schleswig War (in which Austria and Prussia allied with one another to steal some land from Denmark) Prussia engaged in a costly and bloody frontal assault essentially just because the Prussians needed a “signature victory.” At that point the overall result of the war was not really in question, Prussia (and Bismarck) just wanted to make sure they’d be able to effectively lobby for favorable conditions in the peace. In this specific case Prussia and Austria were allied but were really great rivals and Prussia wanted to make sure any benefit from the war went to Prussia and not Austria. (In fact general squabbling over dividing the spoils of the Schleswig War directly lead to war between Prussia and Austria a few years later.)
Well that makes sense. And it points out the mistake in my statement. It’s not that you don’t leave the fort behind, it’s the 150 men. They were mobile and well armed. They weren’t that mobile though, that’s what got them in the fix in the first place, not enough resources to move the artillery before Santa Anna got there. So if he knew they were relatively immobile, I guess it was stupid to waste resources at the Alamo. But if he didn’t know that, he couldn’t move on leaving a mobile armed force to his rear.