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From: Jeff Carter
Date: 02/09/99I've actually thought it would have been great to have been there with a loaded modern military arsenal: grenades, machine guns, mortars, etc...but since that's only a fantasy, here are some of my thoughts...The major moment was the Alamo garrison receiving no significant reinforcements.
Fannin at Goliad was a travesty and a disaster. If the Alamo garrison had decided to retreat to Goliad there would have been an open path for Santa Anna to advance. Fannin needed to reinforce Bexar. I don't know if the garrison engaged in any guerilla warfare tactics.
In the 1960 movie, The Alamo, they Slashed and Ran. This kept the Mexicans off balance, but their sheer numbers would overcome any consistent attempts. The only way the Alamo garrison could have defeated Santa Anna's larger force would have been able to ambush them in a pincer type of movement. Alexander the Great defeated King Darius of Persia at the Battle of Gaugamela by pinching the superior Persian forces at the sides and sending a charge at the front.
They were essentially surrounded on 3 sides and their numbers were decimated. The Mexicans had the superior position and numbers and the Texans were at a disadvantage by being pinned in. Now onto the Mexican side, I believe that Santa Anna made numerous errors. He knew the numbers of the garrison shortly after arriving, yet chose to wait for more of his soldiers to arrive. This may have been prudent to a point, but to wait as long as he did was ridiculous. He should have surrounded the fort at the first available opportunity and focused heavy bombardment on either the north or south walls, probably the south. Then send in 1500 troops against the weakened position. Any Texans that would have tried to escape out of the Alamo could have been chased down by the surrounding Cavalry. I do think that Santa Anna let his ego carry him by killing every defender. If he would have shown some bit of compassion, I don't think that the Texans would have been out for blood at San Jacinto. He could have won the battle and possibly the war by having a group of released prisoners spread the word of Santa Anna's victory and his army size and there would have been no revenge facto!
Combine the results of the Alamo and Goliad and the obvious conclusion is an eventual revenge factor. Getting back to the battle itself...The Texans brilliantly built defenses for the obvious battle inside of the fort. Unfortunately for them, all of the cannon remained inside the fort and not inside the barracks. This proved to be their downfall. Getting the Mexicans caught in a vicious crossfire produced a lot of casualties. This could have worked were it not for the bright thinking of some of the Mexican commanders to turn the cannon on the Texans. By then it was only a matter of time... If only the Texans could have ringed the exterior of the fort with landmines...Oh well...
From: Philip Rosenthal
Date: 02/12/99The defining moment of the Battle of the Alamo quite frankly, didn't even take place in the Alamo.
Arguably, with 200 more men to cover the four acres of the Alamo compound and the ammunition and weapons that went with them, Fannin's reinforcement could have changed the outcome. That assumes, however, that Santa Anna would have attacked and suffered the severe casualties that would have resulted from attacking a fortification like the Alamo which, despite its relatively rundown condition, was still quite formidable. If he instead fought a war of attrition, the Alamo garrison, no matter how many men and how much supplies, would have eventually run short on food and water and long on disease. It does not seem that any other Texian unit was sufficiently positioned ó or perhaps ó willing, to break the siege.
Bottom line, if Fannin gets there with more men and guns, the Alamo holds. Don't be fooled, the Mexicans were a pretty good fighting force, but against a fully-manned fortification like the Alamo, it would have been very, very tough to defeat the Texians. This is a fact of combat and as a veteran of such sieges, I can personally attest to its validity.
As for critical errors, there seem to have been precious few. Travis and his company commanders seemed to have done a pretty good job with what they had. Colonel Neill letting the Bexar Volunteers go earlier along with most of the garrison's supplies was an error, but they all had their reasons and their crops and families to take care of. Even during the battles of the Vietnam War, the Montagnards tended to their crops and this included the military members of the tribes.
Santa Anna, by running up the red flag, at first blush did seem to make a mistake but in all honesty, what was he going to do? Parole the survivors so they could fight him again? March them off back to Mexico City when he didn't have enough food to feed them or men to guard them. Besides, he would have probably lost them to cold or disease anyway on the way back. Revenge and hate are very highly overrated when it comes to winning a battle. Maybe it works in football and ice hockey, but reason and good planning win battles along with calm, steady marksmanship. You can throw men into the breach yelling and screaming, but that only gets them shot, or if you are very lucky, scares the heck out of the other guys and they run.
Nobody's really sure what happened at San Jacinto, or at the ALAMO, or at Goliad for that matter. But we do know what happened at Little Big Horn, Pickett's Charge, and at many battlefields in Southeast Asia and revenge didn't win those battles, superior commands and cool, calm soldiering did. The most critical error then, was not having enough men and weapons. Certainly a few M60 machine guns and a couple of Huey gunships would have helped but no such luck.
What would I have done differently? I would have brought the First Air Cavalry with me. Failing that, I would have made darned sure that the whole province was behind me before I chose to make a stand. The political maneuvering was counterproductive but predictable and if those guys on Washington-on-the-Brazos were a little more interested in building an army and support for their people in the fieldónever mind that there were two Texas armies at the timeórather than positioning themselves for the upcoming independent republic, things could possibly have turned out different. I might blame Sam Houston, too. Do we really know, even to this day, why he was up north and out of sight?
However, Monday morning quarterbacking is very distasteful to me and in the end, the Alamo garrison did a helluva job. In fact, IN SPITE of the political maneuvering, what the garrison did was pretty remarkable. Maybe, just maybe, the plan all along was for Travis, Bowie, Crockett and Seguin to be taken out of the way. After all, they all hadóor would have hadóready-made constituencies and a victory at the Alamo that could have gotten them pretty far up the political pecking order. Certainly Crockett was looking at being one of the high officeholders of the Republicóhe said as much in his letters. Although not an official commander at the Alamo, he was one of those defenders who was truly the "spirit" of the garrison and extremely popular. He was politically savvy and well spoken enough to benefit from a victory there.
Travis, for all his youth and sometimes arrogance, was bright and brave. Bowie was loved, well connected through marriage, and enough of a con man to make a great politician.
Seguin, one of the true tragedies of the Revolution, was courageous and one of the true heroes, willing to give everything up to end the tyranny. If he had not been subverted after the Revolution by others not quite as honorable, he would have been a powerful force in the Republic. Remember, if they had won at the Alamo, he would have been honored as the company commander of the Tejano Lioncitos, rather as one of those who left during the siege, even though his intention and purpose - ordered by the Alamo command ó was to get reinforcements and return.
No, it doesn't take much of a reach to perhaps wonder if the Alamo garrison was set up so that others could make political hay out of the defeat. There are to this day, still too many unanswered questions and the cynic in me perhaps does not want to find the answers. Travis and his command, despite all odds, appear to have performed brilliantly, courageously and honorably. I hope history shows us that so did all the other Texian players. Santa Anna did what he had to do, although it appears he took far too many casualties. But he really didn't lose many of his regular army, the upper class-dominated reserve. He lost lower-class peons of his militia. So did he, to his mind, lose that much? After all, to him it was "but a small affair". He probably really believed it.
From: Jeff Pendleton
Date: 02/14/99After reading some of the other opinions in this month's debate I have to say "what the $%@&*, over?" Which is military radio slang for "what are you guys smoking?"
I cherish the wonderful and tragic history those brave men left us at the Alamo as much as the next man, but I believe it's clear to the most casual of geopolitical observers and military historians that the occupation of and battle for the Alamo mission was a tactical mistake. It constituted a holding action against Santa Anna only because of Santa Anna's very unprofessional decision to let it be.
A wiser commander would have left a siege force and gone on with his main army to scatter the at-the-time unorganized Texas army. This would have rendered Travis' men bottled up and unable to have any outcome on the war. They would have then been reduced through time and dealt with at the Mexicans' leisure.
If I had been there, and had Travis asked my opinion, I would have advised dividing my men into two forces:
1. Mounted troops, the best shots all armed with long rifles and several pistols each. These men would start a scorched earth campaign of grass burning, food store ruining, sniping, and ambushing of the enemies advance parties.2. The rest of the men and all the canon that could be taken, I would transport to Goliad--a much better place to be make a stand from. A great tragedy of Goliad (as if there wasn't enough tragedy there already) is what COULD have been done there. They were in a much better position to successfully weather a siege, and thereby hold the Mexican army up while general Houston prepared his army in the east.
From: Scott McMahon
Date: 02/16/99We can all sit there and analyze the Alamo and say if I was there I would have... but the fact is we weren't there and nothing we can say or do will change what happened. I don't think if Fannin would have reinforced the Alamo it would have stood(however that seems to contradict the popular theory!). The decision to stay and fortify the Alamo was the fatal error. The idea of a hit-and-run mounted force is nice but I think it would have done very little towards slowing Santa Anna. Goliad was a strong defensive point as far as fortifications go but it didn't have the artillery park that the Alamo did so nobody considered it a viable defensive position. The fact that the ragtag force of Texans took the Alamo from Cos should have told them it was a weak spot but they stayed anyway. People make mistakes everyday and the Alamo was a BIG one but they defended it well with what they had...maybe if Fannin had brought in reinforcements the Alamo would have held, for a little while longer but I think in the end it would have fallen just the same. Remember the Alamo for the brave men who died defending it not as a reason to put down her previous commanders or would be reinforcers.
From: Bob Durham
Date: 02/16/99I agree with Jeff Pendleton that Goliad would have been better able to withstand a siege than the Alamo (there were even a couple of missions on the San Antonio mission trail in better shape for defense than the Alamo) but any of the missions could have been cut off & bypassed by Santa Anna if he chose to do so. Since Travis & Bowie determined to hold the Alamo, what could have made it more defensible with the forces on-hand?
Since one of the primary weaknesses of the Alamo was the lack of sufficient manpower to defend a fortress of that size, the defenders should have concentrated their defense in the strongest areas, the chapel and the long barracks. They should have completely torn down the walls & barracks composing the Alamo plaza, and used the materials to strengthen the convent walls & build outworks that would have provided better fields of fire for the artillery. Destroying the plaza buildings would have given them a more compact, stronger area to defend. Actually, Green B. Jameson suggested something like that, only
far more drastic, and he did not have the necessary resources. Since this is a "what-if" scenario, I am assuming that the men would have been sufficiently motivated, with me in charge, to perform the necessary labor.Of course, if their defense had been successful, and Santa Anna wasted his army futilely attacking the fortress, Texas history would have turned out a lot different. Santa Anna would never have moved on East Texas, there would have been no Battle of San Jacinto, Sam Houston would now be no more than the answer to a trivia question, and Travis and/or Crockett would probably have been among the first presidents of the Republic of Texas. One thing would have remained the same though -- people would still remember the Alamo, although for far different reasons.
From: Robert E. Carrier
Date: 02/18/99Gentlemen,
I can't think of one instance in history where a war was won from a defensive position!
Well on second thought, perhaps Wellington at Waterloo and Andrew Jackson at the Battle of New Orleans and the Union Soldiers at Gettysburg may have won their respective wars from defensive positions.
From: Kevin R. Young
Date: 02/24/99The defining moment of the entire Alamo situation was the night of February 22,1836. That is when General Ramirez y Sesma failed to cross the Rio Medina, thus disrupting Santa Anna's operational plan of taking the Bejar garrison by surprise. Had Sesma been able to follow through that night, or at least early the next morning, the Alamo would have never taken place.
There were so many errors made by both sides which contributed to the chain of events resulting in the Alamo siege and battle that it is impossible to point out all of them. The inability of the Texians outside of the Bejar area to provide any substantial reinforcements in time to help is defiantly a contributing factor, but so is the location of the Alamo and San Antonio in relation to the rest of colonized Texas. Bejar is just too far west (90 to 100 miles from the closest settlements of Gonzales, Goliad and Bastrop).
Everyone, however, seems to want to point out the Texian errors, but what about Santa Anna's? There should have never been a battle of the Alamo, because the Mexican commander should have used his artillery to reduce the place to limestone and abode dust! Santa Anna did not use his cavalry to good advantage in his part of the campaign (while Urrea knew exactly how to use his). Sesma is used to screen enemy troop movement within the Bejar area instead of being out further as forward advance details (note how Sesma is running from the Gonzales to the Goliad Roads trying to intercept possible Texian reinforcements.
The Alamo was not a historical vacuum. Events happening outside the siege lines had a direct effect on what was going on in Bejar. As to the idea of abandoning Goliad in favor of the Alamo, either way, you would have let a large force of Mexican troops slip by. Remember that the Mexican plan called for one army to come up the Camino Real (Bejar, Bastrop and Nacogdoches) while another force went up the La Bahía Matamoros Road (Goliad, Victoria and Brazoria). Once past either Bejar or Goliad, a detached part could go up the center (San Felipe and Washington-on-the-Brazos).
As to "cut, slash and run" Johnson and Grant tried that-and Urrea cut them apart. Mounted Texian rifleman vs Mexican lancers equals lots of dead Texians. It sounds so nice when Richard Widmark says it!
As to "one instance where a war was won from a defensive position." How about Gettysburg, Franklin, Nashville, and Rorke's Drift?
From: Stanley Lind, Jr.
Date: 02/26/99To me the defining moments of the Alamo were:
- Sesma's failure to cross the Medina the evening of February 22, 1836. The sheer element of surprise would disorganize and probably disrupt any real attempts at "stiff" resistance by the Texans.
- I've often wondered if the garrison would have been at a better defensive advantage at the San Fernando compound, smaller area, stronger and higher stone walls, or perhaps fortifying the center of Bexar, by barricading the streets leading to the center of town you negate the effects of the Mexican Cavalry. There would be no worry of flank attacks, the narrow streets become death traps for Column attacks, enfilade fire and sniper fire from the roof tops would create additional killing zones. Texan artillery aimed down streets would prevent Mexican infantry at bay.
As in the Battle of Bexar, the Texans bored holes in buildings to avoid dangerous enfilade fire. They could have used this method again to fire down side streets! The demoralizing on Cos' veterans of that battle would have been tremendous.
