A History of War in 100 Battles. Richard Overy
in Argentina of Spanish parentage, but is famous for liberating Latin America from the Spanish Empire.
San Martín’s greatest victory came on a clear April day near the town of Maipú, north of the River Maipo on the approaches to Santiago. He drew up his mixed force of around 5,400 cavalry and infantry (many of them freed black slaves), with cavalry on the extreme right, infantry at the centre and left and a reserve of horse behind them. His favourite battlefield tactic was to imitate Alexander the Great, swinging the cavalry on his right in an oblique attack against the enemy left while part of his reserve came round to attack the rear. After charging several times, the grenadiers broke the Spanish left, but the right held firm against San Martín’s infantry, inflicting heavy losses. He ordered three battalions of the reserve to charge the Spanish regiments and they, too, collapsed in confusion. Osorio fled from the battle.
Surrounded on all sides, the Spanish soldiers fought bravely in the face of heavy fire from the twenty-one Chilean cannon and relentless pressure from the enemy infantry. As resistance crumbled, they were massacred where they stood or taken prisoner. Little effort was made to prevent the foot soldiers in the army of liberation from exacting revenge on an army identified with years of local atrocities against the ‘patriots’ fighting for independence. Of the Spanish army, 2,000 were killed and more than 2,000 taken prisoner. The Army of the Andes suffered an estimated 1,000 casualties.
San Martín’s achievement was not simply to out-fight the Spanish army and free Chile from colonial rule. It lay above all in his decision to create a force from the ground up capable of fighting like a European army. With few weapons and fewer clothes, the handful of fighters he had found in Mendoza were transformed, with new uniforms, guns forged in an arsenal created by a Chilean armourer, and gunpowder produced from local saltpetre. Training was strict and discipline harsh, but San Martín earned the confidence of his army by example. His only weakness was hesitancy when faced with the unpredictable and devious world of Latin American politics. His desire to free America as a whole was an ideal that could inspire temporary loyalty but not a permanent trust. Four years after Maipú, he resigned in disillusionment from command of the army and government of Peru (only half of which he had succeeded in liberating), the victim of malign gossip and political hostility. He sailed to Europe as an exile in 1824 and died in Boulogne in 1850. Before his death in 1850, Chile had woken up to its debt to his military talent and offered him the rank and pay of a Chilean general, while the rest of independent Latin America came to see him as their hero too.
| No. 14 | BATTLE OF VOLTURNO 1–2 October 1860 |
Probably no military leader was so admired and lionized in his own day as the commander of the famous ‘Thousand’ redshirts, Giuseppe Garibaldi. His inspirational leadership was acclaimed by those volunteers who flocked to his call to create a united Italy, but feared and vilified by politicians and monarchists who understood the revolutionary potential of Garibaldi’s ‘people’s army’. The story of the expedition of the Thousand to free Sicily and southern Italy from the rule of their authoritarian Bourbon monarchy is one packed with drama, but nothing was more dramatic than the first and only major defensive battle fought by the Garibaldini along the south bank of the River Volturno, north of Naples.
The campaign that ended with Volturno had begun on 11 May 1860, when the Piemonte and Lombardo, two ships appropriated by Garibaldi in Genoa, arrived at the Sicilian port of Marsala with 1,217 patriots, revolutionaries and students on board. His force faced a Bourbon army numbering 140,000, of whom 25,000 were in Sicily. The odds meant little to Garibaldi. Supported by a flood of volunteers and Sicilians hostile to Bourbon rule, the Thousand had turned by August into a motley force of 20,000. Among them were British and Hungarian veterans keen to support the aspirations for a united Italy and hostile to those great powers, principally the Austrian and Russian empires, which sought to shore up conservative monarchy. The Bourbon king, Francis II, had mixed loyalty from his Neapolitan army, many of whom threw in their lot with Garibaldi over the course of the year. Sicily was overrun and on 19 August, Garibaldi crossed to the mainland at Melito in two old steamers, Torino and Franklin, the latter flying an American flag. He brought 4,200 with him to start a campaign against 17,200 Neapolitan soldiers and 32 cannon.
The expedition was not approved by any of the European powers except Britain. Even the northern Italians, now unified under Victor Emmanuel II thanks to the help of the French army, were wary of Garibaldi and hoped that his ships might founder or sink. Instead, the numbers flocking to join the Garibaldini grew rapidly, though out of the 50,000 in the south no more than half constituted a real fighting force. The Neapolitan army was quickly cleared from Calabria and Garibaldi marched on Naples, the Bourbon capital. As enemy soldiers surrendered, so the rifles and cannon fell into the hands of what was now called the Army of the South, organized like a regular army in divisions and brigades, but reliant for its supply on what it could capture or the money and equipment sent by romantic supporters of Italian freedom. As the Garibaldini moved north, Victor Emmanuel moved his army south through central Italy in the hope that he could prevent Garibaldi from provoking republican revolution. Francis II was caught between the two, but it was the irregulars of Garibaldi who defeated him and made unification possible.
Francis abandoned Naples and moved a little further north to the strongly fortified centres at Capua and Gaeta, where he determined to make a stand. He still commanded 50,000 men with 42 cannon and a body of cavalry, but only half were sent to the front line established along the River Volturno under the command of Marshal Giosuè Ritucci. Garibaldi’s army began to arrive on the south side of the river, and thinking there would be the same uncontested advances seen in Calabria and much of Sicily, István Türr, Garibaldi’s Hungarian commander, launched premature attacks towards Capua. Here and at Caiazzo the Garibaldini were driven back with heavy losses. Francis and Ritucci decided their army was now in a strong enough state to mount a general offensive. The Neapolitan plan was to attack across the river from three different directions, one division from the northwest and two from different points to the east, in the hope that they could surround and annihilate Garibaldi’s army. Garibaldi and his senior commander, Giuseppe Sirtori, were forced to spread out their defensive system to avoid being outflanked. What followed were three different contests that eventually merged into a single battle.
© Prisma Archivo/Alamy
A nineteenth-century image of the Battle of Volturno in October 1860 shows Garibaldi’s red-shirted Italian patriots driving the Neapolitan army to the far side of the aqueduct of Ponte della Valle. The victory brought Italian national unification a decisive step nearer.
Both sides fought, according to observers, with a ferocity and desperation that had been lacking in many of the earlier engagements. Much rose and fell on the outcome. The end of Bourbon rule was certain in the event of a defeat, but a victory for Francis would destroy the momentum for unification and postpone it, perhaps for years. The attack began at dawn on 1 October with a frontal assault on the two major outposts of the Garibaldini at Sant’Angelo and the village of Santa Maria. Good progress was made at first and Garibaldi, who exposed himself time and again to the greatest danger, hurried to Sant’Angelo to try to stem the tide. He was surrounded by the enemy, but rescued almost at once by a group of his own men. He rallied some of the retreating units and with banners flying and sword in hand, if the later images are to be believed, Garibaldi led the counter-attack, smashing the Neapolitan lines. He then rushed to Santa Maria where Giacomo Medici was leading a desperate defence against determined enemy assaults. Again Garibaldi saved the day. He ordered the reserve under Türr to come by train the few miles to the village. Led by the ferocious charge of the Hungarian Hussars, they drove the Bourbon army back to the walls of Capua.
The other axes of advance also went the way of the Neapolitans to begin with. Two columns from the east swept towards Caserta, the main city and road junction. On the right of the line of Garibaldini, a division commanded by Nino