War: A History in 100 Battles. Richard Overy

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       13. BATTLE OF MAIPÚ

       5 April 1818

      ‘This battle,’ announced General José de San Martín to his troops shortly before the fight at Maipú, ‘is going to decide the fate of all America.’ This was a grandiose claim for a battle involving no more than a few thousand men in the remote Latin American territory of Chile, but San Martín – ‘the Liberator’ – was about to defeat the last attempt by the Spanish Empire to retain its grip on the country. Defeat would mean the re-imposition of Spanish rule; victory would send a message to Madrid that Latin America was going to free itself entirely from European rule, just as the United States had done some forty years earlier.

      The outcome of the battle rested almost entirely on the organizational and strategic qualities of the commander of the army of liberation (known formally as the Army of the Andes), which San Martín had brought to Chile more than two years before with 5,000 soldiers and horsemen and 9,000 pack animals. He was an unusual liberator. Born to a Spanish family in a remote part of what is now Argentina, San Martín was sent back to Spain where he became a colonel of cavalry in the Spanish army, fighting in north Africa and then against Napoleon in the Peninsular War. He was strongly influenced by enlightenment ideas, but remained a political conservative in favour of monarchy. The crisis caused by Napoleon’s invasion and the overthrow of the Spanish crown encouraged San Martín to return to the country of his birth in 1812, two years after a revolt in Buenos Aires against rule from Spain. He formed a lasting commitment to the cause of political independence for the states and provinces of South America. San Martín joined the fledgling Argentine army as a colonel of grenadiers and spent the next two years imposing on a ramshackle military organization the principles of discipline, loyalty and sound training. He was a commanding personality: upright, honest, efficient and committed entirely to his conception of a ‘Continental Plan’ to free all America from colonial oppression.

      San Martín’s tough stance on military reform and his growing reputation provoked plots and jealous rivalries. Yet nothing stopped his plan to create a new Army of the Andes in Mendoza, capital of Cuyo province, within striking distance across the mountain chain from the Spanish colony of Chile, struggling for its independence under General Bernardo O’Higgins, son of an Irish-Spanish official. In February 1817, San Martín brought his army of men, better trained and equipped than any rival force, across the high passes of the Andes, along narrow defiles and in bitter cold. Arriving on the other side, his army immediately inflicted a heavy defeat on the Spanish Chilean army at Chacabuco, killing 600 for the loss of only 12 men.

      The Spanish retreated south, while San Martín entered the capital, Santiago, and established Chilean rule. The Spanish forces in the far south were neglected. Reinforcements arrived by sea under General Manuel Osorio and in spring 1818, 4,600 troops moved north to try to restore Spanish rule. O’Higgins’s army was caught and beaten as it tried to retreat, and the Spanish now bore down on Santiago, intent on a savage retribution for the insurrectionary insolence of the Chileans.

      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, 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.