Pershing Rides From Fort Bliss

At four in the morning on March ninth, nineteen sixteen, roughly four hundred and eighty five fighters loyal to Francisco Villa crossed the United States border at Columbus, New Mexico, a small town whose entire population was under a thousand people. They killed about eighteen Americans, burned buildings, and were gone before sunrise. It was the first armed attack on American soil by a foreign force since the War of eighteen twelve.

General John Pershing was headquartered at Fort Bliss, right here in El Paso, in command of the Southern Department. Within a week, President Woodrow Wilson had ordered him to mount an expedition into Mexico to capture Villa. Pershing assembled a force that would eventually reach nearly ten thousand men, supported by motor trucks, aeroplanes, and the logistical infrastructure of a modern military. Among the young officers who served under Pershing in the early days of the expedition was a thirty-year-old lieutenant named George Patton, who used the campaign to establish his reputation for aggressive action.

The Punitive Expedition crossed into Mexico on March fifteenth, nineteen sixteen, marching in two columns through the Chihuahuan Desert in pursuit of an enemy who knew the terrain far better than the Americans did. Villa had spent his entire life in these mountains and arroyos. Pershing had not. The expedition penetrated as far as three hundred miles into Mexico, fought several engagements with Villista bands, but never located Villa himself.

The expedition lasted eleven months. Pershing withdrew in February nineteen seventeen without having accomplished its primary objective. Villa was never captured. He was assassinated in nineteen twenty-three. The expedition had, however, accomplished something unintended: it gave the American Army its first serious field test of mechanized logistics, motor transport, and aerial reconnaissance, lessons that Pershing took with him when he commanded American forces in Europe the following year.

Fort Bliss was the launching point for the last old-fashioned American cavalry expedition and the first hint of what modern warfare would require.