The Dawn of Guerrilla Warfare
Why the Tactics of Insurgents against Napoleon Failed in the US Mexican War
Benjamin J Swenson
Pen and Sword Military, South Yorkshire, UK, 2023, 232 pages
Book Review published on: June 28, 2024
The Mexican-American War from 1846 to 1848 remains among the least understood, and yet most consequential, conflicts in the history of North America. Author Benjamin Swenson, an assistant professor at Hoseo University in Asan, South Korea, who earned his PhD in history from Pompeu Fabra University in Spain, has made an important contribution toward remedying this historical omission with a well-researched and well-argued book that explores how the U.S. Army implemented a program of relatively successful pacification strategies during its occupation of Central Mexico during the latter stages of the conflict. Titled The Dawn of Guerrilla Warfare: Why the Tactics of Insurgency against Napoleon Failed in the US Mexican War, the work explores, more specifically, how Gen. Winfield Scott and other American leaders divined insights from the disastrous French experience in Spain during the Napoleonic Wars to plan and execute a more effective, and politically durable, military occupation of enemy territory.
Dawn of Guerrilla Warfare is divided into to two parts across seven chapters. The first section, which is designed to set up discussion of the book’s focus in Mexico three decades later, delves into the French Army’s bloody experience in Spain as an unwelcome and alien occupying force. The study employs minute detail to explore how Napoleon Bonaparte and his marshals’ heavy-handed tactics—including explicit “terror” policies—led to dramatic setbacks when they provoked a savage guerrilla resistance that stressed the occupation’s capacity to maintain control and operationally persevere. When combined with repeated incursions by the British Army, the resulting mixture of conventional and unconventional attacks created untenable challenges for the bewildered French garrisons. Swenson, doubtlessly benefiting from access to European sources during his graduate studies in Barcelona, provides numerous examples as to how French actions proved counterproductive and inspired a determined guerrilla resistance across the embattled peninsula.
The second part of the book, comprising the final five chapters, focuses on the American military occupation of the Mexico City-Veracruz corridor from 1847 to 1848. Labeling Gen. Winfield Scott, the American expeditionary commander, as “Napoleon’s Student,” Swenson ably connects events such as Scott’s fact-finding visit to occupied Paris in 1815 and his documented studies of the Napoleonic Wars to draw conclusions as to how the senior officer explicitly sought to avoid emulating French mistakes in Spain. The actions that Swenson details, which yielded varying degrees of success for the American strategy, included demonstrating visible respect for Catholic institutions in occupied cities; rescinding the alcabala tax on common people; purchasing food and supplies from local Mexican vendors instead of stealing and plundering; allowing Mexican constabularies to police urban areas; and, most controversially, enlisting a Texan mounted regiment specifically to counter the equally mobile aristocratic resistance that sprang up after the Battle of Cerro Gordo.
The resulting study, which falls short of magisterial while yet presenting a comprehensive argument, makes a valuable addition to the existing array of Mexican-American War historiography. Specifically, it builds on Timothy Johnson’s more general examination, A Gallant Little Army: The Mexico-City Campaign, and Irving Levinson’s more critical work, Wars within War: Mexican Guerrillas, Domestic Elites, and the United States of America, to advance reader understanding of exactly how the American commanders in Mexico managed to apply generally, though not uniformly, successful pacification policies in hostile territory. More importantly, and to Swenson’s credit, he employs numerous primary sources to exhaustively support his arguments that connect the French and American experiences, thus grounding his thesis in verifiable evidence while providing a productive source trail for future scholars seeking to conduct further research on the topic.
Dawn of Guerrilla Warfare thus provides a strongly supported study that explores a topic that has acute relevance to contemporary military affairs: the challenge of occupying foreign territory in both practical and ethical ways that enable the achievement of strategic objectives. In that sense, Swenson’s detailing of American occupation policies in Mexico in general, and Scott’s insightful applications in particular—despite the crimes and atrocities that nevertheless occurred—provide a little-known example where the U.S. Army avoided provoking a large-scale resistance that would have challenged its ability to control a large region with more than two million inhabitants. Instead, due to a pragmatic approach that courted the clergy and placated the common classes, the invading Americans, seeking to avoid the overreach of the French Army in Spain, were able to contain the Mexican resistance to a manageable segment of aristocratic and criminal elements long enough to empower American diplomacy. The resulting campaign illustrates a rare instance where the intentional study of history proved directly beneficial in the application of strategy and tactics.
Book Review written by: Nathan A. Jennings, Leavenworth, Kansas