Taming the Desert with Technology - Perspectives in Military History Roundtable

19 August 2017 - Dr. Julie Irene Prieto

As the German Army continued its advance against the French bastion of Verdun in the early months of 1916, the American border town of Columbus, New Mexico, was ablaze. The flames that consumed the town were the result of a raid conducted by Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa in the early morning of March 9, 1916. In response to this latest in a string of spillovers from the Mexican Revolution, President Woodrow Wilson sent General “Black Jack” Pershing, with nearly 10,000 men, to pursue Villa into Mexico and attempt to capture him. Over the next year, the Mexican Expedition was plagued by supply problems and the inability of mounted cavalry to find Villa. Pershing turned to the use of airplanes and trucks to master this difficult landscape; Pershing never captured Villa, but northern Mexico proved to be an important testing ground for new technologies that would be crucial to the Army on the battlefields of France a few months later. In this lecture, Dr. Julie Irene Prieto led a roundtable lecture at the U.S. Army Heritage and Education Center in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. The lecture focused on the impact of changes the Army made during the Mexican Expedition, and how those changes affected the American actions in World War I. Dr. Prieto was be joined by two scholars, who discussed the finer points of the Expedition and the technological advances of the late 1910’s.

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