Sticky Situations: Barbed Wire

^{Barbed wire. Designed for fencing cattle, it became an indispensable military tool.}

In the long, confused, and bloody affair called the Mexican Revolution, Venustiano Carranza had seized the presidency over the objections of two other rebel leaders, Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa. Carranza, a wealthy planter, was no military man, while his two rivals were experienced commanders.

Carranza’s army was commanded by Álvaro ObregÓn, a keen student of the war raging in Europe at this time (1915), who also picked up some German military advisors. From what he knew of the Western Front, Obregon calculated that launching an offensive would be the wrong move. Instead, he fortified the village of Celaya and defied Villa to do anything about it.

Pancho Villa, known as “the Centaur of the North,” was a bandit turned revolutionist. He had charisma. In 1913, he returned from exile in the United States with eight friends. They rode through towns and ranches shouting “Viva Villa!” and every man with a horse and rifle joined the legendary bandit and guerrilla. Within 30 days, Villa was leading an army of 3,000 cavalrymen. Villa was shrewd, too. He once sneaked an army into Ciudad Juarez in a train that federal troops thought contained part of their own army. And he was colorful.

Villa’s army attracted scores of reporters, and newspapers were filled with stories about his brilliance, his daring, and his humanity. By 1915, he had come to believe the stories. He thought he was invincible.

So when ObregÓn, a middle‑class pipsqueak from the state of Sonora, fortified Celayo, Villa decided to put him in his place. He got 25,000 of his best cavalrymen, Los Dorados (the Golden Ones) and launched them at OrbregÓn’s fortifications. Singing La Cucuracha, the Dorados galloped at the Carrancista trenches. They never got there. The horses were caught in the miles of barbed wire, which formed entanglements in front of Celaya’s trenches, while ObregÓn’s machine guns and quick‑firing field pieces mowed them down. The Dorados fell back, then charged again. And again…and again. At the end of the day, when the remnants of the Golden Ones and their horses could barely stand, ObregÓn brought his own cavalry out from behind the wire and swept them from the field.

Barbed wire, an American invention of the late 19th century, was intended for nothing more warlike than keeping cattle on their own pastures. It was quickly adopted by armies all over the world for non‑peaceful purposes. In Cuba, during the Spanish‑American War, the Spanish surrounded their forts with barbed wire fences. In South Africa, during the Boer War, the British had criss‑crossed the veldt with barbed wire to limit the movements of mounted Afrikaner guerrillas. The wire was strung between bulletproof block houses, each block house within a long rifle shot of others. In the Russo‑Japanese War, both sides used great tangles of barbed wire, which, as we saw in Chapter 27, could not be cleared by artillery fire.

Barbed wire, trenches, masses of artillery, and machine guns were what created the Western Front of World War I, the longest and bloodiest siege in history. It is still being used, although sometimes in a modified form, razor wire. Razor wire was invented by the Germans in World War I, because it could be produced more cheaply than standard barbed wire. Razor wire isn’t wire at all but long, thin strips of metal with sharp, jagged edges. It is cut from sheet metal, is harder to sever with standard wire cutters and deters as effectively as the original barbed wire. One recent improvement to razor wire is adding a fiber‑optic core to the wire. Anyone tampering with the wire would break the core, thus indicating exactly where he was and providing a target for defenders’ fire.

Barbed wire can be used in several ways besides as a simple fence or fence top. One is in an ankle‑high entanglement, which may be hidden in high grass.

It can be laid as “concertina wire,” in which troops place it in coils resembling the body of a concertina. Several rolls of concertina, some of the coils overlapping, may be used to make a particularly difficult barrier. Perhaps the most common way in carefully prepared field fortifications is in a wide entanglement with wire running in all directions and securely staked to the ground. In World War II, movies of troop training often showed soldiers falling on the wire while other soldiers crossed the wire on their backs. In real life, that seldom happened, if ever. The attackers’ object is to cross the wire without getting shot.

Anyone prancing over the top of an entanglement on the bodies of his comrades makes an excellent target. The prescribed method of crossing wire is to go under it, if possible on your back so you can see what to avoid or what to cut.

Of course, there is always the possibility that the enemy has planted land mines under the wire to make your crawl more interesting.

It is a testimony to the importance and prevalence of barbed wire that most modern bayonets are designed so that they can be used as wire cutters.