These photos show how America almost went to war with Mexico during WWI
Pancho Villa launched attacks north of the border and there was little the U.S. could do
As spring gave way to summer in 1916, the world was on fire. In Europe, the Allies were struggling to hold the Western Front. In the Middle East, the Ottoman Empire was caught between British troops in the north and an Arab uprising in the south. In North America, more than 100,000 National Guard troops were amassed on the Mexican border.
The military buildup followed an early-morning raid at the garrison town of Columbus, New Mexico. Ten soldiers and eight civilians were killed when the Mexican revolutionary leader General Francisco “Pancho” Villa attacked with almost 500 men. The revolutionaries suffered heavy losses and captured few supplies, but the raid wasn’t as much a calculated military strike as it was retaliation against America for withdrawing support for Villa.
The decade-long Mexican Revolution was a fractious mess of shifting alliances, as much for the combatants as for Presidents William Taft and Woodrow Wilson. Sympathies teeter-tottered as the American government tried to balance business interests with geopolitical concerns, always wary of both the leftist tendencies fueling successive revolutions and their dictatorial opponents. Relations were already at a low point after American troops occupied Veracruz, and sank deeper in the fall of 1915. Although Wilson had originally been sympathetic to Villa’s cause and tactics, he recognized that Venustiano Carranza, already in marginal control of the government, would provide a stable leadership for Mexico and hopefully end what had become a three-pronged civil war fought between Carranza, Villa, and Emiliano Zapata.
In January, soldiers under Villa dragged 17 American mining engineers from a train near Santa Isabel and executed them. Two months later, Villistas crossed the border to attack Columbus, and Wilson tapped General John J. Pershing to give chase. The de facto Mexican government was incensed but powerless to resist the incursion.
But even Pershing’s straightforward mission was caught up in the constantly shifting winds of the revolution. Carranza begrudgingly gave American troops permission to operate in the border state of Chihuahua but barred them from Mexican railways. Their supply lines were dependent on horse-drawn wagons after military trucks continued to break down in the rough terrain, and communication lines were constantly sabotaged. Worse yet, although Villa continued to order raids north of the border, U.S. troops had few engagements with his soldiers on Mexican soil. Instead they found themselves fighting Carranza’s troops, who wanted them out. On June 21, 1916, seven Americans were killed and 23 captured at the town of Carrizal. Wilson quickly negotiated an agreement with Carranza, and the search for Pancho Villa wound down over the next several months. In February of 1917, the last American troops returned home and General Pershing was soon sent to fight in Europe instead.
