Pershing Crossed Into Mexico to Hunt Pancho Villa, Changing Warfare Forever

Six days after Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa raided the border town of Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916, killing 17 Americans, Brig. Gen. John J. Pershing led 6,600 troops across the border in what became the last major U.S. cavalry operation, the first use of motorized vehicles and aircraft in American military combat, and the training ground that prepared a generation of officers for the Western Front.

The Raid That Started It

At roughly 4 a.m. March 9, 1916, approximately 500 Villistas, followers of Villa, attacked Columbus and Camp Furlong, the small Army post garrisoned by elements of the 13th Cavalry Regiment. Villa had turned against the United States after President Wilson recognized his rival Venustiano Carranza as Mexico’s leader. In January, Villa’s men had executed 16 American mining employees aboard a train at Santa Isabel, Chihuahua. The Columbus raid was the escalation that forced Wilson’s hand. Troopers from the 13th Cavalry drove the raiders back across the border, killing dozens in the pursuit, but the damage was done: A foreign force had attacked American soil for the first time since the War of 1812.

Read More: 'Bring Our Boys Home': The Daring Raid That Rescued 500 POWs From Behind Japanese Lines

The Expedition

Pershing organized his force into a provisional division of three brigades with four cavalry regiments, two infantry regiments and horse artillery. They crossed the border in two columns from Columbus and Culberson’s Ranch and established a main base of operations at Colonia Dublán by March 17. The 1st Aero Squadron, equipped with eight Curtiss JN-3 “Jenny” biplanes, flew the first aerial reconnaissance missions in U.S. military history from Columbus on March 16. Truck convoys replaced mule trains for supply, marking the first use of motorized logistics in an American military operation.

Villa had a six-day head start and the advantage of terrain where he had lived his entire life. His forces scattered into the Sierra Madre. Pershing maintained a mobile headquarters of 30 men using a Dodge touring car and aircraft as messengers, pushing his cavalry columns deep into Chihuahua. On March 29, after a 55-mile night march through snowy mountains, Col. George A. Dodd’s cavalry caught a Villista contingent at Guerrero. The Battle of Guerrero was the expedition’s most successful engagement: Dodd’s men killed or wounded 75 Villistas while suffering only five lightly wounded. Over the first two months, the expedition made a dozen successful contacts with Villista groups, killing 169 fighters who had participated in the Columbus raid.

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What It Cost and What It Built

Pershing never caught Villa. The expedition stretched 11 months and eventually involved 10,000 troops, penetrating more than 500 miles into Mexican territory. Tensions with the Carranza government nearly boiled into open war when Mexican troops attacked the 10th Cavalry’s Buffalo Soldiers at Carrizal on June 21, 1916. By January 1917, with war in Europe looming, Wilson ordered the withdrawal. The last American troops crossed back into the United States on Feb. 5, 1917. Two months later, the country entered World War I.

The expedition failed at its stated objective but succeeded at something no one planned. The officers who chased Villa across the desert went on to lead armies across Europe and the Pacific. Pershing commanded the American Expeditionary Forces in France. A young lieutenant named George Patton, who killed two of Villa’s officers in a gunfight at a ranch and strapped their bodies to the hoods of his touring cars, would command the Third Army across Europe 28 years later. The logistics failures, communication breakdowns and cavalry limitations exposed during the expedition directly shaped the mechanized, combined-arms force the Army built for the world wars that followed.

Sources: U.S. Army, “Long Distance Logistics: The Mexican Expedition”; U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, “Punitive Expedition in Mexico, 1916-1917”; Smithsonian National Museum of American History, “General Pershing’s Mexican Expedition to Capture Pancho Villa”; “Tompkins, Col. Frank. Chasing Villa: The Last Campaign of the U.S. Cavalry,” High-Lonesome Books, 1934/1996; Gen. John J. Pershing, official report on the Punitive Expedition, Oct. 10, 1916.

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