Fighting in the Gran Chaco

Hawera Star, Volume LIV, 9 March 1935, Page 11

Fighting in the Gran Chaco

T\ HERE is a curious parallelism between the war now being waged in the Chaco and the European War of 1914-18, says a writer in the Manchester Guardian. From December, 1932, to December, 1933, the crucial period of the struggle, the Bolivian army, led by a German commander, General Hans Kundt, delivered a series of mass attacks on the Paraguayan front. The man responsible for the successful Paraguayan resistance was a native Paraguayan, General Estigarribia, who learned his trade under Foch in the Great War, while General Irrazabal, his second in command, served with the Belgian forces. In short, a Ger-man-led Bolivian army was using the traditional German form of attack against Paraguayan commanders imbued with the military notions of the Allies. To make the parallel more complete, the two ablest officers in the Paraguayan army after Estigarribia and Irrazabal are both English by blood, and a number of their subordinates are White Russians.

The German military influence in Bolivia began in 1923. Bolivia had been negotiating with Paraguay since 1921 for a corridor across the Chaco through whieh she might run a pipeline from her rich oilfields to the Paraguay River. In 1922 a Nationalist party in Paraguay, believing that the President was about to grant this concession to Bolivia, rose in a revolution which lasted for a year. The rebels were finally defeated, but a change of heart had come over the Paraguayan Government, which broke-'oft the pipe-line negotiations. Bolivia’s reply was to engage in the same year a German military mission under General Ivundt, which included a certain Captain Ernst Roehm, afterwards better known as one of Hitler’s lieutenants. It is said that Kundt made all preparations for a sudden and irresistible attack on the Chaco in 1928, but that his plans somehow reached the ears of the Paraguayan Government. In consequence Kundt was dismissed. In 1930 the Bolivians engaged a Spanish mission, but after their early defeats in the autumn of 1932 they got rid of it and recalled Kundt. His second period of command lasted until December, 1933, when it became clear that his strategy had utterly failed, whereupon he was replaced, first by a Chilean mission and then by General Pazek, a Czechoslovakian. Paraguay also had a German military mission from 19] 2 to 1914. In the 1922 revolution, however, the Germanised army joined the rebels and was defeated by a citizen army led by Majors (as they then were) Estigarribia and Irrazabal, the disciples of France and Belgium. As a result of this lesson Paraguay engaged a French military mission, which remained from 1933 until shortly, before the Chaco War broke out.

From 1926 onwards both sides increased their preparations, and outpost clashes became more frequent. The final casus belli was the capture by the Bolivians in June, 1932, of two Paraguayan forts, one of them the famous Boqueron, while a pact, of non-aggression was actually being discussed in Washington. This began the regular fighting, hut neither side formally declared war for more than a year afterwards; each maintained that it was acting in self-defence..

At-first sight it seemed that the odds were overwhelmingly in favour of Bolivia. Her • population was 3,000,000 to Paraguay’s 800,000; she had adequate tanks, artillery, machineguns, and trench mortars and she had, and still has, a great, superiority in the air. Paraguay had few aeroplanes, no tanks, no machine-guns, no trench mortars, empty arsenals, nondescript uniforms and arms, and inadequate hospital equipment. Her cavalry were armed only with machetes (long knives), ancl her army was not mobilised until two months after the Bolivians had captured Boqueron, which they meanwhile provisioned and fortified. Nevertheless much of Bolivia’s advantage was illusory. The Chaco is a flat country about 1000 feet above sea level, heavily wooded, with almost permanently impassable swamps in many places; elsewhere a week’s rain often makes ■■■■■ ■■iiiiimi I" I'

Armies Under Foreign Generals

Curious Parallelism With Great War

transport practically impossible. There is no regular rainy season, and water and feed for horses are consequently uncertain. . Fighting in the woods was as new and baffling to the Bolivians as it was to the English in the American War of Independence, and they were constantly outwitted by the woodcraft of the Paraguayans. Moreover, their troops were hillmen from the Andes, and the descent to the Chaco robbed them of much of their physical efficiency. The six Bolivian tanks proved almost useless; they were unwieldy in the woods, and the Paraguayans dug camouflaged pits for them in the open approaches. They were also unbearably hot in the Chaco climate, and their users lacked mechanical skill. Artillery were also useless because the woods made observation impossible. The Bolivians used their aeroplanes for bombing camps and depots (they honourably refrained from bombing civilians; the Paraguayans hardly used aircraft at. all except to convey wounded to hospital. The Bolivians used flammenwerfers once, the Paraguayans never, and for climatic reasons neither side used gas at all. Thus superiority in armaments did not count for much, and the Paraguayans were able to make up for their smaller numbers by their skill in woodland fighting. They made good their only serious handicap, lack of machine-guns, by capturing them from the Bolivians to the number of over 4000; it was the recognised sport of spirited young Paraguayarns, to go out at night with machetes, rush a machine-gun or trench mortar, and bring it back.

The first stage of the war consisted of repeated attempts by the Paraguayans to storm Boqueron; after severe losses they starved it out, and it surrendered on September 29, 1932. The Bolivians then fell back south-westwards towards fortified positions at Saavedra, where they brought their pursuers to a halt, and the Paraguayans in their turn had to fall back some fifty miles to their own prepared lines of forts. It was at this time that Kundt was recalled to comipand the Bolivian forces, and for the next twelve months he launched repeated attacks on the Paraguayan positions. The Paraguayan form of defence was a line of strongly-fortified positions at points where there was a permanent water supply. Their strategical triumph was in maintaining command of the water supplies, and Kundt’s mass offensives in July and August, 1933, almost literally dried up for want of water. The Paraguayan line was not a continuous one; in the gaps between the forts they used their knowledge of the woods and marshes to ensure that they should not be outflanked or surrounded. The key fort of the line, the Verdun of the • Chaco, was Nanawa, the old mission station, where Irrazabal was in command. At one time in January, 1933, he was driven back to his last trench and he was being rapidly surrounded ; a decisive Bolivian break through was imminent. The situation was saved by Captain Fred Smith, a Paraguayan-born Englishman, who charged the encircling Bolivians at the head of his maehetcros, all of them Anglo* Paraguayans like himself, and drove them back just long enough for the relieving force to arrive. This in turn was commanded by another Anglo-Paraguayan, Lieutenant-Colonel Arthur Bray, the victor of Boqueron. Irrazabal, Smith, and Bray between them held the line, at Nanawa, and ithe Bolivians never again came so near to breaking through. After twelve months of sanguinary assaults Kundt’s exhausted forces gave ground, and the Paraguayans were quick to counter-attack. Early in December, 1933, 12,000 Bolivians surrendered at Zenteno and Campo Via; their strongest forts, Sanvedra and Munoz, were evacuated without a blow, and an armistice was signed on December 20, 1933. It ended on January 6, 1934, and the renewed fighting went all in favour of the Paraguayans. At the present moment almost the entire Chaco is in Paraguayan hands,, and the Bolivians are fighting with their backs to their own frontiers.