Battle of Celaya
The Battle of Celaya was a military engagement fought between the Constitutionalist federal forces, conducted by Alvaro Obregon, and the Northern Division, led by Pancho Villa, from April 6 to April 15, 1915. It consisted of a series of two battles and smaller skirmishes which took place in Celaya, Guanajuato, during the Mexican Revolution. The second battle, the one that occurred on April 13, was the decisive one, resulting in Pancho Villa's defeat in the hands of the Constitutionalist government forces.
It was an important and decisive armed encounter in the Mexican Revolution, since it was fought between two former allied factions that had fought side by side against Victoriano Huerta, the dictator that had betrayed and assassinated Francisco Madero. On the one side was Pancho Villa, and on the other Venustiano Carranza's forces. When Huerta was ousted from power, Venustiano Carranza became the new President of Mexico and now he had to fight against against the Northern Division, under the command of Pancho Villa.
Alvaro Obregon, who was President Venustiano Carranza’s General, had moved the federal army westward, from Queretaro to Guanajuato, and established defensive positions around the city of Celaya at the end of March, 1915, digging trenches and setting up machine gun nests and artillery pieces behind barbed wire; a defensive strategy he had learned from the first year of the Great War, which was going on in Europe at that moment.
Although they outnumbered the federal forces, the cavalry charges of Pancho Villa’s Northern Division could not breach the strong defensive lines set up by Obregon. Attack after attack were stopped dead as the federal troops raked the battlefield with lethal machine guns that spewed lines of fire. Thus, in two days of fierce fighting, more than 3,500 Villa’s soldiers were mowed down by artillery and machine gun fire in frontal and useless attacks.
As it had happened in Europe, at the beginning of World War I, the cavalry was annihilated by the large and dense volume of fire put up by machine guns. The Battle of Celaya was a decisive victory for President Venustiano Carranza and a turning point in the Mexican Revolution.
