New Mexican Revolution Book

Sorry - not strictly 54mm and just unashamed self-promotion but this offering will be available from Caliver Books soon - here is the blurb from the back page. If I can work out how I will include/attach a picture of the cover

The Mexican Revolution – ten years of strife that nearly tore a country apart

‘The largest land battles (of the Mexican Revolution) …far exceeded those of other well-covered conflicts, such as the American Revolution, the War of 1812, and the Mexican-American War… As the conflict progressed…it grew in scope, scale and sophistication; from local uprisings to a national civil war, from small units to…armies and from ambushes to warfare prosecuted on the level of grand strategy… Guerrilla warfare, where the idea is to attack vulnerable targets using asymmetrical forces, persisted throughout but did not play the deciding role in the outcome…’ Joe Lee Janssens, Maneuver and Battle in the Mexican Revolution: Rise of the Praetorians.

The years of fratricidal warfare described as the Mexican Revolution are not very well known outside of Mexico. The conflict deserves to be better known as it can arguably be called one of the first ‘modern wars’; certainly it heralded many of the major changes in warfare in the First World War.

Generally looked upon as something of a ‘Small War’, comparable to the Colonial Warfare of the late 19th and early 20th Centuries, of guerrilla warfare with small bands of Revolutionaries ambushing Federales, refusing to fight ‘face-to-face’ battles and disappearing back into the hills before they can be caught. This was not the case.

Breechloading and repeating weapons predominated, yet cavalry and ‘mounted infantry’ reached higher numbers than the foot soldiers in some of the armies and battles. But the horseman’s day was over. Here the cavalry of both Mexico and United States made their last grand mounted charges.

Appearing for the first time were motorcycles, motor trucks, armoured cars and the new ’air power’ all made their first tentative appearances. The machine gun played a significant role for the first time in non-colonial warfare, heralding how it would come to dominate future battlefields. Alongside these, wired and wireless communications, barbed wire, searchlights and trenches established their place on the battlefield in the Mexican Revolution.

This book gathers together Information from disparate sources and focuses on the fighting men, and women, what they wore and what they fought with. It describes and illustrates the armed forces, their organization, uniforms, clothing, equipment and weapons to provide a guidebook to historians and wargamers seeking to know more these aspects of the conflict.

The text is supported by full page colour plates by Bruno Mugnai and the author, providing extensive coverage of the appearance of the protagonists and their weapons. Alongside these are photographs from the Elmer Powell Mexican Revolution Collection, DeGolyer Library, SMU, many unique and all published here for the first time.
A guide to wargaming the Mexican Revolution is in preparation as a companion volume to this one.

There is a link to 54mm however, in that we will be running a Mexican Revolution game in 54mm at Slaute in April.