In Celaya: Machismo vs. Overlapping Fields of Fire, Gary Brecher, the War Nerd, describes one of the decisive battles in Mexican history:
Best of all, it’s about a confrontation between the ultimate macho cavalry leader, our old friend Pancho Villa, and one of the most underrated generals in history, a cool-headed, very un-Mexican dude named Alvaro Obregon. It’s the ultimate clash of brawn vs. brain, charisma vs. machine guns. Three guesses who won.
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He also listened to his German military advisor, Maximilian Kloss. Obregon put Kloss in charge of his heavy weapons, machine guns and artillery. That was also a very un-Mexican thing to do. All the big players circa 1915 — Villa, Zapata, Carranza — kept a few German military advisors around for show, but only Obregon bothered to listen to what his tame German had to say. So Obregon was the only commander in Mexico who understood that the era of grand cavalry charges — Villa’s trademark move, his version of Tyson’s right hook — was over, finito, or as Herr Kloss would have said, kaput.But his best weapon was a real unglamorous one: barbed wire. People don’t appreciate what a powerful device that stuff is. Not the ranchers’ version, the kind I used to rip my jeans on climbing fences, but military-issue coils of razor wire. Obregon confiscated 632 rolls of the stuff from a US Expeditionary Force that briefly occupied Veracruz, and when he gave it to Herr Kloss, the German’s eyes just lit up. Give a German officer that much barbed wire, some machine guns and four batteries of French field artillery, and you can pretty much sleep through the rest of the battle, tell your aides to wake you when it’s time for the victory parade.