WARS OF THE PERUVIAN-BOLIVIAN CONFEDERATION AND OF THE PACIFIC

The Pacific littoral was the other site of protracted military struggle. Given their very close economic and administrative links during the colonial era, the early separation of Bolivia and Peru was in many ways a political fiction. In part because of their historic and economic connection and in part because of the rising strength of the Chilean state, the Bolivian president General Andre´s Santa Cruz sought to establish closer connections between two halves of the old Viceroyalty of Lima. In alliance with a number of Peruvian caudillos, he invaded Peru in 1835, and in October 1836 he proclaimed the existence of the Peruvian-Bolivian Confederation. This union did have some popular support, but the division of Peru into two provinces and the selection of Lima as the capital alienated elites in both countries. More important, the union threatened the geopolitical position of Chile and Argentina. Both countries viewed a strong Peru as a challenge to their predominance. The first declared war in December 1836, the latter in May 1837. Despite some early failures, the Chilean army, in alliance with Peruvian forces opposed to the union, were able to defeat Santa Cruz in the battle of Yungay in January 1839, leading to the dissolution of the confederation.

Chile’s victory over Peru and Bolivia in the 1830s established its reputation as the regional ‘‘Prussia’’ and further solidified the political institutionalization begun under Diego Portales (who was assassinated at the very beginning of the war). If any war ‘‘made’’ Chilean exceptionalism, it was this one, as it provided a rare legitimacy while also establishing a stable civil military relationship. For Peru and Bolivia, defeat appears to have accelerated the process of economic and political fragmentation begun with independence.

Beginning in 1840, various international companies began the exploration of the Bolivian coast in order to make use of the guano and nitrate deposits there. The exploitation of silver beginning in 1870 led to an economic boom. During this decade Chile and Bolivia appeared to resolve a series of quarrels by increasing the influence of the former in the disputed region. But disagreements over taxes and the nationalization of Chilean mines in the Peruvian desert in 1875 fueled the tension. Following diplomatic efforts to resolve a new set of crises, Chile declared war in April 1879. Given a Peruvian-Bolivian alliance, this involved Chile in a war with both northern neighbors. The war quickly became a contest for plunder.

None of the countries was prepared for war, although Chile had a significant advantage in naval forces. More important, the Chilean state retained its institutional solidity, whereas both Peru and Bolivia suffered from internal divisions. Chile occupied the Bolivian littoral, then Tarapaca in 1879, and Tacna and Arica and most of the northern coast in 1880. By this stage the Chilean army had increased significantly with an invasion force of twelve thousand men. International pressure from both the U.S. and European powers forced the two sides into negotiation, but the Chileans sought a complete victory. In 1881, with an army now numbering twenty-six thousand, the Chileans entered Lima. They did not leave until 1884, extracting the province of Tarapaca permanently and the provinces of Tacna and Arica, which they retained until 1929. Chile also took the entire Bolivian coast (Atacama).

The victory helped determine the future institutionalization of both the Chilean and Peruvian militaries, as well as partially defining the development options of the three countries. Chile enjoyed an economic boom as well as unprecedented patriotic euphoria, both of which helped dispel the gloom of the 1870s. Despite the relative shortness of the war, Peru suffered severe casualties and the destruction of much of its coastal infrastructure. The war may also be seen as the best example of a military impetus for a new national identity, as the Peruvian and Bolivian memory of their defeat continues to play a large role in their respective nationalisms. The Bolivian defeat deprived that country of a great part of its wealth and left it contained within the Altiplano, in which Chile had no interest. The war did help decrease the political influence of the military and helped consolidate the rule of a civilian oligarchy dominated by mining interests.

The War of the Pacific may best demonstrate the consequences of the external orientation of these states and the lack of domestic domination. It was ‘‘at heart a bald struggle over exports among jealous Chile, Bolivia, and Peru.’’ ‘‘All three countries were hard up, and run by oligarchies which disliked paying taxes and looked to revenue from these fertilizers [nitrate] as a substitute.’’ Each country was competing with the others for those resources that would allow it to maintain its ‘‘rentier’’ status and not challenge the domestic status quo. War came because the states were too weak to fight their respective elites. For example, because the elites of the Altiplano were too powerful to tax, the Bolivian state saw the littoral and the nascent nitrate industry as the best source of fiscal support. This brought it into conflict with Chile. But, precisely because it did not have adequate support from its home base, Bolivia could not hope to win.

Comparing the Navies

The famous Huascar

Evaluating the relative strengths of the belligerents’ fleets just prior to the outbreak of the War of the Pacific is a vexing task. Chilean and Peruvian historians, for example, traditionally pronounced their nations’ ships as barely seaworthy and belittled their crews’ professional skills, while exaggerating their opponents’ prowess. This rite of self-effacement had a clear purpose: by depreciating their prewar flotillas, and those who served in them, the writers could rationalize their nations’ defeats while elevating their victories to the level of the miraculous. Real problems did exist. But although budgetary problems forced the Chilean government to reduce naval expenditures, it was the questionable judgment and misguided priorities of Juan Williams Rebolledo, the Chilean navy’s commander, not material deficiencies, that limited his flotilla’s performance. Conversely, the skill and dedication of Adm. Miguel Grau, the commander of the Peruvian fleet, allowed his nation’s fleet to compensate for the loss of some its equipment and hold back the Chilean armada for the first six months of the war.

Learning the Lessons of Sea Power

Chile’s navy first took to the seas in 1818, when an embryonic fleet, under the command of the Scotsman Lord Thomas Cochrane, sailed north from Valparaíso to liberate Peru and Bolivia from Spanish rule. Some of the British naval officers who served in Cochrane’s armada remained in Chile’s fleet, thus explaining the presence of so many sailors with English surnames: John Williams, Santiago Bynon, Roberto Forster, Roberto Henson, Guillermo Wilkinson, Robert Simpson, Jorge O’Brien, Raimundo Morris (a few Americans, such as Charles Wooster, also served in Chile’s navy). Some, like Robert Simpson and Juan Williams Wilson, even sired a second generation of Chilean naval officers, including three who rose to the rank of admiral. Recognizing the vulnerability of the nation’s economy and its coastal population to a seaborne attack, Chile’s leaders early realized the need for a strong fleet. The government used this navy to vanquish the Peruvian- Bolivian Confederation in 1836. Domestically, the fleet helped suppress the abortive 1851 and 1859 revolutions. But after 1860, perhaps lulled by the lack of foreign and local enemies, Chile neglected its navy. The error of this policy became painfully apparent in the mid-1860s, when Chile and Spain went to war and a Spanish naval squadron subjected Valparaíso to a three-hour bombardment that inflicted fourteen million pesos in damage to the port. This Spanish incursion taught the Moneda that it needed a strong navy, especially since Peru’s fleet, reinforced by some recently purchased ironclads, now dwarfed that of Chile. In furtherance of this policy, Santiago bought two British-built corvettes, the Chacabuco and the O’Higgins, in 1866 and 1867. Two years after Peru responded by acquiring the Oneota and the Catawba, surplus U.S. riverine monitors, the Chilean government ordered two oceangoing ironclads from British shipyards. It also obtained two additional wooden corvettes, the Magallanes and the Abtao, as well as a transport. Anxious to achieve naval parity with Chile, the Peruvians wanted to buy more armored ships. Its legislature even allocated approximately four million soles for their purchase. The onset of a worldwide economic recession in the mid-1870s forced Lima to abandon its naval expansion program. Infected by the same economic malaise, Chilean officials became so desperate that they even considered selling the fleet’s ironclads for four million British pounds. Fortunately for the Chileans, their government could find no takers. Consequently, until onset of the War of the Pacific, the composition of the Peruvian and Chilean navies remained relatively stable.

CHILE’S ARMY

Chile’s military differed from its enemies in a variety of ways. On the most superficial level, Santiago’s troops dressed rather drably, at least when compared to Bolivia’s colorfully clad hosts. A few of Chile’s militia units did design some regalia that rivaled in hue those of La Paz, but the Ministry of War, doubtless anxious to ensure uniformity—always a cardinal military virtue—quickly stifled such originality. Instead, Santiago’s troops, aping the French army’s fashions as well as its tactics, marched into battle wearing blue or red kepis and jackets, red trousers, and sometimes brown puttees or leggings.

Another, and certainly a more significant distinction, was that Chile’s prewar army was composed of volunteers: those who served as private soldiers or noncommissioned officers had enlisted, generally in return for a bonus. The enlisted men did not constitute the elite of the Chilean nation. Indeed, one foreign writer described them as “the very lowest scum of society.” Thus, we should not be surprised if these sunshine soldiers often deserted, taking their bonus and their new uniforms with them.

Unlike the Allies, the Chileans had standardized the regular army’s weapons. The infantry carried Comblain II rifles, and artillerymen used Winchester carbines, while the cavalry’s Regimiento de Cazadores a Caballo dangled Spencer carbines from their saddles. Increasing the size of the army, however, forced some units to use less modern small arms. The newly created Atacama and Concepción battalions used Beaumont rifles, some of which exploded each time the troops used them for target practice; the Regimiento de Granaderos a Caballo employed both types of carbines plus some percussion rifles. Santiago began the war with four Gatling guns as well as forty-four field pieces and mountain guns, including sixteen six- and eight-centimeter cannons purchased from the House of Krupp. Unfortunately, Chilean gunners had little experience deploying these weapons: in two years they had fired their field pieces only once. It does not appear that the infantry had much more experience using their small arms.

While the active army had adequate weaponry, the same could not be said for the national guard. The seven-thousand-man militia—which tumbled from eighteen thousand in 1877—had to make do with 3,868 ancient minié guns and “old French flintlock rifle[s], converted into percussion weapons, which through use and long time in service, are now found in bad state.” Unsurprisingly, the guard’s artillery, or cavalry guard units, also had to make do with outdated equipment.

A few factors distinguished Pinto’s army from that of the Allies. Thanks to Diego Portales, who had purged the army officer corps, the nation had managed to avert some of the more grievous sequela of unbridled militarism. Chile, however, was not immune to internal unrest: in 1851 and 1859 the army had to subdue rebellions. The Moneda sometimes called upon the military—but more so the national guard—to guarantee the “correct,” not necessarily honest, outcome of an election. Officers who demonstrated a lack of enthusiasm for this task or who vocally espoused a different political ideology than the government’s favorites sometimes had to resign their commissions.

In short, although flawed, the Chilean system nonetheless differed from that of Bolivia, where the chain of command was supplanted by cronyism, where “the intimate friends of the commander take turns sharing the command with him.” These facts do not mean that some Chilean officers did not call upon their santos en la corte to influence promotions, to arrange a coveted assignment, or to obtain protection from official retribution. Indeed, precisely because some officers served as government bureaucrats or sat in the legislature as elected representatives their acquaintance with politicians gave them some clout. But Chilean army officers also realized that the congress not only authorized the military’s budget but also set limits on its size, that if the minister of war was a professional officer he served at the pleasure of a civilian president and legislature, and that a promotion law required that officers spend a certain number of years in grade in order to ascend in the army’s hierarchy. Compare this requirement to Daza, who in thirteen years rose from the rank of private to lieutenant colonel.

Additionally, Chile’s officer corps, unlike that of the Allies, was professionally educated. True, a few of the army’s most senior officers, such as Gens. Justo Arteaga and Manuel Baquedano, received their commissions directly, but they were in a minority. Most of Chile’s officers entered the army only after completing a course of study in the Escuela Militar. Founded by Chile’s first national leader, Bernardo O’Higgins, the school at times seemed more like a refuge for juvenile delinquents than an institute for aspiring officers. A cadet riot, for example, forced the authorities to close the school in 1876, but it reopened in late 1878 with the expectation that it would graduate its fi rst class in five years.

Even attending the Escuela Militar or unit-level postgraduate seminars did not prepare Chile’s officers for modern war. The lessons of the later years of the American Civil War and the Franco-Prussian conflict—that rapid-fire rifles and breech-loading artillery devastated massed troop formations—did not seem to influence Chile’s infantry, which continued to use the tactics outlined in a translated edition of a 1862 French military text. Unfortunately, as Jay Luvaas noted, “The infantry regulations of 1862, which had been described as a ‘faithful reproduction of the regulations of 1831’ [varied] little in spirit from the Ordinance of 1791.” Thus Chile would go to war in 1879 using the tactics of the Napoleonic era. As Emilio Sotomayor observed, “A soldier, especially the Chilean, because of his nature has to be watched and overseen constantly by his officers. Otherwise—as practical experience has shown us on many occasions—the soldier obeys the tendency to disperse and to fight alone.” This habit might have developed as a consequence of a situation unique to Chile: for decades the Araucanian Indians were Santiago’s major enemy. Whatever their deficiencies, Chile’s army acquired more military skills fighting the Indians than the Bolivian army did from “promoting or suffocating revolutions or mutinies.” Ironically, the foot soldiers seemed no more backward than Chile’s cavalry, which still followed some early-nineteenth-century Spanish regulations. The infantry employed tactics modeled on those of the Spanish for muzzle-loading weapons, not techniques adapted to the use of modern fi rearms. The artillery perforce demanded a higher level of education: in 1874 Gen. Luis Arteaga wrote a manual to teach the army’s gunners how to master their newly acquired Krupp artillery and Gatling guns.

Only two commanders, Ricardo Santa Cruz of the Zapadores and Domingo Toro Herrera of the Chacabuco, absorbed the lessons, which they later demonstrated during maneuvers. Their efforts, while not converting other commanders, convinced a few to adopt the maneuver of having their companies advance in skirmish lines; regrettably, the rest of the army, an American naval officer observed, did not embrace the new tactics, devoting its efforts to “mechanical precision and too little to skirmishing. Open-order fighting did not seem to form part of the system of tactics.”

In addition to the gaps in their education, Chile’s officers often lacked practical experience. The army’s more senior commanders did not know how to maneuver large units. Col. Marco Arriagada complained that most officers did not possess the knowledge to train the infantry and cavalry how to use their new rifles. Even when they acquired new Krupp field pieces, Chile’s gunners did not understand their value because they had fired them but once in past two years.

In sum, Chile’s army seemed ready to fight the war against Peru and Bolivia in 1879 using the same tactics it had employed when it had battled against the armies of the Peruvian-Bolivian Confederation in 1836. Happily for the Moneda, its enemies’ military proved equally rooted in the past: just as the Bolivians still resorted to Napoleonic squares to repel cavalry charges, the Peruvians continued to follow Spain’s only slightly more modern 1821 military regulations, which, many officers sadly acknowledged, seemed appropriate only for a “distant epoch.”

THE BOLIVIAN ARMY

Peru was not the only nation whose army contained too many officers commanding too few men. Bolivia created its first military academy in 1823. Like its Peruvian counterpart, the school functioned only intermittently. Indeed, in 1847 the military institute for the third time closed its doors. Not until 1872 did these reopen when President Tomás Frías entrusted the Colegio Militar and its cadets to the care of a French general and a veteran of the Franco-Prussian War. (The defeat sustained by the French in the Franco-Prussian War should have given the Bolivians pause.) Regrettably, this school did not meet its founders’ expectations, and even if it had, it never trained enough officers to change dramatically the tone, or level of skills, of Bolivia’s officer corps. Just before the War of the Pacific ended, the Bolivian government called for the creation of both another academy and a school to train noncommissioned officers. In short, Bolivia’s officers lacked the education or training to fight a conventional war.

The military, additionally, lacked the institutions of a modern army: when it existed the general staff, rather than consisting of the army’s intellectual elite, had become a dumping ground for officers considered too untrustworthy to command troops in the field; it had even lost most of its copies of its own Código Militar. Although General Daza apparently revived and reorganized the general staff in the early months of the War of the Pacific, it did not actually function until 1880.

The Bolivian army of 1877 included not only a smaller number of men but fewer units as well: three battalions of infantry, the Daza Granaderos 1 de la Guardia, the Sucre Granaderos de la Guardia, and the Illimani Cazadores de la Guardia; one cavalry detachment, the Bolívar 1 de Húsares; and a mobile squadron of four Gatling machine guns. The Regimiento Santa Cruz de Artillería also contained four cannons, purchased in 1872, as well as ten to fifteen older weapons. In 1880 Bolivia organized the Bolívar 2 de Artillería, which consisted of sixteen artillery field and mountain guns.

The small arms that these troops carried—ranging from Martini-Henrys to flintlocks—proved as varied as their uniforms. Worse, not one unit carried the same weapons into battle. La Paz’s minister of war attributed this problem to the countless cuartelazos that had consumed so many weapons that there was no uniformity of small arms within each of the army’s units. This lack of standardization not only led to supply problems but, according to the 1877 Memoria, “caused many, grave troubles in practical training as well as in their use.” Of the three combat arms, only the infantry seemed marginally acceptable. Certainly the artillery appeared blighted: it possessed two heavy and two light machine guns, and three three-inch artillery pieces. But the unit lacked the horses to transport them to the field and the technical skills needed to fire them accurately. Thanks to a lack of decent mounts, the product of the constant civil unrest, one minister called the cavalry the least efficient branch.

In fairness, Bolivia tried to remedy these problems. Unfortunately, its attempt to improve the troops’ living conditions, increase junior officers’ salaries, purchase draft animals, and acquire small arms plus four Krupp cannons foundered due to a lack of funds.45 In 1878, with war in the offing, Bolivia had requested and received permission from Peru to import, duty free, fifteen hundred Remington rifles plus some other military items. And in mid-1879 it received another two thousand Remingtons to add to the approximately three thousand rifles of the same make. By 1881, thanks to shipments from Panama, Bolivia acquired six modern Krupp artillery and enough rifles that it could to lend some to Peru, though it still continued to carp about the lack of ammunition. La Paz, however, had yet to standardize its arsenals’ contents.

By 1881 La Paz had improved the lot of its troops by providing food and clothing, as well as a general education. It also created various militia units such as the Guardia Republicana and hoped to train another ten thousand militiamen.

The Bolivian soldier’s stolid endurance, his stoicism, and his ability to endure privation did not make a skilled soldier. As Campero observed, training an illiterate Indian, “who does not know how to hold a rifle, [and who] has a very little idea of the motherland or of its elevated ends,” proved extremely difficult. Before the army could make these men into soldiers, it had teach them to be citizens, “to impart notions of civilization” or culture for the soldier “to know and to practice his duties to the motherland.

THE PERUVIAN MILITARY

The declaration of a state of belligerence caught the Peruvian and Chilean armies in various stages of military unpreparedness. In Peru’s case, this condition partially resulted from bad luck: in 1875 the Lima government embarked on a project to reorganize the army using its noncommissioned officers recently graduated from the newly created Escuela de Clases as the core of the new formations. Economic as well as domestic political considerations, however, delayed the proposal’s completion. Thus, once the conflict erupted, Mariano Prado’s government had to abandon its efforts at restructuring and revert to the army’s old table of organization—seven infantry battalions, three cavalry squadrons, and two artillery regiments—to fight the war.

As part of its abortive reform proposal, between 1869 and 1878 Lima sent two missions abroad to acquire small arms. The first purchased two thousand Belgian Comblain II rifles. When Peru sought to buy more of these weapons three years later, it learned that the factory could not fill its order. (Deliveries to Brazil and Chile absorbed most of the plant’s capacity.) The second mission compromised, acquiring five thousand of the less effective French Chassepots, which it modified to accept the same cartridge as the Comblain. This weapon became known as El Peruano, or as the Castañón, in honor of Col. Emilio Castañón, who led the delegation.

The arrival of these new rifles, however, still could not satisfy completely the needs of Peru’s newly expanded army. Consequently, the government had to equip its troops with the obsolescent weapons, generally of different calibers and national origin, that clogged Lima’s arsenals. The Pichincha, Zepita, and Ayacucho battalions carried American-made Sniders, while the Dos de Mayo and Cazadores de Cuzco battalions toted Chassepots. The administration later claimed that by September 1879 it had standardized its weapon systems to the point that at least each division used the same firearms. Yet, on the eve of the Battle of Tacna in May 1880, a provincial prefect informed President Nicolás Piérola that the army was equipped with 5,873 rifles and carbines produced by twelve different manufacturers. As Segundo Leiva of the Second Army of the South noted, relying on such a heterogeneous mélange of rifles caused enormous logistical problems. It proved so difficult to provide ammunition that in some units troops had weapons but no bullets.2 Predictably, the government fobbed off its most out-of-date equipment, the Austrian or Prussian minié guns, on the various guardia nacional units; others carried the old Peabody.

Peru’s artillery park consisted of four eight-centimeter Krupp M/67 guns, twelve six-centimeter Krupp M/73 mountain guns, four Gatling guns, as well as some very heavy and very obsolete bronze cannons. During the war Peru purchased additional small arms, ammunition, as well as forty to fifty Gatling guns plus artillery. Local foundries, moreover, manufactured over 650,000 cartridges for the Chassepots, Castañóns, and 688,000 minié balls. These same factories also produced sixty artillery pieces constructed of fused railroad tracks that they encased in bronze and reinforced with iron rings. Called the Grieve cannon to honor its designer, it fired the same shells made for the Krupp mountain gun and had a range of five thousand yards.

Of all its combat arms, Peru’s cavalry seemed the most ill equipped. Although all mounted units were supposed to use Winchester carbines, they did not. Col. Manuel Zamudio reported, for example, that one of the Lanceros de Torata’s two squadrons, clad in body armor, carried lances as well as sabers; the other received Henry carbines that often malfunctioned because it proved difficult to extract spent cartridges.4 Another curious fact distinguished Lima’s mounted units: while Quechua- and Aymara- speaking Indians constituted the bulk of the infantry, and indeed the country’s population, the authorities prohibited them from serving in the cavalry in the belief that Indians did not know how to ride horses. This honor fell only to blacks and mestizos, who apparently had a genetic predisposition to serve in the cavalry as well as the artillery.

The quality of many of Peru’s officers remained doubtful. Although Lima opened its first military academy in 1823, the school, as well as its successors, operated only sporadically. The most recent reincarnation, the Colegio Militar, had only begun to function in 1875, and it did not graduate its first class until 1877. Consequently, most of those who received their commission directly did so by choosing the winning side of one of Peru’s numerous revolutions. Not surprisingly, the results of this system dismayed the nation. The officers’ performance during the war, particularly those at the company grade level, was so wretched that it had been, according to one British officer, the cause of the army’s defeat. Indeed, the Peruvian intellectual Ricardo Palma said of the officer corps that “for every ten punctilious and worthy officers, you have ninety rogues, for whom duty and motherland are empty words. To form an army you will have to shoot at least half the military.” Curiously, scores of officers from Uruguay and Argentina volunteered to serve under Peruvian colors. One of these was future Argentine president Roque Saenz Pena, who managed to survive the Battle of Arica and return to Buenos Aires to fight in the only marginally less bloody battles of Argentine politics.

NITRATES AS CAUSE OF THE WAR

Chilean nitrates were the chief source of nitrogen for explosives, fertilizer, and chemical industries from the 1830s to the 1930s, and were the only significant source of iodine from the 1870s (replacing seaweed) until the mid-20th century (when iodine began to be extracted from oilfield brines).

In 1830, a shipment of 700 tonnes of nitrate left Tarapacá, southernmost Peru. The industry mushroomed, and annual exports were 16,000 tonnes by 1843. The peak was not reached until the rather unusual conditions of World War I, when production reached nearly 3 million tonnes. The all-time record was set in 1928, at 3.1 million tonnes.

The nitrates occur in what are now Chile's two northern provinces, Tarapacá and Antofagasta, along a band 30 km wide and 700 km long. They seem to have formed in shallow playa lakes, where the saline water contained bacteria that fixed nitrogen into nitrate.

In 1868 there was a boom in nitrate mining in the Atacama Desert, and major nitrate ports were developed from Iquique in the north through Pisagua and across the Atacama desert to Taltal. The nitrate mining was dominated by British and Chilean enterprises, even though the Atacama Desert was formally part of Bolivia. Chile had recognized Bolivia's title in an 1874 treaty, but was allocated economic rights there, including a guarantee that taxes on Chilean mining enterprises would not be raised.

For Peru, nitrate was rather unimportant as long as the guano trade was flourishing: in fact, most of the early nitrate mining on Peruvian and Bolivian territory was done by Chilean and British entrepreneurs. However, in 1875 a particularly impoverished Peruvian government declared nitrate deposits to be the property of the state, copying the declaration covering guano decades before. By this time the governments of Peru, Bolivia, and Chile, had all focussed their attention on control of the nitrate region.

In another of its economic crises, the Bolivian government announced a tax increase of 10 centavos per hundredweight on nitrates in 1879. At that time the largest nitrate mining company was the Antofagasta Nitrate and Railroad Company, a Chilean firm controlled by British capital, including the merchant house of Gibbs. It's not clear what part was played by Gibbs in the politics of this incident, but the Chileans mobilized with the intention of seizing the desert. The Peruvians expressed the intention of mediating the dispute between Bolivia and Chile, but when it turned out that there was a secret treaty between Peru and Bolivia, the Chileans declared war on them both.

The War of the Pacific may have been started as much by national rivalry and runaway emotion as by the economic prize of the nitrate deposits themselves. However, the nitrate prize was enough to give the victor the income of an entire nation, and the combatants were acutely aware of that. Peru's income had been largely based on guano and nitrate for decades; Bolivia's economy was ramshackle at best, but its foreign income was based on metal mining in the Altiplano; and Chile had already had a taste of the riches to be gained from the Atacama mines it was already operating.

Early in the War, W. R. Grace allied itself with the Peruvian government, and became a clandestine arms shipper to Peru. It bought and shipped millions of dollars' worth of armaments, including guns from Krupp and a new naval weapon, a torpedo boat. However the Chileans quickly beat both their opponents and went on to occupy Lima.

Chile's victory in the War of the Pacific gave it full control of a large northern strip of coast. Iquique was the terminus of the Nitrate Railways and the most important outlet. At first Tarapacá province was dominant, with 48 out of Chile's 53 nitrate works in 1892. But twenty years later the southern fields of Antofagasta, linked by a new railroad, the Longitudinal Railway, overtook the northern field in production.

Nitrate played an increasing role in Chile's economy after the War of the Pacific, as copper production declined. By the late 1880s an export tax on nitrate was earning 43% of Chilean government income, and in 1894 it was 68%, and the wealth was used to improve the country's infrastructure. The nitrate industry, however, was largely foreign owned. European capital had bought out Chilean entrepreneurs in Chile, Peru, and Bolivia, even before the War of the Pacific. The major reason was the large amount of capital needed to set up the nitrate works, the infrastructure in the difficult desert regions that contained the nitrate deposits, and the railroad and port facilities that were needed, and the continuing requirement for importing supplies. Capital on this scale was simply not available in South America, nor were the basic supplies to support the industry. For example, foreign coal constituted 20% of Iquique's imports in 1909. In fact, a convenient two-way trade of coal for nitrate favored British shipping firms, who loaded 60% of the nitrates even though most of the nitrate went to European countries.

Synthetic production of nitrates surpassed Chilean mining production in the 1930s. By 1950 the Chilean production was only about 15% of world supply, and by 1980 it was only 0.14%. Today the Chilean reserves total only about a year's worth of world consumption, not because they are close to exhaustion, but because world demand has increased so much.

Uniformes de la Guerra del Pacifico 1879-1884

An astounding large format, full-colour uniform book!

Spanish text, but with rough English translation soon available on PDF.

Amazing uniforms - think ACW meets British Colonial meets Franco-Prussian War - but with extra colour and llamas!

£59.50 GBP

An incredibly sumptuous book that surpasses even Partizan's usual committment to quality colour uniforms.

This book covers one of the longest and bloodiest conflicts in Latin America during the 19th. Century. In 1879 the war started as a simple border dispute which drew three nations armies into armed conflict, Chile, Peru and Bolivia.

Chile with its small army of 2,440 men stood to be overwhelmed by the combine allied forces of Peru and Bolivia which numbered 10,452 men, although this war is not considered large by European standards, it was equally as bloody and left thousands of men dead and the Chilean Army the victor.

In this book you will find the military dress and uniforms worn by all the opposing forces. One is struck by the colourful uniforms worn by the regiments on all sides in this war. The fashion ranges from American Civil War, Franco-Prussian War and you even find some traces of Spanish uniform.

The plates show all ranks from senior officers down to ordinary infantrymen and troopers, even the indegenous Indians are included. Credit must go to Greve and Fernández in producing such beautiful and detailed plates and bringing this subject to life.

You will also find a wonderful collection of contemporary black and white photographs taken during this conflict which with the help of Electronic Retouching have brought them into the 21st. Century. This has been done in the most careful way by the authors following to the letter the dress regulations of the time. This technique was used by them in their first book in Spanish on this subject for the Chilean Army.

This book shows an entirely new and very colourful subject for the student of military dress and campaign history. With 80 superb colour plates, many contemporary photograps and drawings, all showing the uniforms as they were actually worn by the soldiers of the day, with a combination of regulation and improvised dress.

Others show the variety of arms which were used and came from North America and Europe, also the equipment that the soldiers carried on their long campaigns, plus flags, insignia, medals and even buttons are shown in this work.

This excellent book continues to open up the vast subject of South American military uniform and history which has been woefully neglected in the past.