Initially, Conventionist forces–mainly the huge Division del Norte and Zapata’s Liberation Army of the South–dominated most of the country. The Carranzistas held only coastal and border enclaves and the southeast. In mid-November Obregon withdrew from Mexico City and joined Carranza at Veracruz to organize what Carranza designated the ‘Army of Operations.’ Villa’s and Zapata’s fighters, meanwhile, swarmed into the capital.

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At Veracruz, depleted infantry battalions that had followed Obregon from Sonora recruited locally. Workers from the Casa del Obrero Mundial labor organization were organized into ‘Red Battalions.’ Other forces included Yaqui Indian battalions Obregon had raised in Sonora by promising the return of tribal lands. An extraordinary source of equipment became available when the Americans pulled out of Veracruz on November 23, handing over not only the Federal Army stores impounded in the April occupation but also shipments sent by President Woodrow Wilson after his October decision to support Carranza against the radical Conventionists. It was a windfall: twelve thousand rifles and carbines, 3.4 million rounds of ammunition, artillery, machine guns, trucks, uniforms, tools, and 632 rolls of barbed wire. Nevertheless, Carranza’s armies were still outnumbered by his opponents’ forces.

At this crucial moment, Villa chose to ignore the advice of his most trusted adviser and general, Felipe Angeles, to attack Carranza at Veracruz. Instead, Villa turned his troops northward, capturing the major cities of Guadalajara and Monterrey, but allowing Obregon to rout Zapatistas from Puebla and reoccupy Mexico City on January 28. The Constitutionalist commander, however, soon found his nine-thousand-man force harassed by guerrillas and immobilized by administration of Mexico’s large and fractious capital. Moreover, Villa’s troops were threatening to capture the oil port of Tampico. Carranza reacted by ordering Obregon to evacuate La Capital and retreat closer to Veracruz, cutting the railway behind him.

Obregon was happy to leave Mexico City, but proposed advancing north to confront Villa directly in the Bajio, a 250-mile-long depression on Mexico’s high central plateau. The general had studied Villa’s egocentric, mercurial character during earlier negotiations with him. Obregon knew that Villa would see such an advance as a challenge to his carefully cultivated reputation. He would ignore all strategic considerations and contrary advice and concentrate his forces for a showdown.

Obregon had carefully examined Villa’s military tactics as well. His opponent was dangerous, but predictable. Ultimately, he always relied on massive–usually uncoordinated–cavalry charges. Also, during battles Villa failed to maintain a reserve force of infantry or cavalry. Obregon, on the other hand, pored over accounts of the ongoing fighting on Europe’s Western Front, where cavalry charges had been decimated by rifle and machine-gun fire from infantrymen deployed in trenches and behind barbed-wire entanglements and by artillery fire. Thanks to Wilson’s windfall, he had plenty of barbed wire, machine guns, and artillery. He telegraphed Carranza that he would ‘go on the offensive or assume a defensive posture, as the situation dictates.’ With Villa defeated, the rival Conventionist government would inevitably collapse.

As a first step, Obregon occupied the ancient Toltec capital of Tula, where a branch railway skirting Mexico City offered secure communications with Veracruz. His force now numbered eleven thousand soldiers; six thousand cavalrymen, commanded by General Cesareo Castro–a Coahuilan associate of Carranza’s since 1910; and thirty-five hundred infantrymen, eleven battalions from Sonora led by General Benjamin Hill–Obregon’s comrade-in-arms from 1913. The artillery, which included machine-gun battalions, comprised most of the remainder. Its commander, Colonel Maximilian Kloss, was a German immigrant from Sonora who had joined Obregon in 1912. A lieutenant of reserves in his native country, Kloss was one of the few Constitutionalist officers with formal military training.

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