The retreat from Morella (1838): Military logistics and supply chain management during the First Carlist WarWithdrawal from Morella (1838)

Authors

  • Daniel Lasmarías Abellán Investigador independiente

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.53351/kfyqv579

Keywords:

First Carlist War, Morela, military logistics, Military supplies, Maestrazgo

Abstract

During the First Carlist War (1833-1840), the royalist insurrection was gaining strength in the regions of Aragon and Valencia and becoming more professional as the years went by. At the beginning of 1838 the royalists able to dispute the liberal government's military control of certain territories despite the absence of a formal declaration of war. It was then that officer appointed from Madrid to lead the Army of the Center, General Marcelino Oráa, envisioned and implemented a plan to reverse the situation: to wrest control of Morella, a strategically significant and well-defended enclave, from Carlist commander Ramón Cabrera. To this end, he assembled a large column of around 20,000 soldiers for that summer. However, the poor logistics coordination and the good performance of the besieged forced him to an early retreat with catastrophic effects for the evolution of the conflict in those provinces. This failure, together with the destruction, a few weeks later, of General Pardiñas' division, marked the starting signal for an extended period of Carlist supremacy in extensive areas of Teruel and Castellón. This essay is aimed at studying the causes of this ― not only military but also political ― disaster. It is not so much a matter of apportioning blame, as was traditional in nineteenth-century historiography, but of delving into the existing military supplying structures and the relations of the Army's suppliers with the Government in the capital, using journalistic sources of the time and taking advantage of the fact that both issues were the subject of a long-lasting public debate. It was a series of bad decisions ― some of them possibly the result of ill-intent ― that forced Oráa to withdraw his troops from Morella. All of them, however, are also proof of how problematic it was to set up logistic structures to supply the large armies of the time.

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Author Biography

  • Daniel Lasmarías Abellán, Investigador independiente

    Estudiante del Máster Universitario de Historia Militar de España

    (Instituto Universitario General Gutiérrez Mellado – UNED)

References

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Published

2024-07-23

How to Cite

The retreat from Morella (1838): Military logistics and supply chain management during the First Carlist WarWithdrawal from Morella (1838). (2024). Revista Universitaria De Historia Militar, 13(26), 193-215. https://doi.org/10.53351/kfyqv579

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