Did Pancho Villa throw pipe bombs from airplanes?

Logan: This is the burning question that concerns us all. Nick says the answer is yes.

Nick: Actually, I said his forces threw pipe bombs from airplanes.

Frankie: So in the sense that Napoleon fought the battle of Austerlitz, Pancho Villa threw pipe bombs from airplanes?

Nick: Aye. In 1914 Villa, Major General Villa, commander of the División del Norte, was preparing his assault against the forces of dictator Victoriano Huerta in Torreón.  Carloads of war material came across the border, and these shipments included a few airplanes. The aviators were mainly Americans, “barnstormers” looking for adventure. They made crude bombs from metal pipes stuffed with dynamite.

From a pipe bomb awareness report issued by the U.S. Department of State

Frankie: Now, that makes sense. I thought you were talking about pipe bombs full of black powder like idiots make. Dynamite is highly brisant, and stuffed in a metal pipe would give you nice fragmentation.

Logan: Brisant?

Frankie: Having much brisance. The shattering effect of high explosives.

Nick: Thank you, gunny. And aside from pipe bombs, also grenades, though the pipe bombs were fabricated grenades. Here’s how Mariano Azuela, a surgeon in Villa’s army, described things:

They’re like great big birds that don’t even seem to move sometimes….The god-damn things have some American guy inside with hand grenades by the thousand….You know how a farmer feeds corn to his chickens, huh? Well, the American throws his lead bombs at the enemy just like that. Pretty soon the whole damn field is nothing but a graveyard.

A Wright Model HS airplane. This model served with Villa's forces in March, 1915..

Logan:  OK, I asked Microsoft Copilot if Pancho Villa used airplanes, and this is what it said:

Nick: And that is the problem with these LLM’s.  They don’t know what they don’t know. It would be fine if Copilot said, “My training data does not include any references to the use of airplanes by Pancho Villa’s forces.” But saying, “Pancho Villa's forces themselves did not use airplanes” and “Villa himself, however, did not have access to airplanes for his forces,” that’s a pretense of knowledge. Also wrong, of course.

Frankie: Absence of evidence is evidence of absence, apparently.  And absence of evidence may indeed be evidence of absence if a thorough search for evidence has been made and none found. But not otherwise, and this is otherwise. So Copilot is making an argumentum ad ignorantiam: I don’t have any evidence it’s true, so it’s not.

Nick: Exactly. That is the real danger with these models, though one that most writers are too dense to appreciate.  I should note that Google Gemini did know that Villa's forces used airplanes, but it's only aware of the March, 1915 use mentioned in our references below. Unfortunately, when asked about prior use, it says "there isn't significant evidence of his forces using airplanes in any substantial or successful capacity before that specific date." It should say, "It's possible there was significant use before that date, but I don't have any evidence of it."

Frankie: Yes. Nothing wrong with saying, "F**k, I dunno."

Nick: Unless you're a chatbot, apparently. By the way, is there a Diné word for “brisant?”

Frankie:  We borrow it from the French brisant, which is where English got it, wise-ass.

Nick: I knew that.

Frankie: Of course you did. Now why don’t you give us normal humans context on Villa’s Torreón campaign?

Victoriano Huerta in 1912

Nick: I won’t bore people with a history of the Mexican Revolution, but to summarize, the conservative authoritarian Porfirio Diaz was overthrown in 1911 by revolutionary forces after Diaz refused to recognize reformer Francisco Madero’s victory in the presidential election of 1910. These forces included Pancho Villa’s División del Norte. But Madero was overthrown and killed in 1913 by Victoriano Huerta, who was a very bad person. This prompted Venustiano Carranza and others, including Villa, to ally against Huerta. The attack on Torreón in March and April 1914 was part of that campaign. It was successful, with Huerta fleeing the country in July, 1914.  There’s nothing nice you can say about Huerta. Anyway, what happened next will need to wait for another blog post.  For now, it should be enough to say that Major General Pancho Villa commanded a large army, by some estimates 150,000, with trains, airplanes, artillery, and machine guns. The American image of him is a bandit festooned with cartridge belts, but he was way more than that. So much more that, in the autumn of 1914, President Wilson seriously considered recognizing him as the de facto President of Mexico.

Major General Pancho Villa

Logan: Can we eat now?

References: 

Clarence C. Clendenen, The United States and Pancho Villa: A Study in Unconventional Diplomacy (Cornell University Press, 1961) pp. 71-72

Mariano Azuela, The Under Dogs, translated by E. Munguía (New York, 1929), pp. 109-110. This is an autobiographical novel.  (A recent translation is available from Penguin Classics. However, it contains an erroneous footnote to this section stating that “the use of airplanes would actually be a decisive factor in Huerta’s defeat of Villa, beginning in 1915.” Since Huerta fled Mexico in 1914 and never defeated Villa,  Carranza, not Huerta, is probably intended.)

Taibo, Paco Ignacio Pancho Villa: Una biografía narrativa (Barcelona: Editorial Planeta, 2007)  The Wikipedia article on the Second Battle of Torreón cites this as support for Villa importing  a 2-seater aircraft prior to the battle (which does not imply that additional aircraft were not imported).

Edwards, John Carver, Orville's Aviators: Outstanding Alumni of the Wright Flying School, 1910-1916 (McFarland, 2009). An interesting source recounting delivery of a Wright Model HS, marketed as a "Military Flyer," to Villa’s headquarters at Monterrey in March, 1915, and its subsequent use carrying dispatches (but not for bombing). The pilot met with Floyd Gibbons of the Chicago Tribune and George Carothers, President Wilson's special diplomatic agent to Villa, whose dispatches were one of many sources for Clendenen's work cited above. Villa declined to go up in the plane.