War
Late in the afternoon of 14 July 1969, concerted military action began. San Salvador City was put on a black out and the Salvadoran Air Force took off to Honduras (El Salvador lacked sufficient military air equipment, resorting to the use of passenger airplanes with attached vessels strapped to their sides as bombers) attacked targets inside Honduras, who had a better equipped air force but Hondurans were caught off guard by the Salvadorans. Salvadoran air-raids included the airport facility at Toncontin, leaving the Honduran Air Force unable to react. The larger Salvadoran army, launched major offensives along the two main roads connecting the two nations and invaded Honduras. Initially, rapid progress was made by the Salvadorian army, by the evening of 15 July, the Honduran army had been pushed back over eight kilometers. The departmental capital of Nueva Ocotepeque fell shortly after along with eight other cities, placing the Salvadoran army within striking distance of the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa.
However, the momentum of the advance did not last. The Honduran air force reacted, striking the Salvadorian Ilopango military airport facility. The effectiveness of the attack on Ilopango has been called into question, however it is generally accepted that the bombing of oil facilities and depots severely disrupted the logistics of the Salvadorian army.
There is enough evidence to support the contention that, after the surprise Salvadoran air-raid attacks to Toncontin, the Honduran air force managed to establish and maintain control of the air in their territory. On July 15, the Organization of American States met in an emergency session and demanded that El Salvador withdraw from Honduras. The government in San Salvador refused unless promised that reparations would be made to those Salvadorans who were displaced and that those who remained in Honduras would not be harmed.
During the war, the Third Military Zone of the Honduran Army was discovered to have only half of its allotted soldiers. The money for the missing troops had been collected by an apparently corrupt Honduran Army officer. Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle helped Honduras by providing weapons and ammunition.
Read more about this topic: Football War
Famous quotes containing the word war:
“That is what war is and dancing it is forward and back, when one is out walking one wants not to go back the way they came but in dancing and in war it is forward and back.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
“War and culture, those are the two poles of Europe, her heaven and hell, her glory and shame, and they cannot be separated from one another. When one comes to an end, the other will end also and one cannot end without the other. The fact that no war has broken out in Europe for fifty years is connected in some mysterious way with the fact that for fifty years no new Picasso has appeared either.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)
“Their bodies are buried in peace; but their name liveth for evermore.”
—Apocrypha. Ecclesiasticus, 44:14.
The line “their name liveth for evermore” was chosen by Rudyard Kipling on behalf of the Imperial War Graves Commission as an epitaph to be used in Commonwealth War Cemeteries. Kipling had himself lost a son in the fighting.