The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo — And the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation
USA TODAY Review
Historian remembers the Alamo in ‘Blood of Heroes’
"Remember the Alamo!"
That rallying cry has lost much of its potency since 1836, when it led to the establishment of the Republic of Texas.
For many Americans today, the word "Alamo" conjures a car-rental company first, a college football bowl game second and, finally, a tourist attraction in San Antonio where something historic — we're not sure exactly what — happened a long time ago.
Historian James Donovan's stirring and painstakingly researched The Blood of Heroes: The 13-Day Struggle for the Alamo — And the Sacrifice That Forged a Nation forcefully reminds us what we're supposed to remember.
Donovan — author of A Terrible Glory, a best-selling account of another famous military debacle of the American West, the Battle of Little Bighorn — combines strong narrative chops with exhaustive research in his new book. It tells the story of about 200 independence-minded "Texians," holed up in an old mission on the outskirts of the town then known as Béxar, as they hold off a Mexican army of at least 2,000 men for nearly two weeks before being overwhelmed.
As Donovan makes clear, the defenders of the Alamo —including two American folk heroes, James Bowie and David "Davy" Crockett — were doomed from the start. The repeated pleas for reinforcements and supplies by the Texians' young commander, William Barret Travis, went largely unanswered by the dithering and incompetent provisional government. And as a military garrison, the poorly fortified Alamo was makeshift at best.
Worst of all for the Texians, the Mexican dictator Santa Anna, who fancied himself a Bonaparte of the West (though he lacked Napoleon's resources and tactical skills), was determined to make an example of the rebels, ordering his troops to take no prisoners. Donovan, to his credit, gives the Mexican perspective its due, including the misgivings and disgust of several of Santa Anna's top lieutenants at their leader's brutality.
If there's a structural issue with The Blood of Heroes, it's that the actual siege and fall of the Alamo take up barely one-fifth of this 500-page tome. Donovan offers the reader a full 200 pages of backstory, scene-setting and character-establishing before he gets to the main action, then follows it with another 75 pages of aftermath (not to mention an additional 125 pages of appendices, notes and an index). If this were a Hollywood movie, most of the first half of the story, as well as the entire coda, would end up on the cutting-room floor, if it were filmed at all.
Fortunately, this isn't a Hollywood movie. It's popular history with an emphasis on the personalities and backgrounds of the people who populate the tale; to Donovan, who they were is at least as important as what they did. (Crockett, the backwoods sharpshooter and former congressman who arrived from Tennessee shortly before hostilities began, comes off particularly well, bucking up the dispirited Texians with his calm example.) This is smart thinking, not least because by the time the shooting starts, we've established an emotional connection to the characters that makes them all the more poignant and tragic, given the fate we know is coming.
When it does come, it's stomach-churning stuff. The carnage of the battle, which culminates with the slaughter of the defenders by bayonet-wielding Mexican soldiers, makes for brutal reading. But this wasn't the ersatz violence of a football game; it was the real thing, which is what we're supposed to remember. After reading The Blood of Heroes, which sears the events of 1836 on our memories as if branding cattle, no one is likely to forget.