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This article assesses how Paraguay, the weaker power, managed to defeat Bolivia in the 1932-35 Chaco War, fought over the disputed and remote Gran Chaco region that separated the two countries. Using a broad definition of logistics to include the acquisition of matériel before the war as well as the establishment of national and international supply lines during the war, it examines the logistical infrastructure of Bolivia and Paraguay from the early 1920s to 1935. The article argues that Paraguay's logistical superiority, developed in the late 1920s and early 1930s, was a decisive factor leading to its victory in 1935.
COVERED with low dense vegetation, the Chaco region (Gran Chaco or Ghaco Boreal) that separated Bolivia and Paraguay was a flat roadless wilderness inhabited almost exclusively by indigenous Indians. Since their formation as independent republics in the nineteenth century, neither Bolivia nor Paraguay had been able to agree on a common border in the Chaco region. Land-locked Bolivia's desire to push across the Chaco to reach the Paraguay River, from whence it could reach the sea, led to clashes with Paraguayan forces in the 1920s that escalated to full-scale war in 1932. With casualty rates equivalent to those of the powers that fought the First World War, the Ghaco War, 1932-35, was South America's hloodicst inter-state conflict of the twentieth century. In a war in which both sides nelded armies totalling almost 400,000 men, Bolivia lost about 2 percent of its population (56-65,000 dead) and Paraguay approximately 3.5 percent (36,000 dead).- It saw the mobilization of war economies, the use of French and German military advisory teams, large-scale battlefield engagements, the development of wartime alliances, and the deployment of the sorts of modem weaponry that would become commonplace in the second World War.3 It was a training ground-a South-American Spanish Civil War-for the second World War, although it is not clear what lessons, if any, the protagonists of the Second World War drew from the Ghaco War. As Pierre Mondain aptly noted in Revue Historique, the Chaco War "possède toutes les caractéristiques d'une guerre moderne pour l'époque" (possessed all the characteristics of a modern war of that time).4 It was also a war in which Paraguay, by far the smaller, weaker power, emerged...