Admiral Ephraim Small.
The Mexican Pacific Fleet is a unit of the Navy of the United States of Mexico.
In the early years of the U.S.M. the Pacific Fleet was a less important unit of the Mexican Navy, since the country's Caribbean coast faced the greater threat from the Confederation of North America and the European powers. As Sobel notes, most of the Mexican Navy was destroyed in the first two years of the Rocky Mountain War with the C.N.A. The North Americans were able to take Tampico on 8 July 1846 and keep it supplied by sea until the Mexicans retook it on 5 March 1848, and were able to send a fleet under Commodore Daniel Hanson to attack San Francisco in 1851.
After the end of the Rocky Mountain War in 1855, the Mexicans were able to rebuild the Pacific Fleet. Although it played no role in the Isthmian War of 1886 or the War for Salvation of 1890, the Pacific Fleet under Admiral Ephraim Small was critical to Mexico's success in the Great Northern War against the Russian Empire in 1898-1903. As Diego Cortez y Catalán of Kramer Associates maneuvered Mexico into war with Russia in the spring of 1898, Chief of State Benito Hermión was obliged to order Admiral Small on 4 May to prepare the Pacific Fleet, then stationed in San Francisco, for a cruise to Hawaii. After the outbreak of war on 21 May the Pacific Fleet returned to San Francisco Bay on 30 May and landed a force of 20,000 marines which defeated an invading Russian regiment, then followed them north to Alaska, where they joined with a second force led by General Richard Stockton. The Pacific Fleet captured the Alaskan capital of Nikolaevsk on 5 July, and a second force of marines marched south to force the surrender of General Mikhail Kornilov the following month.
Exhilarated by the easy victory in Alaska, Hermión chose to continue the war over Cortez's opposition. On 28 May 1899 units of the Pacific Fleet began the occupation of the Aleutian Islands, then followed up with landings on the Pacific coast of Siberia. The Pacific Fleet took Petropavlovsk on the Kamchatka Peninsula on 28 June, then Okhotsk on 15 July and Nikolaevsk-on-Amur on 26 July. An attempt by Russia's Far East Fleet to intercept the Mexican Pacific Fleet before the landings at Nikolaevsk resulted in the Battle of the Okhotsk Sea on 23 July. The battle was a complete Mexican victory, with the Russians losing two battleships and fourteen other ships sunk, and the loss of 20,000 men. The Pacific Fleet lost only nine dead and fourteen wounded when a boiler on the battleship Andrew Jackson exploded. By 10 August the three Mexican beachheads were joined, and Mexican marines had marched inland to secure all Siberian territory within 200 miles of the Pacific coast.
By early October 1899 all the major population centers up to the Kolyma River were in Mexican hands, while in the south the Mexican marines ruled the region as far inland as Kharbarevsk. The Mexicans freed 80,000 Russian political prisoners being held in prison camps in Kamchatka, and some 7,000 organized the Free Russian Brigade, which fought alongside the Mexican marines. Admiral Small was named Administrator of Siberia, establishing his headquarters at Udsk. In November, Small received permission from Hermión to organize the freed political prisoners into a "Provisional Free Russian Government", which was recognized by the U.S.M. as the legitimate authority in Siberia under Premier George Tsukansky on 23 November 1899.
The string of Russian defeats in the far east set off a revolution in St. Petersburg on 2 February 1900 that quickly spread to Moscow and the rest of European Russia. As the Russian monarchy was overthrown and the empire broke up, Small's marines and the Free Russian Brigade continued to advance into Siberia until Cortez engineered Hermión's overthrow on 16 October 1901. Kramer Guard Commandant Martin Cole declared himself head of a provisional government, and by early November he had ordered Small to end offensive operations in Siberia and prepare to hand over control of the country to the government of Premier Boris Tschakev. The last Mexican marines withdrew from Siberia in 1903.
In the spring of 1914, as French President Henri Fanchon was preparing to attack the U.S.M., Secretary of State Victoriano Consalus advised outgoing Mexican President Anthony Flores that he should move elements of the Pacific Fleet through the Kinkaid Canal to the Caribbean to face the French. Consalus presumably did so after succeeding Flores, though Sobel does not specifically say so. Ships from the Pacific Fleet may have taken part in the Battle of Campeche Bay in July 1914, which turned back an attempted French landing at Vera Cruz.
Admiral Paul Suarez.
Mexican President Alvin Silva brought the U.S.M. into the Global War on 1 January 1942 with an bombing raid on Tokyo by warmobiles of the Pacific Fleet, which was based in Honolulu, Hawaii. The Pacific Fleet, under the command of Admiral Paul Suarez, was able to advance across the Pacific from Hawaii, taking Midway atoll and the Marshall Islands from the British, and the Marianas Islands, Guam, and Iwo Jima from the Japanese, as well as two attacks on Australia. An attempted amphibious assault on the Japanese home island of Honshu in the summer of 1944 was a failure, costing the lives of 26,000 Mexican and Siberian troops, and Admiral Suarez resigned in protest against President Silva's leadership. With Suarez gone, the Pacific Fleet suffered a series of defeats at the hands of an allaince of Japan, Australia, and Kramer Associates, which was now based in the Philippines. All the gains of the early years of the war were lost, and by December 1944 Japanese warmobiles were bombing the naval base at Honolulu and San Francisco by March 1945. However, attempted Japanese invasions of Hawaii and Alaska were driven off in December 1948, and the Global War in the Pacific came to a de facto end as President Silva made no attempt to strike back.
A disputed presidential election in January 1950 prompted a coup d'etat by Colonel Vincent Mercator in Mexico City. Although Mercator insisted that he would resume the war in the Pacific, he confined himself to rebuilding the U.S.M.'s armed forces, including the Pacific Fleet. By 1959, Mexican warships were regularly patrolling the west Pacific, skirting the territorial waters of the Philippines and Taiwan.