We guys do take our sports seriously. The psychosocial impetus behind this curious phenomenon is indeed fascinating. The very term fan is short for fanatic. Fanatic implies crazy. That’s not tough to justify, but this football war was something else.
Some Intense Sports Wars
Just ponder the gravitas of some of these terms. What is a Cleveland Brown, exactly? (The Browns were named after their first head coach, one Paul Brown.) And then you have the Anaheim Ducks, the LA Lakers, the Oakland A’s, the Washington Commanders, and the Green Bay Packers. Fans of the Green Bay Packers voluntarily stroll about with enormous faux cheese on their heads while proudly claiming the moniker “Cheeseheads” for some unfathomable reason.
In a football stadium, 70,000 people can put cheese on their heads and still be considered respectable productive members of society. Walk down a typical American street with your head slathered in cheese and somebody will likely ask you if you stopped taking your medication abruptly. To be honest, none of that makes any sense.
Bizarre Sports
At its heart, all of this bizarre sports-related insanity spawns from the inescapable reality that we are all just so hopelessly tribal. Buried someplace deep in our DNA is this irresistible urge to band together for protection, recreation, comfort, and procreation. It is not hard to see the societal benefits of this hardwired behavior. And yet at some point, something about that innately natural healthy drive clicked and caused hockey fans to start throwing cephalopods onto an ice rink (No kidding. Throwing octopus onto the rink is a thing that Detroit Red Wings fans do. I’ve seen it myself. It’s freaky.)
I think if space aliens made their grand debut at a sporting event wherein the winning players dumped a drum full of ice-cold Gatorade over their head coach while the crowd was insensibly doing “The Wave” they might just pack up their spaceship and go home.
While doing stupid stuff in support of your favorite sports team is typically weird though fairly harmless, sometimes things can get out of control. I’m not just talking about pulling down goal posts or X-ing out the “M’s” on every street sign on the Ohio State University campus (Ohio State really hates Michigan. For that reason, no kidding, the sign outside the Emergency Room at the big teaching hospital there actually reads, “Emergency Roox.”) By way of example, back in 1969, the nations of Honduras and El Salvador cranked off a legit shooting war over the results of the 1970 FIFA World Cup qualifier match.
There was naturally a bit more to it than that, but the soccer match is what appeared to spark the fire. Land reform in Honduras had created a refugee crisis that spilled over into El Salvador. One need look no further than our Southern border to appreciate how frustrating it can be to suddenly have hundreds of thousands of unwashed guests with few marketable skills suddenly show up uninvited. That is what set the stage.
Honduras is five times larger than El Salvador yet plays home to a much smaller population. At the time of the war, there were 3.7 million Salvadorans against some 2.6 million Hondurans. Just as differing concentrations of solute astride a semipermeable membrane will strain to find a level, disaffected Salvadorans poured across the border into Honduras seeking a better life. By 1969, 300,000 Salvadorans had put down roots in Honduras. Salvadorans made up fully ten percent of the Honduran population.
Government Changes
Starting in 1962, a Honduran land reform law allowed both the central government and local townships to seize land from squatters as well as immigrant farmers and give it to native-born Hondurans. As one might imagine, this did not sit well with the immigrant Salvadoran farmers who were working their butts off trying to keep their families from starving. Once word got back to El Salvador regarding how poorly their expat countrymen were being treated at the hands of the Hondurans, the foundation was laid for something horrible.
In the summer of 1969, El Salvador and Honduras played the first of three World Cup qualifying soccer games in Tegucigalpa. Honduras won this match 1-0. One week later, El Salvador took the rematch played in San Salvador 3-0. Each game was followed by widespread violence between fans for the respective teams. Then on 27 June, there was the playoff tiebreaker held in Mexico City. This game was a serious nail-biter in which El Salvador won 3-2 in overtime. That was just more than these overwrought soccer nuts could stand.
Crazy Happenings
Violence broke out all over the place as Hondurans raped, plundered, and even murdered Salvadorans living in their country, all because of this stupid soccer game. 11,700 Salvadorans were forced to flee for their lives. The Salvadoran government declared the unrest to be genocide and cut off all diplomatic ties with their soccer hooligan neighbors. On 14 July 1969, six days before Neil Armstrong first set foot on the moon, the armed forces of El Salvador launched airstrikes against targets in Honduras.
Not What It Looks Like?
This was not Uncle Sam going all shock and awe on the Iraqi Republican Guard. The respective militaries of El Salvador and Honduras were, relatively speaking, fairly shoestring outfits. They were equipped with hand-me-down American WW2-surplus warplanes that had all seen better days. The Salvadorans led with civilian passenger aircraft crudely equipped with improvised aerial bombs. Regardless, they still did a respectable job of blowing Toncontin International Airport in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, straight to hell.
The Salvadoran Army invaded Honduras along two major axes of advance. The force packages were tailored to the terrain, but some of the Salvadoran forces were equipped with WW2-vintage M3 Stuart light tanks and M101 105mm howitzers. The Salvadoran Army was markedly larger and more formidable than was that of Honduras. However, the Nicaraguans began supplying military aid to the Hondurans in the form of weapons and ammunition. Even though this tidy little bloodletting originally spawned over a soccer match, it was now threatening to morph into the Central American version of World War 1.
The Salvadoran offensive initially made rapid progress, eventually threatening the Honduran capital of Tegucigalpa. However, the Honduran Air Force responded by effectively striking Salvadoran oil production facilities. With several of their oil depots along the coast in flames, the Salvadorans were suddenly questioning whether going to war over soccer had been such a good idea.
The really serious combat action took place in the air. Both sides were ably equipped with WW2-vintage American fighter planes. That meant P-51D Mustangs and F4U Corsairs of several different Marks. In support they had T-28 Trojan and AT-6 Texan trainer aircraft as well as a smattering of C-47 Skytrains jury rigged into service as ad hoc bombers.
On 17 July there was a frenetic aerial engagement that rivaled anything that took place in the skies over Europe between the US Army Air Corps and the German Luftwaffe. It began when a pair of Salvadoran TF-51D Mustangs bounced a Honduran Corsair that was strafing Salvadoran ground forces on the approaches to Tegucigalpa. The TF-51D was the ultimate evolutionary iteration of the WW2-vintage Mustang. Honduran Corsair pilot CPT Fernando Soto then jumped the attacking Mustangs, blowing the wing off of one of the fighters with a burst of 20mm fire.
Later that same afternoon, CPT Soto and his wingman came across a pair of Salvadoran FG-1D Corsairs while out looking for trouble. The FG-1 was the Corsair variant made under license by Goodyear during WW2. They jettisoned their external stores and dove into the attack. Soto flamed one of the big gull-winged fighters but left himself open to attack by the doomed Salvadoran pilot’s wingman. The resulting turning fight splashed across the sky. It ended when Soto executed a hard Split-S that brought him around on the other Corsair’s tail. Salvadoran Air Force Captain Guillermo Reynaldo Cortez was killed in the subsequent crash.
CPT Soto ultimately scored three aerial kills in a single day, a truly respectable feat of combat aviating. El Salvador continued operating their Corsairs until 1975. Honduran Corsairs soldiered on for another four years after that. The Football War was the last formal conflict in which piston-driven fighter planes engaged each other in aerial combat. It was also one of the few historical aerial fights wherein both sides fought in essentially the same airplane.
Finally, Somebody Listens to Reason…
With their capital city under threat, the Honduran government requested mediation from the Organization of American States. After a fair amount of cantankerous bickering, both sides agreed to a cease-fire effective 20 July. The war lasted for 100 hours and effectively displaced 300,000 Salvadoran civilians. Roughly 900 Salvadoran civilians died as did 250 Honduran combat troops. As it was fought mostly on their territory, Honduras lost around 2,000 civilians as well. Countless Honduran civilians were rendered homeless, and transnational trade cratered when the respective borders were closed.
In the aftermath of the war, most of those displaced Salvadorans came back home. When the government could not provide for them adequately, a bloody revolt and subsequent civil war resulted. Before the shooting stopped, another 80,000 Salvadorans perished. I think we can all likely agree that we humans are insane.
El Salvador went on to the World Cup that year but lost to the Soviet Union, Mexico, and Belgium. Subsequent border disputes had to be resolved in the International Court of Justice. The final disposition was not inked until 2013, and it still included threats of military action between the two pugilistic nations.
READ MORE: Nathan Bedford Forrest III: The Nut and the Tree
In case you hadn’t noticed, guys are pretty stupid. While all the guys were off fighting and dying over a soccer match, I rather suspect the women were back home raising children and keeping things tidy. The 100-hour Football War is yet another of a long line of examples that definitively illustrate that testosterone is indeed the most potent poison known to man. So, from down here in Mississippi–Hotty Toddy! Go Rebs! Beat State! We are all just a little bit nuts…
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