George Thompson (engineer)

Teniente-Coronel George Thompson (1839-1876) was an English engineer, and was in charge of the Paraguayan military engineering in the Paraguayan War. He was the author of an important source on its history. Because of his efforts and the valour of the ordinary Paraguayans, the Allies (the Brazilian Empire, Argentina and Uruguay) found it much harder to defeat Paraguay than they had imagined.

Thompson was born at Greenwich on 26 March 1839. In 1849 he was sent to a school near Stuttgart, which he left in 1852, continuing his studies near London until 1854. From 1855 to 1857 he served an apprenticeship at the government works at Malta, and was put on the engineering staff of the gasworks in that island. He returned to England in 1857, and soon afterwards was engaged for one year as a draughtsman at a locomotive works. That was the sum total of his engineering experience when he left for South America in 1858, aged 19.

In the middle of the nineteenth century the government of Carlos Antonio López determined to open up Paraguay to modern technology, hiring for that purpose a considerable number of technicians, mainly British.

In September 1858 Thompson joined the staff of the Asunción and Villa Rica railway in Paraguay, working under the British engineers George Paddison, Burrell and Valpy. Although a young man, he was soon considered to be one of the best Guaraní scholars amongst the English, besides speaking fluently five or six other languages.

The war between Paraguay and the allied forces of Brazil and the Argentine and Uruguayan Republics having broken out, Thompson, in 1865, offered his services as a military engineer to the Paraguayan President, Francisco Solano López, and this offer being accepted, he joined the army in the June of that year, and took a prominent part in the war until the end of 1868.

At the war’s outbreak Thompson was a railway engineer and he had no military experience at all. Furthermore, throughout the war Paraguay’s nominal chief military engineer, the Hungarian colonel Wisner de Morgenstern (who had designed the Fortress of Humaitá) was seriously ill, and so the work fell on Thompson’s shoulders. Thus it was that an untried 26-year-old man became the de facto chief military engineer of the Paraguayan army:

...
Wikipedia