George Thompson (26 March 1839 – March 1876) was an English engineer and military officer who was in charge of the Paraguayan military engineering during the Paraguayan War. He later wrote a history of this conflict that became one of the main sources on the subject.
Early life
Thompson was born in 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 in 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 total sum of his engineering experience when he left for South America in 1858, aged 19.
Paraguay
In the middle of the nineteenth century the government of Carlos Antonio López, determined to open up Paraguay to modern technology, hired for that purpose a considerable number of technicians, mainly British.
In September 1858 Thompson joined the staff of the Asunción–Villarica 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 Paraguayan War
After the war between Paraguay and the allied forces of Brazil and the Argentine and Uruguayan Republics broke out, Thompson offered his services as a military engineer to the Paraguayan President, Francisco Solano López, in 1865. The offer was accepted and he joined the army in June of that year, taking a prominent role in the war until the end of 1868.
