smedley butler and dan daly in haiti

Freelibrary | In 1915 the 42-year-old gunnery sergeant participated in the peacekeeping Haiti Campaign. On October 22, he was the senior NCO of a reconnaissance patrol of 38 mounted Marines sent into the interior of the island to locate the Fort Dipitie and Fort Capois strongholds of the Cacos rebels. At dusk on the 24th some 400 Cacos ambushed the small force as it was crossing a river in a deepjungle ravine. The Marines managed to get ashore without losing a man, but they lost 12 horses and the mule carrying their only machine gun. Moving away from river, Daly pulled his troops into a tight defensive perimeter.

Once the perimeter was established, Daly slipped outside the Marine fines and made his way back to the river in the dark. Along the way he silently knifed several Cacos waiting in ambush. Reaching the riverbank, Daly slipped into the water and repeatedly dove to find the patrol's machine gun. Working in the dark and under Cacos fire, Daly finally located the dead mule, detached the machine gun and ammunition, and brought the load ashore in several trips. He then picked up the 200-pound load--which outweighed him by nearly double--and returned through the jungle past more Cacos to the Marine position. Before daylight he assembled and emplaced the machine gun. When dawn broke, the Marines moved out and attacked Fort Dipitie, killing 75 Cacos and scattering the rest.

As it turns out, Butler was commander of that same detachment, and it was he who recommended Daly for his second Medal of Honor. Butler's two subordinate officers, Captain William Upshur and 1st Lt. Edward Ostermann, also received the Medal of Honor for their actions in the battle.

Several weeks later Butler led another force back into the interior to capture Fort Riviere, the remaining Cacos stronghold. The old French fort was a formidable objective. Commanding a mountaintop moun·tain·top The summit of a mountain. with steep, rocky slopes on three sides, it was only approachable from the front. Most of the Marine officers in Haiti were certain it would take an entire regiment supported by artillery to capture the position. Butler convinced Colonel Eli Cole, overall commander of the Marine force, to let him try it with just 96 men supported by two machine gun sections.

Butler moved his small force into position on November 17. While conducting his pre-attack reconnaissance, he discovered a drainage culvert that broached the west wall of the supposedly impregnable fort. Following Sergeant Ross lams and Private Samuel Gross into the culvert, Butler crawled into the interior of the fort. The three emerged shooting and engaged the surprised defenders in fierce hand-to-hand combat that lasted 15 minutes. Their chaotic diversion enabled the rest of Butler's force to storm the fort. By the time it was over, more than 50 of the Cacos rebels were dead. One Marine was injured when a rock knocked out his front teeth. Gross and Iams both received the Medal of Honor for their actions. Butler received his second Medal of Honor, as well as the Haitian Medal of Honor.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Butler - I spent most of my time as a high-class muscleman for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers," he once said. "In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism."

War Is a Racket is a short work by former U.S. Marine Major General Smedley Darlington Butler, in which Butler discusses how business interests have commercially benefited from warfare. , was presented as an expose of the profit motive that drove modern warfare. In a famous speech in 1933 he said: "Looking back on it, I feel that I could have given AI Capone a few hints. The best he could do is operate his racket in three districts [of Chicago]. I operated on three continents."

Despite Butler's open contempt for big business, a group of wealthy industrialists in 1934 actually tried to recruit him to lead an army of 500,000 disgruntled veterans in a bizarre but half-baked coup d'etat plot against newly elected President Franklin Roosevelt, whose New Deal social programs were anathema to many of America's elite. Butler instead exposed the scheme and testified against the plotters during a closed session of the U.S. Senate's Special Committee on Un-American Activities Authorized to Investigate Nazi Propaganda and Certain Other Propaganda Activities--also known as the McCormack-Dickstein Committee. The committee essentially believed Butler's testimony but in the end took no action against the alleged plotters. The affair remains exceptionally controversial.