10
Once the boys came home from France—and Russia—many Americans exhaled a sigh of relief and muttered, “Never again.” Disillusionment set in almost at once. The slaughter in the trenches, the skirmishing in the snow had not made the world safe for democracy. It had produced a defeated Germany eager for revenge and a ravaged Russia pledged to export revolution. Britain, the old guarantor of international order, had been drained by the exertions of the Great War. America alone had the power to police the globe. The power, but not the desire. The Senate, in large part because of Woodrow Wilson’s stubbornness and inflexibility, refused to ratify the Treaty of Versailles or to join the League of Nations.
It would be an exaggeration to say that America turned isolationist, but there is no question that before the Great War, America’s military commitments had been expanding, whereas afterward they contracted. The Harding administration ended the occupation of the Dominican Republic, if not Haiti, and undertook no fresh interventions in Latin America. Anything smacking of “imperialism” was in bad odor with enlightened opinion. America resorted once again to dollar diplomacy, with private companies extending loans and investment to Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, Asia, even to the Soviet Union. In the security realm, the Republican administrations of the 1920s placed their faith in disarmament conferences and international treaties, culminating in the quixotic Kellogg-Briand Pact of 1928, which outlawed war “as an instrument of national policy.”
Americans put aside the cares of the world, preferring to concentrate on other things—on Jack Dempsey’s fights, Babe Ruth’s home runs, Charlie Chaplin’s movies, Rudy Vallee’s songs. Events in Nicaragua would soon make plain, however, that America’s attempts to withdraw from an active security role in the world could backfire.
“Disastrous Results”
The U.S. had been landing troops in this Central American republic since 1853 and had been the dominant force there since at least 1910. It was of abiding interest to Washington because of its proximity to the Panama Canal. In 1912, led by Smedley Butler, the marines put down a Liberal revolt and installed as president the Conservative Adolfo Díaz (see Chapter 5). Most of the marines left shortly thereafter, but a “legation guard” of 100 men remained behind in Managua, a vital source of support for the government, though a cause of friction with some locals. As in other countries, the U.S. also set up a constabulary officered by marines.
The U.S. involvement in Nicaragua was financial as well as military. The Wall Street banks Brown Brothers and J. & W. Seligman took control of both the railroad and national bank of Nicaragua, while a U.S.-dominated high commission was set up to administer the government’s finances. The Bryan-Chamorro Treaty of 1916 gave the U.S. the exclusive right to build a second trans-Isthmian canal in Nicaragua, as well as various naval bases, in return for a payment of $3 million. All this made Nicaragua in effect a U.S. protectorate, and ensured peace and stability for the next 13 years under the auspices of Conservative governments either headed, or dominated by, the pro-American strongman General Emiliano Chamorro.
By 1924, however, President Calvin Coolidge and his powerful secretary of state, Charles Evans Hughes, were determined to pull out. Early in that year Managua finished repaying its foreign loans and completed the process of resuming control over its national railroad and bank. In October, a fair election, held under partial U.S. supervision, was won by a fusion ticket of Liberals and Conservatives opposed to Chamorro. On August 3, 1925, over the protests of the new government, the marine legation guard marched out of Managua and sailed away.
“Seldom if ever,” wrote a New York Times correspondent four years later, with unnecessary exaggeration, “has a nation, having full knowledge of the danger, taken deliberately a step whose disastrous results were more thoroughly a mathematical certainty than the United States took in ordering this withdrawal.”
Those disastrous results manifested themselves within a month of the marines’ departure. Chamorro refused to accept the election’s verdict and overthrew the government in a bloodless coup. Though the U.S. had spent a decade backing Conservative regimes, President Coolidge refused to recognize Chamorro’s usurpation. The Liberals, meanwhile, raised the banner of revolt. They seized much of Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast, including the town of Bluefields, home to a sizeable American business community. In 1926, U.S. Marines landed in Bluefields to protect foreign lives and property. Once again America was being drawn into a civil war between Liberals and Conservatives—an ancient division in Nicaragua, one based less on ideology than on blood and soil, pitting two of the country’s principal cities (Liberal León versus Conservative Granada) against each other.
The State Department maintained relentless pressure on Chamorro to resign; the U.S. chargé d’affaires even telephoned the president regularly to taunt him. Chamorro finally agreed to transfer power to an interim government led by fellow Conservative Adolfo Díaz, who had once been the American-backed president. But the Liberals would not accept this outcome. Dr. Juan Sacasa, a Liberal who had been vice president in the government overthrown by Chamorro, proclaimed himself the rightful ruler—a claim recognized by Mexico, which also supplied Sacasa’s forces with weapons.
This raised alarms in Washington, for Mexico’s government was then veering left, threatening to nationalize American oil interests. Anonymous administration officials were quoted in the newspapers worrying that “a Bolshevist wedge” would be driven “between the continental United States and the Panama Canal.” When during the winter of 1926/27 it became obvious that the Liberal revolt was gaining ground and the Díaz government could not survive on its own, the Coolidge administration decided to intervene. “The action of Mexico in the Nicaraguan crisis is a direct challenge to the United States. . . .” wrote Undersecretary of State Robert Olds on January 2, 1927. “Nicaragua has become a test case. It is difficult to see how we can afford to be defeated.”
Within a couple of months, 2,000 “devil dogs”—as the marines were now proudly calling themselves—had been dispatched. They seized the principal Pacific and Atlantic ports and declared them “neutral zones”; they reestablished a Legation Guard in Managua; and they policed the railway line between Corinto and Managua. The Liberal insurgent army, led by General Jose Maria Moncada, carefully avoided clashes with the Americans but continued to push back the Conservative forces.
The Coolidge administration had little interest in being drawn into another war in Nicaragua. For one thing, even the limited intervention already under way was drawing criticism in Congress, with isolationist Senator William E. Borah denouncing it as a “mahogany and oil policy” undertaken at the behest of Wall Street plutocrats. (Actually the U.S. economic stake in Nicaragua was fairly small.) To “straighten the matter out” and facilitate a timely withdrawal, Coolidge decided to send a personal envoy to Nicaragua.
The man chosen for the job was Henry L. Stimson, an American aristocrat if ever there was one: A graduate of Philips Andover, Yale (where he made Skull and Bones), and Harvard Law School; a big-game hunter; a prominent Wall Street lawyer; a moderate Republican internationalist; a pillar of rectitude (he once denounced spying, proclaiming that “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail”); and one of the original “wise men.” Stimson was a pivotal figure in twentieth century American diplomacy, a protégé of the men (like Theodore Roosevelt and Elihu Root) who launched the Spanish-American War and a mentor to those (like Robert Lovett and John McCloy) who shaped the post–World War II world. Stimson had already been secretary of war in the Taft administration; he would go on to serve as governor-general of the Philippines, secretary of state under Herbert Hoover, and secretary of war again during World War II.
When called upon to resolve the crisis in Nicaragua, “The Colonel”—as he liked to be called, because of a brief stint as a 50-year-old volunteer artillery officer in World War I—quickly showed why he inspired trust in presidents and CEOs alike. Though he knew little about the country—he pronounced it Nic-a-rag-yew-a—when he sailed there in April 1927, it took this consummate negotiator only a month to complete his mission.
Stimson and his wife found a land ravaged by war. “A large portion of the city of Chinandega was in ashes,” he wrote. “Almost every man or boy whom one met either in the country or the cities was armed.” Within a few days, he formulated a proposal to end the fighting: Adolfo Díaz would remain as president until U.S.-supervised elections were held in 1928; both sides would turn over their arms to American forces; Díaz would appoint Liberals to his government; and marines would stay in the country until a new national guard, organized by American officers, could take over policing duties. Díaz and the Conservatives immediately accepted this plan. To win the Liberals’ concurrence, on May 4, 1927, Stimson journeyed 15 miles north of Managua to the village of Tipitapa to confer with the rebels’ military commander, General Jose Maria Moncada.
The colonel and the general sat down on a riverbank in the shade of a large blackthorn tree. “Peace is imperative,” Stimson bluntly told Moncada. “I have instructions to attain it willingly or by force.” Moncada hated to see Díaz continue in office, but he had no intention of fighting the United States. So he promised to abide by Stimson’s terms, provided that his subordinate commanders agreed. “In less than thirty minutes, we understood each other and had settled the matter,” Stimson wrote.
By mid-May 1927, when Stimson left for the United States, the fighting had ceased and both Liberals and Conservatives were surrendering their weapons to the U.S. Marines. There were a few scattered clashes between marines and Liberal bands, but in general both parties were happy to have an American presence to keep their ancient enemies in line. Just before leaving Managua, the Colonel told the New York Times, “The civil war in Nicaragua is now definitely ended.”
In reality it was just beginning.
Sandino
Only one Liberal commander refused to accept the Peace of Tipitapa: Augusto C. Sandino. He was born around 1893, the illegitimate son of a well-to-do plantation owner and an Indian servant girl. As a young boy he was a reader and a dreamer; after learning of the glories of Rome he changed his middle name from Calderon to César. His father was a dedicated Liberal and young Augusto inherited his politics. He was no doubt dismayed to see the Liberal government ousted and replaced in 1912 by the American-backed Conservatives, but he took no active part in politics in his youth. In 1920 Sandino shot a man in a fight (the causes are obscure) and fled the country, going first to Honduras, where he worked at a U.S.-owned sugar refinery; then to Guatemala, where he worked briefly on a United Fruit banana plantation; and finally to Tampico, Mexico, where he found work at an American oil company. Tampico at the time was a hotbed of radical thinking, ranging from communism to syndicalism. Here Sandino became a Freemason and a firm believer in Latin American nationalism of the anti-Yanqui variety.
In 1926, at age 33, he returned to Nicaragua and briefly took a job with the American-owned San Albino gold mine. It did not take him long to join the Liberal revolt against the Chamorro government. A superb orator, he raised a band of 29 men and on November 2, 1926, launched his first, unsuccessful attack on a government garrison at Jicaro. He then went to link up with the main Liberal army but found that its commander, General Moncada, greeted him “disdainfully” and refused his requests for arms. Thus was born a grudge against Moncada that was to motivate Sandino at least as much as his antipathy toward the gringos.
Sandino managed to acquire weapons nevertheless, and a swelling band of followers. He won some notable victories against larger Conservative forces and was calling himself “general” by the time the Peace of Tipitapa was signed. He had no sympathy with a treaty signed by that “traitor,” Moncada. Refusing Moncada’s offer to appoint him governor of the department of Jinotega, Sandino gathered up 200 of his men and marched off to the wilds of northern Nicaragua. “I decided to fight,” he explained, “understanding that I was the one called to protest the betrayal of the Fatherland.”
Oddly enough, this revolutionary who would become a hero of the anti-American left launched his movement by asking for more U.S. intervention. Sandino’s initial demand was that the U.S. establish a military government immediately, kick out all Conservative and Liberal office holders, and then hold an election. After his demand was rebuffed by Washington, Sandino holed up in Nueva Segovia, a remote region of soaring mountains and thick jungles located along the border with Honduras, establishing his capital in the village of Jicaro, which he renamed Sandino City.
It was not long before Sandino’s fury focused not just on the government but on its American defenders.
“Marines Do Not Know How to Surrender”
The first marines—just 50 men—set out for the province of Nueva Segovia from Managua on May 31, 1927. They occupied the provincial capital, Ocotal, about 110 miles north of Managua, but since there were only 1,800 marines in the whole country there were hardly enough men to garrison the entire province. (As we shall see in the next chapter, marine strength was being siphoned off by a concurrent crisis in China.) The marines were reinforced by the Guardia Nacional, 1,136 Nicaraguan enlisted men officered by 93 marines, under the command of Marine Colonel Elias Beadle.
The government forces were surprised to learn on June 30, 1927, that Sandino had seized the American-owned San Albino mine, where the rebel leader had once worked. From here he issued the first of many florid manifestos, denouncing the Americans as “morphine addicts” who had come to “kill us in our own land,” and vowing that “my sword will defend the national honor and redeem the oppressed.” The marines had paid little attention to Sandino until this point, but now he had their attention. On July 15, 1927, Brigadier General Logan Feland, the marine commander in Nicaragua, dispatched a force of 75 marines and 74 guardsmen with orders to disarm Sandino and his followers. Through his excellent intelligence network, the rebel chieftain found out that these reinforcements were on the way and decided to attack before they arrived.
Ocotal was a town of 1,400 people, located not far from the Honduran border in a valley ringed by mountains on all sides. Until the arrival of reinforcements, its garrison consisted of 48 Nicaraguan guardsmen and 41 marines under the command of Captain Gilbert Hatfield. Sandino had been taunting Hatfield via telegram and letter for weeks. The rebel decorated one of his letters with a crude drawing of a guerrilla brandishing a machete over the neck of a prostrate marine—this became his seal—and closed with a flourish: “I remain your most obedient servant, who ardently desires to put you in a handsome tomb with beautiful bouquets of flowers.”
“Bravo! General,” the Spanish-speaking Hatfield wrote back. “If words were bullets and phrases were soldiers, you would be a field marshal instead of a mule thief.”
Sandino tried to make good on his threats by attacking Ocotal. His nucleus consisted of some 60 full-time fighters wielding rifles, machine guns, and dynamite bombs; to aid them, he recruited hundreds of local peasants, many armed only with machetes. He began infiltrating his men, perhaps 600 in all, into Ocotal in the early evening hours of July 15, 1927, dispatching one company to attack the marine barracks, located in the two-story adobe town hall, and another to the National Guard barracks, located in a church across the plaza.
At around 1 A.M. on July 16, an alert marine sentry spied a movement in some bushes near Ocotal’s city hall. A startled Sandinista opened fire, ruining Sandino’s hopes to surprise the garrison. The next few minutes were chaotic. Attackers rushed out of the night screaming “Viva Sandino” and “Death to the Yanquis” and firing rifles and machine guns at the marine and National Guard barracks. The defenders were almost instantly at their battle stations and returned as good as they got. After a few hours of desultory firing, the Sandinistas launched three foolhardy frontal assaults on the marine headquarters, all repulsed with heavy losses by the Americans’ rifles and automatic weapons.
Just after 8 A.M. Sandino dispatched a messenger under a flag of truce to deliver a message to the marines. He promised they would not be harmed if they surrendered within the hour, but if they did not, he vowed to put the town to the torch. Captain Hatfield’s answer was not quite as pithy as “Nuts!”—Brigadier General Anthony McAulliffe’s reply to a Nazi demand for his surrender 17 years later during the Battle of the Bulge. But it was in the same spirit. “Go to hell. . . .” Hatfield replied. “Marines do not know how to surrender.”
As soon as the messenger had returned to the Sandinista lines, the shooting resumed, with more intensity than ever. Not even a tropical rainstorm in the afternoon could dampen the firefight. As the day wore on, the outnumbered defenders probably would have been ground down and defeated were it not for the help they received from the skies.
At around 10 A.M. on July 16, two marine airplanes had appeared over Ocotal. Seeing that a battle was raging, the pilots briefly strafed Sandinista positions before returning to Managua to report to headquarters. Four hours later, airborne reinforcements arrived over Ocotal: a flight of five DH-4 biplanes, each carrying two machine guns (one mounted in a fixed position at the front, operated by the pilot; the other on a swivel in the rear, operated by the observer) and four 25-pound bombs. The squadron leader, Marine Major Ross “Rusty” Rowell, formed his planes into a tight V formation and led them toward the ground from 1,500 feet, strafing Sandinista positions as they dived and loosing bombs at the end of their arc, sometimes from just 300 feet above the deck.
Dive-bomb attacks on a much larger scale would play a major role in the success of the German blitzkrieg that kicked off World War II. In sheer firepower, five relatively primitive biplanes could not compare with the hundreds of Stukas later employed by the Luftwaffe to shatter Polish and French resistance. But the shock and terror spread by the marines’ British-designed DeHavillands was every bit as great; the Nicaraguans had never seen anything like it. In fact the world had never seen anything like it. The marines’ attack that day at Ocotal may have been the first organized dive-bombing raid in history.
As the marine aviators made one pass after another, the frightened attackers “threw away their rifles, jumped over fences, and raced wildly through the streets. . . .” Rowell reported. “I never saw such a wild rout, and probably never will again.”
By the time the DeHavillands were forced to return to Managua, their fuel having run low after 45 minutes of action, the battle of Ocotal was over. It had lasted 16 hours. Captain Hatfield later estimated that 300 Sandinistas had died (the real figure was probably closer to 60). The marines lost just one man killed and suffered one wounded; the National Guard had three wounded and four captured.
Ocotal showed Sandino the folly of punching it out toe-to-toe with American forces in a conventional battle.
Hot Pursuit
After the battle’s end, Marine Major Oliver Floyd set off in pursuit of the retreating guerrillas with 78 marines and 37 guardsmen mounted on horses and mules. Sandino planned to ambush his pursuers in the town of San Fernando, 10 miles from Ocotal, but the plan went awry when Sandino’s sentry disappeared into a shack with an Indian girl, allowing the marine column to reach the center of town undetected. A sharp firefight ensued in which one marine private was killed, but the Sandinistas fled after suffering 11 casualties, Sandino himself just barely escaping. Major Floyd grimly marched on, defeating another Sandinista ambush, killing an estimated 30 guerrillas, and occupying both Sandino’s “capital,” the town of Jicaro, and his primary source of funds, the San Albino mine.
During his pursuit, Floyd concluded that the ordinary Nicaraguans he met were “unquestionably strong for Sandino.” To suppress the rebellion, therefore, “I will have to wage a real blood and thunder campaign and I will have casualties every day. . . . I will be involved in a small real war.” Yet marine headquarters was fooled by Floyd’s momentary success into thinking that, as an intelligence report declared, “Sandino’s power is broken.”
Far from broken, Sandino turned now to the classic guerrilla tactic of staging hit-and-run attacks while avoiding confrontations on equal terms with the enemy. His method manifested itself after a marine Vought Corsair biplane was shot down on October 8, 1927, by small arms fire in the jungle near Jicaro. The pilot and navigator were captured by the Sandinistas, tried before a court-martial and shot. Sandino and 200 of his men then set a trap for the marine patrol they knew would be coming to rescue the aviators.
Sure enough, within a few hours Marine Lieutenant George O’Shea was leading 19 men from the Jicaro garrison toward the scene of the crash. As they were marching uphill along a narrow jungle trail, dynamite bombs started exploding all around them and they discovered a large Sandinista force emerging from the foliage. Using grenades and a Thompson submachine gun, the marines and guardsmen managed to blast their way out of the trap, but they had no choice but to retreat. They spent the next day engaged in a running gunfight with the Sandinistas until they finally reached their base at Jicaro, “suffering from exposure and complete exhaustion, bruised, cut up by thorns and bitten by insects.” Four National Guardsmen were killed on this expedition, and O’Shea thought “it is a miracle that we did not suffer more casualties.”
There were to be numerous similarly frustrating encounters in the months ahead. The terrain of northern Nicaragua was ideally suited for guerrilla warfare; indeed this area would be utilized to great effect by American-backed contras in their fight against the Sandinista government in the 1980s. As one visitor observed: “On every hand loomed height after height, great crags and ridges, profound valleys and enormous precipices, all blanketed in the densest tropical vegetation, some days simmering under the hot, open tropical sky, at other times almost invisible in the whirl of tropical storms.”
Amid this dense wilderness stood a 5,000-foot mountain known as El Chipote. This was the Sandinistas’ headquarters, and the marines devoted much of their energy to pinpointing its location. On November 23, 1927, a marine airplane finally found it. For weeks to come, marine aviators launched regular bombing runs against El Chipote but their ordnance, so devastating against the Sandinista ranks in Ocotal, had little effect against the dug-in positions atop the mountain. With their explosives being swallowed up by the jungle, the marines decided they had no choice but to mount a ground assault on the rebels’ mountain lair.
On December 19, 1927, two columns set off on converging routes toward El Chipote. They did not get far. Each was ambushed in turn and “slaughtered,” a lieutenant wrote, “like rats in a trap.”13 They barely managed to stagger into the town of Qualili, but this offered scant relief. Located at the base of a dozen hills, Qualili was virtually indefensible, and before long it was under siege from perhaps 400 Sandinistas. Of 174 officers and men who had set out, eight were dead and 31 wounded, including every surviving officer. Eighteen of the wounded were in such bad shape that they would die if they did not receive immediate help, but they were unlikely to survive a trip on muleback; their only hope was relief from the air. A few decades later, a helicopter would have been dispatched, but although the marines in Nicaragua would later experiment with an “autogyro,” an operational model did not yet exist. That made it a job for fixed-wing aviation.
The troops tore down houses, hacked through bush, and pulled down trees to create a small, rough landing strip in the middle of town. Marine 1st Lieutenant Christian F. Schilt volunteered to fly into the beleaguered town in his Vought O2U-1 Corsair biplane. From January 6 to January 8, 1928, he made ten trips to Quilali, bringing in 1,400 pounds of relief supplies and taking out 18 wounded men, the whole time under heavy fire. Every time he landed, marines had to rush out and grab the Corsair’s wings to keep it from overshooting the abbreviated landing strip. The plane had no brakes.
Schilt won the Medal of Honor for what a journalist called “one of the most gallant and skillful exploits in aviation,” but his bravery only facilitated the evacuation of Quilali. It did nothing to stamp out the Sandinista uprising, or make up for the guerrillas’ skillful ambushes of the marine/guard columns. The marines’ “stupidly criminal blunder” had allowed Sandino to claim “a moral victory,” in the estimation of one lieutenant who was in Quilali.
Later that month (January 1928), the marines renewed their assault on El Chipote. Major Rusty Rowell stepped up his air attacks, this time with new Vought Corsairs and Curtiss Falcons that carried more bombs than the old DeHavilands. These raids resulted in more substantial Sandinista casualties, including the wounding of Sandino’s mistress. Faced with this withering assault, the Sandinistas slipped away, leaving straw dummies to occupy their positions. By the time a marine battalion reached the summit of El Chipote on January 26, 1928, having blasted the jungle with mortars and rifle grenades all the way up the mountain in order to ward off ambushes, they found the guerrillas’ fabled hideaway deserted.
Catching Sandino was proving to be about as easy as grabbing a fistful of water.
A Hero to the Left
To the marines he may have been nothing more than a “bandit,” but to leftist critics of America, Augusto César Sandino was fast becoming a hero. Admirers from across Latin America flocked to his red-and-black banner. In early 1928, the radical American journalist Carleton Beal journeyed overland from Honduras, dodging marine air raids along the way, to meet the elusive rebel chieftain at his new hideout. “Sandino is short, probably not more than five feet,” Beals recorded:
On the morning of our interview he was dressed in a new uniform of almost black khaki, and wore puttees, immaculately polished. A silk red and black handkerchief was knotted about his throat. His broad-rimmed Stetson, lower over his forehead, was pinched into a shovel-like shape. Occasionally, as we conversed, he shoved his sombrero far back on his head and hitched his chair forward. The gesture revealed his straight black hair and full forehead. His face is straight-lined from temple to sharp-angled jawbone, which slants to an even firm jaw. His regular curved eyebrows are high above liquid black eyes without visible pupils, eyes of remarkable mobility and refraction of light—quick intense eyes.
Beals was much taken by his host, whom he described as “a man utterly without vices, with an unequivocal sense of justice, a keen eye for the welfare of the humblest soldier.” He published a series of articles about his trip in The Nation and later a book—a small part of a growing campaign to lionize the Nicaraguan rebel.
Pro-Sandino committees sprang up across Latin America. In Moscow, the Communist International, or Comintern, sent “fraternal greetings to the workers and peasants of Nicaragua, and the heroic army of national emancipation of General Sandino.” In China, the Kuomintang renamed one of its divisions after him. In New York, the All American Anti-Imperialist League, a Comintern front group, rallied to his defense carrying signs that read: Wall Street and not Sandino is the Real Bandit. At one such rally, editors from the Daily Worker and The Nation solicited money to send “medical supplies” to the Sandinistas.
Sandino was happy to have the communists’ support, and he had some communists in his staff, most notably the Salvadoran Agustín Farabundo Martí, but he never toed the party line. Eventually he broke with Martí, who complained that Sandino “did not embrace the communist program for which I was fighting.” Precisely what Sandino was fighting for always remained murky; he was fired by hatred of “that traitor” Moncada and the “machos”—as he derisively called the Americans—but he lacked a well-thought-out political agenda.
The 1928 Election
Embarrassed by their setbacks, the marines rushed more men to Nicaragua, but they were unprepared for Sandino’s next stratagem. The guerrillas swung south, capturing and looting several American-owned mines and coffee plantations. (Sandino impishly suggested that the owners send President Coolidge a bill for the damages.) Yet while able to elude the marines and win admirers around the world, Sandino was having trouble rallying his own countrymen to his cause. This became evident in the election of 1928.
Balloting was scheduled for November 4, 1928, in accordance with the Peace of Tipitapa. Much to the marines’ chagrin, President Coolidge appointed Army Brigadier General Frank Ross McCoy—“one of those iron-willed, super-logical, single-track types whose stern jaw carries not an ounce of compromise”—to run the electoral commission. Sandino denounced the election as illegal and urged voters to boycott it, even staging terrorist attacks to disrupt the voting. But his campaign of intimidation did not work. The U.S. flooded the country with more than 5,000 servicemen—the most it has ever stationed in Nicaragua—to ensure that voting occurred peacefully and fairly. Nearly 90 percent of registered voters went to the polls, and even in Sandino’s stronghold of Nueva Segovia, 82 percent voted. Sandino’s archenemy, the Liberal candidate Jose Maria Moncada, won a decisive victory in an election that was generally acknowledged, even by the defeated Conservatives, to be the cleanest in the country’s history.
After the voting, both the Liberal and Conservative parties pleaded with Washington to retain a military presence in Nicaragua, and the outgoing Coolidge administration agreed, a decision to which the new president, Herbert Hoover, reluctantly acceded, at least for the time being. The guerrilla war dragged on in a series of small-unit actions deep in the bush, some won by the guerrillas, others by the government.
A few months after the election, the marines received an unexpected bonus. One morning in early February 1929, an exhausted General Manuel Maria Giron, Sandino’s chief of staff, was riding alone, half asleep in the saddle, when he had the misfortune to bump into a marine patrol bathing in the river. Or rather four of the eight marines were bathing; the other four were standing guard. They spotted the lone rider and immediately apprehended him. The commander of this alert detail was none other than 1st Lieutenant Herman “Hard Head” Hanneken, who a decade earlier had killed the rebel leader Charlemagne Peralte in Haiti to help end the Second Caco War. Giron was turned over to Nicaraguan government troops, who held a kangaroo court-martial and sentenced him to death. Just before he was hanged, Giron was asked if he had any last words. His reply: “No, you son of a bitch!”
Giron’s death was a blow to Sandino. The rebel leader must have realized that he needed foreign help if he was to prevail against the Yanquis. In May 1929 Sandino and some trusted lieutenants slipped across the border into Honduras and headed north to Mexico.
Sandino had reason to hope that Mexican president Emilio Portes Gil would offer him aid. But he was denied permission to proceed to Mexico City, instead being shunted off to a guest villa on the Yucatan Peninsula. U.S. ambassador Dwight Morrow—Charles Lindbergh’s father-in-law—applied strong and skillful pressure on the Mexican government not to offer Sandino much support. Not until January 1930, after he had been waiting for more than six months, did Sandino receive an audience with Mexico’s president, and nothing significant came of this meeting. Sandino returned to his villa and made a great show of resuming his routine, since he knew that Mexican and American agents were watching. Once he had lulled his watchers to sleep, he and his aides slipped away. By mid-May 1930, after a year away, they were back in Nicaragua with little to show for their Mexican sojourn.
“The Perfect Soldier”
After the 1928 election, the U.S. began drawing down its military strength in Nicaragua, leaving only about 1,500 marines by 1929. Most of the marines garrisoned the large cities; combat operations in the hinterlands were generally turned over to the Guardia Nacional, assisted by marine aviators. Under the direction of marine officers, this force developed into the most competent of the constabularies created by the U.S. throughout Central America and the Caribbean. Despite 10 mutinies that left five American officers dead, its enlisted men remained for the most part loyal to their gringo leaders. Its most feared unit was Company M, commanded by a marine named Lewis Burwell Puller.
There is a paradox about the Marine Corps. The marines, as a group, are America’s best-known fighting men, immortalized in the most famous image of American warfare, the flag-raising at Iwo Jima. Yet no individual marine is particularly celebrated. To the men who fought with him, “Chesty” Puller would become perhaps the most admired marine in history, but who now remembers him outside the corps? To the extent that he is known at all among the general public, it is probably as the father of a marine who returned from Vietnam a quadriplegic and wrote a best-selling book about his ordeal before committing suicide. Dozens of army generals—and even a few army enlisted men, such as Alvin York and Audie Murphy—are more famous. This may be a tribute to the corps’ collective ethos. Or it may simply be that relatively few marines have commanded an organization bigger than a division in battle; and none were wartime theater commanders like Grant, Pershing, Eisenhower, MacArthur, or Schwartzkopf.
Certainly Chesty Puller did not attain the eminence of these more senior generals, but his life was every bit as colorful. Before retiring in 1955 as a lieutenant general, he would win a record five Navy Crosses—the service’s second highest decoration—for his actions during World War II and the Korean War. In 1950, as a colonel commanding the 1st Marine Regiment, 1st Marine Division, he landed at Inchon and then participated in the hellish retreat from Choisin Reservoir—an epic of endurance for the marines, who had to ward off numerically superior Chinese attackers in subzero cold. Told at one point during this retreat that his position was surrounded, Puller was said to have replied, “Those poor bastards. They’ve got us right where we want ’em. We can shoot in every direction now.” A marine commandant reportedly later said of Puller, “He’s about the only man in the Corps who really loves to fight. I’ll go further: He’s the only man in any of the services who loves fighting.” Recent research has cast doubt on these and many other tales that have accumulated around Puller’s life, but their continual telling and retelling among marines testifies to the attraction that Chesty still exercises on the “mystic chords of memory.”
“The perfect soldier”—as he was described by a combat correspondent on Guadalcanal—was born in small-town Virginia in 1898. His grandfather had died fighting for the Confederacy, and young Lewis’s (pronounced “Lewie’s”) heroes were Robert E. Lee and “Stonewall” Jackson. He grew up on a steady diet of hunting, fishing, and horseback riding; after his father, a traveling salesman, died of cancer when he was 10, Lewie took to trapping muskrats before school to supplement his mother’s income. “Those days in the woods saved my life many a time in combat,” he later recalled.
Puller grew into a young man “with a chest like a pouter pigeon [hence his nickname] and a sort of bullet-shaped head.” After graduating from high school with a mediocre record, he entered the Virginia Military Institute in 1917. But he was so desperate to see action in France that he dropped out after a year to enlist as a private in the marines. With the Corps rapidly expanding because of the war in Europe, Puller was sent straight from boot camp to be trained first as an NCO, then as an officer. But much to his regret, the World War ended before he could make it to France.
After the armistice, the corps was downsized and Puller found himself denied an officer’s commission. In 1919 he and a pal named Lawrence Muth enlisted as marine privates and requested duty in Haiti, where they could serve as officers with the gendarmerie. The 21-year-old Puller arrived just in time to fight the second caco uprising. It was in the Haitian outback that he gained his advanced education in soldiering. Not long after landing he was leading patrols deep into the bush, commanding men who spoke no English, while he spoke no Creole. During four months in combat, he learned to live off the country, operate at night, and move fast; one of the few French words he knew at first was vite! (hurry).
Puller enjoyed his service with the gendarmerie but was eager to become a regular marine officer. After several unsuccessful attempts, he finally pinned on a second lieutenant’s gold bars in 1924. He spent the next four years in America, engaged in the normal routines of garrison life. He tried to become an aviator but flunked out of flight school and then requested reassignment to overseas expeditionary duty. In 1928 his wish was granted. At first he was assigned to desk duty with the guardia in Managua, but by constantly badgering his superiors he got out into the field where he could again see action. He would be in the bush almost nonstop during two tours of duty in Nicaragua between 1929 and 1933, interrupted by a year off (July 1931–June 1932) to attend the Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia.
Puller was an impressive presence, with “a lantern jaw, a mouth like a proverbial steel trap” and a face that looked “as though it were carved out of teak wood.” His “normal speaking voice was somewhere between a rasp and a growl and when he wanted to get your attention he could bark like a howitzer.” He and his adjutant—William A. Lee, a marine gunnery sergeant who was commissioned a guardia lieutenant—certainly got their men’s attention. They turned Company M, the Mobile Company, into a fearsome long-range patrolling unit.
Its three dozen men were mostly locally recruited Indians who had intimate knowledge of the terrain of Jinotega province where they operated. They were armed with only five automatic weapons—three Thompson submachine guns and two Browning Automatic Rifles—and six grenade launchers mounted on Springfield rifles. The rest of the men had to make do with the old Krag-Jorgensen rifle that had been used in the Philippines three decades before. Puller understood the secret of effective counterinsurgency: “you’ve got to keep moving”—patrolling nonstop, often at night, to keep the guerrillas on the run. Company M averaged 30 miles a day on foot over winding mountain trails. They kept slogging right through the rainy season, spending 20 days of every month in the field, even as the trails turned to mud and their uniforms disintegrated into rags. Puller and his men carried only a handful of supplies on sturdy native mules, and for the most part subsisted on a diet of rice, beans, coffee, and some occasional wild game or beef. Whenever a chow line formed, Puller and Lee made sure they were at the back; their men got fed first. If a man was wounded or killed, he often had to be evacuated by hand or in a cart up to 100 miles over jungle trails. Puller subscribed to the old marine ethos to never leave a man, dead or alive, on the battlefield.
Company M might occasionally receive assistance from marine airplanes—to evacuate wounded, say, or conduct reconnaissance—but for the most part the men were on their own; if they got into trouble, help was not likely to arrive in time. This did not faze Puller. He was careful but not overly cautious; Company M loved a good scrap and would willingly walk into an ambush if Puller and Lee thought this was the only way to draw the enemy into battle. When the firing started, the two officers ran right into the thick of it. Thanks to the guardsmen’s discipline and shooting accuracy, they suffered few casualties while inflicting many.
As news of Company M’s exploits got around, Puller became known as El Tigre, and rumors spread that his men carried on their belts the ears of slain Sandinistas. Sandino even put a price of 5,000 pesos on the stocky Virginian’s head. It would never be collected.
1932 Election
Despite the success of Company M—and a comparable, all-marine unit led by Captain “Red Mike” Edson that patrolled the Coco River separating Honduras from Nicaragua—the guardia’s campaign was hardly sufficient to end the Sandinista threat. The major problem was the 500-mile border with Honduras. There were simply not enough guardsmen (just 2,350 officers and men in 1931) and marines (fewer than 1,500) to police this sparsely settled frontier. The guerrillas could always avoid decisive defeats and slip over the border if need be. From the other direction, supplies flowed through Honduras to the Sandinista bands. In many cases their weapons came from the United States, bought on the open market by Sandino’s agents and shipped from Mexico. Sandino sometimes even got higher-quality rifle ammunition than the marines were issued.
And his men knew how to use their weapons. Unlike Haitian cacos, who for the most part fired wildly and inaccurately into U.S.-held towns, the Sandinistas conducted skillful attacks on isolated marine contingents. On New Year’s Eve 1930, Sandino’s men ambushed 10 marines outside Ocotal, killing eight and wounding two. This brought home to President Hoover and his secretary of state, Henry Stimson, the price of the Nicaraguan intervention. They determined to pull out after the 1932 election, provided the marines could leave without the collapse of the Managua government. In the meantime, they reduced the marine presence even further, to fewer than 1,000 men.
In 1931 Sandino shifted his base of operations to Nicaragua’s Atlantic coast, where the guerrillas raided a series of American-owned businesses, including a lumber company and banana plantation controlled by the Standard Fruit Company. American businessmen screamed for protection from Washington but it was not forthcoming. Secretary Stimson had no sympathy for this “pampered lot of people.” He announced that the U.S. was abandoning its traditional policy of protecting American civilians and businesses in Nicaragua: “The Department recommends to all Americans who do not feel secure under the protection afforded them by the Nicaraguan government . . . to withdraw from the country, or at least to the coast towns whence they can be protected or evacuated in case of necessity.” Stimson’s declaration emboldened the Sandinistas, who stepped up their raids in the countryside north of Managua.
Augusto Sandino took some pains to win the allegiance of the peasants by treating those who cooperated with his forces well, but those who did not pay “taxes” or provide other help to the Sandinistas—or, worse, those who helped the National Guard—could expect a terrible vengeance. The Sandinistas administered various cortes, or cuts, to those they sought to punish. There was the corte de chaleco, or vest cut: The victim’s head was chopped off with a machete, the arms were amputated, and a design etched into the chest with a machete; the corte de cumbo, or gourd cut: A machete was used to slice off a portion of the offender’s skull, exposing his brain to the sun and leaving him to die a lingering, agonizing death; and the corte de bloomers: The victim’s legs were chopped off at the knees, leading him to bleed to death.
The National Guard and marines, as in most counterinsurgency operations, responded with a combination of measures designed to attract civilian support and punish those who helped the guerrillas. On the punitive side, the National Guard was accused of using the “water cure” to elicit information, roughing up prisoners, and mutilating dead guerrillas (one American guardia lieutenant posed for a photograph holding a severed guerrilla head). On a more positive note, the guardia took over civil administration in many parts of the country and generally did a better job than the patronage appointees who came before and after. The guardia’s doctors, on loan from the U.S. Navy, launched nationwide immunization programs to combat smallpox and typhoid fever.
Uncle Sam’s helping hand was especially visible after a devastating earthquake and fire ravaged Managua on March 31, 1931. The marines, Chesty Puller among them, took the lead in salvage, rescue, and recovery operations. Medical supplies flown in by the navy and marines prevented epidemics. More than 1,400 Nicaraguans died in this catastrophe, but the death toll undoubtedly would have been much higher without U.S. aid.
Still, despite the guardia’s and marines’ best efforts, the Sandinistas were able to continue operating, which would have been impossible if the bulk of the civilian population in northern Nicaragua were cooperating with government forces.
By the time of the 1932 election, America was deep in the Depression and the U.S. Congress was turning increasingly isolationist. Will Rogers expressed the sentiments of many when he asked, “Why are we in Nicaragua and what the hell are we doing there?” In 1929 congressional critics tried and failed to attach a rider to the naval appropriations bill cutting off all funding for the marines in Nicaragua. In 1932, they succeeded in blocking funding for American troops to supervise that year’s balloting. President Hoover and Secretary Stimson nevertheless managed to scrape up enough personnel using existing appropriations to supervise a minority of the polling stations.
Like the 1928 election, this one was probably fairer than many big-city elections held in the U.S. during this period. The winner was the Liberal candidate, Dr. Juan Sacasa, who had once raised the banner of revolt against a previous Conservative government and its American patrons. But now Washington gladly recognized his government.
El Sauce
Jose Maria Moncada, the outgoing Liberal president, determined on one last grand flourish to mark the end of his administration: He would drive a golden spike to commemorate the completion of a railway line from León to El Sauce. Guardia intelligence officers received word that Sandinistas would try to disrupt the ceremony, scheduled for December 28, 1932. The day after Christmas, Chesty Puller with seven guardia lieutenants, including Bill Lee, and 64 hand-picked National Guardsmen, boarded a train to El Sauce. They arrived just in time to find 250 Sandinistas looting the construction company commissary. What happened next recalls the 1969 movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: The outlaws are happily looting a mail train when out of nowhere approaches another locomotive . . . and out tumble the lawmen, horses’ hoofs thundering, guns blazing. The Sandinistas must have been as startled as Butch and Sundance.
The guerrillas deployed on either side of the railroad tracks and opened up on the train with a machine gun. Half the guardsmen jumped out with Puller on the right side, the others following Lee to the left. Lee’s men took cover from the Sandinistas’ machine gun fire in a dry creek bed, while Puller’s contingent circled around to turn the enemy’s flank. After slightly more than an hour’s battle, they drove off the Sandinistas, who left behind 31 dead guerrillas and 63 live horses. The guardia casualties: three killed and three wounded. It was the worst defeat suffered by the Sandinistas since the battle of Ocotal five years earlier. Moncada was so impressed that as one of his last acts in office he promoted Chesty Puller to major and Bill Lee to captain in the guardia.
The officers did not have long to enjoy their new rank. As scheduled, the marines withdrew from Nicaragua at the beginning of 1933.
Somoza
The new government, feeling vulnerable without U.S. protection, immediately entered into negotiations with Augusto Sandino. On February 2, 1933, the guerrilla chieftain journeyed to Managua to sign a ceasefire. With his arch-enemies, the Americans, gone, he was willing to agree to the “gradual abandonment of his arms.” Under the agreement, Sandino was allowed to retain 100 armed men on a tract of land in the remote Coco Valley. Over the following month 1,800 Sandinistas were officially demobilized—yet only 361 weapons were turned in, leading to the suspicion that Sandino retained a secret weapons cache.
Though the war was officially over, the animosity between the Sandinistas and the National Guard hardly abated. As long as the marines were running the guardia, it remained a relatively professional and neutral force. But on January 2, 1933, the guardia was denuded of all American officers. Since the Nicaraguan Military Academy had opened only three years before, there were few Nicaraguans qualified to take over the senior posts. The Liberals turned to political appointees, who quickly politicized the force. Its jefe director became Anastasio “Tacho” Somoza, who had been war minister under Moncada and was a fluent English speaker (which helped make his selection popular at the American legation).
Sandino was unsparing in his verbal attacks on the guardia, which he denounced as a criminal institution. The guardia officers, not unnaturally, perceived Sandino as a threat to their well-being. The ineffectual Sacasa government was caught in the middle, equally afraid of both the guardia and the Sandinistas.
In mid-February 1934, while Sandino was visiting Managua for a round of meetings and receptions, General Somoza and the other senior guardia officers gathered in a secret meeting where they signed a resolution titled “The Death of César.” On the night of February 21, 1934, Sandino attended a farewell dinner at the presidential palace. The guerrilla leader and some other Sandinistas left in a car around 10 P.M., only to find their way blocked by a guardia patrol, which took Sandino and two of his generals to a military airfield. Here they were joined by Sandino’s brother, who had also been abducted at gunpoint, and mowed down with a machine gun. The next morning, the guardia surrounded a Sandinista camp in the north, killing a number of the guerrillas and disarming the rest. The Sandinistas finally had been crushed; the National Guard was triumphant.
Two years later, in 1936, Somoza deposed President Sacasa and became president in his own right. His dynasty would rule the country until rebels calling themselves Sandinistas overthrew Somoza’s son in 1979.
Leftists charged for years afterward that Somoza had been given an American go-ahead to kill Sandino and usurp power—an impression that Tacho himself was happy to foster. The evidence does not support this contention. The U.S. minister, Arthur Bliss Lane, was shocked and upset when he heard about Sandino’s assassination. He wanted to support the democratically elected Sacasa government. But there was little he or his successor could do. President Franklin Roosevelt’s “Good Neighbor” policy, an extension of the Hoover approach, committed Washington not to interfere in Latin America’s internal affairs.
Since the early days of the twentieth century, the U.S. had refused to recognize Nicaraguan rulers who came to power by unconstitutional means—even the pro-American Emiliano Chamorro. But now Washington was willing to extend the hand of friendship to all Latin rulers, regardless of how they came to be called “el presidente.” Of Somoza, Franklin Roosevelt famously (and perhaps apocryphally) said, “He’s a sonofabitch but he’s our sonofabitch.” But make no mistake: Somoza did not attain power because of U.S. support; he attained power because of U.S. indifference.
Ironically, many of the same critics who later attacked the U.S. for supporting tyrannical regimes had earlier criticized the U.S. for interfering in Latin America’s internal affairs. Yet those interventions were the only way that nations such as Nicaragua were likely to see free and fair elections with the losers honoring the outcome (as in 1928 and 1932). Once the marines left, those countries reverted to dictatorships. It was hardly Washington’s fault. Yes, the National Guard in Nicaragua made possible Somoza’s tyranny, but there had been no shortage of dictators in the country’s past—nothing but, in fact—and all had come to power without benefit of a U.S.-trained constabulary. Dictatorship was indigenous; democracy was a foreign transplant that did not take, in part because America would not stick around long enough to cultivate it.
“The Best School”
From a purely military standpoint, the U.S. intervention must be judged a limited success. Forty-seven marines were killed in action; another 66 were wounded. Counting casualties from all causes—disease, accident, suicide, homicide—136 marines lost their lives in Nicaragua. The U.S. casualties were heavier than in the Dominican Republic (17 killed in action) or Haiti (10 killed in action) because the Sandinistas were more skilled in guerrilla warfare than their Hispaniola counterparts. But even when combined with the death toll among native National Guardsmen (75 were said to have died in action, though the actual figure may be higher), those losses are still relatively low for five years of almost nonstop warfare. Writes one historian, “The total number of Marine combat fatalities during the entire intervention was probably less than the Sandinista losses in the single battle of Ocotal.”
Of course, as the U.S. learned a few decades later, body counts can hardly be the measure of success in a guerrilla war. On one level, the Nicaraguan adventure was frustrating; after all, the marines never managed to catch Sandino or stamp out his movement. Nevertheless they did keep Sandino on the run. The Sandinistas continued to operate, primarily in the northern wilderness, but they never came close to seizing a major city, much less the whole country.
Certainly by big war standards—by the standards of World War II, where the Allied goal was unconditional surrender—the Nicaragua intervention was a flop. But in small wars, the military’s role is akin to that of a police department; it is expected to keep the criminals at bay, not to stamp out criminality altogether. The armed forces do not necessarily have to win a counterinsurgency; sometimes it is enough not to lose. By that standard, the Nicaraguan intervention achieved its goals.
And the marines reaped plenty of collateral benefits from their five years spent chasing Sandino. A generation of marines gained invaluable experience in small unit operations, combat patrolling, close air support, the use of automatic weapons, and jungle fighting. “The Constabulary Detachment, where I saw it in both Haiti and Nicaragua, was the best school the Marine Corps has ever devised,” Chesty Puller proclaimed near the end of his life.
A few years later many of the Nicaragua veterans—Puller, “Red Mike” Edson, Herman Hanneken, and others—would put those lessons to good use on Guadalcanal, in the first major U.S. offensive of World War II. If, as the Duke of Wellington once claimed, the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton, then it might be said with equal justice that the Pacific campaign in World War II was won in the jungles of Nicaragua.