THE JUNGLES AGAIN
Nicaragua was even more rugged than Haiti, a green, rolling country of jungle and plains, dominated by towering highlands upon which were tumbled mountain masses. For many years revolutions had torn the land, despite the presence of U. S. Marines, and now a bitter new war had called them back after a year’s absence. In the north lay an unconquered Indian empire whose people did not recognize the central government, and there, where he moved back and forth across the border of Honduras, was the rebel chief, Augusto César Sandino.
Sandino led a guerrilla army of thousands against the government of President Moncada, whom he had once served as an officer, and the country was being wasted anew by raids and atrocities. The Marines and the native force which they led, the Guardia Nacional, struggled against odds. It was this fighting that had drawn Lewis Puller so far across the globe.
When he reported to General E. R. Beadle, commander of the Guardia, Lewis was dismayed to learn that he must serve as adjutant for a month and a half, while Beadle’s man was on leave. Afterward, the general promised, things would change: “I’ll give you a company up in the Segovias, in the north. I understand you like to mix it up.”
In his post in the capital, Managua, Puller found himself assigned to trifling duties. He was still spoiling for action, and often pleaded with Captain Eddie Craig of his battalion to send him out on patrol when things were quiet at headquarters. Then, when he was assigned to take over a patrol of the First Mobile Battalion in the Jinotega area of central Nicaragua, a newly arrived major from the States appeared without a billet, and was given the job. Lewis was assigned as quartermaster of the battalion.
He hid his disappointment in hard work. His first coup was the overturning of the scandal-ridden system of the native chiefs, the jefes politicos and alcaldes, who were renting barracks buildings to the Guardia, despite the fact that these were public property. Puller saved a thousand dollars the first month by exposing this fraud, and in the next weeks began building barracks in the outlying districts like those he had put up in Haiti. He then reformed the hauling contracts of bullcart concerns, which were charging twenty-five dollars per cartload for the forty-mile round trip from. Jinotega to Matagalpa. When Puller pointed out that this was more than the cost of a cart and a pair of oxen, he was allowed to buy transport for the Guardia.
There was a daily ration of fifteen cents per man, and Puller stretched accounts, buying like a miserly native. Cattle on the hoof were under three dollars a head, coffee was three cents a pound, beans a cent and a half, rice five cents, brown sugar two cents, and bread loaves or tortillas a penny each. He sent gangs of prisoners to gather mangoes and papayas from government lands to supplement the ration, and insisted upon bananas, too, despite the disdain of natives, who spoke of them as “pig food.”
In March, 1929, after a few months of such work, Puller won a commendation from Beadle “for services in helping to organize the Guardia beyond the call of duty.” Soon after, in May, Lewis took examinations for the rank of First Lieutenant in the Marine Corps, and in October got his commission. Beadle again promised him a chance at action in the hills, but there was a fresh disappointment.
Just as he was about to lead a company northward, Beadle snatched him away and called him into his office:
“Puller, I want you to go to Corinto and see what you can do. They’ve wounded Lieutenant Stevens—like a fool he rode a horse into a street mob, and they shot him with his own pistol. Go take command and restore order. The method is up to you.”
Lewis boarded the train with a suitcase containing a Thompson submachine gun and ammunition, and when he arrived and found Corinto quiet, and had talked with his tiny garrison force, took the suitcase to the waterfront.
Within sight of a hostile crowd of longshoremen who had formed the troublesome mob, Puller opened the bag, took out the weapon, and with a few bursts sank several cans in the water some yards away. He then put away the gun, and with the aid of a few Guardia arrested half a dozen ringleaders of the mob. Within a few days he had convictions in the courts, but the man credited with the actual shooting of Stevens had fled the country. There was a final conquest in the port city.
The native boss was a fire-eating brigand who had been appointed as the local jefe politico. Puller invaded his office, accompanied by a sergeant, and in brief words told the terrorist that he had come to restore order, and that troublemakers would fare badly. He ended quietly: “You will be held responsible for any further disorder. With your life.”
As he talked, he saw a partially open drawer in the desk before the chief, and the butt of a revolver. The boss looked as if he wanted to snatch the pistol.
“Go ahead,” Puller said. “Use it if you can. We’ll settle this once and for all. You’d better be fast.”
The chief glanced at Puller’s old hand-made holster, worn from so many months on the trails in Haiti, and hesitated. He closed the drawer slowly with his knee and placed empty hands on the desk. Puller walked out without a backward glance, and when they had left, the sergeant erupted in a torrent of praise. The story of the Lieutenant’s bravery swept through the city.
Lewis remained in Corinto for several weeks, brushing up on his Bull Cart Spanish with the aid of natives, a correspondence school, and his new-found friend Chris, a Dane who operated a barroom. Puller’s major accomplishment in this time was the design of a small hotel for Chris—built almost entirely of old beer bottles and concrete, a low, Spanish-styled structure of rambling wings and patios which the Dane pronounced an artistic triumph.
General David McDougal, Puller’s old chief in Haiti, had now arrived to take over the Guardia, and things quickly improved. One of McDougal’s first acts was to promote Puller to captain in the Guardia, and to send him into the hills as commander of Company M.
They were forty miles from the base at Jinotega, deep in Indian country, when the enemy struck from ambush. Puller’s patrol of about thirty men was in single file along a wooded trail when, from a long ridge to their left, there was a hail of fire from rifles and automatic weapons, punctuated by unfamiliar heavier explosions. Puller called for one blast from his bugler, and the men took cover.
There was brief firing, as Lewis led a flanking movement and turned the half-seen bandits from their position, but the action had been vicious. The Guardia had three wounded, and they found nine bandit bodies on the ridge. The camp had been occupied for several days, the trap waiting.
Puller learned the cause of the heavy explosions of this attack: dynamite bombs, crude bags of rawhide, sewn around sticks of dynamite when fresh, and allowed to harden until they were like iron. The interior was packed with fragments of stone and iron, to act as shrapnel; Puller found them effective only with direct hits, for the fragments flew up or down, and did not cover wide areas.
There was one miraculous escape for Puller in these days of ambush:
He was leading the company, unaware that bandits were in the area, when a rifle went off almost in his ear. He folded his feet beneath him and dropped to the ground, drawing his pistol and turning his head as he did so. A native, no more than five yards away, was ejecting a shell from his rifle, preparing to shoot again. Puller fired three times before he fell, and missed.
It was a moment he remembered vividly: “When I fell to the ground some sanity returned. I knew that the man was almost reloaded, and that I’d better hit him this time, or it was curtains for me. I knew he wouldn’t miss twice.”
Puller killed his man with the next shot of the .45.
Lewis also saw the first land mines of his career on this expedition—bags of rawhide much like the dynamite bombs, buried in loose earth and staked out on a wire, to be set off by this trigger when an unwary Guardia stumbled into it. Puller took one of the mines to headquarters for study.
Puller’s career as a guerrilla fighter now opened in earnest. In February, 1930, he was ordered to clear bandits from the area of San Antonio, Le Virgen and Guapinol, and took out a patrol of twenty-eight men and two junior officers. A few days out of Jinotega, about mid-morning, as they marched north of San Antonio, they met another ambush. Puller was in front, with Lieutenant Marcos commanding the center and Lieutenant Rittman the rear. Under orders, men in front and rear sections were walking eight yards apart, and those in the main column five yards apart. This tactic saved them when a Lewis machine gun opened upon the head of the file and rifles fired at the rest.
The troops fell flat on the hillside and returned fire, some of them firing rifle grenades. When the Lewis gun stopped, Puller ordered a charge, and the bandits scattered in the direction of a nearby mountain. There were no Guardia casualties.
On the following day, after camping within 2000 yards of a bandit hideout which was screened by dense forest, the patrol found the camp of Pedro Altamirano, one of Sandino’s generals. The skirmish was slight, for there were but six bandits in the camp. Altamirano was wounded, and before his death told Puller that the camp had been used for two years—and that Sandino and other officers had fled as the patrol approached. A rebel captain, Sabar Manzanares, was killed outright.
When he returned to base, Puller and the troops got a commendation from General McDougal for these actions—and the young captain also got a replacement, one Bill Lee, who had earlier served three years in Nicaragua, and had been pleading for a chance to return. Lee was a tall, muscular athlete from Haverhill, Massachusetts, who had been sixteen years in the Corps and was conditioned by years of playing fullback on the team of a coal-burning battleship and by boxing and pulling an oar on a crew.
Puller unhesitatingly chose him to help direct Company M, and Lee found Lewis an ideal commander: “He never really gave me orders. He just told me what Headquarters wanted, asked me if I knew the country, and to get up the men we needed. He was a common-sense officer, and you always knew where you stood with him. When he was displeased about something I’d done, he never chewed me out, as so many inexperienced officers would have done. He would say, ‘If I’d been doing that, I’d have done it this way,’ and that would be the end of it. We got on like brothers. Most important of all, he was not green when he first came to Nicaragua. Haiti had taught him jungle fighting, and he took to the new country like a native.”
Their first skirmish together was on June 6, at Los Cedros, when the patrol was ambushed by the jefes Marcial Rivera and Ascensión Rodrigues. Lee was walking at the point, in front, and with his eight men dropped and began returning fire against the enemy, who were on a wooded slope above the trail. The two officers worked with an unspoken mutual understanding. Puller took about half the patrol and without so much as a signal to Lee moved for high ground on the bandit flank, under fire. When he was about 150 yards from Lee, Lewis opened fire with all his men, caught the enemy between them, and forced a flight.
They counted seven bandit dead, including the two chiefs, and captured two rifles, sharp-bladed cutachas, detonators and dynamite bombs. The Guardia had no losses. Puller and Lee agreed on the cause of their continuing miraculous escapes in ambush: “The Indians were brave, and intelligent, and laid perfect traps, but they were excitable, and not accustomed to the weapons. They usually fired high. If we’d been in their shoes, we’d have wiped out any passing patrol.”
Company M fought again at Moncotal on July 22 and at Guapinol three days later, and for a brief time the territory seemed free of bandits. But in August, when they were told of a boy bandit leading a fast-moving gang of horse thieves through the country, Puller and Lee set out again, with the company on foot. The invaders were reported to be from Honduras, all well mounted, but Puller reasoned that determined marchers could overtake them.
The bandits were forced to rest their animals every third day, and during that day the hurrying patrol gained ground. It was the rainy season, when roads and trails were more tiring to horses than to men—and there was mud here, in contrast to the solid footing in the Haitian jungles. Within less than a week Puller and Lee and their forty men caught up with the 150 Hondurans, at a place called Malacate.
A few hours before they found their quarry a woman in a native hut described the chief of the invaders for Puller: “Why, he’s so young. Just a boy. He’s even younger than you.”
The bandits were waiting on a hill which lay at right angles to the trail, and opened fire on the head of Puller’s company. Lewis led the column past the point without hesitation, and when he was out of range, turned and struck the flank at a run. Lee remembered it: “We were so strung out when we hit them, from running into the camp at top speed, that most of them got away.” They killed two bandits, captured about eighty horses and mules, numerous saddles, and four tons of stolen corn. For months civilians came to Jinotega to claim animals and saddles stolen by the raiders.
This action ended a campaign so effectively that General McDougal recommended Puller for a Navy Cross, citing the five fights against superior numbers without loss to himself, the nine known enemy dead and numerous but uncounted wounded, and the impressive loot of munitions, animals, food, and captured military dispatches.
The recommendation ended:
Thus by his intelligent and forceful leadership without thought of his own personal safety, by great physical exertion, and by suffering many hardships, he surmounted all obstacles and dealt five successive and severe blows against organized banditry in the Republic of Nicaragua.
President Moncada, an old soldier himself, followed suit by awarding Lewis a high decoration of the country, the Presidential Order of Merit, citing his nine engagements against Sandino forces around Jinotega within a year:
The activities of this company under the known direction of Captain Puller contributed greatly to the clearing of bandits from many parts of the central area, facilitating thus for the inhabitants the gathering of their crops of coffee and other grain. The activities and operations of Captain Puller, his valor and his personality, assisted in gaining the sympathies of the honorable inhabitants of the country and greatly strengthening the goodwill and the feeling of confidence in the Guardia Nacional.
Captain E. E. Linsert, intelligence officer of the Marine Brigade, seldom saw Lewis Puller in Nicaragua, but in his wide reading of native newspapers saw plentiful signs. There was unanimous praise in the press for the fearless young Marine who seemed to thrive on the most deadly bandit attacks, and Linsert made these stories part of his intelligence reports. Puller was becoming a public relations asset in the campaign.
Linsert saw that there were a few jealous detractors: “Now and then the New York Times got some of these stories from Nicaraguan papers, and Puller’s name became widely known. A few officers around headquarters, who thought of themselves as Clausewitz types, muttered criticisms of Puller, and said he was a publicity hound. I knew that the opposite was true—and that Lewis spent virtually his whole life in this period on the trail, deep in enemy country, while our staff officer friends sat on their duffs in the cities, far removed from the warfare.”
Linsert’s reaction was supported by Puller’s reports of combats, which were so terse as to vex even the most businesslike senior officers.
On March 31, 1931, a disastrous earthquake struck the new capital, Managua, killing more than 1000 of its 120,000 people. Puller was in Jinotega when the news came, and he immediately volunteered to go to the stricken city; he left in an automobile about noon of the same day, riding with the jefe politico of Jinotega.
The road was barely passable, and they spent the night on the way. Near dawn, as they approached the city, driving through mobs of refugees, Puller smelled the stench of the dead. He was put in charge of a detail of troops and civilians, recovering and burying bodies. They worked among still-burning and charring buildings; outside the city, great fissures had split open the earth. He buried hundreds that afternoon and the next day, and for the next several days, as the men found bodies so badly burned as to be beyond burying, Lewis carried out grim orders: Burn them with fuel oil where they lie. There were hundreds more of these victims.
Puller had briefly commanded the penitentiary in Managua some years earlier, and was stunned by what he now saw of that building; for its great twenty-five-foot-high walls of quarried stone, with blocks of three and a half by two feet, were so badly tumbled that no two adjacent stones were in place.
On the third day of the work in the city a Red Cross man flew in from San Francisco, bringing a check for $10,000 to the Nicaraguan government for food and medicines. Puller worked in the distribution of these supplies.
Fires continued to break out in the ruins, and the new chief of constabulary, General Calvin B. Matthews, banned civilian cooking in the city. The Marines served the first meal to survivors the next morning, but no more than 11,000 of the original population remained. Puller thought this was prophetic: “Those people went away from their city as far as they could, to the oceans, and Honduras and Costa Rica. It will be the same, some day, when cities of the United States are bombed. When I left Nicaragua for good, two years later, the people of Managua still had not returned.” American Red Cross Headquarters sent Puller a commendation for his work in the stricken city.
It was a busy spring for Puller. On one final outing in the far north, he penetrated more deeply into enemy country than any Marine patrol had gone.
They were more than a hundred miles from Jinotega, Company M marching over open country on high ground beside the swift Cua River. Puller and Lee were not far apart when they saw, almost at the same instant, a native dugout canoe speed around a bend to their rear, bearing two men. One of these men fired, wildly. There was also a burst of rifle fire from across the river—another attempt at ambush.
Puller reacted as usual. He ran at top speed toward the river bank, straight for the canoe, pulling his pistol as he went. He fired in motion, and one of the canoeists fell across the gunwale. The patrol killed the other Indian, and when men splashed across the river, they found that the band had fled.
Lee thought Puller’s action a climax of the fighting in Nicaragua: “It was the greatest field shot I ever saw. He shot that bird from fifteen to twenty-five yards away from that canoe, going at full speed, and the canoe moving, too. He drilled him right in the ear, so perfectly that we looked over the body for several minutes before finding the wound. He had shot him precisely in the opening of the ear. I don’t think such shooting was accidental.”
The patrol picked up two rifles and cutachas from the victims, scouted a nearby camp with accommodations for about five hundred men, and Puller made sketches of it in case of a return to the area. They found here some surprising bandit ammunition—the newest type available, 1927 cartridges from the Frankford Arsenal, more effective than the older ammunition used by Marines themselves. This caused a sensation at Headquarters, and launched a search for traitors and smugglers back in the States.
Generals Julian Smith and C. B. Matthews both endorsed Puller’s application for duty at the Army Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, about this time. General Smith wrote: “Lieutenant Puller is an officer of the highest type, and will represent the Marine Corps creditably in any Army school.” Informally Smith told a reporter: “He was probably the bravest man I ever knew. His was a cool courage, not one of desperation. About the only way to contact the enemy there was to let them ambush him. He would go anywhere without support, knowing that if he got in a jam he had to get himself out. He never hesitated; he invited that kind of work.”
General Matthews commended Lewis to Washington as “especially the type who should be given opportunity for education he seeks.”
But when word of Puller’s coming departure reached the Nicaraguan people a group of about thirty prominent residents of Jinotega wrote General Smith in protest:
… Captain Puller was one of the few officers of the Guardia Nacional that worked brilliantly on the task of pacifying this area, where for a long time he revealed himself as the strong and efficient man for this kind of campaign, carried out among all kinds of danger, in an untamed and wild tropical wilderness.
For the above reasons we, the undersigned merchants, farmers and neighbors of this city request that Captain Puller be brought back to Jinotega, as we consider him an important factor in the guarantee for the interests of our community and one of the best officers due to his long experience in dealing with our difficult situation while fighting to obtain peace in Nicaragua. We hope that, in interpreting our petition, you convey to General C. B. Matthews, Jefe Director of the Guardia Nacional, our wishes in this matter, which will result in Captain Puller being ordered back to duty in this locality.
But in the late summer, Lewis was back in the States, ready for more formal schooling, after three years in the Central American jungles.
In Saluda, Virginia Evans quickly divined that he was in the country, for she got an enormous box of red rosebuds. She was puzzled about the label on the box: “Funeral flowers,” until she learned of the admonition from Lewis to a Richmond florist, who was confused or frightened: “I want rosebuds, and if they’re not buds, there’s going to be a funeral.”
There was a brief visit at home, and a stop at Camp Peary, Virginia, where his young brother Sam, a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps, was stationed. An old sergeant major who asked Lewis if he could do anything for Sam was told: “I wish you’d give the first sergeant some leave, and give Sam the paper work to do. It’s the quickest way for him to learn the ropes.”
Lewis was soon on his way southward to Columbus, Georgia, home of Fort Benning.