RETURN OF THE TIGER
Lewis had a singular welcome to the second phase of his warfare in Nicaragua on the front page of a Managua newspaper:
A ULTIMA HORA
Los Marinos traen al “Tigre de las Segovias” para combatir a Sandino.…
He translated rather hesitantly:
BULLETIN
Marines Bring The Tiger of Segovia To Fight Sandino. Late yesterday afternoon, Captain L. B. Puller, The Tiger of Segovia, arrived at Managua by air. It had been brought to his attention that the situation in Segovia had grown worse. He will be sent to Kisalaya where the bandits of Sandino are spreading terror.
There was more to be heard in the market place, where native women provided Puller with the best of his intelligence: Sandino had a price of five thousand pesos on the head of El Tigre—and a new atrocity tale was being circulated about Puller, to the effect that he was paying bounty to his men for collecting the ears of Sandino’s men, and that soldiers on patrol carried the grisly mementoes in strings on their belts.
Lewis flung himself into the Work of Company M once more—but as if he feared that the fighting might soon come to an end, he asked Marine Corps Headquarters that he be sent, upon withdrawal of Marines from Nicaragua, to a foreign post, with preferences in this order: 1. Haiti. 2. Fourth Regiment, Shanghai. 3. Marine Detachment, U. S. Legation, Peking. 4. Sea duty.
With that on record, he took Sandino’s trail once more.
In the second week of September, 1932, Puller and his old companion Bill Lee learned of a new bandit supply trail in the hills north of Jinotega. The word was brought by a native who had come down from Metagalpa, in excitement, to speak with El Tigre:
“It is the old Incan trail, Señor. Sandino’s men bring down ammunition, maybe all the way from Mexico. But you must not go there, Señor. If you take fifty men with you, they will kill you, with four hundred men and plenty of machine guns.”
Puller and Lee fitted the company for a long campaign and marched north. They found the trail four days out and hurried along it, destroying several bandit camps as they went. They burned a dozen camp sites within eighteen miles; the next day, covering sixteen miles, they destroyed nine more camps. But despite the fresh signs of the enemy, not a man had been spotted.
On September 26, near the remote settlement of Agua Carta, the column of forty men and eighteen pack mules ran into trouble. Near noon, as they passed along a swale, two rifle shots sounded from cover—the usual signal for an ambush; but when nothing developed, the column pushed ahead. Within six hundred yards the vanguard came to a shallow stream, some thirty yards wide. Lee halted and studied the wooded ground beyond. Puller came by at a trot, one soldier in front of him and the bugler, Rodriques, at his heels.
“Let’s go, Bill. What’re you waiting for?”
Lewis splashed through the stream with the two natives, with the column after him. No more than a hundred and fifty yards from the bank the man in front shouted: “Look out, Captain! They are here!”
Puller went down on one knee, and as he did so glimpsed a machine gun directly ahead. He recalled the moment with remorse thirty years afterward: “I wasn’t as good a man as that Indian ahead of me. He saved my life by yelling, and I could have saved Rodriques, but I just dropped. When I looked behind me I saw a sheet of blood; those machine gun bullets had stitched the bugler’s body, every two inches, running from the groin up to the head. They literally cut him to pieces.”
Lewis flattened on the ground. The machine gun fell silent, but rifle fire was now constant from both sides of the trail. The machine gun coughed again, and a burst of fire kicked dirt by Puller’s right shoulder. He realized that the next burst would hit him, and dove for the base of a large swamp oak; the machine gun tore at the bole of the tree, but the Captain miraculously escaped the point-blank fire.
Puller shouted for his men to deploy into line and get their machine gun into action, but for a few moments could not move, for each time he raised his head, he drew machine gun fire. When his men began to return rifle fire Lewis lunged to his feet and ran rearward, calling to his men to avoid panic: “I’m going to get the machine gun!”
He found Lee lying in the trail, his head and shoulders covered with blood, with the top of his skull evidently knocked in. A nearby Guardia called that Lee was dead. Lewis pulled the body off the trail by a foot, under fire from the brush, and led men of the patrol to the high ground on right and left. Within a few minutes he saw that Lee was recovered, and had the machine gun firing; they soon held the ridge beside the trail on either side, and the bandits were in flight.
Puller set up a perimeter defense and began tending his wounded. He found that Lee had a creased skull—a miraculous escape, but the wound looked dangerous. Men buried Rodriques, their only dead man, and Lewis had stretchers improvised from clothing and poles, giving orders to the bearers: “We will take these men back, eight men to a stretcher, so that no one will be worn out. No stretcher is to be put to the ground without orders from me. Any man who drops a stretcher will be shot.”
They marched until darkness fell. One of the wounded died in the night and was buried. Lee’s head wound was becoming infected, but despite this and other wounds the big man joined the march at dawn. They had left sixteen bandit bodies and many enemy wounded behind, but Company M had never before been so badly hurt. There was more to come.
On September 30, as they neared their base, the company was twice ambushed. Near San Antonio a party of about eighty bandits fired from a brushy hillside, but caused no casualties, and fled when they were charged.
In the afternoon, at Paso Real, there was a more serious threat. Lee, who left the trail to enter a native house, in search of food, found two women huddled together, speechless with fear. He could not persuade them to talk, but was certain that bandits were near, and sent a sergeant forward to Puller with a warning: “Tell him to watch sharp at the stream crossing down the hill.”
The column halted on a slope and Lee went up to confer with Puller. “Captain,” he said; “if we get past this spot we’ll be all right. They’re going to be down there, waiting for us, and it’s a wicked place.”
“Let’s give it a try,” Puller said, and the file moved down the hill behind him. He was now the only vanguard, since the unwounded Guardia were all serving as stretcher bearers, and it was one long train of the wounded. The trail dropped between two steep ridges to the bank of a small stream, then turned right and followed the brook. Yet another hill rose on the far side of the stream.
The attack came when the column had wound around the curve, with Puller in front, beyond sight of Lee. There was a shower of the noisy dynamite bombs, and raking machine gun fire from two directions. Once more, Puller escaped without a wound, and directed the disciplined Guardia in returning fire; the men placed the wounded along the edge of the trail and fought their way out. Gradually, as the troops crawled forward, fire lessened from the hilltops, the machine guns of the enemy were stilled, and the bandit band retreated downstream.
The patrol halted in the place for a time, for Lee was weaker, though he insisted he could walk. Puller sent a runner to the base, and on the next morning a plane picked up Lee at the air strip a few miles outside Jinotega.
Company M ended a ten-day march of more than 150 miles, having fought four engagements and killed at least thirty bandits, besides wounding and killing an undetermined number of others. From this patrol Puller got a star in lieu of a second Navy Cross, and Lee a second star for his Cross. Lee soon returned from the Managua hospital, and within a few days led a patrol of his own against the enemy.
Lewis did not get so much as a scratch in the Nicaraguan fighting, and only once was he forced to slow his pace. One day, near the village of Los Cochives, the patrol climbed abruptly above the tropical growth to a high, chilly altitude, and Puller was felled by a puzzling respiratory ailment. His lungs began to fill and he gasped for breath. He could no longer walk.
Lee halted the column and their skilled Navy Medical Corpsman, Tom Lynch, went to work. He sent men to a native hut for unrendered hog fat, heated this over a fire, and smeared hot grease on Puller’s chest. He tore uniform shirts into strips and wrapped the patient from shoulders to waist. Within an hour or two Lewis was breathing more easily, and by morning was well enough to walk. It seemed a miracle, but the native troops took the cure as a matter of course.
A more serious affair was now developing at headquarters in Jinotega, where a new battalion commander had arrived from the States. He was vigorous but inexperienced, and issued to Puller a series of naïve and wasteful orders.
One day when Company M was at the village of Corinto Finca, some fifteen miles from Jinotega, a runner brought Puller an order from the new major: A bandit force was reported in a hill town some thirty miles south of Company M’s position. Puller would march to this town and destroy the enemy.
The order was mandatory, and Lewis put the men on the trail; he used an old hunter’s device from his childhood, and cut directly across the circle in which he expected his quarry to move. He had gone but a few miles when he learned from natives that the bandits had departed the town, and were circling to Puller’s left on a wide arc. Company M was immediately turned, and at a crossing of the Tuma River, Puller found that he was only one day behind the bandits.
Puller followed for several days, until he caught the rebels on a hill in open country, attacked and overran their camp, and killed or captured those who did not flee. He killed about fifty wounded animals on the scene, and went back to headquarters with a train of eighty-two captured horses and mules with pack saddles. The new commander watched the victorious patrol pass with its spoils, then questioned Puller:
“Why did you disobey my orders? You should have gone directly south as I told you.”
“If I’d done that, you’d never have got these animals, and I’d never have seen the bandits. They’d still be tearing up the countryside. I always carry out orders implicitly, and if I had not found the enemy, I would have marched south before coming back in. Since we were successful, it seems to me it didn’t matter whether I carried out the letter of the order.”
The Major studied Puller’s face, hesitated, and nodded in dismissal.
Throughout the latter half of 1932 Company M was on unceasing patrol, averaging eighteen to twenty miles daily on the mountain trails, stretching it some days to as much as forty miles. There was no communication with Jinotega. In the rainy season, when bandits emerged from the hills to gather supplies, Puller was constantly on call, and for months the company seldom escaped wet blankets and clothing.
Puller and Lee and their troops marched more than ten thousand miles in the Nicaraguan fighting, always on foot, for they early discovered that horsemen drew fire in every skirmish, and so they walked, without the mark of an officer on their uniforms. They also found that horses in numbers slowed progress, since there was little forage in the wild country for a fast-moving force. They could sustain pack mules by chopping down trees when they camped, and allowing the animals to browse on the foliage, but horses required grass.
The Company built a reputation as the most aggressive in the Guardia, a fact which was not lost on Puller’s commanders. One day Lewis went into headquarters at Jinotega and found General McDougal and his staff officers bending over a large map lying on an improvised table, discussing the possibility of catching a bandit force.
McDougal looked up as Puller entered: “There’s the man who can tell us. Puller, how fast will our patrols have to move to catch these devils?”
“Forty miles a day. The enemy will make twenty, easily, and you’ve got to be much faster to overtake him.”
McDougal grunted in disgust, kicked over the table, balled up a marching schedule in his hands and flung it against the wall. “Let’s go to Pio’s, Puller.” The captain and the general repaired to the only oasis in town where cold beer was served and discussed the problems of conquering an enemy who moved at twice the speed of the average Guardia patrol.
Near the end of the year, largely because of the victories of Company M, the bandit menace had been so reduced that the Marines could safely make their planned evacuation. For months, Nicaraguan officers had been trained to take over their own forces, and a new president had been duly elected—Juan Batista Sacasa. In theory, the revolution was over.
On January 1, 1933, outgoing President Moncada planned the crowning ceremony of his regime, the driving of a golden spike to complete his new railroad line from León to El Sauce, a branch line which had been under construction for years, but was not yet a model of its kind. Two great bridges, one of them 900 feet and the other 1700 feet, were to be built of steel, but the beams had not arrived from Sweden, and the rails now spanned the gorges on temporary trestles of green pine trunks, fastened with spikes.
On Christmas Eve, 1932, Puller was in the bar of the Managua officers’ club when Colonel Leroy P. Hunt, the intelligence officer, came searching for him through the crowd: “I’ve got something hot. But it’s strictly on a volunteer basis.”
“Count me in.”
“You’d better hear it first, Lewis. The way we get it from the grapevine, Sandino has sworn that Moncada will not live to drive that last spike at El Sauce. All we know is that a band of two hundred fifty horse thieves has crossed the Honduranian border, headed south. They may be only the usual gang, but the President suspects they’ve come to tear up his railroad, and the General wants a patrol.”
“How big a patrol?”
“About eighty men and half a dozen officers.”
“I’ll get ’em.”
“Fine. Have them ready at 8:00 A.M., day after tomorrow.”
They boarded their train at León, a box car, a gondola, an engine and a passenger car, and chugged off over the narrow-gauge rails on the eighty-mile route toward El Sauce, the box car in front. The rails were held by few spikes; the box car fell between them several times, and there were halts to jack it up and onto the tracks. Puller went back to the engine when they approached the bridges, held his pistol on the engineer, and forced him to creep across. The structure shivered and swayed under the weight, and men peered anxiously below them into a hundred-foot gorge until they were safely over.
As they neared the end of the line, Lewis rode in the coach; the lookout atop the box car was manned by Bill Lee and Lieutenant Stevens, Progress was slow, for gangs of workmen pounded furiously on the tracks before them, driving spikes. About 4:30 P.M., as the train labored up an incline, Lee saw two men on the tracks ahead. Stevens shouted to workmen below: “Are those men in your gang?”
A machine gun burst answered. Lee shouted below for a BAR, and the weapon was handed up to him; it jammed after one round and he leapt to the ground, banged the weapon with a stone and somehow slipped the jammed firing pin into place. He opened fire.
Bandits on horseback circled the train, firing from covered positions on the necks of their mounts. Puller became aware of the attack when bullets stitched the window pane at his side and showered him with glass. He plunged from the car to the right of the tracks with Lieutenants Bunn and Hays and about half the patrol behind him. The car had halted on a trestle over a dry stream bed. A skirmish line of bandits fired from cover in the train’s front, and across the track where Lee had taken another party, more of the ambush lay behind a hedgerow. Still the horses circled wildly, and guns blazed away. The box car was already being splintered. “I’ll bet this is the first Indian attack on a train in fifty years,” Puller said.
Dynamite bombs pocked the ground nearby. Puller ran across the open, firing his pistol. The patrol followed. Two men fell and Tom Lynch jumped from the train to carry them to safety, an act which won him a Navy Cross.
Puller, Bunn and Hays put the men into a skirmish line, but were pinned down by fire from bandits hiding on an old Indian mound. Puller sent two runners to find Lee and report on conditions across the track. They did not return. Puller darted over the tracks under fire and found Lee preparing to charge.
Puller returned to lead his own men to the attack and though the bandits still shifted to his right in front of him, extending their flank, he finally drove them. Lieutenant Bunn grabbed a BAR from a native soldier and blazed into the open, shooting with such accuracy that the enemy ceased fire and began to flee. On Puller’s recommendation, he, too, won the Navy Cross. The Guardia charged, and when the flank was turned, Lee and Puller struck the bandit center; most of the enemy escaped, but sixty-three horses were captured.
Bandit casualties were thirty-two dead; the Guardia had three dead and three wounded in this fight of an hour and ten minutes, one of the most severe actions of the Marine occupation. Puller lost no time in putting the men to work, burying the dead, cleaning up, and preparing to move into El Sauce.
Several excited men ran to him from a nearby railroad camp, stark naked, to explain that they had been stripped by the bandits, and were lined up for possible execution when the train had arrived. There was a report that the leaders of the bandit force, Benavides and Umanzor, were killed or wounded.
When Lewis tried to move the train there was a delay—the engineer could not be found until, after a long search, he was discovered in the water tender, standing neck-deep in the water, still trembling with fear. The patrol soon chuffed up the hill into El Sauce, and the final threat to the inauguration of the new rail line was removed.
Moncada and a party of dignitaries arrived three days later in a special train, and the President had the cars halted in the precise spot where the action had been fought. For two hours or more he insisted upon being led over the field, while Puller and Lee explained the battle. Captain Linsert, as officer representing Marine headquarters, noticed that Moncada seemed somewhat disappointed at what he saw, and questioned Puller:
“Where are all the bodies—and the dead animals? It doesn’t look much like a battlefield. He wants to see some gore.”
“I spent the better part of two days cleaning up,” Puller said. “I dragged the animal carcasses down the hill for burial, and even had them level up the torn earth.”
Moncada made an impressive ceremony of the final moments on this field. He was standing among Nicaraguan officers and political leaders and the few Americans when he shouted as if in inspiration:
“Captain Puller, you deserve promotion for this gallant action. I hereby promote you, Major in the Guardia Nacional de Nicaragua.”
As Lewis looked in astonishment, Moncada turned to another, officer, unpinned a star from his shoulders, and fastened it upon Puller’s uniform.
“There,” the President said. “Congratulations, Major Puller. Our friend will have to wait to get another star.”
Moncada then elevated Bill Lee to Captain, Bunn to First Lieutenant, and awarded the Cross of Valor to every Guardia officer who had fought in the place.
The story was soon made known back in the States, first by the New York Times, whose dispatch was labeled “By Tropical Radio to the New York Times.” In Saluda, Virginia, it came to the notice of Virginia Evans, whose mother interrupted a family bridge game to hear a radio announcer describe the little battle, and report Puller’s decoration.
On schedule, on January 2, 1933, the Marines began leaving Nicaragua. Puller had a physical examination just before entraining, and the Navy doctor who looked him over, admiring the lean physique developed on the mountain trails, told Lewis: “Captain, you’re in absolutely perfect shape. Nicaragua has been good for you. It would take thirty years of steady dissipation to break down your body as it is today.”
Puller left Managua for Corinto as “the most decorated Marine in Nicaragua,” still uncertain as to his future duty.
On the train a general spotted Puller: “I’m going to Washington by plane. Anything I can do for you?”
“Yes, sir. I’ve put in for China duty. Please try to get me sent there.”
When Puller’s ship arrived in San Diego ten days later, an airmail letter from Headquarters informed him that he would ship for the Orient in February.