Smedley Butler: Encyclopedia II - Smedley Butler - Military career

Smedley Butler - Military career

In spite of his father's insistence that he remain in school, Smedley Butler dropped out when the United States declared war against Spain in 1898. Being only sixteen years old, Butler lied about his age to secure a second lieutenant's commission in the Marines.

"How old did ye say thou wast?" asked Thomas Butler, to which Smedley confessed that he had told the commandant that he was 18, born on April 20, 1880. "If ye is determined to go, thou shalt go," Thomas replied, "but don't add another year to your age, my son. Thy mother and I weren't married until 1879."

After six weeks of basic training, Second Lieutenant Butler was sent to Guantanamo, Cuba, in July 1898. The bay was already secured, but a Spanish sniper's bullet barely missed Butler's head one night.

Butler was twice wounded during the Boxer rebellion. Following one engagement near Tientsin on July 13, 1900, Butler, another lieutenant and four enlisted men carried a wounded officer to the rear for medical attention — a 17-mile trek under heavy fire. Four of the men received the Medal of Honor. At that time, however, officers were not eligible to receive the award. In recognition of his bravery in the incident, Butler was commissioned a captain by brevet, receiving his promotion while in the hospital recovering from a wound incurred at the Battle of Tientsin, two weeks before his nineteenth birthday.

In 1903, he fought to protect the U.S. Consulate in Honduras from rebels. An incident during that expedition allegedly earned him the first of several colorful nicknames, "Old Gimlet Eye," attributed to the feverish, bloodshot eyes which enhanced his habitually penetrating and bellicose stare.

Butler was married in 1905 to Ethel C. Peters, of Philadelphia. He had a daughter, Ethel Peters, and two sons, Smedley Darlington and Thomas Richard.^[1]

From 1909 to 1912, he served in Nicaragua.

Smedley Butler - First Medal of Honor

Between the Spanish-American War and the American entry into the first World War, in 1917, Butler achieved the distinction, shared with only three other Marines since that time, of being twice awarded the Medal of Honor for outstanding gallantry in action. The first award was for his activities in the U.S. occupation of Veracruz, Mexico in 1914 at Veracruz, Mexico, in 1914. But the large number of Medals of Honor awarded during that campaign — one for the Army, nine for Marines and 46 to Navy personnel — diminished the medal's prestige. During World War I, Butler, then a major, attempted to return his Medal of Honor, explaining that he had done nothing to deserve it. It was returned with orders that not only would he keep it, but that he would wear it as well.

Smedley Butler - Second Medal of Honor

The Marines tried to secure Haiti against the "Cacos" rebels in 1915. On October 24, 1915, a patrol of forty-four mounted Marines led by Butler was ambushed by some 400 Cacos. The Marines maintained their perimeter throughout the night, and early the next morning they charged the much larger enemy force from three directions. The startled Haitians fled. Dan Daly received a Medal of Honor for his gallantry in the battle and might have received an unprecedented third Medal of Honor but was denied it for his foul language during the June 1918 Battle of Belleau Wood, when he uttered what later became a classic Marine battle cry: "Come on, you sons of bitches! Do you want to live forever?"

By mid-November 1915, most of the Cacos had been dispersed from the Haitian region. The remainder took refuge at Fort Rivière, an old French-built stronghold deep within the country. Fort Rivière sat atop Montagne Noire, the front reachable by a steep, rocky slope. The other three sides fell away so steeply that an approach from those directions was impossible. Some Marine officers argued that it should be assaulted by a regiment supported by artillery, but Butler convinced his colonel to allow him to attack with just four companies of 24 men each, plus two machine gun detachments. Butler and his men took the rebel stronghold on November 17 1915, in which he received his second Medal of Honor, for which he also received the Haitian Medal of Honor. Butler was an aggressive troop commander and a stern disciplinarian, but as he always led from the front, his men loved him.

Later, as the initial organizer and commanding officer of the Haitian Gendarmerie, the native police force, Butler established a record as a capable administrator; under his supervision, order was largely restored, and many vital public works projects were successfully completed.

Smedley Butler - World War I

During World War I, Butler, much to his disappointment, was not assigned to a combat command on the Western Front. While his superiors considered him brave and brilliant, they also described him as "unreliable." He was, however, promoted to the rank of brigadier general at the age of thirty-seven and placed in command of Camp Pontanezen at Brest, France. In October 1918, a debarkation depot near Brest funneled troops of the American Expeditionary Force to the battlefields. U.S. Secretary of War Newton Baker sent novelist Mary Roberts Rinehart to report on the camp. She later described how Butler solved the mud problem: "[T]he ground under the tents was nothing but mud, [so] he had raided the wharf at Brest of the duckboards no longer needed for the trenches, carted the first one himself up that four-mile hill to the camp, and thus provided something in the way of protection for the men to sleep on." General John J. Pershing authorized a duckboard shoulder patch for the units. This won Butler another nickname, "Old Duckboard." For his services Butler earned not only the Distinguished Service Medal of both the Army and the Navy but also the French Order of the Black Star.

Smedley Butler - Director of Public Safety

Following the war, Butler, transformed that wartime training camp at Quantico,Virgina into a permanent Marine post.

On official leave of absence from the Marine Corps from January 1924 to December 1925, due to his father's influence, W. Freeland Kendrick, the newly elected mayor of Philadelphia, asked Butler to leave the Marines to become the Director of Public Safety running the police and fire departments. Butler refused at first. Philadelphia's municipal government was notoriously corrupt, but when Kendrick asked President Calvin Coolidge to intervene, and Coolidge contacted Butler to say that he could take the necessary leave from the Corps, Butler agreed.

Within days Butler ordered raids on more than 900 speakeasies. Butler also went after bootleggers, hookers, gamblers and corrupt police officers. He had roofs removed from police cars so that cops couldn't sleep during their shifts.

What got Butler in trouble is in addition to going after gangsters and the working-class joints, Butler raided the social elites' favorite speakeasies, the Ritz-Carlton and the Union League.

A week later, Kendrick fired Butler. Butler later said "cleaning up Philadelphia was worse than any battle I was ever in."^[2]

Smedley Butler - China and stateside service

From 1927 to 1929 Butler was commander of the Marine Expeditionary Force in China. He cleverly parlayed among various nationalist generals and war lords in order to protect American lives and property and ultimately won the public acclaim of contending Chinese leaders.

When he returned to the United States he was promoted to the rank of major general. Butler helped to preserve the Marine Corps' existence against critics in the Army and the Congress who, during budget fights, argued that the Army could do the work of the Marines. He directed the Quantico camp's growth until it became the "showplace" of the Corps. He also set about vigorously to keep the Marines in the public limelight. In four years, his Quantico Marines football team amassed a record of 38-2-2 against powerful service teams as well as civilian schools, and bulldog mascot "Sergeant Major Jiggs" became a national symbol of Marine tenacity and aggressiveness. Butler also won national attention by taking thousands of his men on long field marches, many of which he led from the front, to Gettysburg and other Civil War battle sites, where they conducted large-scale re-enactments before crowds of often distinguished spectators.

In 1929, Butler, at 48, became the Marine Corps' youngest major general. When Major General Wendell C. Neville died the next year, many expected Butler to succeed him as Marine Corps commandant. Butler, however, had criticized too many things too often. A much junior general received the post.

In 1931, Butler publicly recounted gossip about Benito Mussolini in which the dictator allegedly struck a child with his automobile in a hit-and-run accident. The Italian government protested and President Hoover, who strongly disliked Butler, forced Secretary of the Navy Adams to court martial Butler. Butler became the first general officer to be placed under arrest since the Civil War. Butler apologized (to Adams) and the court martial was cancelled with only a reprimand.

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Military career", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki