Combat· Banana Wars
Battle of Fort Riviere
The climax of the first Caco war in Haiti, and one of the Corps' celebrated small-unit feats.
The Caco rebels held Fort Rivière, an old French stone fort on a mountaintop, as their last stronghold. On 17 November 1915 Major Smedley Butler led about a hundred Marines up the steep approaches and found the fort had only one practicable entrance, a narrow drain or breach in the wall. Butler and a handful of men crawled through it under fire and burst into the interior, and in a sharp fifteen-minute fight at close quarters the garrison of some two hundred Cacos was overwhelmed, about fifty of them killed. The Marine loss was a single man wounded. The action effectively ended the first Caco war. Butler received his second Medal of Honor.
Podcast episodes on Banana Wars
Record no. 5