Combat· Banana Wars
Bromaderos, Murra, and La Flor engagements
A series of sharp guerrilla actions in the Sandino campaign.
On 27 February 1928 a Marine pack train returning from Yalí to Estelí was ambushed near the village of Bromaderos; Lieutenant O'Day's thirty-five Marines and their mule drivers took cover, worked their way to a ridge, and from that good ground broke up two enemy attacks, neither well planned nor pressed home. In the following weeks the fighting shifted to the air as much as the ground: Marine planes repeatedly bombed and strafed rebel concentrations around Murra, and in mid-May a column under Captain Hunter, ambushed near La Flor, had its commander seriously wounded before fighting clear. The cumulative actions of this period showed both the cost and the character of the guerrilla war, the constant ambushes of patrols and pack trains, and the growing weight the Marines threw into close air support to answer them.
Podcast episodes on Banana Wars
Record no. 504