Combat· Banana Wars
Fortaleza at San Francisco de Macoris
A daring small-party storming that broke the last open defiance of the disarmament order.
In November 1916, as the American military government took formal control of the Dominican Republic, the local governor at San Francisco de Macorís refused to give up the arms held in the old Spanish fort, the fortaleza, and gathered men there in defiance. Rather than wait, First Lieutenant Ernest Williams resolved to rush the gate before it could be closed. Leading a party of about a dozen Marines, he charged across the open ground and through the entrance into the fort, where his men, several of them hit on the way in, overpowered the much larger garrison in a sharp fight at close quarters. Eight of his small party were wounded. Williams received the Medal of Honor for the assault, which consolidated American control of the central Dominican Republic on the very day the military government was proclaimed.
Podcast episodes on Banana Wars
Record no. 112