Combat· Banana Wars
Mexico Veracruz Operations
The single great Mexican intervention of the period, the seizure and occupation of the port of Veracruz.
Ordered ashore by President Wilson in the crisis with the Huerta government that grew out of the Tampico affair, the combined Marine and Navy landing force took the city on 21–22 April 1914 after two days of sharp street fighting against Mexican cadets, soldiers, and armed civilians, and held it under occupation until November. The Marine share of the loss was about thirteen killed and forty-one wounded, within a combined American toll of some seventeen to twenty-two killed and around seventy wounded. The action produced an extraordinary cluster of Medals of Honor and contributed to the fall of Huerta later that year. Veracruz was the Corps' largest single combat action between the Philippine war and the World War, a conventional urban fight in the midst of an era of small wars.
Podcast episodes on Banana Wars
Record no. 495