Combat· Banana Wars
Nicaragua 1912 Major Intervention
The full-scale intervention in the Liberal revolt that led to the battles around Masaya.
In August 1912, as the rebellion under Mena and Zeledón threatened the government of President Díaz and the railroad on which the country's commerce moved, Major Smedley Butler brought his battalion across the country by train to Managua, and Colonel Joseph Pendleton followed with a regiment and took command. By the end of the month the combined Marine force numbered some twenty-seven hundred. The initial landings and the move inland to secure the capital and the rail line met no serious resistance and cost no casualties; the hard fighting came afterward, in the storming of the Coyotepe and Barranca heights in October. This 1912 intervention was the largest American commitment to Nicaragua before the Sandino war, and it set the pattern, Marines securing the railroad and the capital, then breaking the rebel strongholds, that decided the campaign.
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Record no. 500