Combat· Banana Wars
Villa Duarte action
A deadly small-unit clash in the early Dominican occupation.
On 24 October 1916, in the Villa Duarte district across the river from Santo Domingo city, a Marine party attempting to apprehend Dominican bandits ran into a sharp fight in which Captain William Low and Sergeant Frank Atwood were both killed. It was one of the costliest single incidents of the campaign's opening phase, two men lost in a single brush with the kind of armed band the occupation was meant to suppress. The action carried a lesson that the next several years would drive home repeatedly: the seemingly routine work of policing the countryside and running down small bands of bandits was lethal, and an officer and a sergeant could be killed in a moment in an encounter that looked like nothing on the map. The counter-bandit patrolling that would dominate the Dominican campaign was dangerous from the start.
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Record no. 113