Category: A Victory!
There is this peculiar artificiality intrinsic to modern life. Inundated as we are with modern conveniences, one might be forgiven for believing that chickens are born shrink-wrapped in Styrofoam trays, that tuna fish are hatched in cans, and that corn springs forth from the ground in tasty flakes covered in sugar. This artificiality breeds a certain unfortunate complacency. We assume our food will always just miraculously appear at the local Kroger, Walmart, or Trader Joe’s.
We may rightfully grouse about the price, but the fact that the shelves will be fat with prepackaged protein is a given in the United States of America. We have engineered buffers that protect us against such unpleasantness as drought, pestilence, and natural disaster. If a domestic crop fails, then we just pay extra and have it all shipped in from someplace else. However, that was not always the case.
The average life expectancy for an American male in 1900 was 47. Stuff like typhoid and yellow fever were still scourges, and agriculture performed at the whim of the environment and the weather. A century ago, we lacked those artificial buffers that make life so predictably comfortable today. In many cases, farmers’ margins were razor-thin.
The Setting
Back in the Dark Ages, when I attended flight school at Fort Rucker, Alabama, the Yankees in the class called the region UCLA. That was short for the Ugly Corner of Lower Alabama. I didn’t think that was quite fair.
I loved the Alabama Wiregrass region. It was a short hop down to the beautiful sugar sand beaches of the Florida panhandle, and the winters were mild. The several small communities surrounding Mother Rucker appreciated the troops, and learning to fly helicopters was a serious rush. That’s not to say that this part of rural Alabama didn’t have its own eccentricities.
All serious Army bases enjoy nearby communities that support them. The troops and their families need homes, restaurants, and churches, and all those overpriced used sports cars aren’t going to sell themselves. In the case of Fort Rucker, the nearby satellite communities are Enterprise, Ozark, Daleville, and Newton.
When my wife and I first explored the place back in 1989, I was surprised to discover a life-size Greco-Roman statue of a woman standing at the crossroads at the very center of the small town of Enterprise, Alabama.
Adorned in a traditional chiton, this not-unattractive lass towered above the traffic and pedestrians passing by with her hands held skyward. What makes the whole scene fairly surreal is that she is holding aloft a big honking bug. This was my first introduction to the Enterprise, Alabama, Boll Weevil Monument.
The Boll Weevil Monument is the literal centerpiece of the delightful little Southern town of Enterprise, Alabama. Enterprise stands just outside the gate to Fort Rucker, the home of Army Aviation.
When Life Gives You Lemons
Back in the early 1900s, this part of agrarian Alabama supported itself with cotton. The American Deep South makes the finest cotton on Earth, and this part of Alabama rode that wave. And then there was the invasion.
Anthonomus grandis is the snooty scientific term for the Mexican cotton boll weevil. Originally indigenous to our friends south of the border, the boll weevil marched north and invaded southern Alabama in 1915, like Sherman and his marauding blue legions. Three years later, entire cotton crops were falling prey to this rampaging pest. The region was threatened with cataclysmic economic collapse.
Faced with such a dire crisis, a local gentleman named H.M. Sessions had an idea. He convinced an indebted farmer named C.W. Baston to go out on a limb and sow his fields not with cotton but with peanuts. This crop was resistant to pests and produced a splendid bounty. In short order, UCLA was dirty with peanut farmers, and the economy was thriving again.
This historical marker explains the significance of the statue of the stately woman holding a big honking bug that occupies the center of Enterprise, Alabama.
Credit Where Credit is Due
In recognition of this divine serendipity, local businessman Bon Fleming proposed that the community craft a monument to show their corporate appreciation for the humble boll weevil. He praised the little bug as a “Herald of Prosperity” and paid for most of the $1,800 cost himself. That would be about $33,000 in today’s money.
They had the statue crafted in Italy. The whole shebang stands about 13 feet tall and includes a modest fountain along with a wrought-iron railing. A plaque on its base reads, “In profound appreciation of the Boll Weevil and what it has done as the herald of prosperity this monument was erected by the citizens of Enterprise, Coffee County, Alabama.”
These curious stylized boll weevils can be found all over Enterprise, Alabama. This one stands outside city hall. The good folks of Enterprise really lean into the boll weevil thing.
Ruminations
Of course, people are bad, so the thing has been repeatedly vandalized over the decades. The whole rig has been stolen a time or two, and vandals have relieved the svelte stone lass of her signature bug. Some young pranksters have even charged the fountain with dish soap and flooded the intersection with mountains of suds.
Eventually, in 1998, the city fathers moved the original monument to the nearby Pea River Historical and Genealogical Society’s Gift Shop, where security cameras could oversee it 24/7. The version standing guard at the intersection of Main and College Streets today is a polymer and resin replica. Regardless, the Enterprise, Alabama, Boll Weevil Monument is a quirky piece of Americana that actually pays sincere tribute to a rampaging agricultural pest.
Lessons in Cold War economics and stag hunting with the KGB under the hammer and sickle of Soviet Communism.
Did I ever tell you about the time I paid a hundred thousand dollars for a deer? The money wasn’t mine of course, and it was in rubles, Russian money, but that’s what the tab came to in American money.
The whole thing happened several years ago, before the fall of Soviet communism, and the Russians wanted to do some trading with an American computer manufacturer. (I’m going to leave out some names, and change those of the Russians involved, because for all I know they could still get in trouble over what happened.)
What they wanted were not the type of high-powered computers used for strategic military purposes or stuff like that, and in any event we couldn’t sell to them anyway, except for ordinary PCs for innocent chores like library retrieval and medical records.
As it happened, there was at least one U.S. maker of such computers willing to do business with the Russians, but the catch was they didn’t want Russian money. The reason being that Russian bucks – rubles – were virtually worthless out of Russia, and for that matter not worth much inside Russia either. But more about that later.
So what the Russians had in mind was swapping some of their products for our computers, and among the items they wanted to trade were guns. Mainly sporting shotguns. The U.S. computer company was interested in trading for guns, but they didn’t know anything about Russian shotguns or the American gun market. And that’s how I came to be involved.
The deal they offered was irresistible: two Americans, my good pal John Amber, the legendary editor of Gun Digest, and myself, accompanied by a trade specialist from the computer company, would visit some of the Russian gunmakers and size up what they had to offer, then give our opinions as to what appeal Russian guns would have for American hunters. In return for our services, they would treat us to an exclusive hunt for Russian stag, plus some waterfowl hunting in one of their preserves.
On top of that, they promised a private tour of the fabled gun collection inside the Kremlin itself. I would have been happy to go just for a peek at the gun factories and Kremlin tour, so the hunting was gravy.
But first I had to be convinced that everyone was on the up and up about the computers to be swapped, that they were not to be used for strategic purposes, and that I would not be aiding and abetting our Cold War enemies.
As it turned out, even our State Department was in favor of the deal, so I agreed to go, and it came to pass that on a drizzly November evening, I found myself in the dark and dreary bar of a Moscow hotel in some rather mixed company.
Aside from Amber and myself, there was the American trade specialist, whom I’ll call Dave, and another American, Roger Barlow, whom I’d met before. Barlow, in addition to being a firearms expert in his own right, was a cinematographer who had been hired to make a promotional movie of our tour and hunting.
The other members of our suspicious-looking group were Hans, an Austrian who looked after the computer maker’s affairs in Europe, and Viktor, a Russian whose English-printed business card proclaimed him a “Consultant for Technical Product Trade Alliances,” or some such hopelessly unfathomable bureaucratic title.
Viktor and I hadn’t hit it off very well at first, beginning with my rather discourteous inquiry if it were possible to get a gin and tonic in Russia, followed by his scowling admonishment that they were not uncivilized bears. As we sat glaring at each other and contemplating an escalation of the Cold War, Hans relieved the growing tension by asking if we would like to go upstairs and see the money.
Carmichel (third from left) poses with foresters and the hunters in front of the Russian lodge. Viktor (far left) was assigned by the KGB to keep tabs on the author.
“The what?”
“The money,” he replied, chuckling at my befuddlement, then began explaining the peculiarities of doing business with the Soviet government.
As the ancient birdcage-shaped elevator creaked and bumped its way to the top floor, Hans let us in on the strange fact that the Soviets paid cash in their international trade deals.
The catch to paying rubles on the barrelhead, however, is that the money is almost worthless and besides that, it couldn’t be taken out of the country. Which is why their so-called cash business had to be propped up with trades for Russian goods, such as the guns Amber and I had come to have a look at.
As a result of such dealings, so much Russian money had been accumulated by his company that Hans had rented a hotel room to store it in. In fact, the entire top floor of the hotel!
“Why bother with a bank,” he further explained, “when rubles aren’t worth stealing.”
And having thus explained what we were about to see, Hans produced a key and swung open the door of a large room. And there, in great piles in the middle of the floor and terraced against the walls, were big bundles of rubles, all in large denominations.
Astonished by so much money lying around relatively unguarded, I was somehow reminded of the Donald Duck comic books I’d read as a kid, in which Donald’s Uncle Scrooge McDuck hoarded huge piles of money that he played with like a child in a sandbox.
“Part of my job,” Hans went on after my companions and I had recovered our collective breath, “is to look after this money and keep inventory. Fresh piles of rubles come in pretty often.”
“But what will become of it?” I had to ask.
“Who knows,” Hans answered with a shoulder shrug, as if he had no particular interest. Shrugs, as I was to learn in coming days, are part of the Russian language. Especially in official circles.
Over the next three days we looked at guns, were escorted from place to place like dignitaries, indeed saw the Kremlin gun collection, and ate some awful meals (I’ll tell that story another time).
We also did some skeet shooting with Eugene Petrov, the Olympic gold-medalist shooter (I let him beat me because it was the politically polite thing to do), saw the changing of the guard at Lenin’s tomb, and took in a wonderful performance at the famed Bolshoi Ballet.
After the ballet, we attended a fancy reception at one of the gilded and chandelier-hung government palaces. Most of the attendees were military types, each of whom was festooned with yards of gold braid and acres of service medals, so I figured they must be important guys.
They seemed to be bored with the affair and indifferent to their American guests, eagerly consuming vodka and caviar with the same single-minded diligence I’ve observed when dealing with American bureaucrats.
Meanwhile, Viktor and I were hitting it off better. He spoke American English with a New York accent that he picked up when he was a member of the Soviet delegation to the U.N. He was a man to be liked, I discovered during our jaunts, but also a man to be feared.
I found this out late one afternoon, after he and I had been on a walking tour of Moscow and decided we were too far from the hotel to walk back and had better take a taxi.
There were plenty of empty cabs going by, but none seemed interested in stopping, apparently because their daily quotas had been filled and they were just joy riding.
After several minutes of fruitless cab hailing, Viktor calmly stepped into the lines of traffic and held up his hand so the oncoming cabs could see what he held in his palm. From my angle I couldn’t see what he was holding, but it was powerful stuff because a half-dozen or so taxis screeched to a halt, their drivers tumbling out and jerking the rear doors open for our entry, all grinning and bowing like boys caught misbehaving.
We selected the cleaner looking and best repaired of the taxis. Once inside, I took a long look at Viktor and suddenly KGB flashed in my mind like a fluttering neon sign – the dreaded Soviet Secret Police.
So that’s it, I realized, Viktor’s job is to keep an eye on us and make sure we don’t get into trouble.
He must have sensed my questions in the making because before I could speak, he simply shrugged and settled back for our silent ride through the darkening streets of Moscow. When we arrived at the hotel a light snow had begun to fall, and I wondered if I was seeing the beginning of the Russian winter. It had defeated Napoleon’s might and a vast German army. Would a couple of American gunwriters fair any better?
Carmichel grips a cluster of bloody oak leaves, which in accordance to Russian tradition, he then placed inside his cap.
According to our schedule, we were to fly several hundred miles south of Moscow to the city of Krasnadar, and from there, drive to a camp where we would hunt the fabled Russian stag.
None of us, Viktor included, had any idea what a Russian hunting camp would be like or what services it would offer. So, to be on the safe side, we figured it would be wise to stock up on some caviar, smoked salmon, and other such nutrients vital to survival in a hunting camp. And a few bottles of vodka wouldn’t be a bad idea either.
To pay for these necessities, we raided Han’s hoard of rubles at the hotel and filled a scuffed and ancient crocodile suitcase we found in one of the rooms.
But as it turned out, the foodstuffs we needed were not available at the bare-shelved peoples’ markets. In order to buy caviar and other such desirable Russian goods, we had to go to relatively swanky, state-run shops that catered only to foreign currency, preferably U.S. dollars. When we flipped open our ruble-stuffed suitcase and offered to pay in local greenbacks, the husky saleswoman scowled and slammed the lid closed.
“Nyet.”
It’s about $3.50 U.S. for one ruble. The illegal street exchange rate, however, was about ten rubles for a single dollar. The ridiculous exchange rate, as it turned out, was to bring our hunt to an almost unhappy conclusion.
The shopping tour was a lesson in Soviet economics, but not particularly a surprise because after the previous days in the capital city, I was getting a clearer idea of what Winston Churchill had meant when he said, “Russia is a riddle inside a puzzle wrapped in an enigma.”
When we got back to our hotel, laden with our survival foods and finished packing for departure for the airport, another Russian mystery presented itself: Viktor’s almost psychotic fear of flying.
Only he didn’t tell us of his fearful distrust of flying on Aeroflot, the Soviet State airline, but rather, lied about the airport at Krasnadar, our destination, being closed for repair and that we would have to go by train. His explanation about the closed airport seemed a bit thin, but no one questioned his motives except to ask if train reservations had been made.
Viktor shrugged, “We’ll take care of that when we get to the station,” and I had visions of us crammed into a drafty boxcar filled with smelly peasants and chugging across a frozen landscape like in a scene from Doctor Zhivago.
The reality of the train we were to take was pleasantly different. It was huge, with tracks of a wider gauge than ours, and pulled by a gigantic, gleaming engine surmounted by the symbolic hammer and sickle of Soviet Communism.
But very uncommunistic, for a supposedly classless society, was that the train offered four classes of travel. Upon learning this, we naturally hoped that we could get First Class seats, but without prior reservations it seemed doubtful.
”I’ll see what I can do,” Viktor shrugged and casually approached a pudgy, cheery-looking young woman, dressed in what looked like a stewardess uniform, standing by the steps of the yacht-like First Class car.
He spoke quietly to her for a moment and was answered by a vehement shaking of her head and a flurry of negative hand gestures. Clearly, there was no First Class space available, and I was resigning myself to travel among the deodorant-challenged masses when Viktor gently took the stewardess by the arm and walked her a short way down the platform with their backs to us and out of hearing.
When they returned, she climbed into the First Class coach and Viktor walked over to our apprehensive group.
“It will be a few minutes…she is reassigning the First-Class compartments, and then we will get on board.”
Viktor’s mysterious badge had again worked its magic.
The trip to Krasnadar lasted 28 hours, and as the giant train roared through miles of primeval forests and across seemingly endless plains, I saw firsthand the abject failure of communism: wheat fields big enough to feed a nation were littered with abandoned farm machinery, while in the villages, horses tugged carts along muddy streets.
Wandering through the crowded lower class coaches I saw only sullen faces until I reached Fourth Class, where some turbaned Kuzaks were cooking over tiny alcohol stoves. A woman, probably younger than she looked, with her head tightly swathed in a patterned shawl, smiled at me with government-issue stainless steel teeth and invited me to eat with them by pointing at a steaming pot and patting her stomach. It smelled delicious.
The only other sounds of gaiety I heard as the hours passed were uproarious laughter and shrill giggles from a compartment near mine that was inhabited by two Soviet generals and a couple of women who looked too young to be their wives.
On the few occasions any of them emerged from the compartment, they wore faces of solemn dignity, but when the door closed, the giggling would resume. In our own compartments the supply of caviar and salmon diminished at a steady rate and was completely gone by the time our train arrived in Krasnadar.
Which was just as well because our hunting “camp” was a villa once used by the Czars of Imperial Russia and their hunting buddies. It was fully staffed by cooks and maids and gamekeepers who wore the traditional European gamekeeper’s insignia of oak clusters but entwined in their gold-embroidered leaves was the hammer and sickle.
After many introductions to officials whose names I couldn’t possibly understand or remember, we were ushered into a small meeting room with a podium over which hung a portrait of Lenin sitting by a campfire, shotgun over his knee, and apparently haranguing a cluster of fellow hunters.
A white-uniformed maid, as sour looking as she was fat, served scalding tea marble-hard biscuits after which the chief forester welcomed us briefly in passable English, then went about the serious business of explaining the rules of Russian hunting.
His main concern, it seemed, was that we understood their trophy scoring system and, using charts and diagrams, detailed the measurement methods and how a monetary value was attached to various trophy points.
At the time I was under the impression that I was a non-paying guest and paid little attention to the price tags attached to various parts of a stag’s antlers, but I couldn’t help but note the distinctly capitalistic way they were intent on profiting from their deer herd.
That evening, over a meal better than anything we’d had in Moscow, the vodka left over from our train ride disappeared. As it did, the stony-faced local officials became increasingly convivial and the foresters who would be our guides on the morrow raised endless toasts to our coming success.
The Russian stag we were hunting is more commonly known throughout Europe as red deer and is a cousin to North American elk, though somewhat smaller and with a rather different antler configuration, typically branching into a cluster of points at the upper ends. On the better trophies these upper points may palmate into cuplike formations called chalices. The Soviet pricing schedule put a high value on fine chalices.
On the morning of our hunt we were issued our rifles, which were Baikal Medveds. (Baikal is the trade name applied to most Russian sporting arms, more or less the equivalent of Remington or Winchester.) The gas-operated Medved autoloader, even with its checkered sporter-style stocks, has distinctly military parentage with an over-the-barrel action rod and military-style sights similar to the Simonov and AK systems. The caliber was 9mm and looked something like a .35 Remington but a bit shorter.
When I asked for ballistic details, I was answered with a shrug and told it was called “deer.” Another sporting caliber, I learned, is called “bear.” Which probably means that Russian big game hunters don’t have much to debate or choose from in the way of calibers. Only one of the rifles had a scope – a stubby low-power model that looked to be of WW II sniper vintage, which John Amber opted to use.
The vast woodland around us was known as the Red Forest, which was no surprise as they attached the color of revolution communism to about everything (Red Square in Moscow, for example). The deer are hunted from stands with beaters driving the game toward the guns.
The stands turned out to be impromptu hiding places selected by our individual guides. My chain-smoking guide spoke no more English than I spoke Russian and carried a battered bolt-action rifle of ancient origin. Despite the language barrier – or because of it – we got along pretty well with the sign language that hunters communicate with the world over.
A Russian guide with the author’s big jackal.
On the first drive we spotted a jackal zigzagging in our direction. I wasn’t sure if it was on the shooting menu and raised my eyebrows in the universal questioning expression. He responded by nodding in the affirmative, touching my rifle and making a shooting gesture. So when the jackal came within about 25 yards, I killed it with an easy shot. This pleased the guide immensely, who pantomimed that he would take the skin and make it into a fur cap.
When I fired at the jackal, the front sight fell off my rifle and was retrieved by the guide after a brief search in the leaves. He slipped the sight back onto the muzzle – still as loose as before –and smiled with satisfaction at the repair.
Now it was my turn to shrug, and I made a mental note to recommend that the Medved not be imported for American hunters.
There were two drives that morning and on the second drive we heard a couple of nearby shots followed minutes later by a running Viktor, explaining that he had wounded a stag and asking if it had come our way. We had seen nothing.
On the second day of our hunt, I was stationed at the edge of a vast, recently plowed field. Two deer had been bagged the previous afternoon, plus the wounded one Viktor was still tracking, but I had seen nothing.
More and more I was blaming my poor luck on my guide’s incessant cigarette smoking, which was probably spooking any deer headed our way. Just as I was contemplating a complaint to the head forester, the guide made a hissing sound and nudged me toward the open field.
There, coming in from an angle that would bring them within 75 yards, was a gang of five or six stags running in a loose bunch. All had good antlers, and as far as I could tell, each was good as the others so I simply swung the loose sights of my Medved ahead of the lead stag and pulled the two-stage trigger.
The shot had no effect that I could see except to turn the deer toward the safety of the forest. Just before they disappeared, I fired again, with no apparent effect. I was disgusted with my bungling shot and with myself even more for being so dumb as to hunt with a rifle without having had a chance to check its zero.
But just as I was beginning to utter my disgust, the guide put his cupped hand behind his ear, pantomiming hearing a distant sound, then pointing in the direction where the stags had disappeared. Then he broke into a big smoky grin and made a downward motion with his hands. I had hit the stag and it was down!
The next morning the Russians turned out in their best medal-bedecked suits and uniforms and presented us with rather elegant-looking certificates, which on closer inspection turned out to be scorecards tallying the points of our trophies. Handshakes and solemn congratulations were offered, and at the conclusion of the ceremony, a calculator was produced and it was obvious that rubles were being converted to U.S. dollars.
After considerable whispering among themselves and a bit of smug giggling, they presented us with our individual bills. Mine came to something a little over a hundred grand, and the main bureaucrat who handed us our bills stood in front of me in smiling anticipation, as if he thought I had that much cash on me and was going to hand it over.
The night before, Dave had warned us that the Russians would probably try to milk us for a bunch of dollars and outlined what our response was to be. Since I was the first of our group to be presented with the outrageous bill, I was the first to speak. I savored the moment.
Red Forest officials tally the huge cost of the author’s stag hunt, hoping to be paid in American dollars.
“You wish to pay in American, no?”
“Nyet,” I replied, returning the bureaucrat’s smile and ignoring his proffered bill for American money. “We’ll pay in rubles…your money.”
“Viktor, open that old suitcase so we can pay these guys off and get out of here.”
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Smedley Butler: The Marine Who Earned Two Medals of Honor by Will Dabbs
Major General Smedley Butler collected two Medals of Honor, fought across the globe, battled corruption at home, and later claimed powerful businessmen wanted him at the center of an American coup.
Before Smedley Butler, Let’s Talk About Names
My name is Willis. I might have preferred William, but I didn’t pick it. Mine is a family name. As such things go, it certainly could be worse.
Many famous individuals, particularly actors, often choose a new name if their original names seem insufficiently photogenic. John Wayne entered the world as Marion Robert Morrison. Cary Grant was born Archibald Leach. Michael Caine was Maurice Joseph Micklewhite. Charlie Sheen was Carlos Irwin Estevez. Comedian Jonah Hill was originally Jonah Feldstein. Vin Diesel began life as Mark Sinclair. Diesel changed his name at age seventeen when he became a professional bouncer at a fashionable New York nightclub.
There are countless examples. Famed British actress Helen Mirren was originally Ilyena Lydia Vasilievna Mironov. Olivia Wilde was Olivia Jane Cockburn before she became enamored with the playwright Oscar Wilde. Natalie Portman was Natalie Hershlag, but changed her name in a failed effort at protecting her privacy.
Caryn Elaine Johnson had such a problem with passing gas that her coworkers called her “Whoopi Cushion.” When her show business career began to take off, she adopted Whoopi Goldberg because somebody told her that folks with Jewish-sounding names did better in Hollywood. Apparently, it worked. She’s worth $60 million today.
The point is simply that some names can make surviving Second Grade pretty tough. Despite having been saddled with an objectively awkward moniker, Smedley Darlington Butler went on to do some pretty amazing things.
Butler was one of only two Marines in American history to have been awarded the Medal of Honor twice for two different combat engagements. In 1933, he was also tagged to lead a military coup to overthrow President Franklin Roosevelt. That effort kind of fizzled, but Smedley Butler was nonetheless a simply fascinating guy.
Smedley Butler Before the Legend: A Quaker Goes to War
Smedley Butler was born on 30 July 1881, in West Chester, Pennsylvania. He was the oldest of three sons born to Quaker parents. Butler was an accomplished athlete in High School, serving as captain of his baseball team and quarterback on the gridiron.
He quit school 38 days before his 17th birthday to enlist in the US Marine Corps. His dad was livid, but the young man was terrified he might miss the Spanish-American War. The administrators at his High School had mercy on him and granted him a diploma anyway.
Smedley’s dad served in the US House of Representatives for 31 years. He was chairman of the House Naval Affairs Committee under Presidents Harding and Coolidge. Having your dad managing the Marine Corps budget likely didn’t hurt the young Jarhead’s career prospects.
The younger Butler lied about his age and was granted a direct commission as a Marine officer. He arrived in Cuba just after the war ended. Butler piddled about the Marine Corps for another year but then mustered out. However, with the Philippine-American War now heating up, the young officer turned around and donned his uniform yet again, this time as a First Lieutenant.
From the Philippines to the Boxer Rebellion
Like many true warriors, Smedley Butler did not handle boredom well. When not in action, he drank excessively. He once got drunk and was relieved of command.
However, in October of 1899, Butler led 300 Marines to seize the town of Noveleta in the Philippines. Though he briefly panicked when his First Sergeant was hit, Butler regained his composure and led his Marines to rout the enemy. Once the carnage abated in the Philippines, Butler headed to China to put down the Boxer Rebellion.
During the Battle of Tientsin in the summer of 1900, Lieutenant Butler was shot through the thigh while rescuing a wounded Marine. Despite the grievous nature of his injury, Butler went on to help evacuate several of his troops under fire.
Four enlisted Marines earned the Medal of Honor in this engagement, but Marine officers were, at that time, not eligible for the award. However, Butler was granted the Marine Corps Brevet Medal, which also included a promotion to Captain. He was one of only twenty Marines in the history of the Corps to be so recognized.
Old Gimlet Eye and the Bloody Banana Wars
Having now tasted proper combat, Captain Butler just couldn’t get enough. He fought across Central America and the Caribbean in what has since come to be called the Banana Wars.
Even though Butler and his Marines were protecting American business interests, they still no doubt faced some profoundly fierce combat. Losing Marines in support of the United Fruit Company and similar corporate concerns made a deep and lasting impression.
In 1903, Butler took a detachment of Marines into Trujillo, Honduras, looking for trouble. Their primary mission was to secure the American consulate there. In a subsequent letter home, he said that he and his Marines were “Prepared to land and shoot everybody and everything that was breaking the peace.”
They landed amidst a 55-hour ongoing firefight between rebels and government forces. They found the American consul hiding in the rafters of the consulate, wrapped in an American flag. Once they got clear of the town with the American diplomat in tow, the opposing forces resumed killing each other.
At some point in all this traipsing about the jungle, Smedley Butler contracted a variety of bizarre tropical diseases. While rescuing the American consul, Butler was feverish with something or other and had sunken red eyes.
His men began calling him “Old Gimlet Eye.” A gimlet is either a cocktail made with gin and lime or a small tool designed to bore holes in wood. This was one of several respectful, though unsettling monikers bestowed upon him by his troops.
Vera Cruz and Smedley Butler’s First Medal of Honor
Butler subsequently fought all over South and Central America. He once led his battalion to relieve a besieged city on the island of Grenada while running a 104-degree fever.
In April of 1914, he led his troops in an assault on Vera Cruz, Mexico. The fight roiled across the city and ultimately cost American forces 17 dead and 63 wounded. Along the way, Smedley Butler earned the Medal of Honor.
His citation reads in part, “For distinguished conduct in battle, engagement of Vera Cruz, 22 April 1914. Major Butler was eminent and conspicuous in command of his battalion. He exhibited courage and skill in leading his men through the action of the 22d and in the final occupation of the city.” The rules had obviously been changed by then to allow officers to earn the rarefied decoration.
Haiti and Smedley Butler’s Second Medal of Honor
Six months later, Smedley Butler invaded Haiti. He first arrived in the lawless area around Fort Dipitie with 44 Marines. They were ambushed by a force of 400 indigenous Cacos and, surrounded, fought them off all night long. The following morning, Butler organized an infantry charge that repelled the enemy forces in disarray.
On 17 November 1915, Butler led an ad hoc battalion of Marines and sailors in an infiltration of Fort Rivière. The subsequent combat was hand-to-hand and pitiless. When they took the fort, 50 Haitians were dead, and Smedley Butler had earned his second Medal of Honor.
Here’s the citation: “For extraordinary heroism in action as Commanding Officer of detachments from the 5th, 13th, 23d Companies and the Marine and sailor detachment from the U.S.S. Connecticut, Major Butler led the attack on Fort Rivière, Haiti, 17 November 1915. Following a concentrated drive, several different detachments of Marines gradually closed in on the old French bastion fort to cut off all avenues of retreat for the Cacos. Reaching the fort on the southern side where there was a small opening in the wall, Major Butler gave the signal to attack, and Marines from the 15th Company poured through the breach, engaged the Cacos, took the bastion, and crushed the Cacos resistance.”
World War I Passed Him By, but Smedley Butler Kept Fighting
Butler was not granted a combat command during World War 1. There were several reasons for this, some political and others practical. Along the way, he had developed a reputation for erratic behavior. Butler subsequently came home to command the Marine Corps Base Quantico, Virginia.
From Marine General to Philadelphia’s Crime Fighter
This was a different time. In 1924, W. Freeland Kendrick had been elected mayor of Philadelphia and faced a city awash in Prohibition-driven corruption.
President Calvin Coolidge therefore released General Butler to serve as the city’s Director of Public Safety in charge of both fire and police forces. Butler reassigned his police officers to unfamiliar precincts to upset the inevitable protection rackets he knew to be active.
In his first two days on the job, Butler’s cops raided 900 illegal liquor clubs. He was quoted as having told his officers, “I don’t believe there is a single bandit notch on a policeman’s gun in this city; go out and get some.” I wonder how that might go over today….
The Business Plot: Smedley Butler’s Strangest Battle
Butler eventually retired and became an outspoken critic of war profiteering. In November of 1934, Butler claimed that there was a plot afoot led by prominent American businessmen to field a 500,000-man army of military veterans and march on Washington, depose FDR, and install MG Butler as dictator.
Along the way, Butler named names. The alleged conspirators dismissed the claims as bluff and bluster, but subsequent evidence came to light that lent credence to the plot. Regardless, Butler’s testimony before a House committee drove those behind it back into the shadows. Historians now call this sordid episode the Business Plot.
The Fighting Quaker’s Final Years and Legacy
Major General Butler finally retired to Newton Township, Pennsylvania, with his wife. In 1940, he fell ill and was found to be suffering from what was likely stomach cancer. He had a drinking history, and videos I tracked down in preparing this article sounded like he was a smoker as well.
“The Fighting Quaker,” also known as “Old Gimlet Eye,” succumbed to his disease in June of 1940. He was 58 years old. A real “Break Glass in Case of War” Marine, Smedley Butler was indeed a Leatherneck’s Leatherneck.
A real WWII gold grab with OSS shadows and missing bars reads like Kelly’s Heroes with receipts. The chaos was real, the loot was massive, and the ending still stings.
Why Nazi Gold Made The Perfect Movie Villain Fuel
Second only to Aliens, Kelley’s Heroes is my favorite movie. Featuring an ensemble cast led by Clint Eastwood, Telly Savalas, Donald Sutherland, and Don Rickles, Kelley’s Heroes is equal parts comedy, caper movie, action film, and subtle antiwar commentary. Even with the benefit of half a century’s worth of hindsight, I don’t think I’d change a thing. It was perfect.
If you haven’t seen it yet, drop what you’re doing and check it out. You can stream it on Hulu Premium for free or most anywhere else for less than four bucks. It doesn’t matter if you are driving an 18-wheeler, leading a board meeting, flying an airplane, or delivering a baby; do it now. You’ll thank me later.
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From Merkers To Mittenwald: How The Gold Got Loose
The basic premise is indeed intoxicating. What if a bunch of normal guys found themselves in the sort of place where they could knock over a bank and get away with it? That would presuppose a catastrophic yet transient breakdown in social order, something you might find in the waning days of a dying empire. While Kelly’s Heroes was indeed a delightful watch, it was actually based on a real heist. This robbery was orchestrated by an eclectic amalgam of American GIs, German soldiers, and a couple of real-deal spies in the chaotic last days of World War 2. Depending upon how you rate them, this was arguably the most successful bank robbery of all time.
The Setting
There is a reason the Nazis make the best movie villains. They had all the trappings of the ideal bad guys. They were snappy-dressing narcissists who were also inveterate racists. They believed to their core that they were the super race destined to rule over the rest of humanity with an iron fist. Curiously, the rest of humanity was not terribly keen on that. By 1945, the Third Reich’s pigeons were coming home to roost.
In addition to seizing most of Europe by brutal force of arms, the Germans also ruthlessly looted their occupied territories. Many priceless art treasures made it into Herman Goering’s private collection. Untold tons of precious metals and sundry valuables stolen from the occupied lands were moved to the Reichsbank in Berlin for safekeeping.
In February of that year, nearly 1,000 American heavy bombers hammered the German capital. The Reichsbank employees weathered the raid in the basement of the structure, while the upper portion of the building was pulverized. As a result, Hitler directed that the pilfered loot be relocated to decentralized holding areas to keep it from being destroyed.
Much of that stuff was subsequently moved to repurposed repositories in southern Germany and Austria. Most Germans appreciated that the war was lost. The planned protracted insurgency that was to erupt after the formal shooting stopped was going to cost a fortune. The plan was to utilize this stolen gold and pilfered currency to keep that insurgency burning.
One of the primary hiding spots was the Merkers potassium mine southwest of Berlin. This exceptionally deep mine ended up the repository for around 100 tons of gold, along with paper currency from a variety of occupied countries and assorted valuables. This included priceless artworks by the great masters.
The total value of these Nazi gold stocks was approximately $520 million in 1945. That’s around $8 billion in today’s money. A period inventory reported 3,682 large bundles of German Marks, 80 bags of assorted foreign currency, 8,307 gold bars, 55 boxes of gold bullion, 3,326 bags of gold coins, 63 bags of silver, 1 bag of platinum bars, and 207 containers of assorted loot. There were also 8 bags of stolen gold rings, most of which came from the death camps.
The Scenario
That’s a lot of gold, but that wasn’t all of it. What remained, an estimated $151 million at the time, was moved to the resort town of Mittenwald in Bavaria. There it was stashed away at a remote lodge.
Gold is dense and heavy. Moving this much of it was harder than you might think. Two of the German officers tasked with spiriting this stuff away divided the massive horde into smaller chunks and then cached them separately around the area. Throughout it all, the Americans doggedly followed up rumors in an effort to secure these Nazi gold reserves. After interrogating several captured German soldiers, a small American motorized engineer unit discovered a total of 728 bars hidden underneath a tree stump adjacent to Lake Walchen. Is this starting to sound familiar?
Each of the 728 bars was worth $15,000 at the time. That’s about $267,000 apiece or a total of $194 million today. That’s a whole lot of money. These engineers dutifully removed the gold to the Reichsbank vault in Frankfurt. However, while these 728 bars were impressive, a larger stash of 2,500 just disappeared. These 2,500 bars were originally divided up into 25 crates of 100 bars apiece.
Most of what we know of this story comes from interviews with SGT Albert Singleton. Singleton was assigned to the office of the Provost Marshal for the 10th Armored Division. He reported that his commander, a CPT Craig, was ordered to head up into the mountains with a halftrack, a guard detail, and a couple of captured German officers to retrieve a rumored gold stash. En route, they purportedly encountered a pair of American OSS officers with two deuce-and-a-half trucks. The Office of Strategic Services was the wartime predecessor to the CIA.
The OSS guys already knew where this cache was hidden. They led CPT Craig and his men up to a 12 by 12-foot bunker hidden underneath a trap door that was stacked to the ceiling with boxes of gold bars. This bunker was oriented fairly high up a mountainside. The men fashioned a slide they used to move the individual bars down the mountain before putting them into sacks and loading everything onto the trucks.
Singleton testified that the following day, he received a telegram reporting that the recovered cache was safely secured in Munich. However, amidst the fog of war, the details of this stash were conflated with the 728 bars that had actually made it to Frankfurt. When queries were made to Munich later, there was no record of their receiving any recovered gold bullion.
Did They Get Away With It The Evidence Says Yes
1.25 tons of pure gold bullion simply vanished. The authorities investigated, but nothing materialized. In the chaos that was the end of the war in Europe, there were bigger fish to fry.
The Guinness Book of World Records once sported this entry under the heading of Greatest Bank Robbery of All Time:
“The greatest robbery on record was of the German National Gold Reserves in Bavaria by a combine of US Military personnel and German civilians in June 1945, A total of 730 gold bars valued at £3,528,000 together with six sacks of banks notes and 25 boxes of platinum bars and precious stones disappeared in transit but none of those responsible has been brought to trial.”
In reality, this report stemmed from the original confusion between the 728 bars that were actually recovered and the 2,500 that were lost. Presuming the bars were the same size, that was the modern equivalent of $666 million. That would be more than adequate to set a couple of ex-OSS guys up very nicely on a beach somewhere after the war. CPT Craig and the security detail also likely got a pretty healthy cut. Perhaps those two German officers who were in the halftrack got a little sweetness to help keep them quiet, as well. By my count, that was maybe eight guys total. They never talked. Nobody will ever know the details.
What Vanished Gold Teaches Us About War And Chaos
With American airpower systematically deconstructing his nation’s military in 2003, Saddam Hussein dispatched his son Qusay to Iraq’s Central Bank with a handwritten note demanding he be given access to the vaults. Qusay left with around a billion dollars in cash. $350 million of that was never recovered. We may explore that story in this space at some point in the future. Adjusted for inflation, these opportunistic GIs operating at the end of WW2 got away with more than that.
Kelly’s Heroes was indeed an epic movie. Three Kings, with Mark Wahlberg and George Clooney, enjoyed a very similar plot set during the First Gulf War. Regardless of the details, it seems that, yet again, art imitates life.
WWII Nazi Gold Heist Facts And Figures
| Primary Repository | Merkers potassium mine |
|---|---|
| Total Value Noted 1945 | $520 million |
| Modern Rough Equivalent | $8 billion |
| Recovered Bars | 728 bars at Lake Walchen |
| Per Bar Value Then | $15,000 |
| Per Bar Value Now | $267,000 |
| Missing Stash | 2,500 bars in 25 crates of 100 |
| Hidden Bunker Size | 12 by 12-foot |
| Gold That Vanished | 1.25 tons |
Sadly and probably to the relief of both of these states, I don’t !! Grumpy