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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.
Table of contents
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 |
What is shockingly clear is that the boys who were exposed to the horrors of war in the four years of unbridled bloodshed were hardened and trained to be raiders, which, when you think about it, are the prerequisites for a supreme education in outlawry after the war. And that is why the fighting, especially in Missouri and Kansas, paved the way for the Western gunfighter that followed, as a sort of master’s degree from a four-year college of war. This is that story.
After the battle of Centralia, rebel troops dallied with the dead Union soldiers. According to author T. J. Stiles, “The rebels walked among the dead, crushing faces with rifle butts and shoving bayonets through the bodies, pinning them to the ground. Others slid knives out of their sheaths and knelt down to work. One by one, they cut seventeen scalps loose, then carefully tied them to their saddles and bridles. At least one guerrilla carved a nose off a victim. Others sliced off ears, or sawed off heads and switched their bodies. Someone pulled the trousers off one corpse, cut off the penis and shoved it in the mouth of the dead man.”
It was a playground of juvenile atrocities.
William “Bloody Bill” Anderson, age 23
One 16-year-old bushwhacker was credited with killing the Union commander. The proud killer’s name was Jesse James. His older brother Frank, 17, later remembered, “We rode out of the woods low on our ponies, like Indians.”
They frolicked like this for some time until their commander, “the old man,” told them to stop. They called their leader “The Old Man.” William Anderson, also known as “Bloody Bill,” was 23.
A Teacher’s Bloody Field Trips
Born in Ohio, the eldest of 12 children, William Quantrill taught school off and on before turning to raiding in the “Bloody Kansas” corridor of the Civil War. His young charges included future outlaws Jesse and Frank James and Cole Younger, not to mention “Bloody Bill” Anderson, among others. He taught them all well.
His biggest raiding lesson came during the predawn hours of August 21, 1863, when some 450 of Quantrill’s Raiders rode into Lawrence, Kansas, and slaughtered more than 160 men and boys (some estimates have the bloody total at 190). They also robbed the bank and looted every home. However, their main target, James Henry Lane, the leader of the Free State Party of Kansas, escaped, barely, in his nightclothes by running through a cornfield and hiding.
Quantrill’s Bloodiest Field Trip on August 21, 1863
James Butler Hickok left his Monroe, Michigan, home at the age of 15 and grew up quick on the violent plains of Missouri and Kansas.
James Henry Lane (1814-1866) politician and leader of the Free State Party of Kansas
And It’s Off to Graduate School
At the end of the Civil War, a generation of boys looked for a reprieve from the fighting, but some of these kids were too well trained to let all those warfare skills go to waste. Especially when so many people in Missouri—and throughout most of the South—felt oppressed by the banks and the railroads.
With a little nudging—not much!—a whole bunch of spunky farm boys began to ply the trade they were trained for: bank robbery and train robbery. Over the course of the next 20 years, a whole bunch of banks and railroads felt the bite, and a whole slew of country outlaws rose to fame and infamy.
A couple of them rose damn close to immortality. And you know who that would include.
On July 21, 1873, a half-dozen men crouched next to the railroad tracks near Adair, Iowa. As a Rock Island train slowed for a big curve, the men dislodged the tracks, which derailed the train. This was the James-Younger Gang’s first foray into train robbery. The young robbers got away with close to $3,000 and became internationally famous for the attack.
When the James-Younger Gang took their act to Minnesota, they got a warmer welcome as the locals in Northfield put up a stiff resistance to the bank robbers, who barely got away with their lives. Eyewitnesses said on their escape, “They took the whole road.”
The James Gang by the Numbers
24 robberies • 11 banks
7 trains • 3 stagecoaches • 1 town looted
1 fairgrounds gate receipts robbery
1 steamboat robbery
19-year career of committing “crimes”
$323,000: estimated dollars stolen (gang member “Doc” Miller claimed the actual take was much higher because of under-reporting by railroads: $1,038,000)
O: minutes spent behind bars. Jesse was never arrested or captured.
27,000: the estimated number of Missourian deaths from guerrilla violence during the Civil War
37: number of movies about Jesse, so far
Do any of these stats change the way we think about Jesse? Not really, because. . .
“There are lies, damn lies and then there are statistics.”
— OLD VAQUERO SAYING —
Civilians were caught in the middle. They often were attacked by troops who were sent to protect them and then again by pro-Southern guerillas. The Union troops from Kansas were no better. In addition to “casual freebooting,” these blue-capped soldiers engaged in extortion and felt justified because they believed Missourians should be punished for their secessionist, slaveholding sins, and they subsequently raided, plundered and murdered with a special zeal.
After the war, the killer kids cashed in on their education. “Their exploits all partook of a semi-military
character, and could only have resulted from experience.” — THE KANSAS CITY JOURNAL OF COMMERCE —
The First Gunfighter
“What’s done to children, they will do to society.”
—Karl A. Menninger
“Are you Satisfied?”
James Butler “Wild Bill” Hickok allegedly turned on the gathered crowd and said these words to them. The utterance has added meaning because this lone event became the prototype for the stand up gunfight that became a staple in hundreds of Western movies.
The is is an excerpt from the forthcoming book, The Illustrated Life & Times of Jesse James. For details and preorders, go to truewestmagazine.com
An Iconic Myth Is Born
I can hear some old timer just before he died cursing Fetterman for getting into this mess. Grumpy