Learning

After being forced from El Chipote, Sandino struck south towards San Rafael del Norte, Jinotega and Matagalpa. Thereafter, his bands were constantly on the move. By mid-1928, they had, the American journalist Carleton Beals wrote:

"learned the habits of the airplanes. The Sandinistas travel early in the morning, late in the afternoon, or at night; at other times only in the jungles where they are invisible from above." (Conrad, 1990, 176)

The Sandinistas enjoyed good intelligence from their agents, even though communications were accomplished by runner. Beals wrote:

"The espionage system of Sandino is excellent. When we neared Jinotega Colonel Colindres ordered two soldiers to take off their red and black hat bands, remove their leggings, tie bundles over their shoulders, and report on the activities of the marines in the town of Jinotega and elsewhere. There was nothing whatever to identify them as Sandino soldiers. In contrast, an outsider in a Sandino encampment must explain his presence…" (Conrad, 1990, 176)

Although the Sandinistas had supply routes running through Honduras, their weapons were both captured and improvised, and included "bombs…. made of a certain amount of dynamite wrapped in several layers of lightly dampened rawhide with inverted nuts, nails, staples, pieces of metal from unserviceable rifles and pistols or any other metal objects we could find."(Conrad, 1990, 163) At Telpaneca, at least three members of the assault force were armed with Thompson sub-machine guns, and, thereafter, weapons of this type were often found in Sandinista hands.

To obtain food and funds, the Sandinistas raided farms and plantations, villages and towns, confiscating property and forcing contributions to the war effort. Sandino, however, recognised that a measure of restraint was essential if he was to retain the support of the people of northern Nicaragua, and his officers were instructed to prevent indiscriminate pillaging and give receipts for the property they took. Anyone who felt they had been treated unfairly by the insurgents could send protests to Sandino and sometimes get a hearing from him. Occasionally, he would scale down the contribution demanded when it was shown to be excessive. But to those who refused to co-operate, and especially those who assisted the Marines or Guardia Nacional, savage punishments were meted out.

After Ocotal, it was rare for large numbers of guerrillas to concentrate. On 18 June 1930, however, two Marine planes spotted one such gathering of 400 men heading toward El Saraguazca mountain, which lay within striking distance of the town of Jinotega. The planes immediately attacked, and, after expending all their ammunition, dropped a warning message to the Jinotega garrison, and then flew away to Managua to give the alarm there. A strong Guardia Nacional force was assembled at Jinotega, and six Marine planes loaded up at Managua for a strike on El Saraguazca. Meanwhile, at about noon, a Guardia patrol which happened to be in the area made contact with the Sandinistas, and had lost two men wounded by the time the planes from Managua appeared over El Saraguazca.

The Sandinistas on El Saraguazca were well protected by boulders and trees and generally invisible to the airmen, who covered the mountain with bombs and machine gun fire, hoping to keep the insurgents pinned down till the Jinotega column arrived on the scene. But the Jinotega column was late, and by the time it arrived the planes had run out of ammunition. About fifteen minutes after the aircraft had flown away, the Guardias from Jinotega began their attack. Contact, however, was lost as soon as darkness fell, and during the night the Sandinistas slipped away to the north.

Sandino's claim that he lost only one man killed and two wounded, including himself, in this action may be correct; but the fact remains that his troops were forced to disperse and abandon their planned attack on Jinotega.

Ambush Tactics Sandinista ambush parties were usually positioned in a "V' or horseshoe formation, with the open end serving as an escape route for the enemy. The Sandinistas recognised that without this exit, an ambushed patrol would have no choice but to try to smash a way through the guerrilla lines. From their point of view this was undesirable, for they realised that they could usually inflict more casualties or. the enemy at less cost to themselves by inducing him to run through the open end of the horseshoe or "V'.

One notable ambush was that which occurred at 1.30 pm on 27 February 1928, when an empty convoy of ninety-five pack mules, escorted by thirty-five Marines, under First Lieutenant Edward F. O'Day, was on the march between Yali and Condega, its home base. As the column was making its way over an open stretch of country near the town of Bromaderos, with a high ridge and crude native lava wall to its right, it was hit by a fierce burst of fire, accompanied by a shower of dynamite bombs, from front and rear and along its entire right from behind the wall. The mules stampeded and the Marines, rallied by Lieutenant O'Day and his senior NCO, Sergeant Isham, formed a firing line along a lower ridge to the left, facing the Sandinistas across the trail.

After an hour-long exchange of fire, the insurgents, more than 600 strong, charged the Marines position in a regular skirmish line, covered by the fire of at least four machine guns. Despite their superiority in numbers, they were thrown back to the trail, where they regrouped, and, under cover of the machine guns, looted the remnants of the convoy. At dusk, they made a second attempt to assault the Marines position, but were again stopped by rifle fire. Again they fell back and resumed a continuous fire on the beleaguered platoon of Marines.

Meanwhile, a runner from O'Day's detachment slipped past the guerrillas, and, at 10.30 pm, reported the ambush to Captain William K. MacNulty, who was patrolling the area with a force of about eighty-eight Marines. At dawn, MacNulty made contact with 0'Day and attacked the Sandinistas right flank, supported by a machine gun. At first, the guerrillas returned fire, but by 8 am they had retired, carrying, as always, their dead and wounded with them. Five Marines died in this ambush, three from machete wounds, and eight were wounded.

In May 1928, under pressure from the Marines, the Sandinistas retired into that portion of the Jinotega Department which is drained by the Coco and Bocay Rivers. This was an area of dense jungle, which was crossed by only a few known trails, and in which daytime visibility was usually about twenty feet. Sandino had a number of secret trails cut through the jungle, often paralleling known trails, so as to provide avenues of withdrawal and enable him to better defend the area. He ordered his forces not to use horses, as aircraft could spot them easily and they could not be got through the bush quickly.

Instead, the Sandinistas moved along the jungle trails on foot, in single file, and closed up when the Marines were known to be far away. They crossed all open spaces on the double, and, when the Marines were known to be nearby, marched with about two paces between men. The point of a column usually consisted of two men, followed at about 100 yards by the commander and his staff, with the main body marching 100 yards behind the headquarters group. When a column had to move from one trail to another, the guerrillas would leave the first trail individually at different points, and make their way through the bush to some point on the second trail. Daytime marches usually began at about 5 am, and never later than 7 am. Sandinista patrols often travelled on moonlit nights, but rarely on dark nights or in the rain. Guerrilla bands moving during the daytime usually made camp by 2 pm. The camps were temporary structures built on the sides of hills, with sentries posted on the hilltops above them.

Defending Army

In the summer of 1931, Sandino divided his army, known as the Defending Army of the National Sovereignty of Nicaragua, into eight columns of between 75 and 150 men each, operating more or less independently. The Sandinistas now began targeting American companies, with the properties of the Standard Fruit Company in eastern Nicaragua coming under sustained guerrilla attack in early 1931 at a time of labour unrest on the banana plantations. They also attempted, with less success, to disrupt the presidential elections of 1928 and 1932.

The difficulty for the Marines in meeting the insurgent threat was compounded by the refusal of the State Department to permit a declaration of war by the Nicaraguan Government. It was thought that such a declaration would raise Sandino's status from that of bandit to leader of an organised rebellion, with the possibility of his belligerency being recognised by other nations. As no state of war was deemed to exist, martial law could not be declared.

Consequently, the Marines and Guardia Nacional had no way of dealing with part-time guerrillas, who, for most of the time, assumed the guise of innocent civilians, but who were always ready to provide food and information, or join the regulars for an especially important operation. At Bromaderos, for example, a large part of the Sandinista force was recruited from the nearby towns and villages shortly before the encounter. After the fight, they returned to their homes and resumed their normal occupations, awaiting the next call to arms. Often suspected guerrillas were rounded up by the Marines or Guardia Nacional, only to be released on a writ of habeus corpus. Sometimes, even prisoners of war were released on writs of habeus corpus.

There was no question of the Marines and Guardia Nacional using even non-lethal chemical agents, such as tear gas, and restrictions were placed on American air power so that towns could not be attacked. Thus, when Major Rowell, on an armed reconnaissance, discovered a large force of guerrillas bivouacked at San Rafael del Norte in February 1928, he was unable to strike and merely made a non-firing pass over the town.

Another problem was that the intervention in Nicaragua was, like all overseas interventions, unpopular in the United States. So the deaths in ambush of eight Marines repairing telephone lines near Achuapa on 31 December 1930 led to an announcement that most of the 1,500 remaining Marines would be withdrawn by June 1931 and all the rest after the 1932 elections.

Marine strength in Nicaragua varied considerably due to misconceptions as to the threat posed by Sandino and other international and economic factors. In March 1927, the following Marine units, totalling 2,000 men, were in country:

2nd Brigade Headquarters
5th Marine Regiment
Scouting Force Battalion (formed from the Marine detachments of USS Texas, Florida and Arkansas)
Landing parties from various warships
1st Observation Squadron (six DH-4s)

Tipitapa Accords

After the signing of the Tipitapa Accords (as the agreement of 4 May 1927 was known), Moncada realised that he could not possibly control all the irregular forces enlisted in the Liberal cause, so he and Díaz issued an appeal for additional Marines to disarm the rival armies, and, between 17 and 22 May, the 11th Marine Regiment and 4th Observation Squadron landed at Corinto. These units brought 2nd Brigade up to a strength of 181 officers and 2,800 enlisted men. The tense situation in China led to an over hasty reduction of this force. In June 1927, 1,000 officers and men were withdrawn from Nicaragua, and, on 6 September, the 11th Regiment left the country for disbandment and the 1st and 4th Observation Squadrons were merged to form the 7th Observation Squadron.

Thus, the only Marine units in Nicaragua during the first five months of the Sandinista rebellion were the 5th Regiment and 7th Observation Squadron. After word arrived in Washington of the reverse sustained in December 1927, orders were issued for the reactivation of the 11th Regiment and the 300 or so Marines in the Special Service Squadron (a force of cruisers and gunboats stationed off the Central American coasts) were attached to 2nd Brigade, as were several Marine detachments from other ships. More aviation, including three tri-motor Fokkers, the first transport planes ever assigned to the Marine Corps, reinforced 7th Observation Squadron.

By the end of January 1928, the strength of 2nd Brigade had risen to 2,700 officers and men. In August, however, the 11th Regiment was again withdrawn, leaving the brigade with about 2,000 men. The post-1929 economic depression forced new reductions to barely 1,000 by mid-1930, and Congress declined to fund additional manpower to help supervise the 1932 election. The conduct of the war, therefore, devolved increasingly upon the Guardia Nacional, with the remaining Marines concentrated at Managua, Matagalpa and Ocotal. Marine aviation, however, continued to support all field operations.

Guardia Nacional

Formed as a result of the Stimson-Moncada agreement, the American officered Guardia Nacional was designed to act as the paramilitary police force of the legally constituted government of Nicaragua, and was entirely distinct from the Marine brigade stationed in the country. Following two temporary commandants, Brigadier General (Marine Lieutenant Colonel) Elias R. Beadle was appointed as the Guardia's first permanent Jefe Director on 12 July 1927. Beadle believed that his new command should not be committed to field operations until it was properly trained, and so he adopted a policy of withholding the bulk of the Guardia as a rural police force for the peaceful areas, leaving the suppression of the rebellion in the north, for the time being, to the Marine brigade.

In this, he received the support of President Díaz and of the American Minister in Managua, Charles C. Eberhardt, but not that of the commander of 2nd Marine Brigade, Brigadier General Logan Feland, who resented the Jefe Director's independent command. Feland wanted the Guardia Nacional brought under his own control, and sent into the field to fight the Sandinistas. With the inauguration on 1 January 1929 of José Maria Moncada as President, Feland found a natural ally in his dispute with Beadle, for the new Chief Executive, too, was intent on destroying the independence of the Guardia Nacional, though for different reasons.

Abetted by Feland, Moncada began to renege on the agreement made with Stimson at Tipitapa. The President specifically objected to the provision that the non-partisan Guardia Nacional was to be the sole military and police force of the republic. In addition to the Guardia, Moncada wanted a corps of Voluntarios, commanded by Nicaraguan officers of his own choosing. Although the President might put this new force under Feland's control at first, Eberhardt feared that in future Moncada would use it to keep himself in power. Yet, despite the strenuous objections of the Minister and Beadle, who favoured an expansion of the Guardia Nacional to meet the demand for native troops in the combat areas, Moncada, on 8 January 1929, began recruiting his Voluntarios.

In all, two groups of Voluntarios, with a strength of approximately ninety men each, were organised. In the field, they had to operate in conjunction with Marine patrols, for they had no automatic weapons, and would, therefore, have been outgunned by the Sandinistas, who were often armed with such weapons.

Of the two Voluntario groups, one, commanded by General Augusto Caldera, with a Marine patrol under a Captain Stockes, took the field in January 1929 and operated from Ocotal in the general area of western Nuevo Segovia; and the other, commanded by General Juan Escamilla, a Mexican soldier-of-fortune, in conjunction with a Marine patrol under First Lieutenant H. H. Hanneken, took the field on 19 February 1929 and operated in the San Albino-El Chipote area.

The Escamilla group consisted of the General himself, seven colonels and about eighty enlisted men. The General and colonels were armed with two revolvers each, and the colonels also carried long, straight-edged machetes. All the colonels were men of mature age and considerable field experience. The enlisted men were a motley group of native Indians and Nicaraguans, ranging in age from 17-50 years. They were armed with Krag-Jorgenson rifles and 100 rounds of ammunition each. Some also carried a revolver or machete. Two cases of extra ammunition and thirty days rations were carried on twenty-five pack animals, several of which were bulls. Escamilla and three of the colonels had riding animals.

The Escamilla group's first patrol lasted for seventy-four days, during which time it suffered one casualty, a Nicaraguan enlisted man wounded in the arm during an encounter with the insurgents near Los Cedros on 27 April. Its second patrol lasted for thirty-eight days, and also resulted in but a single contact with the enemy.

President Moncada had signed an order giving Escamilla the power to convene military courts, which could award the death penalty. In the course of the aforementioned patrols, seven Sandinistas, including Manuel Maria Girón, one of Sandino's generals, were tried and executed by these courts. In response, the Conservative press in Nicaragua launched a full-scale attack on Escamilla and his American collaborators. Among other things, the General was labelled a Mexican adventurer, a murderer and a cut-throat. The Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, realised that the Nicaraguan Conservatives had some justification for their fears that the United States was helping Moncada to create a Liberal army, which, in future, might be employed against them. Stimson therefore instructed the United States authorities in Nicaragua to disassociate themselves from Escamilla's actions and urged Moncada to disband the Voluntarios without delay. Since the Guardia Nacional now had a new Jefe Director, Marine Colonel Douglas C. McDougal, the way was clear for a rapid expansion of the Guardia and its commitment to field operations.

With this programme under way, Stimson insisted that there was no longer any justification for the Voluntarios, and, in mid-June, Moncada agreed to disband them. The last members of the force were mustered out before the end of the summer, and jobs provided for them on a government road building project.

By the end of August 1929, three battalions of the Guardia Nacional were in the combat zone: 609 men in Nuevo Segovia and the adjoining areas of Estelí and Jinotega Departments; 414 in Matagalpa and southern Jinotega; and 257 in the eastern half of the country. The Guardia Nacional reached a total strength of 2,256 by October 1930, but financial difficulties forced a reduction to 160 officers and 1 ,650 enlisted men by the end of the year. In January 1931, however, these cuts were reversed, and the strength of the Guardia was raised to 2,350 officers and men.

Anti-Guerrilla Tactics

During the intervention in the Dominican Republic (1917-1922), the Marines had found that the best answer to the problems of banditry and guerrilla activity was constant and intensive patrolling by small groups of up to thirty men, often mounted, who remained in bandit/guerrilla areas for days or even weeks. Similar tactics were employed in Nicaragua.

Captain (Marine First Lieutenant ) Lewis "Chesty" Puller's "M" Company, Guardia Nacional, for example, operated from Jinotega as a 30-40 man patrol with light equipment carried on a few sturdy little Nicaraguan pack mules. To increase the mobility of his command, Puller dispensed with flank guards and if ambushed, relied upon the firepower provided by a Lewis gun, four rifles fitted with grenade launchers and six automatic weapons (Thompson sub-machine guns and Browning automatic rifles). His favoured automatic weapon, the Thompson SMG, had only a limited range, but this mattered little when contacts were at close range and of a brief duration.

Puller's most successful patrol was undertaken in September 1932. Early in that year, while on a reconnaissance north of Jinotega, he stumbled across a fifteen foot wide, newly cut and obviously well maintained trail, which he had never seen before, and which did not connect with any known trail. Since this trail pointed straight towards an uninhabited region, the Captain concluded that it was the Sandinistas means of descending unobserved from the wilds of the upper Coco River, east of El Chipote, into the populated area around Jinotega.

On 20 September, at the head of his forty-man company with eighteen pack mules, Puller and his second-in-command, Lieutenant (Marine Gunnery Sergeant) William A. Lee, struck out from Jinotega for the secret trail. On the fourth day out, more than forty miles from Jinotega, the scouts found an unoccupied guerrilla camp, and then two more. That day, the patrol located and destroyed eighteen empty guerrilla camps along twelve miles of trail. Next day, during a sixteen mile march, nine more camps were found and burnt. So far, despite every sign of the insurgents, including evidence that their scouts were tracking the patrol, not a living man had been seen.

On the following morning, 26 September, the patrol was crossing the stream of Agua Carta, seventy-five miles from Jinotega, when a fire of rifles and automatic weapons erupted from the jungle on the right of the trail. The Guardias counter-attacked, and the Sandinistas melted back into the bush.

The patrol then moved silently across a ridge, over another stream, and up a long narrow valley with ridges on both sides. As the point advanced, Captain Puller, the second man in the column, suddenly dived to the ground, and so did the point. As they dropped, a Sandinista opened up with an automatic rifle, and, with the first burst, killed the man behind Puller. Thereupon, a fire of musketry, dynamite bombs, hand and rifle grenades and at least seven machine guns or automatic rifles erupted from the whole of the ridge to the right. Three Guardias fell wounded, as did Lieutenant Lee, who, having been shot twice, was unable to cut the patrol's Lewis gun loose from its pack mule.

Under an intense fire, the Guardias began to fight their way up the slope, while Lee, by exerting all his strength, managed to get at the Lewis gun and bring it into action. Then more Sandinistas opened fire from the opposite ridge, now to the patrol's rear. This brought the total number of guerrillas to 150. Finally, the Guardias gained the summit of the right hand ridge, faced about, and raked the high ground opposite with musketry and rifle grenades. The Sandinistas firing slackened and then ceased. After the hour-long action, the patrol found sixteen guerrillas dead, and enough pools of blood to indicate that many more had been wounded.

His own wounded forced Puller to turn back, and four days later, after two more unsuccessful ambushes, in which the Sandinistas suffered yet more casualties, the patrol emerged from the jungle at Jinotega. In ten days, they had marched more than 150 miles, fought four actions, destroyed thirty guerrilla camps and killed at least thirty Sandinistas. Small wonder that an analysis of the Nicaraguan Guardia Nacional in 1937 concluded that if there had been seven more formations such as "M" Company, the campaign against Sandino would have been brought to a successful conclusion at an early stage.

For the patrol of September 1932, Puller was awarded his second Navy Cross and Lee his third.

Nicaraugua 1927-1932: The US Marines Go In
Nicaraugua 1927-1932: The Guardia Nacional Sweep