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This account of the U.S. Marine pacification of Haiti is the first of a three-part series condensed from a chapter dealing with the American occupation of Haiti from the book, WRITTEN IN BLOOD: The Story of the Haitian People-1492-1971, by Robert Debs Heinl and Nancy Gordon Heinl, published by Houghton Mifflin Company, Boston. Copyright © 1978 by Robert Debs Heinl Jr. and Nancy Gordon Heinl.
I - Pacification, 1915-1921
Late in the afternoon of 28 July 1915, 330 U.S. Marines and sailors - ship's landing force of the cruiser Washington - went ashore in steam launches at Port-au-Prince and swiftly secured the Haitian capital before nightfall.
With headquarters in the picturesque, filthy old Iron Market - "pervaded with a heavy odor, worse than a stable and more like a privy," reported the cruiser's surgeon - the men of the landing force could not know that the 19-year U.S. occupation of Haiti had just commenced.
The day before, infuriated mobs had dragged President Guillaume Sam from the sanctuary of the French legation and dismembered him in the street. Similar treatment had been meted out to one of his chief lieutenants, Gen Charles-Oscar Etienne, found hiding in the Dominican legation. What had stirred public fury throughout Port-au-Prince was one of the bloodiest savageries in the history of the Americas: On orders from the president, Gen Etienne had butchered 169 political hostages chosen from the elite of the city and crammed into the grim National Penitentiary downtown. The weapons employed had not been chosen for finesse or delicacy. They were rusty .50 caliber muskets, machetes, daggers and clubbed cocomacacs, the Haitian shillelagh which can beat a person to a pulp.
In the words of the British minister who first reached the scene that day, "They were found shot, hacked, mutilated, and disembowelled -the walls and floors of the prison were spattered with their blood, their brains, and their entrails."
The horrifying massacre accompanied by total disintegration of government and followed by simultaneous mob violation of two diplomatic missions provided ample justification for the U.S. landing at Port-au-Prince. But there was more to it than that.
Imperial Germany, toward which the United States was slowly edging into war, had over at least a decade been angling for...