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Chapter 4:
The Banana Men
"But there is in our fellow citizen an innate martial spirit,
a yearning for adventure, which finds vent whenever any expedition with
the
prospect of a fight with any one at all, is undertaken ... the United States is
filled with soldiers of fortune." -- Arthur H. Dutton
After receiving his discharge, Holmdahl
worked a few weeks
in Oakland as a steam fitter, then a cryptic note in his hand
written diary states, "In the vaudeville business, Imitation
Animal Act greatest hit on the Orpheum Circuit." [1] Perhaps a phony
animal act was the genesis of Holmdahl's later talents as a confi-
dence man. Then, there is a curious gap of two years in his diary
entries. Consequently, it is not known how or when Holmdahl got
involved in the so-called "Banana Wars," waged intermittently in
Central America from 1880 until 1930.
Holmdahl later told friends of his fighting experiences under
General Lee Christmas, perhaps the greatest mercenary of them all;
but no written records exist. Undoubtedly, he was there because
many of the "banana men" who fought in those jungles also played
a prominent part in the Mexican Revolution and knew Holmdahl, if
not in person, at least by reputation.
The opposing sides in that struggle often resembled participants
in a game of musical chairs (although losers were not only out of
the game; they were probably shot). An old Central American
comrade of today might turn up on the other side tomorrow. Since
no one ever implied Holmdahl was a fraud, lack of records notwith-
standing, one may assume he took part in at least some of the many
revolts and wars in Honduras and Nicaragua from 1907 until the
summer of 1909. While it is unknown exactly what he did, some
probable assumptions can be made by following other mercenaries
in the jungle wars of Central America.
San Francisco and New Orleans were the prime recruiting areas
for the hard-faced men who fought for an)' side that paid in cash.
There was little, if any, ideological content in those revolutions, and
although one side might call themselves "liberal" and the other side
"conservative," the labels meant little. It was always a battle between
a family dynasty of ticos who were "in" and another dynasty who
were "out." Often an American banana company, wanting a land
concession or lower taxes or to wipe out a competitor, would
finance a revolt and recruit and pay the hired guns.
The revolutions meant little to the impoverished peasants who
labored for pittances on the banana and coffee plantations. As
Richard Harding Davis wrote, "Half of the people in the country
will not know of it (the revolution) until it has been put down or
succeeded." [2] He might have added that they couldn't have cared
less. After all, it amounted only to a change of masters, each total-
ly uncaring about their welfare. In recruiting locals to fight, the
standard joke was about the Honduran agent who dispatched his
"volunteers" to a rebel general with the note, "I send you 40 volun-
teers. Please return the ropes." [3]
As the Philippine insurrection began to falter, there were scores
of ex-soldiers, looking for work, who hung out in the Vieux Carre
in New Orleans, usually at the Hotel Monteleone. In San Francisco
you could usually find them in the rebuilt Tenderloin District, drink-
ing and eyeballing the girls. At those haunts they would be contact-
ed by entrepreneurs like Samuel "Sam the Banana Man" Zemurray,
the brains of the expanding American-owned United Fruit
Company. [4]
After agreeing on wages, the Americans usually boarded a
banana boat out of New Orleans bound for the Caribbean port of
Bluefields, Nicaragua. From there, they gathered at the Hotel
Tropical bar until they moved out through tick-infested mountains
and malaria-ridden jungles to their new "army" in El Salvador,
Honduras, Guatemala, or Nicaragua.
While some of the men who fought in those wars
were profes-
sional soldiers, others were cutthroats, thieves, or ne'er-do-wells on
the run from police or from intolerable personal problems. The real
professionals, the Sam Drebens, the Tracy Richardsons, Guy
Maloneys, and Emil Holmdahls, while not adverse to acquiring a
large stake for their services, were often driven by other devils.
Maloney once said, in the long run, he would have earned more
money digging ditches, "but there was also the lure of a romantic
cause, for adventure, for fame, or for the hope of future material
rewards." [5] Victor Gordon, who led mercenaries in a dozen Latin
American revolutions, described his recruits:
Some were cutthroats who fled the United States and
were going
under
assumed names. Others were youngsters who had come down ... for
excite
ment. A few were experienced soldiers. [6] Central Americans of all
persuasions usually referred to them as "scum of all nations. " [7]
Often, however, the mercenaries were cheated out of their
wages. A Captain Linderfeldt who led a unit of Americans in the
battle for Juarez, Mexico, in 1911, complained he was promised $10
a day in gold, but was finally paid off with only $2 a day in pesos.8
And if one picked the losing side, he was lucky to escape with his
life.
Mostly, the Americans were adventurous types who had the rest-
lessness of the now-vanished frontier still running in their veins.
When asked why he joined a band of Nicaraguan revolutionaries,
Tracy Richardson replied, "For money and the hell of it." [9]
These men were in contrast to foreign volunteers fighting
for the Boers during their war with the British. War correspondent
Richard Harding Davis said of them, "They were not soldiers of
fortune, for the soldier of fortune fights for gain. These men
receive no pay, no emolument, no reward." For them, Davis said,
"There were no bugles ... Their conscience was their bugle call."
They fought, "to try and save the independence of a free people."
[10]
It was a sense of morality totally lacking in the Banana Wars.
After picking the winning side in one Nicaraguan revolution,
Richardson and Sam Dreben each received $5,000 and a parcel of
good banana-growing land. [11] Not being of banana-growing tem-
perament they pocketed the cash and sailed for New Orleans. This
was good pay for 1909. But when one considers that they sweated
in fever-ridden jungles for months, ate rotten food, drank bad water,
were constantly chewed on by a large variety of airborne, disease-
bearing insects, risked being crippled or killed in the fighting and
faced a lonely death in a savage land-it is doubtful the banana men
fought for money alone.
Not infrequently the Central American condottiere would find
themselves in an army commanded by the legendary General Lee
Christmas. Christmas, a Louisiana railroad man, arrived in
Honduras in 1894 as an engine driver for the local railroad. He soon
became embroiled in a local revolution. By sheer guts bordering on
foolhardiness, a native ability to lead tough men, and a determina-
tion and focus rare in Central America, he rapidly rose to promi-
nence as a commander who could take a town and rout an enemy
army.
At about the time that Holmdahl became involved, Honduras
was undergoing one of its perennial revolts led by Christmas against
the current tyrant. According to a newspaper interview given in
1913, Holmdahl became a field officer in that army. In that and sub-
sequent campaigns, for almost two years he underwent a "proces-
sion of marches through sweltering jungles, descents on startled
adobe towns, confused fights between rival groups of barefooted
soldiers and ambuscades in lonely valleys with outlandish names." [12]
Since Honduras had no extradition treaties, it was a mecca for
cutthroats from both the United States and Europe. It became a
fertile recruiting ground for soldiers of fortune, con men down on
their luck, and the kind of human flotsam who would join any enter-
prise if the price was right. Christmas's toughness was an ongoing
legend among the hard cases in his army. The story was told that
once when captured by the "other" side, he was brought before the
enemy general who announced:
"Christmas, you are a no-good son-of-a-bitch and I'm going to
have you shot."
Christmas reportedly replied, "Okay, but I have just one request
before you shoot me."
"What is it?" the general growled.
"Don't bury me," Christmas said.
A little taken back, the general asked, "Why in the name of God,
don't you wish to be buried?"
Christmas drew himself up to his full six-foot plus height and
pointed to a nearby clump of trees, "See those filthy vultures sitting
in those trees? I want them to eat my body so they will fly over your
camp and dump shit on your heads."
The general looked startled and for a moment there was a death-
ly silence until suddenly he let out a tremendous roar of laughter.
Tears running down his cheeks he chortled, "I can't shoot anyone
with a sense of humor like that. Let the bastard go free." [13]
Christmas was released and his legend grew.
But for all his toughness, the railroader-turned-general also
needed skilled men. The age of revolution in Central America coin-
cided with mechanical improvements of the rapid firing weapons
recently labeled the "machine gun." The old multi-barreled Gatling
gun required a strong man who could crank the heavy revolving bar-
rels of the gun, regulating the rate of fire. It was extremely heavy,
difficult to transport, and often jammed. The new machine guns
such as those designed by Sir Hiram Maxim, and similar weapons
being produced by British, German, and French manufacturers were
lighter and had a much more rapid rate of fire. Strong arms were
no longer needed because to get the maximum rate of fire from its
one barrel, one had only to pull the trigger.
Early machine guns, however, were temperamental and tended
to jam. To keep them operating in a jungle environment was beyond
the capacity of the average peasant soldier. The peasants were brave
enough, but it was said they had the ability to break an anvil and
could repair nothing. It was a golden opportunity for all the foot-
loose veterans of the Spanish-American War and the Philippine
Insurrection, as well as a number of strays from the British armies
and their scores of colonial battles.
Soon they came. Sam "The Fighting Jew" Dreben, who fought
in half a dozen wars and in middle age became one of the most dec-
orated war heroes of the American Expeditionary Force in France
in World War I. [14] Tracy Richardson, "The World's Greatest Machine
Gunner," who single-handedly captured the city of Managua and
later became an officer in the Canadian army, the British navy and
the U.S. Army in World War I. He survived to serve as a Lieutenant
Colonel in the U.S. Army Air Corps during the second World War. [15]
There was Guy "Machine Gun" Maloney who became a colonel
and commanded batteries of artillery in the U.S. Army in France and
later was named chief of police in New Orleans, Louisiana; Edward
"Tex" O'Reilly who fought in Asia,
Central and South America and
later became a famous editor and
war correspondent; and one Emil
Holmdahl, who was perhaps too
much the professional soldier to
rate a nickname. [16]
Those men acquired local,
and sometimes world-wide, notori-
ety as fighting men in the banana
wars, thanks to the sensational "yel
low journalism" of the times.
Other mercenaries would find only
lonely unmarked graves in a tropical
jungle. If their glory was tarnished,
few of these soldiers of fortune
would acquire wealth from their
sometimes heroic efforts with
foreign armies. These were the
"Banana Men," whose fighting
prowess changed the course of Latin-American history.
Holmdahl likely fought alongside Christmas in a 1907 battle
between an invading Nicaraguan army on one side and 2,000
Honduran troops led by the former engine driver. During that war,
Tracy Richardson, fighting beside Holmdahl, embellished the
famous "buzzard shit" story. In his memoirs, he states that when
Christmas was captured, he was staked to the ground, his shoes
removed, and his feet burned with red-hot machetes before he was
led out to be shot. [17]
Following a series of inconclusive battles, the American govern-
ment called the warring parties together and established a cease-fire
and shaky peace. In late 1907 and early 1908, Christmas led anoth-
er revolution to install his friend Manuel Bonilla in the president's
chair in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. It is likely that Holmdahl took part
in that campaign as well.
After that revolt succeeded in the fall of 1909, many of the mer-
cenaries moved to Nicaragua to join an army attempting to unseat
the tyrant Jose Santos Zelaya. They may have had tacit approval
from the United States government. Zelaya, with European and
japanese backing, was making noises about digging a canal across
the Nicaraguan isthmus, which would compete with American plans
for the Panama Canal.
In fighting along the San Juan River near Lake Nicaragua,
Zelaya's troops captured two American mercenaries, Lee Roy
Cannon and Leonard Groce. They were caught in the act of laying
mines designed to blow up steamer traffic on the waterway. The
Americans were tortured until they signed confessions admitting all
sorts of evil deeds, and after a farce of a court martial, the hapless
pair were condemned to die before a firing squad.
In spite of protests by the United States consul in Managua, the
two were led from their filthy cell during a rainstorm and made to
sit on a bench in front of recently dug graves. Their feet and hands
were tied and ragged bandanas were placed over their eyes. Four
riflemen, two to each of the condemned, stood six feet away, and at
the command "Fuego," they shot the two and unceremoniously
shoved them into the graves.
Groce left a Nicaraguan wife and four children. Cannon wrote
an agonizing letter to his mother saying, "Now, mother dear, bear
up. This is my fate; the results of war and disobedience to a loving
mother." [18] Richard Harding Davis and other glamorizers of the
mercenaries notwithstanding, the price of glory for soldiers of for-
tune often came high.
The deaths of the two Americans, however, probably gave
William Howard Taft, now president of the United States, all the
excuse he needed. He dispatched a fleet and landed U.S. marines in
Nicaragua, and the two dead mercenaries suddenly became
American heroes engaged in a battle for freedom and liberty.
Overwhelmed b}7 new-found patriotism and banana company
gold, a flock of new American volunteers began to swell the army
of Nicaraguan revolutionists under General Luis Mena. Marching
through swamps and bogs, hacking their way through interlaced jun-
gle vines, fighting malaria and exhaustion, Mena's army with his 400
American machine gunners fought their way toward Managua. As
further intervention by the American government seemed immi-
nent, Zelaya gave up and accepted a courtesy ride on a Mexican gun-
boat which took him into exile. His successor found favor with the
Americans, and, with their support for the rebels withdrawn, the
revolutionary forces suffered several stiff defeats.
At this point many of the American mercenaries, probably
including Holmdahl, considered discretion the better part of valor
and boarded a banana boat bound for New Orleans. The pickings,
they thought, might be better in the revolution about to break out in
Mexico against the dictatorship of President Porfirio Diaz. It
would, indeed, become lucrative for some; for others it would
become another graveyard.
A story in the El Paso Times later reported that Holmdahl made
his way to New Orleans and then ...
... Joined a filibuster expedition ... for South America with a
shipload of ammunition. The ship circled Cape Horn and landed its cargo
at Mazanillo, in the Mexican state of Colima. The soldier of fortune
then
went to Los Angeles where he joined a junta planning a revolt in
Mexico. [19]
For Holmdahl, it was the first in a lifetime of hair-raising adventures
in Mexico.
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