How Marine Dan Daly Lived Forever

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On a hot June afternoon in 1918, the 6th Marines were facing a massacre.

It was World War I and the American forces had gathered in Bellow Wood in northern France.

They were there to fight the Germans.

But to get to them, they would have to cross a wide open field of wheat.

And that field was ringed by enemy machine gunners.

They were hidden in trees and behind boulders, invisible and deadly.

The stalks of grain bent in the breeze.

The sun was shining.

It might have been a beautiful day, but the only sound anyone could hear was the snapping and cracking of machine gun and rifle fire and the screaming of wounded men.

There was just one way for the Marines to eliminate those enemy positions.

One at a time.

Slowly and painfully.

Using hand grenades, rifles, bayonets, fighting hand to hand if they had to.

Progress seemed impossible.

The men had already been there for days, pinned down and stuck, worn out by the never-ending combat.

One platoon of Marines was lying in a shallow foxhole.

They had dug it out by hand at the edge of a clearing.

They were holding on to that ground for dear life.

Then, a runner came scrambling through the brush.

He handed a piece of paper to their sergeant.

The sergeant's name?

Dan Daly.

He was a lot older than the men he led.

He'd been in the Marines for nearly 20 years.

With a bristle of snow-white hair and intense gray eyes, Dan was pretty easy to pick out on the battlefield.

But more than that, Dan was famous.

Famous for his courage in battle, for his toughness.

In fact, the story goes that when one of the guys in the platoon learned his sergeant was Dan Daly, he said, quote, he's real?

I thought he was somebody the Marines made up, like Paul Bunyan.

Dan Daly read that piece of paper.

He looked across his line of Marines, and then Dan made a forward motion with his hand.

The men knew what it meant.

Their sergeant wanted them to advance toward the enemy, out into the open, into the machine gun fire.

They hesitated.

They could already see enemy bullets kicking up the dirt, inching closer and closer.

So Dan stood up.

and ran to the center of the platoon right in the middle of his men.

He swung his rifle over his head, bayonet glinting in the sunlight and then he shouted, come on you sons of bitches!

Do you want to live forever?

I'm JR Martinez and this is Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage.

The Medal of Honor is the highest military decoration in the United States.

awarded for gallantry and bravery in combat at the risk of life above and beyond the call of duty.

Each candidate must be approved all the way up the chain of command, from the supervisory officer in the field to the White House.

This show is about those heroes.

What they did, what it meant, and what their stories tell us about the nature of courage and sacrifice.

Today, we'll meet the ultimate Marine, Daniel Daly.

One of the very few people to have been awarded the Medal of Honor not once, but twice.

Plus a zillion other awards from the Navy Cross to the Croix du Guerre.

So of course his platoon followed him when he yelled that famous battle cry.

They charged into those German defenses and Dan himself rescued 12 Marines who were stranded in that wheat field, risking his life again and again.

And this wasn't even one of the actions he received the Medal of Honor for.

Dan's story isn't just about incredible courage.

It's about a man who witnessed a totally different and sort of surprising version of the Marine Corps and whose legend helped make it the force it is today.

Back in the early 1900s, the Marine Corps looked nothing like it does now.

It was tiny.

Just about 150 officers and around 5,500 men.

Their main duty was guarding naval installations on land and working as guards on naval vessels at sea, kind of like cops on ships.

They were bit players in a lot of conflicts all over the place.

Uncle Sam's most colorful and heroic military unit.

Officially formed by the Continental Congress in 1775, the Marines have been in the thick of things ever since.

But they also had a very specific and unusual function.

When there were threats to Americans doing business in foreign countries, the Marines would go ashore to protect them.

Which is how they ended up in China in the summer of 1900.

For decades, Western nations and Japan had forced China to accept foreign control over the country's international trade.

American businessmen, bankers, manufacturers, and companies like Standard Oil were a huge presence in the country.

They wanted to sell their goods to the largest population in the world.

Not everyone was happy about this arrangement.

A group emerged in northern China called the Society of the Righteous and Harmonious Fist.

Westerners reduced it to just the boxers.

The boxers thought the colonizers and particularly the Christian missionaries were to blame for their poor standard of living.

So they decided to fight back.

By 1899, the boxers were destroying churches and foreign property, killing Chinese Christians and Western missionaries.

They got closer and closer to the country's capital, Peiking, now called Beijing.

That's where the foreigners lived, in a kind of walled city within the city.

They called it the Legation Quarter.

The Chinese government began supporting the boxers, and the international community realized that to leave the walled city would probably mean death for them.

So they called in military protection from their home countries.

In May of 1900, about 300 troops from places like Great Britain, Japan, Germany, and Italy arrived in Peking.

And from America came the Marines.

Except,

there were just 50 of them, including a young man named Dan Daly.

Dan had joined the Corps just a year before.

before.

According to his enlistment papers, he had been born in Long Island in 1873.

But evidence suggests he was born a few years earlier and thousands of miles away in Ireland.

His parents survived the Great Famine and resettled in America.

Young Dan worked in a kerosene factory on Long Island.

It's easy to see why the Marines appealed to him.

America was spreading into more and more foreign territory.

Marines traveled the world, and that probably sounded a lot better than spending your life in a factory on Long Island.

Plus, Dan was a prize fighter on the side.

Exploring, fighting, these were things Dan loved.

So he enlisted.

And after a little more than a year, he was in Peiking.

Foreigners and their families were fleeing the boxers.

They poured into the legation quarter.

Thousands of Chinese Christian refugees did too.

And on June 20th, the boxers began their siege of the city.

That small international group of military men, Dan included, was stationed in the quarter, and they were outnumbered 40 to 1.

They called for reinforcements.

but it would take almost two months for those to arrive.

In the meantime, the heat soared, reaching 110 degrees in the shade.

Food was dwindling.

The people in the quarter had to eat their horses.

Dan and the Marines had one main goal, to hold what was called a tartar wall.

It ran along one side of the quarter, about the size of a four-story building.

The boxers built barricades on the other side of the wall and they kept building them higher.

They hoped to be able to storm their way inside the quarter.

So the Marines spent all their time firing at the boxers on the barricades trying to hold them off.

They were quickly running out of ammunition.

If the boxers breached the wall, the fight would be over instantly.

On the night of July 14th, weeks into the siege, Dan's captain told him he needed a volunteer to stay on top of the wall, alone.

The The captain had to go down to bring up more men and sandbags.

Reportedly, the captain whispered to Dan, I won't order you to stay out here, but if you can hold them back tonight, they'll never drive us back tomorrow.

To which Dan cheerily replied, see you in the morning, Captain.

The night would have been hot.

Dan took cover in a little fortified bastion.

He piled ammunition in front of him and he waited.

He could hear the Chinese soldiers talking nearby.

And then, sure enough, they came after him in the dark.

The boxers weren't sure how many Marines were in that bastion.

They didn't know it was just Dan with his limited supply of ammo.

He was going to need all of it.

First, Two came Dan's way and he shot them.

Then four more men came.

He shot three and used his bayonet to kill the fourth.

But the men kept coming.

All through the night, Dan held on for daylight and watched his pile of bullets get smaller and smaller.

He had to be a perfect shot.

In the dark, for hours.

He couldn't waste a bullet.

And he didn't.

Dawn rose slowly over the tartar wall, and when the captain arrived back at the top, Dan was there to greet him, just like he had promised.

According to some reports, the bodies of 200 enemy soldiers were found that morning below the wall.

This marked the first time that Dan would receive the Medal of Honor.

He had been a one-man barricade.

If he hadn't been there, it might have been the end of the quarter.

A few weeks later, a force from eight nations arrived in China.

Roughly 10,000 of them took Peking, defeating the boxers.

The siege was over.

And the foreign powers took brutal revenge.

They executed boxers and their supporters.

They burned villages to the ground.

They plundered everything.

Plus, the foreign nations demanded reparations from the Chinese government.

These reparations were so large that they would cripple China for decades.

The Marines would stay there until 1941.

Not Dan Daly, though.

He kept moving.

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Part of what made Dan the ultimate Marine is he went all in on everything he did.

Dan Daly arrived in the Philippines in September of 1900.

While there were no battles to fight at the moment, he still had a lot of

energy.

By October, he was put on report for failing to return on time from leave.

Then he was on restriction for 30 days after being 10 hours late from leave.

Then he was court-martialed for being drunk on his post and was sent to the brig.

He got out and promptly went in again.

for the same thing.

Drunkenness, along with, quote, using obscene, threatening, and abusive language toward a sergeant of the guard.

All of these offenses, and a bunch more, in just 10 months.

Not exactly the description of the ideal Marine that the Corps advertised.

In the Marine Corps, a man is trained first in those things that will develop him as a man.

in those qualities of general leadership such as dependability, personal bearing, physical and mental stamina, initiative, self-reliance, and self-confidence.

Well, he certainly had self-confidence, I guess.

His bad behavior went on for years.

But while he was seeing the inside of the brig, he was also seeing the world.

Because these years coincided with Teddy Roosevelt's presidency.

And Roosevelt believed that the U.S.

should act as a sort of international policeman, stepping in with force if necessary.

So the Marines were all over the place.

Dan was off the coast of Puerto Rico, then Panama.

The Marines were officially there to protect American citizens and unofficially there to make sure the U.S.

could build the Panama Canal.

In March of 1911, he was aboard the USS Springfield in San Juan, Puerto Rico when a gasoline fire broke out.

Dan risked his life to put out the flames before the ship blew up.

He got a commendation from the the Secretary of the Navy.

In 1914, Dan went to Mexico, where the U.S.

had investments in oil.

He fought in the Battle of Veracruz.

The Marines occupied the city.

I mean, come on,

this guy was everywhere.

Eventually, he became a sergeant.

He was in his early 40s, mellowing out a little.

Maybe.

And the Marines were changing too.

The tiny corps that Dan had joined in 1899 was up to 10,000 men by 1914.

But their role was still a little...

odd.

They weren't exactly fighting in war zones.

They were kind of like a police force for American business.

That's how Dan wound up in Haiti.

Haiti was a major port in the sea lane between the new Panama Canal and the Atlantic Ocean.

So it was more important to the U.S.

than ever.

The United States had moved Haiti's gold reserve to New York in 1914.

Then, they used that as leverage to pressure Haiti to hand over control of its finances.

By July of 1915, the country was on the brink of civil war.

Having suffered a succession of weak presidents and almost continuous civil wars, Haiti is now on brink of bankruptcy and laws of the land have been virtually lost in chaos of island-wide anarchy.

A civil war would be bad for business.

So President Woodrow Wilson sent in the Marines.

Dan's major was the awesomely named Smedley Darlington Butler.

His men nicknamed him Ole Gimlet Eye because he had a crazy intense stare.

Anyways, Butler had been in China and Mexico with Dan.

He loved him.

He said Dan was, quote, the fightinest man I ever knew.

His hair was gray even then.

He was smooth-faced with skin like leather.

Hard-boiled as the devil, but fine clear through.

I admired his courage and modesty and became very much attached to him.

The Marines took charge of Haiti's ports and set up camps throughout the country.

Meanwhile, U.S.

officials got veto power over government decisions.

They had the Constitution changed to allow foreigners to buy property.

Pretty sweet deal for the U.S.

Maybe not so much for the Haitians.

Everything was settling in for a long occupation.

Except that a group of rebels called CACOs began ambushing Marine patrols, attacking outposts.

And so the Marines and the CACOs went to battle.

Then in 1915, United States Marines land in Haiti to battle Haitian bandits threatening destruction of American properties and native bandits quickly head for the hills.

This puts immediate end to troubles in populated areas, but Marines prepare to drive into interior and route the insurgents out.

In late October, Smedley Darlington Butler, Dan, and around 35 other men went to find a KACO stronghold in the mountains.

They set out from a base camp on horseback with pack animals carrying food, ammunition, and a machine gun.

On the third day of their mission, they came across a Haitian man, and Butler made him an offer.

Show us the Kakos fort.

If you do, you'll get $5.

If you don't, you'll get a bullet.

And not much of a choice.

The man chose the money.

Soon, The Marines had the Kakos fortress in their sights.

It was perched on a mountain, surrounded by rough stone walls and trenches.

Butler immediately realized his single platoon of men would be no match for that.

So they retreated.

They rode in the rain.

They reached the banks of a fast-running river, too deep for them to wade across.

So the men dismounted and the horses began to swim with the Marines hanging onto their tails.

Suddenly, bullets zipping past the men into the water.

That guy they threatened with death, he had led them right

into a trap.

The Marines were surrounded by hundreds of cackos.

By a stroke of crazy luck, all of the Marines made it across the river.

Their animals weren't so fortunate.

After the men got to safety, Butler ordered Dan to set up the machine gun.

But it had been strapped to the back of one of the pack horses, and that horse was at the bottom of the river.

Butler tried to figure out what they could do instead, and Dan just

disappeared.

He crawled back to the river through the underbrush that Kako's bullets sheared off the sticks and leaves around him.

Then he plunged into the river.

He dived over and over into the depths of that cold and murky water, trying to locate each dead horse.

Until finally, he found the one with the machine gun tied to its back.

Then he dove even deeper, holding on to the horse underwater.

Dan cut the gun loose.

He broke the surface of the water and gasped for air.

Then he swam back to the riverbank, dragging the gun, somehow dodging bullets.

He made it to shore and then he strapped the gun to his back and carried it to the high ground where the rest of the Marines were.

Dan threw the gun down and I can only imagine they were like, how the hell did you get that?

But by now they were surrounded.

Butler said, quote, all the men were praying.

Even hard-boiled Marines pray when they feel helplessly snared in a death trap.

Dawn was breaking.

Butler divided the men into three squads and told them to go in three different directions, shooting everyone they could see.

That machine gun helped a whole lot.

The Marines were eventually able to make their way back to safety, sleepless, exhausted, and hungry.

Marching 120 miles in five days, all without losing a man.

Later on, Butler recommended Dan for the Medal of Honor, saying, quote, I wouldn't have had the courage to do that.

Remember, he went back on his own initiative without a hint or suggestion from me.

And that's how fighting Dan Daly got his second medal.

Dan left Haiti in January of 1916.

headed for New York, where his mom and siblings still lived.

But the Marines would stay in Haiti for another 19 years, fighting the rebels and anyone else who objected to the U.S.

presence.

Till 1934, contingents of United States Marines keep order in Haiti, withdrawing only when Haiti finally becomes nation of peace and prosperity.

Well,

that's not exactly what happened, is it?

Dan and Smedley Darlington Butler and the rest of the Marines had risked life and limb.

But one of them, at least, would look back and wonder, for what?

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In today's super competitive business environment, the edge goes to those who push harder, move faster, and level up every tool in their arsenal.

T-Mobile knows all about that.

They're now the best network, according to the experts at UCLA Speed Test, and they're using that network to launch Supermobile, the first and only business plan.

to combine intelligent performance, built-in security, and seamless satellite coverage.

With Supermobile, your performance, security, and coverage are supercharged.

With a network that adapts in real time, your business stays operating at peak capacity even in times of high demand.

With built-in security on the first nationwide 5G advanced network, you keep private data private for you, your team, your clients.

And with seamless coverage from the world's largest satellite-to-mobile constellation, your whole team can text and stay updated even when they're off the grid.

That's your business, supercharged.

Learn more at supermobile.com.

Seamless coverage with compatible devices in most outdoor areas in the U.S.

where you can see the sky.

Best network based on analysis by OOCLA of Speed Test Intelligence Data 1H 2025.

American Military University, where service members like you can access high-quality, affordable education built for your lifestyle.

With online programs that fit around deployments, training, and unpredictable schedules, AMU makes it possible to earn your degree no matter where duty takes you.

Their preferred military rate keeps tuition at just $250 per credit hour for undergraduate and master's tuition.

And with 24/7 mental health support plus career coaching and other services, AMU is committed to your success during and after your service.

Learn more at amu.apus.edu slash military.

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Let's go back to France, where we started this episode.

It was World War I,

the zillionth conflict Dan had seen.

Just one more port of call for him.

But the Marines had changed massively in the almost 20 years that Dan had been enlisted.

For one thing, they were so much bigger.

By the end of World War I, there would be about 2,400 officers and 70,000 enlisted men.

Dan put his combat experience to work.

He trained new recruits and got them ready for war.

Ironically, he was a stickler for detail.

ready to restrict a man's leave if his uniform wasn't pressed right.

A far cry from old drunk Dan who spent weeks in the brig.

Anyway, he and the rest of the sixth Marines shipped out to France in October of 1917.

Dan was still in fighting shape.

Are we surprised?

And ready to go to the front.

It was chaos, but Dan just kept being...

Dan.

He single-handedly put out a fire in an ammunition train.

He destroyed enemy machine guns.

He captured 14 Germans all by himself.

You know, the usual.

Then came June 10th, the day on that hill where he gave that famous battle cry.

And when Dan yelled, come on, you sons of bitches, do you want to live forever?

Maybe his men thought, well,

he's kind of lived forever, right?

And he was a legend.

So his men entered that field with a roar, Dan leading the way.

They fought for many days.

Eventually, they were victorious.

But Dan was wounded.

His injuries would keep him out of the rest of the war.

But let's go back to that famous line.

When Dan got back to the United States, he claimed he never actually said it.

The real version, he said, was more like, for gracious sakes, you chaps, leave us charge the foe.

Not exactly convincing from a man who could reportedly swear in seven languages and never repeat the same curse twice.

But anyway, Dan was one of the most decorated men of World War I,

but he didn't care about the hardware.

As he once put it, quote, any stiff can go out and win a few medals if he ain't entirely out of luck.

He was recommended for yet another Medal of Honor after France, but he received a Distinguished Service Cross instead.

Maybe the higher-ups thought three medals of honor would be overkill.

He didn't need them anyway.

Every Marine knew his name.

In fact, his bravery and service helped to define what it meant to be a Marine.

Dan Daley retired from active service in the Marines in 1920 and fully retired in 1929.

In pictures from that time, he's fit and trim as ever with posture that would make Mary Poppins proud.

He had never married and when asked why, he responded, quote, I can't see how a single man could spend his time better than in the Marines.

He lived with his sister and her family in Queens and took a job as a bank guard.

He liked to work at night so he could go to baseball games during the day.

And the kids in the neighborhood loved him.

One of them remembered, quote, I've never met a quieter, more thoughtful man.

So kind, so cheerful.

He loved all of us children, and we all loved him.

Not what you were expecting, am I right?

Dan wasn't much for speeches or interviews.

He refused to talk about his famous battles.

He told his boss at the bank, quote, oh, there really wasn't much to it.

But while Dan hated the spotlight, remember his commander?

Smedley Darlington Butler, old gimlet eye?

Butler was a major general.

He had also received two medals of honor.

the only other Marine to do so.

And while Dan kept quiet, Butler did the exact opposite.

He looked back and questioned what he and Dan had been doing in all those countries for all those years.

Sure, in World War I, the Marines were fighting for democracy, for a principle they could actually believe in.

But what about those other random places where they'd put their lives on the line?

Butler retired from the Corps in 1931, just as the Great Depression was pushing the country deep into poverty.

He went on a lecture tour, talking about how Marines had been pawns, risking death to put profits in the hands of private citizens.

Recordings of those speeches haven't survived.

But here's old Gimlet Eye speaking to a group of unemployed World War I veterans.

Makes me so damn mad a whole lot of people speak of you as tramps.

By God, they didn't speak of you as tramps in 1917 and 18.

He wrote, quote, I spent 33 years and four months in active service as a member of our country's most agile military force, the Marine Corps.

And during that period, I spent most of my time being a high-class muscle man for big business, for Wall Street, and for the bankers.

I helped make Mexico safe for American oil interests.

I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the national city bank boys.

In China, I helped to see to it that standard oil went its way unmolested.

To be clear, Butler wasn't a crank.

He was a decorated veteran who loved his country and loved the Corps.

Butler helped push the Marines even further from being a police force for American business and into what they are today.

We don't know what Dan Daly made of his former commander's views, but when I think about Butler's outrage about the Marines risking their lives for big business, I think he must have been imagining Dan

racing back to that rushing river, diving through the bullets to save his men.

Butler must have thought, a man like that should only be asked to serve the highest cause.

In 1937, when he was in his mid-60s, Dan accepted an invitation to march in the parade for Franklin Delano Roosevelt's second inauguration.

It fell on a wet and cold January day.

He spent hours standing and marching in the downpour.

He caught a cold, which led to pneumonia, which weakened his already damaged heart.

Dan died just a few months later.

He was buried back on Long Island with full military honors.

Even he couldn't live forever.

But that famous quote, well, that quote is never going to die.

It's carved into the wall of the National Museum of the Marine Corps in Quantico.

It speaks to a time when men like Dan set a new standard for bravery in the service of something that wasn't always clear.

Dan didn't ask to share in the spoils of war.

None of the Marines did.

They didn't fight for Standard Oil or the National City Bank.

As the Marine Corps hem puts it, they fought for right and freedom and to keep their honor clean.

And that is what they put their lives on the line for

over

and over

again.

Medal of Honor, Stories of Courage, is written by Meredith Rollins and produced by Meredith Rollins and Jess Shane.

Our editor is Ben Nadaf Hoffrey.

Sound design and additional music by Jake Gorski.

Our executive producer is Constanza Gallardo.

Fact-checking by Arthur Gompertz.

And original music by Eric Phillips.

Production support by Suzanne Gabber.

Don't forget, we also want to hear from you.

Send us your personal story of courage or highlight someone else's bravery.

Just email us at medalofhonor at pushkin.fm.

You also might hear your stories on future episodes of Medal of Honor or see them on our social channels at Pushkin Pods.

I'm your host, J.R.

Martinez.

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This is an iHeart Podcast.