Medal of Honor · Haiti Campaign
Daniel Joseph Daly
Gunnery Sergeant, U.S. Marine Corps
- Date of Action
- October 24, 1915
- Location
- Fort Dipitié, Haiti
- Medal Presented
- July 6, 1916
Values Embodied
- Courage
- Commitment
- Sacrifice
Official Citation
This citation is paraphrased from public-domain histories and is pending verbatim verification against the Congressional Medal of Honor Society archive.
Serving with the 15th Company of Marines, he fought with exceptional gallantry against heavy odds throughout this action. His company was ambushed in the night by about four hundred Cacos on three sides, and he, with his comrades, held the ground and repelled the attack, enabling the column to break through in the morning.
Biography
Before the War
Daniel Joseph Daly was born November 11, 1873, in Glen Cove, New York — a short, wiry newsboy and amateur boxer on Long Island before he enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1899. He was on the Peking Legation detachment during the Boxer Rebellion and received his first Medal of Honor for single-handedly holding a wall outside the British Legation through a night of close-quarters fighting. He was already a legend inside the Corps before Haiti.
The Action
In the autumn of 1915, the Marines were engaged in a campaign against Haitian rebels — the Cacos — in the mountains north of Port-au-Prince. On the night of October 24, a mounted Marine column under Major Smedley Butler was ambushed on three sides while fording a river in the dark. A pack horse carrying the unit’s only machine gun was shot and drifted downstream. Daly — a gunnery sergeant in the 15th Company — went into the river alone, recovered the machine gun, and returned with it to the Marine perimeter. The Marines held through the night and at dawn broke up the enemy position at Fort Dipitié.
After the War
Daly was awarded a second Medal of Honor for the action, one of only nineteen men in American history to receive two. At Belleau Wood in June 1918 — a sergeant major by then, already fifty — he is remembered for rallying a Marine assault across a wheatfield with the shout: “Come on, you sons of bitches — do you want to live forever?” He retired in 1929 and lived quietly in New York until his death on April 27, 1937. He is buried in Cypress Hills National Cemetery, Brooklyn.