It would be really helpful to see the odd image of some of these people as I've said before this is way out of my comfort zone.
Matts come up with some good ideas but the figures I'm sculpting have to have a duel use,eg: haile selassie,also doubles as a westernised Arab leader.to make the cut.
One set will include Richard Todd,David Niven,and Jack Churchill.(although there not strictly inter war characters they'll be included because of the nature of the type men they were and the secondary use of the character in uniform)
Matt as you've set the ball rolling without asking for anything in return then consider your hero sculpted(just minus knowing who he was or what he looked, 
)
Mark.
Bahaha, so you want to know about Smedley, do you?
Well he is certainly an interesting character. On the surface of things he should be a well-known American hero, having won the Medal of Honour twice (he even tried to return the first one he got), but things did not quite turn out that way.
I will relate a bit here, since his wiki page is a bit dry and does not feature even half of his colonial adventures. In brief, he was a Quaker who decided to join the marines and had quite a career. He had quite an illustrious career in the early 20th century fighting in American colonial holdings, first in China then mostly in Central America and the Caribbean. Some of the more notable anecdotes from this time were:
- His first ever deployment (in China) featured him doing a classic "rescue a wounded man from under a hail of enemy fire." He did this in spite of being shot in the thigh, while racked with illness and having an abscessed tooth so rotten the pain severely impaired him.
- In one central american mission His men were alone in a swamp, and he made a dangerous monthlong mostly solo journey to go get them some help after they had been completely abandoned by HQ. Had he not done so, it's quite possible that all the men of his command would have perished.
- In another central american mission his men were on a train in rebel territory, surrounded and outnumbered, but he sacred the rebels off by grabbing sacks of innocuous stuff and waving them at the enemy while yelling "Dynamite! dynamite!"
- In Haiti, he and only TWO other men charged a tiny entrance into a hilltop fort and took it, when the same fortress had held off an American force of 700 men for a week. This was one of his two medals of honour and a famous Marine corps painting was commissioned of the event.
During WWI, he demanded frontline service but was refused a transfer for many months, as they preferred to leave him as military governor of Cuba and he was not shall we say, politically popular. To be fair, all his previous experience was at the skirmish level and so we shall never know if Smedley's talents would have been equally robust at modern Division level warfare. Anyway, eventually, he was sent to France, but only as an administrative general well behind the lines. His most famous episode in France was when he took soldiers and had them requisition stores (especially duckboards to cover the mud floors of the trenches) at gunpoint for the immediate improvement of American trenches and the soldiers fighting in them - of all the fictional stories one might've heard of soldiers doing this sort of thing, this is the one instance I know of where it really did happen. Grateful doughboys started referring to him as "Old Duckboard" after that.
Following WWI, he spent some time in China managing warlords as part of the US military mission there (quite successfully at that), but earned several people's ire (including president Hoover) for badmouthing Mussolini publicly, and as a result he became the first American general officer placed under arrest since the civil war (he apologized and they dropped the matter).
But his military career wasn't even the whole story. For a while in the 1920's he took leave from the army at the request of the city of Philadelphia to become their police commissioner, mostly to clean up prohibition-related crime and government corruption. He had an impressive record, and raised the ire of the city's elite when he shuttered high-class speakeasies just as harshly as he did the working-class ones. He was impressively zealous and probably overreached in using military methods - the city had checkpoints and in some ways approached a military dictatorship and many of the population bemoaned his tendency to swear like a... well... a marine, during his radio addresses, but he was popular enough that the citizens of Philadephia demanded he stay on for a second year. After the second year Philadelphia was in much better shape, but Butler had worn out his welcome and away he went, calling the job the dirtiest one he'd ever done.
In spite of his impressive record, his failure to ingratiate himself politically meant he never became Marine commandant, so in 1931 he resigned. He could have retired, but instead he actually rethought his whole life, and started leaning very far left. he made a run for the Senate, but failed and for the rest of the 30's he gave lectures and speeches, often sharing the podium with communists (he stated he was not one himself, though he did become strongly leftist). In essence, he repudiated colonialism and his entire military career, something which must have taken more guts than even charging into enemy fire. What is probably his most famous quote comes from this time:
I spent 33 years and four months in active military service and during that period I spent most of my time as a high class muscle man for Big Business, for Wall Street and the bankers. In short, I was a racketeer, a gangster for capitalism. I helped make Mexico and especially Tampico safe for American oil interests in 1914. I helped make Haiti and Cuba a decent place for the National City Bank boys to collect revenues in. I helped in the raping of half a dozen Central American republics for the benefit of Wall Street. I helped purify Nicaragua for the International Banking House of Brown Brothers in 1902–1912. I brought light to the Dominican Republic for the American sugar interests in 1916. I helped make Honduras right for the American fruit companies in 1903. In China in 1927 I helped see to it that Standard Oil went on its way unmolested. Looking back on it, I might have given Al Capone a few hints. The best he could do was to operate his racket in three districts. I operated on three continents.
Finally, he was well-known for his involvement in two of the most fascinating events during the American depression.
The first was the fact that he supported the bonus army, which were a large group of homeless WWI veterans encamped near Washington DC demanding payment of a bonus that would be due them later on so they could get by. At one point he visited the camp, ate with the soldiers, and gave a speech supporting them, telling them they had as much right to lobby the US government as any corporation. The next day, Doug MacArthur and George Patton led cavalry charges which destroyed the camp and killed or wounded many men, ending the bonus army's occupation.
The second was his involvement in the Business Plot, where a man, Gerald MacGuire, approached Butler claiming he represented powerful business interests (and provided some documentation to allegedly prove this claim) who wished to use idle, impoverished WWI veterans to stage a coup, with Butler (who was greatly respected by WWI vets) as a figurehead military dictator of the United States. Butler's response was to play for time, while he went directly to Roosevelt and reported the whole thing directly to the president. Fans of an American version of the VBCW are already well-familiar with this episode, but it remains surprisingly unknown. It resulted in government house hearings that went nowhere other than to confirm that MacGuire's claim did seem credible, but further investigation was dropped. To this there is an argument over whether the plot was real, or MacGuire was just a very well-connected con man playing some unknown game. To my mind that doesn't matter, because it was good enough that Smedley believed it was real and his actions demonstrate the highest possible character.
Interestingly, in the film
Patton George C. Scott portrays Patton as having the gravelly voice of a confident, battle-hardened general. But Patton himself had a whiny, reedy, nasal voice, one which made him quite afraid of public speaking. The only film footage of Butler with sound, his testimony to congress, actually shows that
he was the one who had such a voice. When George C. Scott does his "Patton" voice, that's actually the way
Smedley sounded. Only usually with more swearing, I imagine.
When people argue about whether or not Patton should be treated as a hero, it always irks me that the Americans have a contemporary who was vastly more heroic in every possible sense of the word, a man for whom there's no such argument, and who needs no excuses made for his behaviour or actions, but it's Patton whose name lives on.
Here are some pictures, which you might find useful. You'll have to decide if you're sculpting for the 20's or 30's though, as the Marine uniform changed a great deal from the 10's to the 20's to the 30's. The first picture (and the smaller inset from the second one) is much earlier, probably the later teens, the rest are from the late 20's and early 30's. The last one is from his retirement. I have one of him giving speeches in civilian attire, but it's very small and not much use.
And here's some footage from his public statement on the Business Plot. The congressional testimony is on YouTube as well.
...and I think this post just used up my entire 2015 allotment of gushing fanboyism on LAF for all of 2015.
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May 21, 2024, 02:07:58 PM
March 29, 2010, 12:39:04 PM