DANJOU AND HIS DEMONS

4/30/1863 - One of the most famous days in all of French military history takes place on a dusty road and sun-baked abandoned hacienda near the port of Vera Cruz, Mexico ... the heroic last stand of Captain Jean Danjou and his command of sixty-four members of the French Foreign Legion at a place called Camarone.

Camarone

Born on April, 15, 1828, in the southern French city of Chalabre, only a few decades removed from the military exploits of Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte and his Imperial legions, to better his station in life, Jean Danjou enrolls in the Ecole Speciale Military De Saint-Cyr ... the French West Point, created by the Emperor himself in 1802, and in his three years of military study, takes to heart the academy's creed, "Training for Victory."  Graduating as an officer at the age of twenty, Danjou is first assigned to the 51st Regiment of the Line, before transferring to the relatively new (King Louis Philippe creates the organization on March 10, 1831) French Foreign Legion in 1852 ... he will be a member of the elite French force for the rest of his life.  Supporting French colonization efforts in Algeria, on 5/1/1853, during a mapping assignment of the Kabylie region, Danjou loses his left hand when his musket explodes.  An injury that might cripple most other men, the tough officer just designs a prosthetic wooden hand as a replacement and goes on with his career (an articulated finely sculpted piece of wood he straps to his wrist with a large leather sheath and then covers with a formal uniform dress white glove).  Promoted to first lieutenant later in the year, he fights with the French Army in the Crimean War and is among the thousands of troops that see action during the Siege of Sevastopol (a year long blood bath in which over two-hundred-thousand soldiers from a myriad of nations will be killed or wounded).  He is made a captain on June 9, 1855, and during Europe's Austro-Sardinian War, adds to his battle resume by participating in the 1859 French victories of Napoleon III at Magenta and Solferino, before serving a tour of duty for the Legion in Morocco.

The Siege Of Sevastopol

The Battle Of Magenta

The Battle Of Solferino

In 1862, when Napoleon III uses the excuse of non-payment of funds to try and expand his empire by taking over control of Mexico, with his puppet leader, Austrian born Emperor Maximilian I (the younger brother of Austrian Emperor Francis Joseph I) at its head, Danjou is part of the expeditionary force sent to defeat the government of President Benito Pablo Juarez Garcia (a window of closing opportunity, at the time, the United States is unable to enforce its Monroe Doctrine against European forces entering the area due to its preoccupation with a little bloodbath known as the American Civil War).  Assigned to insure the safe moment of French supply convoys, Danjou is the quartermaster of a regiment of Legionaires under the command of Colonel Pierre Jeanningros ... and on 4/30, there is a convoy that must get through to the French forces besieging the Mexican town of Puebla ... a convoy of two companies of fusilier guards, food, sixty wagons of of ammunition, siege guns, one-hundred-and-fifty mules, and a payroll of four million francs in gold (all under the immediate direction of Captain Jacques Cabossel).  Advised of the convoy, and receiving information from an Indian spy that an ambush is being planned, Jeanningros decides to enhance the chances of the unit making a successful journey by sending a company of Legionaires ahead to scout for trouble (a typical Legion unit, the group consists of Frenchmen of course, plus Belgian, Swiss, Dane, Dutch, and German soldiers, two are former winners of the French Legion of Honor ... sixty-two men in all to march with three officers, each man carrying a rifle and approximately 60 rounds of ammunition for the mission) ... but it is a unit that is under-strength by half due to disease (dysentery, malaria, and a horror known as vomito negro, black vomit) and fighting the enemy since arriving in Mexico, one without any officers to oversee the mission ... so Danjou volunteers to step away from his usual duties and take the unit's command (Second Lieutenants Napoleon Vilain and Clement Maudet also volunteer for the trip).

Napoleon III

Maximilian I

Juarez

Shortly after midnight on 4/30, the sixty-five men march off along what the French call, "The Fever Road" (the convoy leaves a few hours later and takes an alternate route towards Puebla) ... and everything goes well at first.  As the dawn sun is just rising, and after passing through the small village of Camerone (one soldier describes the place as being fit only to be "inhabited by vultures"), the unit stops to refill their canteens and brew a little coffee ... and their long day of troubles begin, Mexican cavalry is spotted crossing the road ahead (two-hundred-and-fifty horsemen of the Cotaxtia Squadron, under the command of Tomas Algonzanas).  Reacting immediately, knowing his command stands no chance against hordes of armed riders out in the open, Danjou orders his men to retreat back to Camerone, and the relative safety of an abandoned hacienda there featuring ten-foot-high walls ... a defensible position if his men can make it back.  Using the tactic that contributed to Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, the unit forms a hollow square and fights off repeated cavalry charges to make it back to Camerone (along with using the cover of a few trees and a cactus filled ditch), but in the process has men wounded, and sixteen Legionaires are captured (also lost are the pack animals carrying the unit's extra food, water, and ammunition).  Hacienda already occupied by Mexican troops by 9:00 when they reach it, Danjou's unit instead takes refuge in a stable on the property surrounded by adobe walls, with two gates and another opening ... with only precious seconds available before they will be put upon, the men use rocks and rubble to close off the openings and then take up firing positions around the compound. 
 Site Of The Struggle Off Along The Gulf Of Mexico
 Garb On The Legionaires - 1860s
 Camerone

At 9:30, Danjou receives the first request for his surrender, which he greets with disdain, replying, "We have munitions.  We will not surrender."  Battle on, forty-nine Legionaires take on a force that will eventually swell to over 3,000 men (under the command of Colonel Francisco de Paula Milan), and the stable becomes a hell-on-earth of attacks and sniping from all directions, cries for unavailable water, baking temperatures over a hundred degrees, screams of pain, a whiteness that blinds the eyes (from the sunlight bouncing off the adobe walls), the smell of gunpowder, explosions, and dashed hopes (hearing bugling nearby shortly after noon, the men think a relief column is about to arrive, but it is only more soldiers of the Mexican army) ... hour after hour after hour as the force is slowly whittled down to almost nothing!  During the struggle, sensing what is coming, Danjou crawls to each man in his unit, gives them a sip of wine his batman has carried into the battle, and with a kiss to his wooden hand, has each swear they will remain true to the Legion and die before surrendering ... all make the pledge.  At around noon, Danjou honors his, taking a killing round to the chest as he moves about his men in preparation for the next assault ... he is thirty-five-years-old.

Danjou
 Danjou At Camerone

Assuming command of the remaining fighters, Second Lieutenant Vilain in turn refuses to surrender, rallying the command by stating, "My children, I command you now.  We may die, but we will never surrender!"  And his men fight on, with Sergeant Vincent Morzycki screaming "Merde!" at another request for surrender.  At around 4:30 in the afternoon, Vilain too is gunned down orchestrating the stable's defense and command now goes to Second Lieutenant Maudet.  Numbers dwindling, the twenty remaining fighters are reduced to twelve, and then with another attack and the capture of three corporals and two fusiliers, there are six men left, each with a single bullet ... and Maudet gives his last order, when the Mexicans approach next, the men will fire a last volley and then charge with fixed bayonets.  At about 6:30 in the evening the moment comes ... one Legionaire, a Belgian named Victor Catteau, is struck down with nineteen bullets trying to protect Maudet, Maudet is mortally wounded, another soldier named Leonhart is also struck down, and the last three men fight on as they are beaten to the ground by Mexican rifle butts.  About to be torn apart, the men are halted by the sword of a French-born, Mexican colonel named Campos.  Incredibly, Corporal Philipe Maine, and Legionaires Wenzel and Constantin, still refuse to surrender, with the senior man present, Maine, demanding they will only stop fighting if Maudet's wounds are treated and they can escort Danjou's body back to France while retaining their broken rifles and equipment.  Overcome by emotion, Campos replies, "One refuses nothing to such men as you," and the battle is over.  Marched before Colonel Milan, the Mexican commander will ask where the other defenders are, and after Campos responds that there are no more, Milan looks at the three men before him and utters a response that will be immortal praise to the Legionaires ... "Pero, no son hombres, son demonios" ... "Then these are not men, but devils."  Indeed!
  Battle
  Another Assault
 Last Stand
 The Charge

Finally over, the heroic defeat transforms, and eventually becomes a victory for all the French Foreign Legion means to its members and the people of France ... annually as of 1931, 4/30, is Camerone Day (a day in which Legionaires are forgiven almost any offense short of murder) ... a formal celebration in every Foreign Legion outpost around the world of the Legion's courage and refusal to be defeated ... and at the Legion headquarters in Aubagne, France, a memento is taken from the small wood-and-glass casket it resides in and paraded before Legionaires, French politicians, and visiting dignitaries by a specially selected, highly decorated former Legionaire (it is considered the ultimate honor a living Legionaire can attain) ... the most sacred talisman of the legion, the wooden hand of Captain Danjou, the hand men kissed as they made their vows to never surrender on this day in 1863 (found on the battle site by a local rancher and kept as a souvenir, the hand is sold to the French commander in Mexico a few years later, a former member of the Legion himself, General Achille Bazaine).  May Danjou and his men always, and the men they fought against, always be remembered!
 Headquarters Parade
 The Honored
 Casket And Hand!
     
 

WINDY CITY WRONG

4/27/1926 - Murders all over the streets of Chicago and it's suburbs as rival gangs fight for control of the area's criminal enterprises, mostly the creation and distribution of liquor during Prohibition, it does come as a mean surprise however when the victim is a leading member of the justice system ... adios to 26-year-old bachelor, assistant state attorney William Harold "Bill" McSwiggin, a rising boy star in the barrister community.

Histrionics Addressing A Chicago Jury

A hometown boy all the way, McSwiggin is born in Chicago on February 7, 1901, and will grow up surrounded by the Catholic love of both his parents (his father, Anthony, is a thirty-year veteran of the local police department) and four sisters (Helen, Emily, Nellie, and Marjorie) ... and sadly, also enveloped in the friendship of future gangsters.  Black haired and blue eyed, and of moderate height, though somewhat dumpy in appearance (he wears owlish horn-rimmed glasses and has a double chin), his actual physical prowess allows him to box and pitch baseball.  He is also quite intelligent, advancing through parochial school, De Paul Academy, and then De Paul University with a law degree he pays for by working jobs as varied as being a truck driver, a bouncer for a dance hall, a sales clerk in a department store, and as a security guard for the American Railway Express Company (he also finds time to become a lieutenant in the University's ROTC).  One month after receiving his law degree from De Paul with honors, he passes his bar examination, and soon becomes one of sixty-nine assistant state's attorneys working Cook County for Yale Law School graduate, Robert Emmett Crowe (the prosecutor in the infamous Leopold & Loeb murder case).

De Paul University - 1911

Crowe

Hard work, speaking in a manner juries can understand, pounding on tables, thumping the jury box, and waving his arms and hands about to illustrate points has McSwiggin win seven of the office's eleven first-degree murder cases in 1925 (in eight months) ... convictions that include the five-feet-three-inch notorious "Midget Bandit," Henry J. Fernekes, and two of his confederates for the 1925 holdup killing of Michael Swiontkowski, and Raymond Costello, for killing his sixteen-year-old girlfriend.  He is soon know as "The Hanging Prosecutor" (other nicknames include "Little Mac," "Specks," "Billy," and around the childhood home he still lives in at 4946 Washington Boulevard, he is called "Harold") by local newspaper men who note his status as one of Crowe's ace lawyers, his conviction rate, and his placement on high publicity cases such as the investigation of the 1924 flower shop hand-shake murder of mobster Dion O'Bannion, interviewing Al Capone in association with the murder of hoodlum Joe Howard (a crime Capone did commit for Howard's drunken slapping of Capone associate, Jake "Greasy Thumb" Cuzik, and for calling Capone a "pimp" when he demanded an apology for the slapping), and heading the second prosecution of hitmen John Scalise and Albert Anselmi (two gorillas who rub their bullets in garlic so they with create gangrene if the wounds they produce are not initially fatal) for the 1925 murder of Chicago Police officer Charles Walsh, and trying Jim Doherty and Myles O'Donnell for the murder of their beer rival, Eddie Tancl.  What no one seems to notice though is that all his attempts to dispense justice to liquor mobsters are failures, he has maintained his childhood friendship with the same Jim Doherty, though prohibited, he likes to imbibe himself, and gamble too, and earlier in April, he meets with Capone at the gangster's headquarters at the Hawthorne Hotel in Cicero, Illinois (a meeting the lawyer's own father will later state would "... blow the lid off Chicago" if its subject matter were to be revealed).  McSwiggin is dancing on very thin ice, and on 4/27/1926, it breaks beneath his feet.
 The "Midget Bandit"
 "Scarface" Capone

After eating dinner with his parents, and making a phone call to attempt to "fix" a friend's parking ticket, at about 7:30, Thomas "Red" Duffy, a barber, political precinct captain, low-level beer peddler, gambling operator, and McSwiggin childhood friend shows up and asks the lawyer if he'd like to go out on the town with friends ... an offer the attorney accepts with alacrity, telling his parents he going into Cicero to drink some "good beer" (a sign of the times, his police officer father does not react to the news).  Outside, McSwiggin finds himself among men he knows, the car for the evening's frolics is driven by boyhood buddy Jim Doherty (the same man he has unsuccessful recently prosecuted for murder), and also contains Myles O'Donnell (the other man who escaped justice in the Tancl killing, and O'Donnell's brother, William "Klondike" O'Donnell ... the leadership of the criminals controlling liquor distribution on Chicago's "West-side" (when their ride goes bad, they move to Klondike's green Lincoln sedan and pick up a sixth celebrant, Edward Hanley, a former boxer and policeman, and now a Doherty associate), all rivals of Mr. Alphonse Capone.  Believing Capone has shown weakness for brokering a gangster truce while city elections are taking place (the primary's take place on 4/13/1926), they enter the mobster's Cicero territory without fear ... and soon regret the decision.
 Klondike
 Myles

Moving about town, Klondike's well known vehicle is spotted, information is passed on to the big man himself, and a Scarface plan is quickly concocted involving five vehicles ... one ready to ram any police cars that might interfere, two cars for blocking side traffic, a car to cover the retreat and cause a chase interfering accident if necessary, and an armored sedan for the night's assassins, Capone and three of his outfit's gunners.  Making contact with their targets, the killers follow the O'Donnell group discreetly until the Lincoln pulls up in front of Harry Madigan's Pony Inn, a two-story, two-door (one leads to and upside Apartment numbered 5615), cream- colored brick building standing alone in vacant lot to the south side of Roosevelt Road (5613 West Roosevelt Road to be precise).  Darkness has fallen, the light rains of early evening are over and it is around a 8:45 p.m.  Alighting with intentions to go inside (all survivors of what is to come, Hanley and the O'Donnells never clear the car) Capone's sedan drives up slowly seconds later and opens up on the group.  Machine guns firing off flame and lead, Hanley and the O'Donnell's instinctively dive for cover on the Lincoln's floorboards and are missed, unable to move as quickly however, twenty-two bullets crater the west side of the building, six more splinter a tree standing in front of the structure, Duffy is fatally struck five times (he manages to crawl behind a nearby tree, where he will be found by a passing motorist who drives him to the nearby Western Suburban Hospital where he dies six hours later), Doherty hits the sidewalk as a result of sixteen bullet wounds, and McSwiggin is murderously holed twenty times in the back and neck.  Deed done, the killers vanish in the night, while the O'Donnell's and Hanley haul McSwiggin and Doherty back to Klondike's Parkside Avenue residence, where the corpses have the contents of their pockets removed and the labels on their clothes ripped off (which does nothing to hamper identification of the men only a few hours later), before being put back in the car, driven to the nearby town of Berwyn, and dumped along a deserted road (the car is abandoned in Oak Park). 
 Crime Scene
 Klondike's Lincoln

Public indignation is immediate as the killings become front page news across the country ... but no one is ever brought to justice for the murders.  Knowing who the culprit probably is, Chicago police raid numerous Capone enterprises, but can't find the big man himself ... and no one is talking for the record.  Eventually, on July 28, 1926, Capone turns himself in to Federal authorities at the Illinois-Indiana state line (rightly believing Chicago cops might take matters into their own hands ... a plot is set in motion to allow Sgt. McSwiggin to kill his son's killer, but the honest cop can't find it in him to kill the unarmed mobster when presented with the opportunity), makes statements to the press about not being involved in the murders and how all the corpses were good friends of his, and is taken into custody.  The next day, he is released after posting a bond of $25,000 on pending Federal Prohibition charges, and then when freed, immediately arrested by Chicago Police Chief William H. "Bill" Shoemaker for the murders of Doherty, Duffy, and McSwiggin.  The next morning Capone's lawyer's take up the matter before state Chief Justice Thomas J. Lynch, and with no supporting evidence available, the complaint is dropped and Capone is freed.  One night in jail for the killings is all Capone ever gets for the crime ... and O'Donnell's shown which way the wind is blowing (Myles will be mortally wounded by a bartender he kills during a 1933 booze generated argument, while Klondike dies a penniless wraith in 1976), he is now free to giving his full attention to a more lethal adversary ... North-side gang leader, Hymie Weiss.
 Headlines
 Some Of The McSwiggin Funeral Crowd
 McSwiggin On His Way To Rest
 Hymie Weiss

Wrong place, at the very wrong time ... just another day in the "Windy City" of Chicago ... the McSwiggin killing of 1926!
 McSwiggin