William P. Upshur

His Story

William Peterkin Upshur was born in Richmond on October 28, 1881. He attended Maguire's University School, entered the Virginia Military Institute in 1898, and was commissioned in the Marine Corps in 1904. By the autumn of 1915 he was a captain in Haiti, where the Marines were campaigning against Caco insurgents in the northern mountains.

Late that October, Upshur rode out of Fort Liberté with a mounted detachment of forty Marines on a six-day reconnaissance. After dark on October 24, while the column was crossing a river in a deep ravine, about four hundred Cacos opened fire on it from three sides. Ten to one. The Marines fought their way forward to good ground and held it through the night under continuous fire. At daybreak they went out in three squads, each in a different direction. Upshur led one of them. The Cacos scattered, and the Marines took Fort Dipitie. The expedition commander wrote afterward that had one squad failed, "not one man of the party would have lived to tell the story."

Two other Marines received the Medal of Honor for the same action. One of them, Gunnery Sergeant Dan Daly, received his second.

Upshur served twenty-seven more years in the Corps. He was posted to Cuba, Santo Domingo, China, and the Philippines, commanded a military prison at Bordeaux during the First World War, led the Marine Corps Schools at Quantico, and commanded the Marine Corps Base at San Diego. On January 1, 1942, a major general, he took over the Department of the Pacific. He died on July 21, 1943, of injuries from a plane crash near Sitka, Alaska, while inspecting his command. He was buried in Alaska, and in September 1948 his remains were moved to the U.S. Naval Academy Cemetery at Annapolis.