Billeted at the American embassy to the south of Legation Street, fifty US Marines were tasked with stopping the Chinese from gaining access to the sixty-foot-high and forty-foot-wide Tartar Wall that loomed over the foreign ghetto. If the Chinese were able to scale it, the Westerners below would be sitting ducks. During one firefight, Private Dan Daly, a five-foot-six Irish American from Manhattan’s rough-and-tumble Five Points neighborhood, found himself alone behind a low stone parapet. As the Chinese attacked in ones and twos, Daly picked off two hundred of them. For his deeds, he won the
...more
