Old Man of the Atolls

(See Cover)

Kwajalein, key to the Marshalls, was secure in U.S. hands. The second amphibious attack on Central Pacific atolls had been successful far beyond the first heroic but costly assault on Tarawa and Makin. As they were learning through experience about other phases of war, U.S. forces were improving their amphibious operation. Kwajalein's casualty list was only about half as large as Tarawa's 3,200.

For its improving amphibious operations the U.S. could thank the top Pacific admirals: Nimitz, Spruance, Turner and Towers. But it was also deeply in the debt of an explosive, spectacled, mustached major general of the Marine Corps; Holland McTyeire Smith.

Kwajalein had proved the effectiveness of greatly increased naval and air bombardment. It had also proved that no atoll can be captured until the foot soldiers wade ashore and kill the remaining Japs. The boss of Central Pacific foot soldiers is amphibious warfare's kindly, choleric "Howlin' Mad" Smith, who looks and sometimes talks like Wallace Beery in the role of a Marine general. He is the father of modern U.S. amphibious warfare.

Toughest in the Book. Traditionally, Marines have always been amphibious: they fight on the land and on the sea. They man Navy guns and they shoot Army rifles. But the toughest job in any military operation lies in that half-&-half area between the troop transport and the dry land of the defended enemy beach. Said a Marine sergeant who waded into Tarawa through the soprano whine of Jap

13-mm. and .303-caliber bullets: "That's where they separate the men from the boys."

The Corps made its first beachhead landing in the first year of its existence, 1776. That was on New Providence, the Bahama Islands, when Captain Samuel Nicholas took 220 marines and 50 sailors ashore as the schooner Wasp and the sloop Providence laid down supporting fire. Captain Nicholas captured 71 cannon, 115 mortars, 24 casks of powder, suffered no casualties.

But most of the wars between 1776 and 1941 were land wars or sea wars. World War I was quite definitely both, but mostly landlocked. Peace-minded Congresses (and most U.S. citizens) thought wishfully that the Navy could insure the U.S. against war. The "bluewater" U.S. Navy hoarded its thin appropriations for its armored warships, which it planned would bombard not enemy beaches but enemy warships, as in the Battle of Jutland. The Marines, always conscious of their traditional role, got nothing when they tried to get funds for the small landing boats which are the key to beachhead operations.

By the time Japan's swift conquest of the Pacific had ended this unrealistic dream, a new start had been made. In September 1939, the ist Marine Brigade started an amphibious training program. That was the month Marine Commandant Thomas Holcomb sent his assistant, Brigadier General Holland Smith, to take command. Tommy Holcomb had picked the right man.

The Listless Lawyer. By 1905 Holland Smith, 23, graduate of Alabama Polytechnic Institute and the University of

Alabama, had practiced law for two years. That was enough for him. He took down his shingle, said good-by to his mother & father (also a Montgomery lawyer), went to Washington. There he told Congressman Ariosto A. Wiley of the Montgomery district that he would like to try for a commission in the Army. Back came the answer: no Army vacancies, but the Marines could use another second lieutenant.

"What are the Marines?" asked Holland Smith. He found out, and took the commission.

During his training at the Annapolis "Schools of Application" (where civilians were turned into officers), Marine Smith met Ada Wilkinson of Phoenixville, Pa. at a dance. In 1909, when he returned from the Philippines, he married her, despite the anti-Yankee doubts of the Alabama Smiths.

Travels of a Marine. The Smiths have been travelers, like all Marines: they lived in Bremerton, Seattle, Manila, Cavite, Shanghai, Puerta Plata, Norfolk, Newport, Port-au-Prince, Quantico, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Long Beach, San Francisco, Washington, San Diego. In one two-year stretch they moved 14 times.

By 1917, Captain Holland Smith set off for France. He spent two years there. He was adjutant of the famed 4th Marine Brigade. Then he was Assistant Operations Officer for the U.S. I Corps, where he served with Army officers as well as Marines. He was at Soissons, Champagne, St. Mihiel.

Now & Then the General. When mercurial Brigadier General Smith took over the 1st Brigade in 1939, he had long since lost his earlier nickname "Hoke." The name his fellow Marines knew him by was "Howlin-Mad." He was always demanding and often profane. He could be kind, too. He fumed and scolded, but when he laughed he laughed deep in the belly. He was enthusiastic, thoughtful, stubborn, a hard driver. Sometimes he scaled the heights of elation; again he walked hip-deep in despair.*

To train some 5,000 men in amphibious landings, Holland Smith and the Atlantic Fleet commander, Rear Admiral Ernest

J. King (now the Navy's top man), had to make and mesh their own rules. Navy gun crews had to be taught how to fire at beaches instead of at ships; marines had to learn how to scamper down rope cargo nets, what to do once they had waded ashore. They learned the tedious but vital facts of combat loading.

Equipment was more than a problem: there wasn't any. Holland Smith started practicing with two ancient ship's launches whose engines frequently did not work. He experimented with Boat Builder Andrew Jackson Higgins on a fast, high, stout-bottomed boat that could bounce over shallow reefs and hit the sand hard enough to get men into shallow water.

He got Higgins to build a boat that would carry tanks into water shallow enough for them to roll ashore. He tried an amphibious tractor ("alligator") that Donald Roebling had invented for rescue use in the Florida Everglades. For two years the aluminum cleats always came off the alligator. But it was the forerunner of today's amphibious tank.

"Don't Ever Forget . . ." Late in 1940 Holland Smith took his brigade and his single alligator to the Caribbean for seven months' hard training in beachhead landings. He threw in his course in Marine philosophy: "Don't ever forget you are the best fighting man in the world." After he returned he was made a major general.

Before the U.S. was at war, Holland Smith was a corps commander. He was training not only his marines but also the 1st Army Division in amphibious operations. Later he trained the 9th Army Division. But when the doughboys fought well on beach heads in Africa, Sicily, Italy, General Smith only read about it. In 1942 he was transferred to the West Coast, where he gave postgraduate training courses in amphibious warfare to the 7th Army Division (before it went to Attu), the 3rd Marine Division (which took Bougainville), the five regiments which landed on Kiska.

This time when his pupils went into action on Attu, Holland Smith was allowed to watch them from an airplane. Before the troops sailed for Kiska, Smith wanted a patrol sent in to find out if the Japs had really pulled out. The patrol was not sent.

Now the Fight. Old Marine Smith ached for a combat assignment. And at last he got it. Last September, just four years after he started teaching his marines how to be amphibious but modern, he got his Central Pacific combat corps command. There on the Pacific atolls, where professionals die but professionals are made, Holland Smith, the top U.S. professional of amphibious warfare, was chosen to put his graduates through their public examination.

His new job made Holland Smith the foot soldiers' counterpart to Richmond Kelly Turner, the Central Pacific's admiral who commands the warships that fire on atolls and the transports that deliver the invading soldiers and marines.

Holland Smith has a hand in strategic and tactical planning, supervises the final training of the island-invading troops.

That his training has been good is well attested by the record of the troops of his Central Pacific command which have al ready been in battle: the 2nd Marine and 27th Army Divisions (Gilberts), the 4th Marine and 7th Army Divisions (Marshalls).

Hot-tempered Kelly Turner and hot-tempered Holland Smith get along fine --now. Says General Smith: "I like that guy. We fought. We argued like hell. We were nasty to each other. But when we came up from the mat we were friends." Why the Marines? Some theorists claim that marines are good fighters be cause they must always fight, war or peace. More than once Army officers have tried to abolish the Marine Corps --Douglas MacArthur as Chief of Staff had the last notable try. Many a West Pointer will still argue that the picked troops of the Marine Corps should be leading the Army's vast collection of average guys: "We could use all those privates for sergeants." At the same time the Marine generals always must struggle with the Navy for a bigger role in tactical decisions. Many a non-Marine agrees that the people who do the dying ought to be able to say how they will die.

This continuous alert against attacks from other services has been shared by Holland Smith. He is so Marine-minded that he has been known to argue against hidebound Navy thinking with his blonde, six-footer only son John Victor (Annapo lis '34), until recently a destroyer commander in the Mediterranean, now aide to Admiral Leahy.

A Time for Diplomacy. Perennially truculent, Holland Smith would have been busted out years ago if he had not been the man and the Marine he is. A military liberal at the salt-encrusted age of 61, he never hesitates to admit his own mistakes.

In war or peace he enjoys a good fight. When his troops have landed he goes ashore as soon as possible, carbine over his shoulder. On Makin he came upon a young lieutenant firing madly at nothing visible. "Son," said General Smith, "if you don't quit that wild shooting I'm going to take your gun away from you." From Makin soon after the battle had ended, he flew to Tarawa. He walked through little Betio Island's 5,000 enemy and U.S. dead with the 2nd Marine Division's Major General Julian Smith.* A few minutes after they passed a pillbox rubble, Jap snipers killed three marines on the spot they had left.

When he is not learning more about amphibious warfare on places like Makin, Tarawa or Kwajalein, Holland Smith lives in a house near the naval base at Pearl Harbor with his tall, courtly Chief of Staff, Brigadier General Graves B. ("Bobby") Erskine, his aide, Major Clifton A. Woodrum Jr. (ex-SEC lawyer and son of the Virginia Congressman) and his three Marine orderlies.

He eats sparingly (only thick soup for luncheon), smokes more William Penn cigars than his doctor thinks he should. His favorite topic of conversation is his grandchildren, Marion and Holland II, aged four and two. Toward women he is an old-fashioned Southerner. Riding recently in a C-54 through the Pacific, he noticed two Army nurses aboard, mused: "Think of it. Women in a war."

Soldier's Reward. Last week President Roosevelt nominated Kelly Turner a three-star admiral (see p. 65). Observers felt certain that the three stars of a lieutenant general would soon follow for Holland Smith.

He has already won the D.S.M. When Secretary Frank Knox conferred it on him, the official citation said: "By his capable performance of duty on both coasts of the United States, he laid the groundwork for amphibious training of practically all American units. . . . His proficient leadership and tireless energy in the development of high combat efficiency among the forces under his supervision were in keeping with the highest traditions of the United States Naval Service."

* Once he sent General Holcomb a list of Marine generals he thought should be retired, to give younger officers a chance. No. 1 on the list: Holland Smith. *Not to be confused with two other approximate General Smiths in Holland Smith's command: Ralph Smith of the 27th Army Division, Harry Schmidt of the 4th Marine Division.

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