_LtGen Smith in his command post ashore on Saipan uses a high-powered
telescope to observe his troops in action._]
Lieutenant General Holland M. Smith, one of the most famous Marines
of World War II, was born in 1882. He was commissioned a second
lieutenant in 1905. There followed a series of overseas assignments in
the Philippines, Nicaragua, Santo Domingo, and with the Marine Brigade
in France in World War I. Beginning in the early 1930s, he became
increasingly focused on the development of amphibious warfare concepts.
Soon after the outbreak of war with Japan in 1941, he came to a crucial
position, command of all Marines in the Central Pacific.
As another Marine officer later described him, “He was of medium
height, perhaps five feet nine or ten inches, and somewhat paunchy. His
once-black hair had turned gray. His once close-trimmed mustache was
somewhat scraggly. He wore steel-rimmed glasses and he smoked cigars
incessantly.” There was one other feature that characterized him: a
ferocious temper that earned him the nickname “Howlin’ Mad” Smith,
although his close friends knew him as “Hoke.”
This characteristic would usually emerge as irritation at what he felt
were substandard performances. One famous example of this was his
relief of an Army general on Saipan. A huge interservice uproar erupted!
Less than two years later, after 41 years of active service, during
which he was awarded four Distinguished Service Medals for his
leadership in four successive successful amphibious operations, he
retired in April 1946, as a four-star general. He died in January 1967.
]
[Sidebar (page 5): The 2d Marine Division
[Illustration:
Department of Defense Photo (USMC) A412992
]
The origins of this division lay in the activation of the 2d Marine
Brigade as part of the Fleet Marine Force on 1 July 1936. A year later
the brigade deployed to Shanghai, China, returning in 1938 to San
Diego, California.
On 1 February 1941, the unit was redesignated as the 2d Marine
Division. Its component regiments, the 2d, 6th, 8th, and 10th Marines,
brought with them impressive histories of service in Vera Cruz
(Mexico), World War I in France, and the Caribbean.
In World War II, elements of the division served in Iceland, in Hawaii
during the attack on Pearl Harbor, and on Samoa, then the full division
in the Guadalcanal campaign, followed by the bloody assault of Tarawa
for which it was awarded a Presidential Unit Citation, and on to
Saipan, Tinian, and Okinawa.