ARMED FORCES: Wizard for the Corps

To succeed retiring General Lemuel C. Shepherd as Commandant of the Marine Corps, President Eisenhower last week named Lieut. General Randolph McCall Pate, 57, a warmly modest little South Carolinian with a flamethrower’s efficiency but none of its roar.

The corps’ 21st commandant, born across Battery Creek from the Marines’ Parris Island at Port Royal, S.C., began soldiering as a World War I Army private. After that, Randolph Pate, like Lemuel Shepherd, entered Virginia Military Institute,* graduated at the top of his class (’21), and entered the corps as a second lieutenant. For the next 20 years, Pate served in Hawaii, Santo Domingo and China. Then came Pearl Harbor. Major Pate, upped to lieutenant-colonel, became D-4 (supply officer) of the First Marine Division, set sail for the South Pacific and the testing time of two decades’ waiting.

Most Astute. Expecting a leisurely stopover, the First arrived in New Zealand in June 1942, suddenly got orders to take Guadalcanal. All equipment had to be reloaded for combat immediately. In torrential rains on a crowded Wellington dock, D-4 Pate quietly bossed marines slithering through mushy corn flakes and drowned cigarettes, and wrapped up the job in a record 13 days.

On Guadalcanal, when the Japanese fleet drove off U.S. naval support, Pate tirelessly scrounged captured rice to feed the hungry First, finally was ordered off the island with a severe case of jungle rot. As his plane left Henderson Field, it was riddled by enemy A.A. fire, crash-landed twelve hours later on a shallow reef that left the 25 survivors in waist-high water; they were rescued eleven days later. Pate recovered to help Major General Holland (“Howling Mad”) Smith plan the amphibious assaults on Peleliu, Iwo Jima and Okinawa, won the Legion of Merit twice.

Very Surprised. After the war, Pate directed Marine Reserve training, served as a logistics planner for the Joint Chiefs. In 1953 he went back to the First Division as commander in Korea. In the final three months of bitter fighting, Pate earned a nickname (“The Wizard”) and an Army Distinguished Service Medal for “most astute military judgment and discretion in the deployment of his troops.” With characteristic meticulousness, he salvaged equipment after the armistice, re-established a strong battle line and policed the “Big Switch” prisoner exchange.

Last week, back in Washington as assistant commandant, the Wizard was living quietly with his Canadian-born wife Mary (they have no children) when his appointment was announced. In his new job, which he will take on early next year, Marine Pate vowed to carry on with the corps’ “high morale, excellent training and readiness for battle.”

*When famed Major General Smedley Darlington (“The Fighting Quaker”) Butler retired from the Marine Corps in 1931, he said bitterly that none but Annapolis men could aspire to be commandant. The Marines’ last Annapolis-trained commandant was Major General John H. Russell, 1934-36.