COMMAND: The Road from Willaumez

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“When daylight of March 6 came, the ocean was empty except for six straggling LCMs, three of them going in our direction and three going in the opposite direction. [The] Army boat group commander had no idea where Beach Red was. [Staff officers] and I got out maps and by inspection determined that what we were looking at toward our right was, in fact, Willaumez Peninsula. By checking the silhouette of the peaks we were also able to determine the approximate location of Beach Red . . .”

Thus Colonel Oliver Prince Smith, commanding the 5th Regiment of the 1st Marine Division, described the dawn of his first battle in World War II. His naval escort consisted of six little PT boats mounting nothing stronger than 20-mm. guns. Smith improvised his own artillery preparation by firing the guns of his tanks while they were still offshore in the assault craft. Since air support from Army planes failed to arrive, Smith’s air support consisted of one Piper cub which dropped eight hand grenades behind the enemy beach. In spite of these crudities, the Willaumez operation was successful; Smith got a Bronze Star, the first of his three World War II decorations.

The minutely planned and elaborately organized amphibious assault in Korea last week was as different from the Willaumez snafu as an F80 jet is from the baling-wire crates of World War I. Since Willaumez, a great deal has been learned about the art of amphibious warfare. More than any other marine, “O.P.” Smith, sometimes called “the Professor,” had labored to get World War II beach assault experience into textbooks where all U.S. planners could use it.

Last week Oliver Prince Smith, now a major general commanding the 1st Marine Division, was ashore in Korea with the 23,000 marines who had spearheaded Douglas MacArthur’s assault. Up to the time when the first marine set foot ashore, the heaviest responsibility lay on Rear Admiral James H. (“Jimmy”) Doyle, amphibious attack commander, and on Vice Admiral Arthur Struble, commander of the Seventh Fleet, who softened up the shore defenses and got the troops to the beaches. After all troops were ashore, the ground fighting would be taken over by General Almond as commander of MacArthur’s X Corps. Between times, the heaviest responsibility for the success or failure of Operation Chromite lay with General Smith’s marines.

It was no new thing for Smith to be late getting into the war, or not to get into it at all. He had to wait in California while his assistant division commander, Brigadier General Edward Craig (TIME, Aug. 14), took advance elements of the ist to Korea for the first Marine battles there. In World War I, Smith, as a fledgling Marine officer, had been sent to Guam—of all places—where the only German he might have sighted (he did not) would have been Count Luckner, the Kaiser’s famed sea raider. Pearl Harbor found Smith in—of all places—Iceland. He missed the 1st Marine Division’s epochal blooding on Guadalcanal.

Wizard with Roses. Like many another top Marine officer, Smith joined the Corps after a civilian education (with military trimmings). Sprig of a family that settled in Virginia in 1740, he was born (1893) in Menard, Texas. His father, a lawer, died when Oliver was six. His mother, a woman of fortitude and strong Christian Science principles, took the boy and two other children to the sleepy little town of Santa Cruz, in California, raised the youngsters in her church, of which Marine Smith is still a quietly devout member.

Smith’s mother earned a living as a dressmaker and piano teacher and son Oliver helped out with paper routes and later with jobs as gardener, high-school janitor and cement plant worker. After high school, he spent a year in a logging camp, then worked his way through the University of California at Berkeley. Gardening is still his favorite hobby. His specialty: roses.

At the university Smith joined the R.O.T.C. and became a cadet 1st lieutenant. At that time he was a gawky, shy six-footer with intense, deep-set blue eyes, and was deeply in love with a merry, bouncing girl named Esther King.

After graduation Smith clerked for a year with Standard Oil, dropped the job in a flash when he read in a newspaper that the Marines were commissioning men with university military training such as his. He got his 2nd lieutenancy in May 1917 and was sent to Guam. Esther King sailed out there and married him. After the war he was transferred to the Marine base at Mare Island.

He served in Haiti, at Quantico and in Washington. He took a competitive examination for the Ecole Supérieure de Guerre in Paris (then renowned as one of the world’s great theory-of-warfare schools) and won it handily. Because work at the école was fantastically hard, marines who attended it called it “a period of great suffering.” While Smith toiled like a galley slave, his daughters studied geometry in French. During vacations the family toured Europe, passing up nightclubs for Baedeker’s monuments.

Bulging Briefcase. From 1931 to 1939, like many another officer of his training-minded corps, Smith was almost constantly in school, as teacher or student. In the spring of 1941, a lieutenant colonel, he was given command of a battalion and shipped off with three other Marine battalions to Iceland. The browned-off marines in Iceland solemnly assessed the place as the “sinkhole of the world,” but there was never a word of complaint in Smith’s letters to his family in the U.S.

In his personally devised shorthand, he made voluminous notes on the island, and when the Marines were relieved in March 1942, the incoming Army commander—a two-star general—took over Colonel Smith’s transcribed notes as the military bible for the station. After taking his battalion to San Diego, Smith was ordered to Washington and duty on the Corps’ Plans & Policy Division (“Pots & Pans”).

“No, Thank You, Sir.” It was early 1944 when Smith got into the war as a colonel commanding the 1st Division’s 5th Regiment (part of his command in Korea today). By then the 1st had long since finished its dreadful battle for Guadalcanal and was floundering in the mud and rain of New Britain.

Smith and the late Major General William Rupertus, who commanded the 1st during the New Britain campaign, had taken an instant dislike to each other. Such frictions are common in all military hierarchies; the measure of the junior-ranking man in each case is how he takes it. When Smith got his first general’s star and was made ADC (assistant division commander), the promotion did not come from Rupertus but from “topside.” The first day Smith assumed his duties as ADC, Rupertus decided to make a hospitable gesture and reached for a bottle. “Have a drink,” he growled.

Standing at attention, Smith answered quietly: “No, thank you, sir.”

Rupertus exploded in a barrage of blistering Marine denunciation. After listening for a minute or two—still at attention —Smith whipped out a notebook and began taking down his superior’s remarks in his odd shorthand. “And that,” another officer recalled, “was just about the way Smith was. He would never have said anything back to Rupertus, because he [Smith] was a marine by the books. The general was talking, so Smith just stood there like he was in staff meeting, taking notes.”

Into the Textbooks. Despite their differences, Smith and Rupertus planned the Peleliu invasion (the 1st Division’s bloodiest battle of the war). When Rupertus broke his ankle while watching landing practice, some doubt was expressed by topside on his physical ability to command at Peleliu. Smith loyally argued for the superior who had berated him, and Rupertus commanded the operation on crutches.

After Peleliu, Smith was transferred to the staff of Lieut. General Simon Buckner’s Tenth Army at Pearl Harbor, to help plan D-day on Okinawa, a combined Army-Marine operation (1,213 ships, 183,000 men). In July 1945 he was assigned once more to Quantico. Appointed as Quantico commandant in 1946 was General Clifton B. Gates, a regimental commander’ on Guadalcanal who is now commandant of the Corps. Gates and Smith sifted out all that had been learned of the art of amphibious warfare and distilled it into a series of textbooks, leaning heavily on Smith’s enormous mass of notes.

Smith reads a great deal, and is described by his wife (and by admiring Marine Corps officers) as an “intellectual type.” Never a party man or a backslapper, he is a nondrinker by inclination, but he takes an occasional beer “to be sociable.”

Back of His Hand. When the Communists invaded South Korea, Smith was in Washington as Clifton Cates’s assistant commandant. In July Smith was sent to California, as a two-star general, to command the 1st Division. While Eddie Craig with his advance combat team kicked off the Marine fighting in Korea, Smith fleshed out the depleted division with reserves and regulars summoned from all over the country. Last week, in the kind of ship-to-shore assault he knows like the back of his hand, Oliver Prince Smith was in the Korean war at last.