Army & Navy – MARINES: Professional

Platoon Sergeant Charles Henry Smith, U.S.M.C., can go back to civilian life any time he wants. He has 232 points, three campaign ribbons with 17 Pacific battle stars and a chestful of decorations, including the Navy Cross. He also carries 39 pieces of shrapnel, a Jap bullet in his shoulder and another in his spine. But this week, as the Marine Corps celebrated its 170th birthday, indestructible, 27-year-old Sergeant Smith was glad to tell reporters that he was not going to be a civilian. He is a professional marine.

Older professionals, getting near retirement, heard what he had to say with approval. As it had from the day it was founded (Nov. 10, 1775), the Corps would need noncoms like Smith to keep the outfit going. Smith was 16 when he shipped in the Marine Corps. He was a husky, competent corporal of 22 when he heard his first shot fired in anger. That was at Pearl Harbor. Charles Henry Smith was in the color guard aboard the battleship Maryland when the enemy struck. On the double at the proper command, he manned his antiaircraft gun.

On that Sunday morning his wife was killed on Ford Island by a Jap aerial gunner.

Marine Smith sailed south on the Lexington, was aboard her when she was sunk in the Coral Sea. Rescued and taken back to Pearl Harbor, he was put aboard the North Carolina. Then he got shore duty, and became a member of Carlson’s Raiders.

The Raiders. He stormed ashore with them on Makin Island, killed one Jap with his rifle butt in hand-to-hand combat. The Raiders went on to Guadalcanal and there, during Carlson’s famous 30-day patrol behind enemy lines, among other feats Smith knocked out two machine-gun nests and choked one Jap to death. Willing to volunteer for anything, he served a tour as an aerial gunner (“I wasn’t doing anything at the time”) and shot down two planes.

He went home after that for a breather, met and married pretty, 21-year-old Ada North. But he was soon back in the South Pacific, fighting in Abemama and Majuro, and in the Marshall Islands, where he was wounded by a Jap hand grenade.

In the Marshalls one night, Marine Smith found himself with two comrades in a foxhole within earshot of the enemy. In Japanese, he invited confused Jap soldiers to join him. One after another, four of them crawled over; Smith quietly bayoneted them to death. Smith’s friends left for another foxhole. Said he: “I guess they thought I was crazy.”

At Tinian he and Pfc. Al Shirley, of Los Angeles, made an unauthorized patrol ahead of advancing tanks to defuse land mines. They captured a machine gun, turned it on the enemy and killed 19. Pfc. Shirley used a whole clip from a Browning automatic rifle to knock down a Jap before the machine gun was taken. For such waste, Sergeant Smith gave him a good dressing-down.

Marine Smith fought on at Peleliu, was shipped back to Pearl Harbor, for another breather, then shipped out again for the Leyte and Luzon campaigns. He was sent home to California (“They said I was tired and worn out”) but he got back in time for the Okinawa campaign and the last days of the war.

Last week at Camp Pendleton, Calif., he was teaching new marines to be better fighting men, “in case the time comes when they have to go in battle again.” As far as the Marine Corps was concerned, Sergeant Smith had settled down. But Mrs. Smith had left him, taken their 15-month-old baby along. Said she: “He was for the Marine Corps, first, last and always.”