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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