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Alabama, had practiced law for two years. That was enough for him. He took down his shingle, said good-by to his mother & father (also a Montgomery lawyer), went to Washington. There he told Congressman Ariosto A. Wiley of the Montgomery district that he would like to try for a commission in the Army. Back came the answer: no Army vacancies, but the Marines could use another second lieutenant.
"What are the Marines?" asked Holland Smith. He found out, and took the commission.
During his training at the Annapolis "Schools of Application" (where civilians were turned into officers), Marine Smith met Ada Wilkinson of Phoenixville, Pa. at a dance. In 1909, when he returned from the Philippines, he married her, despite the anti-Yankee doubts of the Alabama Smiths.
Travels of a Marine. The Smiths have been travelers, like all Marines: they lived in Bremerton, Seattle, Manila, Cavite, Shanghai, Puerta Plata, Norfolk, Newport, Port-au-Prince, Quantico, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Long Beach, San Francisco, Washington, San Diego. In one two-year stretch they moved 14 times.
By 1917, Captain Holland Smith set off for France. He spent two years there. He was adjutant of the famed 4th Marine Brigade. Then he was Assistant Operations Officer for the U.S. I Corps, where he served with Army officers as well as Marines. He was at Soissons, Champagne, St. Mihiel.
Now & Then the General. When mercurial Brigadier General Smith took over the 1st Brigade in 1939, he had long since lost his earlier nickname "Hoke." The name his fellow Marines knew him by was "Howlin-Mad." He was always demanding and often profane. He could be kind, too. He fumed and scolded, but when he laughed he laughed deep in the belly. He was enthusiastic, thoughtful, stubborn, a hard driver. Sometimes he scaled the heights of elation; again he walked hip-deep in despair.*
To train some 5,000 men in amphibious landings, Holland Smith and the Atlantic Fleet commander, Rear Admiral Ernest
J. King (now the Navy's top man), had to make and mesh their own rules. Navy gun crews had to be taught how to fire at beaches instead of at ships; marines had to learn how to scamper down rope cargo nets, what to do once they had waded ashore. They learned the tedious but vital facts of combat loading.
Equipment was more than a problem: there wasn't any. Holland Smith started practicing with two ancient ship's launches whose engines frequently did not work. He experimented with Boat Builder Andrew Jackson Higgins on a fast, high, stout-bottomed boat that could bounce over shallow reefs and hit the sand hard enough to get men into shallow water.
He got Higgins to build a boat that would carry tanks into water shallow enough for them to roll ashore. He tried an amphibious tractor ("alligator") that Donald Roebling had invented for rescue use in the Florida Everglades. For two years the aluminum cleats always came off the alligator. But it was the forerunner of today's amphibious tank.