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"Don't Ever Forget . . ." Late in 1940 Holland Smith took his brigade and his single alligator to the Caribbean for seven months' hard training in beachhead landings. He threw in his course in Marine philosophy: "Don't ever forget you are the best fighting man in the world." After he returned he was made a major general.
Before the U.S. was at war, Holland Smith was a corps commander. He was training not only his marines but also the 1st Army Division in amphibious operations. Later he trained the 9th Army Division. But when the doughboys fought well on beach heads in Africa, Sicily, Italy, General Smith only read about it. In 1942 he was transferred to the West Coast, where he gave postgraduate training courses in amphibious warfare to the 7th Army Division (before it went to Attu), the 3rd Marine Division (which took Bougainville), the five regiments which landed on Kiska.
This time when his pupils went into action on Attu, Holland Smith was allowed to watch them from an airplane. Before the troops sailed for Kiska, Smith wanted a patrol sent in to find out if the Japs had really pulled out. The patrol was not sent.
Now the Fight. Old Marine Smith ached for a combat assignment. And at last he got it. Last September, just four years after he started teaching his marines how to be amphibious but modern, he got his Central Pacific combat corps command. There on the Pacific atolls, where professionals die but professionals are made, Holland Smith, the top U.S. professional of amphibious warfare, was chosen to put his graduates through their public examination.
His new job made Holland Smith the foot soldiers' counterpart to Richmond Kelly Turner, the Central Pacific's admiral who commands the warships that fire on atolls and the transports that deliver the invading soldiers and marines.
Holland Smith has a hand in strategic and tactical planning, supervises the final training of the island-invading troops.
That his training has been good is well attested by the record of the troops of his Central Pacific command which have al ready been in battle: the 2nd Marine and 27th Army Divisions (Gilberts), the 4th Marine and 7th Army Divisions (Marshalls).
Hot-tempered Kelly Turner and hot-tempered Holland Smith get along fine —now. Says General Smith: "I like that guy. We fought. We argued like hell. We were nasty to each other. But when we came up from the mat we were friends." Why the Marines? Some theorists claim that marines are good fighters be cause they must always fight, war or peace. More than once Army officers have tried to abolish the Marine Corps —Douglas MacArthur as Chief of Staff had the last notable try. Many a West Pointer will still argue that the picked troops of the Marine Corps should be leading the Army's vast collection of average guys: "We could use all those privates for sergeants." At the same time the Marine generals always must struggle with the Navy for a bigger role in tactical decisions. Many a non-Marine agrees that the people who do the dying ought to be able to say how they will die.