For Country and Corps: The Life of General Oliver P. Smith

By Gail B Shisler

Oliver P. Smith fought at Peleliu and Okinawa and then commanded the 1st Marine Division in Korea during the assault at Inchon, the recapture of Seoul, and the breakout from the Chosin Reservoir. Called one of the twentieth century’s great Marine leaders, Smith was known as an outstanding combat commander and a man of great intellect and moral courage. This biography, written by the granddaughter he helped raise, illuminates the general’s remarkable life. It draws on interviews, oral histories and a thorough examination of letters held by the family and not previously available to researchers. Gail Shisler’s investigation of Smith’s relationship with his Army superiors in Korea and with his Marine Corps peers and superiors takes exception to previously published descriptions and adds new insights into the Corps’ postwar battle for survival.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Naval Institute Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781612511764

Book preview

for

Country

and CORPS

This book has been brought to publication with the generous assistance of the United States Naval Academy Class of 1945.

for

Country

and CORPS

THE LIFE OF

GENERAL

OLIVER P. SMITH

GAIL B. SHISLER

NAVAL INSTITUTE PRESS

Annapolis, Maryland

Naval Institute Press

291 Wood Road

Annapolis, MD 21402

© 2009 by Gail B. Shisler

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Shisler, Gail B.

For country and Corps : the life of Gen. Oliver P. Smith / Gail B. Shisler.

   p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-61251-176-4  1. Smith, Oliver Prince. 2. Generals--United States--Biography. 3. United States. Marine Corps--Biography. I. Title.

E745.S617S55 2009

355.0092--dc22

[B]

2009025841

All photographs are from the author’s collection except where otherwise noted. All maps were created by Chris Robinson.

14131211100998765432

First printing

For Michael

Semper Fidelis

CONTENTS

PREFACE

He was just my grandfather—someone whose large hand would close over my small one when we went for walks, someone who would always make room for me to join him in his large, green leather chair. I might have noticed that he went to work in a uniform with stars glinting on his shoulders, but it meant nothing to me. He was simply the man who would play a game of croquet with me after dinner, or let me help him with his nightly games of solitaire.

As my father was killed in World War II, my grandfather filled an important place in my life. I lived with him full time as a small child, moving with my grandparents from white clapboard quarters on the Marine Base at Quantico, Virginia, to a three-story brick house at the Marine Barracks at 8th and I Streets in Washington, D.C., to the bougainvillea-covered Ranch House at Camp Pendleton, California, to the widow-walked Michigan House on the Naval Base in Norfolk, Virginia.

As I grew up, I began to understand to some extent who he was and what he had done with his life. Although he was reserved even in the midst of the family circle, I easily understood from my earliest years that his warm heart was close to the surface. I admired his quiet, steadfast manner and his unruffled, gentlemanly behavior. And I loved him as a kind, caring grandfather. In college I wrote my senior thesis on his actions in the Korean War. He was very patient with my efforts, enjoying having a family member, no matter how naïve, take such an interest in his past. It was a period I wish I could have back again. Later, I visited him often while my Marine husband was in Vietnam, and he took in stride the addition of great-grandchildren in his house.

But it was not until I began writing this biography that I understood what a great man he had truly been. And his greatness lay not so much in the events that marked his life, but in his response to those events. While he had an unswerving adherence to principle, it was infused with a great understanding of the human heart.

His was not an easy climb to the top. He had emerged from World War I a captain who had served in the Pacific rather than in France. In a combat organization such as the Marine Corps, he knew he had one strike against him because of it. In fact one of his contemporaries would comment to him at the end of that war: I suppose you were out in the Pacific counting the casualties among us that were over in France.¹ Yet interestingly, many years later, this same man, now a retired general, would note that his list of outstanding Marine officers included three men: General Vandegrift for Guadalcanal, General Roy Hunt for leadership, and Oliver Smith who was good at anything.² For Smith’s response to the challenge had been to work hard at whatever job he was given. He had been determined to make it to the top, but never at the expense of others. He never politicked for an assignment, never angled for favored subordinates, and never was less than loyal to his friends or to those with whom he served.

His papers in the archives at the Marine Corps University at Quantico, Virginia, comprise forty-nine boxes of letters, narratives, official correspondence, memorabilia, maps, and his unpublished memoirs. It is a written record of unusual depth and immediacy, much of it written either during the events described or directly afterward. But among all this writing there are very few insights into his inner feelings and emotions, even in the letters to his wife. His reserve was legendary.

His historical persona stands frozen in time, like a statue of Roman general—opaque eyes showing nothing of the man within, the still form silently depicting the virtues of veritas, dignitas, and gravitas. And engraved on the base of this statue could be these words from Marcus Aurelius, the philosopher, soldier, and statesman: Things have no hold on the soul. They have no access to it, cannot move or direct it. It is moved and directed by itself alone. It takes the things before it and interprets them as it sees fit.³

He was often urged to write his memoirs, but he steadfastly demurred. He would do so only if he could be honest, and in being honest he would have to be critical. This he refused to do. Thus, he left his story in the hands of future historians, trusting that the record would speak for the man. But while the record of his Marines in Korea still shines down the years, the story of the man who led them has not been fully told. In truth, he probably would not have minded this. His pride had never been in what he had achieved, but in what the 1st Marine Division had accomplished. He would say over and over again that no unit in Korea could have done what his Marines had done. For thirty-eight years the Marine Corps was his life, culminating in the stand he made with his Marines in the high, winter-blasted mountains of North Korea. His is a life that deserves to be examined, not only for the events of which he was an integral part, but for his response to those events.

Thus, this biography is not a lens through which to view a particular military campaign, or a certain period in American history, or even the institution of the Marine Corps itself, although all of these are of necessity a great part of it. The focus of this volume is upon the remarkable character of a man who—no matter what the trials, no matter what the circumstance—never abandoned his principles. This is the journey of that rarest of beings—a good man.

ABBREVIATIONS

PROLOGUE

The Marines looked out on a lunar landscape. The rocky, mountainous terrain was covered by snow, jagged outcroppings of rock showing blackly against the white background in the moonlight. In North Korea winter had settled in with a vengeance, an adversary as much as the gathering enemy. Here on the northernmost point of their march toward the Yalu River on this night of 27 November 1950, the Marines tried to keep their rifles from freezing, their feet from frostbite, and their eyes riveted on the terrain that spread out before them.

Suddenly the piercing sound of bugles and drums split the night air and troops in white padded coats began advancing on the Marine position. These were not the North Korean troops that the 1st Marine Division had fought so well during the spectacular landing at Inchon and the taking of Seoul. These were troops who would change the face of the United Nations’ action in Korea by a night attack on this far-flung position. The Chinese, in response to the United Nations’ troop advance toward their icy border, had entered the war in force.

The Korean War is often forgotten, lost in the great shadow cast by World War II. A generation of men had fought in Europe and Asia in a worldwide convulsion that took millions of lives. For those who survived there was a great longing to go home and resume their interrupted lives: to use veterans’ benefits to gain college educations of which their parents had only dreamed, to get married and start families, and to buy their own homes in the Levittowns of the new American landscape.

Not many really listened or understood when Winston Churchill, his country having turned him out of office once the emergency of World War II was over, spoke at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, in March of 1946. After receiving an honorary degree Churchill, in his distinctive gravelly voice, described the new world that had taken shape following the end of World War II by introducing the phrase the Iron Curtain to describe the division between Western powers and the area controlled by the Soviet Union.

Churchill’s speech heralded the long conflict that was to consume the Soviets, the Americans, and their various allies for the next forty years. Eastern Europe was on the other side of this Iron Curtain as was the northern part of Korea, a country now split in half at the 38th Parallel. On 25 June 1950, 90,000 North Korean troops poured over that border in an attempt to conquer South Korea. With the Soviet Union absent and unable to veto the proposal, the Security Council of the United Nations voted to send troops to aid South Korea in repulsing this incursion. Although troops from many countries would participate, it would be the Americans who would bear the brunt of the war.

Now, after his brilliant success at Inchon, Gen. Douglas MacArthur, not content with pushing the North Koreans back over the 38th Parallel, had penetrated this Iron Curtain by crossing the 38th Parallel and heading for the Yalu River, the border between North Korea and China. This northward advance had awakened the sleeping tiger. The Chinese were coming south in their thousands to wipe out this first advance of the Western allies into Communist-held territory.

The 1st Marine Division, the spearhead of MacArthur’s eastern attack, was in a perilous position, strung out over eighty miles of a narrow, winding, icy road in the grip of a ferocious winter. They were surrounded by the mountains, the enemy, and the winter snow and ice. When informed of the situation, a panicked Army higher headquarters sent word that all equipment was to be destroyed, and that the Marines were to retreat to the sea as fast as possible. Following the glittering pinnacle of Inchon and the wild rush toward the Yalu, MacArthur faced a disaster that he had refused to consider. Thus began a fight to the death in that inaccessible corner of the world, and at first much of the world was unaware of the danger the Marines were facing in their remote mountain battleground.

However, neither the orders from higher headquarters nor the world took into account the character of the division commander, a character that was fueled by self-discipline and the banked fires of an inner resolve. Under the press of events he never wavered for a moment. He knew his capacities, and had been readying himself his whole life for this moment.

From his command tent at Hagaru, half-way up the mountain, near the airfield he had had the foresight to build and surrounded by the stockpiles of supplies that he had carefully positioned, he took quiet stock of the situation and then acted. His moment had come and he was more than ready. Maj. Gen. Oliver P. Smith was to lead a breakout down the mountain that would leave the many Chinese divisions he faced too crippled to face combat again. Age fifty-seven, his tall, lanky form clad in the same parka and rubber boots as his men (cold weather equipment they had only because he had insisted), he would stay with them all the way—a calm, composed figure at the center of a maelstrom. And in the end he would bring his division down that long, snow-covered, winding road from the Chosin Reservoir to the sea and safety. He honored his dead and grieved over his casualties, but he kept faith with the living, not just bringing them home but bringing them home with their spirit and élan intact.

CHAPTER ONE

BEGINNINGS

No random actions, none not based on underlying principles.

— Marcus Aurelius

The United States is a land of immigrants—even the Native Americans, in prehistoric times, migrated across the sea over a land bridge when the North American and Asian landmasses were connected. The history of the country can be recounted in these various waves of immigration, each group of immigrants bringing with them their own culture and religion, and contributing their experiences of hardships and conquest in the new land. The newcomers would find their feet and settle in. Their sons and daughters would absorb the resident culture, adding their own flavor to it and in turn greeting, not always hospitably, the next wave of immigrants.

Oliver Prince Smith had both the old and the new immigrant in his background. On his father’s side he was the seventh generation to be born in this country. His ancestors had come to Virginia from Scotland in the mid-1600s and then had migrated west with each successive generation as the country opened up to settlement. His father, John Alexander Smith II, was born in Alabama, received his law degree from Cumberland University in Lebanon, Tennessee, and opened his new law practice in Menardville, Texas (now known as Menard) in about 1886.

This was a family that could trace its ancestors to before the Revolutionary War. This was not a very impressive feat in most parts of the globe, but in the still-forming United States of that time it was an ancient and honorable lineage, especially in the raw West. He had an ancestor who had stood with General Wolfe at the siege of Quebec and later raised a regiment of troops in North Carolina during the American Revolution. Another served in the Confederacy and was captured by Union troops in the battle of Shiloh, only to escape and return to the fight. There had been doctors, landowners, military officers, and now a lawyer, the solid descendants of the earliest immigrants.

On the other hand his mother, Anna Marie Obervetter, was in the first native-born generation in her family. Born in 1861 in New Braunfels, Texas, her parents had come from Germany in the 1840s. Her father had been a liberal, deeply involved in the political ferment of that period. As the revolutions across Europe were ruthlessly shut down and the monarchs were once again returned to their thrones, those who had participated in the uprisings were hunted down. Peter Obervetter had to leave his homeland in a hurry. His bride of a few months, Katherine, in the company of her mother, obtained passage on a ship sailing for the United States. As family legend has it, Peter came on board the ship under the cloak of darkness, climbing up the anchor chain.

Although they landed in New Orleans, they were heading for New Braunfels, Texas, a recently formed settlement of Germans who had been the victims of political tyranny at home. The new bride was shocked when the ship captain, upon bidding her farewell commented, Mrs. Obervetter, you have seen your best days. And in fact Katherine was never reconciled to her new land, speaking English reluctantly and with a heavy accent, always longing for the comforts and culture of home.

New Braunfels was an interesting spot. Named for Prince Carl of Solms-Braunfels, the leader of the first contingent of settlers, it seemed at first glance to be a populace divided between prince and peasant. But class distinctions were frowned upon and a count became the first innkeeper; the son of Hanover’s prime minister, a farmer; a baron, a cowboy. The local music master had studied under Liszt. Throughout its history New Braunfels maintained its strong emphasis on individual conscience. Although the Civil War monument in its main plaza could have been found in any town or city throughout the South, its inscription was dedicated to all the soldiers of the war, not just those who fought for the Confederacy.

Many of these Germans were put in a difficult situation when the Civil War broke out and Texas threw in its lot with the Confederacy. As many of them had fled Europe for their liberal views, they could not now fight for a government that wanted to preserve slavery. When the Confederacy resorted to conscription in 1862 Peter Obervetter went to Mexico, found employment, and sent money home to his family until the war was over and he returned to Texas.

In 1890 the seventh-generation lawyer, John Alexander Smith, married the first-generation teacher, Anna Marie Obervetter, in Menard, Texas. Oliver Prince Smith was born on 26 October 1893, the middle child of three. His brother Alex was two years older and his sister Marguerite would be born two years later.

Oliver was only six when tragedy struck the family. While recuperating from minor surgery his father died suddenly of a resultant infection, leaving Anna Marie with three young children. After the death of the family breadwinner, Anna Marie held on in Menard with her young family until a severe flood swept through town, destroying not only their house but the contents as well.

With no house, no husband, and a young family to care for, Anna Marie had no choice but to move in with her parents in Austin. She stayed two years in the parental home before striking out on her own. In a show of what would be a lifelong striving for independence, she bought a large house near the University of Texas with the goal of taking in university students as boarders. She was just getting settled in her new life when her brother-in-law, Sydney Smith, stepped in to destroy her plans. For whatever reason, whether the idea of having a sister-in-law running a boarding house was distasteful, whether this supporter of the Confederacy was bothered by her draft-dodging father, or whether there was simply the desire for control, Sydney announced his plans for the family. Texas law at that time supported a brother-in-law’s right to gain legal control of his deceased brother’s children. Sydney was going to use this law to take her children away from Anna Marie, and perhaps further disrupt the family by distributing them among various other family members.

Anna Marie, the descendant of a vigorous liberal, fought back. She was not going to let this happen. She sold her home near the campus, packed up her three children, and took them to California. She settled in Santa Cruz on the coast of northern California. Her choice of Santa Cruz is interesting, the reason vaguely explained in Smith’s memoirs: My mother finally decided to take the family west. She narrowed her choice to Ashland, Oregon, and Santa Cruz, California. She apparently chose Santa Cruz after communicating with church authorities, and, in June 1903, she took her family there.¹

Smith’s father had been of Presbyterian descent, his mother Lutheran. It is not clear to what degree either family practiced their faith. Somewhere, somehow, Anna Marie had discovered Christian Science, a religion founded in the late 1800s by Mary Baker Eddy in Boston, Massachusetts. The backbone of the religion was two books: the King James Bible, and Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, written by Mrs. Eddy. Most early Christian Scientists, especially in areas as far from the East as Austin, Texas, became interested in this new religion simply by reading the books. Most were more than familiar with the King James Bible; it was the elucidation of the Bible found in Science and Health that would interest them in the religion. There were few Christian Science churches west of Chicago, and fellow adherents would have been few and far between.

No one in her family could have been happy about her choice of this new religion, something that further demonstrated her independence of thought. At that time Christian Science was profoundly resisted and distrusted by the mainstream churches, and her adherence to this new faith probably only added to Sydney Smith’s desire to wrest her children from her control. If she was leaving all that was familiar, she would at least move to a town where there would be a church of fellow adherents, as well as legal protection for her rights as a single parent. In Smith’s laconic words she took her family there, there is no hint of the courage and determination involved in the move. Anna Marie left her parents, her siblings, and the place of her birth for a faraway, strange place to ensure that she would have the political, economic, and religious freedom to raise her children as she saw fit.

At an early age young Oliver’s world had collapsed around him. His father had died, and with him had gone the familiar order of home, family, and neighborhood. His mother, in an amazing show of independence for a woman of her era, had had the courage to stand up for her beliefs and act on them. The dichotomy of these experiences is shown in his approach to his family history. In retirement he would spend a number of years researching and writing about his ancestors. In this family journal it is interesting to note that he spent many more pages on his father’s side of the family than on his mother’s. It was as if he wanted to identify with that older, more settled, traditional strain that followed a straight, conventional course through history. As a man of tremendous self-discipline and order, this set of ancestors would and did please him. Whether under British rule, or fighting for American independence, or serving with the Confederacy, they did what honor and history would approve.

His mother’s ancestry is discussed only parenthetically, almost as an afterthought. He had less to say about his anchor-climbing grandfather Obervetter, although he spoke with affection of roaming the hills around Austin with this amateur botanist. Yet this was a man who was forced to flee the country of his birth for his strongly held political beliefs and then, after making a home in a new land, was willing to leave that home and family for a space of several years rather than serve in a cause that supported the enslaving of his fellow man. He clearly had unwavering principles and was willing to pay a price for them, a tradition his daughter had followed. On the surface Smith might have been more comfortable living in an environment where he knew the rules and could live by them, yet at his inner core he was always his mother’s son, a man who was willing to pay a price to uphold principles that he held dear.

Once in Santa Cruz, Anna Marie rented a small house and worked as a seamstress to support her family. Life was a continual economic struggle, Oliver and his older brother Alex taking various jobs to help augment the family income. As a young boy Oliver delivered a series of local newspapers during the year, and spent two summers cutting apricots for drying. During high school, when all the other students headed home at the close of classes he stayed on cleaning blackboards and wielding a broom in his after-school job as the high school janitor. At sixteen he went off for the summer to the Santa Cruz Mountains where he worked in a logging camp. All proceeds from his employment were turned over to his mother for the family’s support.

There would be one more aspect of his character that would emerge from his early years, one that would mask all the others: that was his great personal reserve. In his memoirs, written in his seventies, he spent pages describing his summer jobs at the logging camps and the intricacies of the logging process. Yet the death of his father and the resulting family turmoil is reported in a few short paragraphs with absolutely no personal commentary. The construction of the thick wall of his reserve and personal reticence, begun at an early age as a defense against so much change and disruption, would become legendary as he grew older. The outside world, and even his family, was allowed only slight, sporadic views of the deep feelings he buried within.

He might write with joy of running the hills in back of Santa Cruz with his brother, of swimming in the ocean, the tidal pools, and the rivers, of carrying a .22 rifle into the fields behind town to shoot a rabbit for the dinner stew pot; but of his deeper emotions and thoughts there was little sharing. Those were always—and forever—his alone.

CHAPTER TWO

FOUNDATIONS

You have to assemble your life yourself—action by action.

— Marcus Aurelius

In August of 1912 Oliver Smith, aged eighteen, made his way from Santa Cruz, California, to the University of California at Berkeley. He made the trip alone, carrying one suitcase and ten dollars, not knowing where he would live or how he would support himself. But his eyes were set on something beyond the small town in which he had been raised, and this was the first step on that road. Beneath his shy, reserved manner was a determination to step out into the world, a desire for adventure and change, and a yearning to experience a wider world than was to be found in a small town on the California coast.

While Smith had come from an educated family, his father obtaining a law degree and his mother a teaching certificate, he also came from a home where the only parent was a seamstress, and money was always in short supply. His older brother had already joined the workforce and would stay there, never attending college. Smith said of him: [H]e quit school early to go to work to help our mother, who was having quite a struggle to bring up a family of three on her meager earnings. Through his unselfish devotion to our mother, I was not required to make the same sacrifice he made.¹ Thus, he was given the chance to move on and he grabbed it with both hands. A door had been opened for him, but it must have taken courage to step through that door, board the train for San Francisco, take the ferry across the bay to Oakland, and then board a street car for Berkeley, all places he had never been before in his life.

He said of leaving home: I had a suitcase holding my belongings and very little money. I, of course, did not retain all of my summer earnings.² It is the of course that stands out almost a century later. It was a matter of course that, in his reach for something beyond Santa Cruz, he would not forget those he left behind. And this financial assistance would continue, with the earnings from his summer jobs during college going to his mother as well as tuition support for his sister Marguerite when she, in turn, entered the University of California.

Those who know the University of California at Berkeley from its intense protests over the Vietnam War, or its very visible dalliances in radical politics over the years, would be surprised to know that as a land-grant college it originally required all of its male students to take military training for four years. By the time Smith reached the campus, the requirement had been dropped to two years, with the second two years optional. Smith chose to do all four.

His immediate need upon arriving in Berkeley was to find a place to live and a job with which he could support himself. Through the YMCA he found a part-time job in a cafeteria. It was located in an old residence, the ground floor being taken up by the cafeteria, the second floor by the family who ran it, and the third floor with rooms that were rented out to students. Here he lived and washed dishes three times a day in return for room and board. Later he would earn money by gardening for a wealthy local family whose estate eventually was given to the university to be used as an arboretum. This is where he began his lifelong love of gardening, with a special interest in roses. The thirty hours a week that he spent gardening and washing dishes was, of course, in addition to attending school full time.

He was a serious student, and won a scholarship his sophomore year. He majored in economics and minored in foreign languages, eventually taking four years of both French and Spanish. He also took typing and shorthand, which he always said were his hardest subjects but those to which he owed the most enduring use. He recorded all the notes he took in countless small green notebooks over the years, including every day during the Inchon landing and his march from the Chosin Reservoir, in the shorthand that he learned while in college.

His reputation in the Marine Corps over the years was that of a scholar, one that he more than earned. But he was more than a bookish academician, and even as a young man consciously cultivated a trait that would be one of the hallmarks of his professional character—leadership. His first lessons in leadership were learned in a hard school. At sixteen he began working during his summer vacations in the logging camps of the Santa Cruz Mountains, his size gaining him entry into this world of hard, dangerous men. The lumberjacks lived in an all-male world, where fights were always just under the surface and the point of the week’s work was the weekend bender in the nearest town. He noted that the range and variety of the profanity used by loggers exceeded anything I ever heard later when in the military service.³ For thirty dollars a week plus room and board, he worked as a whistle punk, signaling to the loggers when a log was ready to be hoisted onto the single-gage train. In subsequent summers he worked his way through winch operator, fireman, and finally during college he was made foreman of a crew. This tall, reed-thin young man, who was raised by a single mother and who did not drink or smoke, must have had fierce determination, iron courage, and a remarkable understanding of men to return again and again to the tough, mountain camps and in the end lead a crew of hardened lumberjacks. His successful leadership was not an accident but something to which he gave considerable thought. He wrote to a friend in 1917 during his last summer in the logging camps: One rule for handling men—that is never threaten and don’t be sentimental. Showing preferences has spoiled more than one good crew.⁴

Although he developed social ease over the years, it did not come easily. At the end of his freshman year, he was asked to join Los Amigos, a social club whose members lived in a house near the campus. (This would later become the national fraternity Alpha Kappa Lambda.) Although the club was formed mostly by students who were also working their way through the university, the dues involved in living at the house were still too much for young Smith. But he did join and entered, sometimes reluctantly, into the social events the house sponsored. He participated in his first formal dance, but only at the urgings of the seniors in the house. They provided the girl and filled the dance card, but they could not make the evening enjoyable for their fellow club member. He said of the dance, sixty years later: The evening was hardly an enjoyable one, but eventually I became housebroken.⁵

In spite of his social reluctance he met his future wife, Esther Laurilla King, during his sophomore year. They were introduced by her brother, and in due course he was taken to meet the family in nearby Hayward. Esther King was raised on a very successful fruit ranch that is today split by freeways, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants. She was the next-to-the-youngest of six children, and was raised mostly by her mother and grandmother, as her father had died when she was five. The family had a tried and true method of checking out prospective spouses—they took them on a camping trip in the nearby mountains. It was assumed that any difficulties of character would be revealed under the primitive living conditions. The habitué of logging camps probably found the family camping trip tame, and passed the test with no trouble.

Theirs was a shy but fervent courtship, carried out at least partially by mail. Their initial correspondence was conducted while they both were at their summer jobs in 1916. Signed chastely Sincerely, Esther or Sincerely Oliver, Esther wonders in one letter whether she ought to have sent the missive as she had the temerity to say that she missed him. However, her cryptic comments in subsequent letters suggest he proposed to her in April. If you have time on Sunday let’s go out to the place we went on April 22nd.⁶ And again in May: Well, I got my diploma. I must confess that certain things which happened during the last exam season were rather disconcerting and I am afraid my exams suffered as a consequence.⁷

Theirs was an affair of the heart, but also of the soul. Esther too had been raised as a Christian Scientist, something that would have added to the natural pull they felt for one another. Like Smith’s mother, her mother had also been given the Christian Science textbook and had also faced resistance from her family. When she discovered the religion, her husband was deceased and the older four of her seven children were almost grown. Her mother-in-law, a forceful character, lived with the family and did not approve of this new religion. Therefore, every Sunday Aurora Morrill King took her three youngest children out behind the barn and held Sunday school away from the prying eyes of her mother-in-law. From this beginning Esther learned a deep respect for the Bible, which she studied for the rest of her life. At one point after Oliver had graduated, she went to the weekly Christian Science meeting on campus and wrote to him afterward: Oliver dear, I can’t tell you how I missed you at that meeting. It just seemed as though you must be there in the crowd someplace. I feel that all our lives we will remember the happy days we spent in that [Christian Science] Society, if for no other reason than because that is the place where we best got to know each other, isn’t it?⁸

During his time at the university, Smith had considered a career in the consular service to which end he had taken his eight years of foreign languages. For some reason he now dismissed that, and settled on applying to the foreign service of the Standard Oil Company of New York. Applicants, if accepted, were given a year’s training in New York and then sent abroad for a three-year tour before they could return to the United States. Only bachelors could apply, but marriage after a successful year of employment was permitted.

However, the application took a while to process and in the meantime he needed employment. The only position open in the home offices of the Standard Oil Company in San Francisco was as a stenographer, which he took for the princely pay of seventy-five dollars per month. One can sense that this was a difficult time for him, and his letters to Esther and his friends have a restless quality. He lived with his mother and sister in Berkeley, taking the ferry to work in San Francisco every day. "I am experiencing a summer in Berkeley and believe me it is some experience. When college goes the life goes right out of Berkeley. The part that I am across [sic] the bay helps matters a little bit, but not much. I suppose I shouldn’t grumble, but I am young yet and don’t care to vegetate."⁹ In a letter to Esther he notes that she is making more money selling subscriptions than he is as a college graduate.

Although eventually his application to Standard Oil was accepted, he still had not heard from the company when war was declared on the Central Powers in April of 1917. He learned that the Marine Corps was offering ten commissions to graduates of the University of California with the recommendation of the professor of military science and tactics. He instantly applied, noting that he wanted to get into something.¹⁰ Add to that the yearly pay of $1,700 and it is not hard to see why he was willing to leave life with his mother and sister in an apartment in Berkeley, the stenographer’s job, and his daily ferry ride.

In addition to being over 5 feet 6 inches tall stripped; active, with firm muscles; and evidently vigorous and healthy,¹¹ he needed two recommendations in addition to that of his ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) instructor. His employer at Standard Oil, a retired Army colonel, agreed to be one of them. In order to get his recommendation in on time, Smith lugged his typewriter across the city of San Francisco to the man’s home, and the needed letter was duly typed out at his dining room table. Smith received a regular commission rather than one for the reserves, which at the time meant nothing to him. He was joining for the duration of the war, and that was all he cared about. In fact, he would later admit he knew nothing of the Marine Corps other than the fact it was a military organization and that it had openings.

The Marine Corps that he was joining was in the process of great change. In 1916 the Naval Personnel Bill had enlarged the Marine Corps by nearly 50 percent, and the resulting recruiting campaign, with the slogan First to Fight, had been aggressive. By 1917 the Corps found itself engulfed with highly qualified recruits, the cream of the 1917 volunteers. By war’s end 239,274 men would try to join the Marines, of which only 60,189 would be taken.¹² In fact the recruits were so well qualified that all officer appointments were closed to civilians by June of 1917, with the officer corps being filled from the rich talent within the ranks.¹³ By joining in April, Smith had slipped in just before the gate closed.

With all this talent, the current Commandant of the Marine Corps had no intention of using his expanded Corps for naval service only, and he was able to commit his troops to the ground war in France. And once there, they were to win great distinction at places such as Belleau Wood and Soissons. But the young man who lugged his typewriter across a city so that he could enter the fray was not to be among them.

Upon commissioning, Smith, in the company of twenty-nine other officers from colleges in Washington, Oregon, and California, went to Mare Island, a recruit depot north of San Francisco. The Marines were not ready for the influx of new officers and the training was sketchy. We did close order drill; we stood up and recited paragraphs from the Infantry Drill Regulations, and we had white painted stones that we threw to represent grenade practice and that was about it.¹⁴

With the influx of officers, it was very difficult to get a full kit of uniforms, but by haunting the two establishments in San Francisco that made them, Smith was able to assemble almost a full set by the time he reported for duty. The list of the needed uniforms, with his notations as to cost, indicates that his dress blues cost fifty dollars and his sword twenty-five dollars. In fact his assiduousness in getting those uniforms may have been partially responsible for his wartime assignment.

With its eye on France, the Marine Corps was desperate for its experienced officers scattered throughout posts and stations in the Pacific to return and lead this force. The decision was made to send freshly minted second lieutenants out to replace them. The formula reached was that it would take two green lieutenants to replace one experienced captain.¹⁵ Thus Smith and nine other officers, whose only qualifications were that they had the most complete uniform kits, were chosen.

With a stroke of a pen he was sent, not to the war he had joined to fight, but as far away from it as possible. This one single act would affect him for the rest of his career. He would always be judged against contemporaries who had seen combat while he had not. Their uniforms would bear ribbons he had had no chance to win, and they would be placed ahead of him on the lineal ranking list. They would form a club within a club, while Smith would have to wait until World War II to prove himself in the crucible of combat. But even then he would not truly feel comfortable in the Marine Corps until after his epochal battle in the mountains of North Korea.

On 5 June 1917, he sailed for Guam on the USAT Sheridan, steaming steadily away from the conflict in France. He was also steaming away from his fiancée. Now they could have no plans for the future, and would have to wait until the end of the war before they could be married. He was heading off on an adventure he had chosen, but Esther must have felt bereft. In a letter written from on board ship, Smith notes how disturbing her tears had been during their last phone call. Guam in 1917 had to seem like the end of the world to a young girl on a fruit ranch in Hayward, California. And indeed it was—six thousand miles from the coast of California, a tiny dot in the endless, rolling Pacific.

CHAPTER THREE

GUAM

Anywhere you can lead your life, you can lead a good one.

—Marcus Aurelius

The troop ship that Smith boarded contained 1,800 other passengers who were not only heading for Guam but also the Philippines and, ultimately, China. On board were sailors, Marines, soldiers, cavalry, and civilians, including wives and nurses. His letters home are filled with two themes: his obvious enjoyment and interest in being a Marine, and his desire to be united with Esther once more. He tells Esther in one letter, with the pride he would always feel about being a Marine: We young Marine officers are the dress side of the ship. We are all wearing blues while the other officers only have khaki and wool. And speaking of the troops: And the fact is when you see the Marines mixed up with the others you can see why we are so proud of them. But then the letter closes with: "One thing I know is that I love you and that you love me and we are going to find