Word: command
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Dates: during 1950-1950
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...Help Me!" As I dashed up the slope of the beach, I got my first look at Wolmi Island's defenders. Three or four half-naked North Korean soldiers, hands held rigid over their pinched, scared faces, stumbled into one of their old shallow trenches at the command of a marine. I talked to them in Japanese. "Are you going to kill us?" stammered one. When I said we wouldn't, he chattered to the others and a little of the fear went out of their eyes...
Bulging Briefcase. From 1931 to 1939, like many another officer of his training-minded corps, Smith was almost constantly in school, as teacher or student. In the spring of 1941, a lieutenant colonel, he was given command of a battalion and shipped off with three other Marine battalions to Iceland. The browned-off marines in Iceland solemnly assessed the place as the "sinkhole of the world," but there was never a word of complaint in Smith's letters to his family...
...Thank You, Sir." It was early 1944 when Smith got into the war as a colonel commanding the 1st Division's 5th Regiment (part of his command in Korea today). By then the 1st had long since finished its dreadful battle for Guadalcanal and was floundering in the mud and rain of New Britain...
Into the Textbooks. Despite their differences, Smith and Rupertus planned the Peleliu invasion (the 1st Division's bloodiest battle of the war). When Rupertus broke his ankle while watching landing practice, some doubt was expressed by topside on his physical ability to command at Peleliu. Smith loyally argued for the superior who had berated him, and Rupertus commanded the operation on crutches...
Back of His Hand. When the Communists invaded South Korea, Smith was in Washington as Clifton Cates's assistant commandant. In July Smith was sent to California, as a two-star general, to command the 1st Division. While Eddie Craig with his advance combat team kicked off the Marine fighting in Korea, Smith fleshed out the depleted division with reserves and regulars summoned from all over the country. Last week, in the kind of ship-to-shore assault he knows like the back of his hand, Oliver Prince Smith was in the Korean war at last...