A Marine General Fired an Army General on Saipan. It Nearly Split the Military in Half. SS

406 dead, 512 wounded. That is what two battalions of the 105th Infantry Regiment lost in a single morning on Saipan. 900 casualties out of roughly 1100 men. Three medals of honor, all awarded postumously because the men who earned them fought until they had nothing left to fight with. Private Thomas Baker, two wounded to walk, asked his buddies to prop him against a tree with a pistol and eight rounds.

They found him dead, pistol empty, eight Japanese bodies around him. Captain Benjamin Salomon, a dentist running a battalion aid station, manned a 30 caliber machine gun alone to cover the evacuation of wounded. 98 Japanese dead around his position when they found his body. Those are the men that a Marine general said would not fight.

Those are the soldiers from the division that a Time magazine correspondent said froze in their foxholes. And the commanding general who was supposed to have failed them, the man a Marine lieutenant general fired in the middle of the bloodiest battle of the Pacific War to that point, was not even there to see it.

He had been put on a plane before dawn 10 days earlier, ordered out of the theater, not permitted to say goodbye to his own troops. His name was Ralph Smith. The man who fired him was Holland Smith. Same last name, different branches, different temperaments, and the collision between them on a 13-mi long island in the Marianas nearly ripped the American military apart at the seams.

A lot of you in the comments have been asking for this one, and some of you have personal connections to this story. I want to do it justice. To understand what happened on Saipan in June of 1944, you need to understand what the island meant strategically. Saipan sits in the Mariana Islands chain, roughly 1300 miles south of Tokyo.

American bombers operating from airfields on Saipan could reach the Japanese home islands. Prime Minister Tojo told the diet that the Marianas were the last line of absolute national defense. He was not exaggerating. Lose Saipan and the B29s come. Lose Saipan and Japan’s inner defense perimeter collapses. The Japanese were prepared to spend every man on the island to hold it, and they nearly did.

The garrison was roughly 31,600 defenders, more than double what American intelligence had estimated going in. The intelligence failure alone deserves mention. Pre-invasion estimates put the garrison at around 15,000. The actual number was more than twice that. Every assumption about the timeline for securing the island was based on the wrong number.

The defenders were commanded by Lieutenant General Yoshitsugu Saito of the 43rd Division with Vice Admiral Tuichi Nagumo, the man who had led the carrier strike force at Pearl Harbor, commanding naval elements ashore. Nagumo was a broken figure by this point, stripped of carrier command after Midway, reduced to commanding shore-based sailors on a Pacific island.

It was a long fall from the bridge of the Akagi, but the rank and caliber of officers, Japan committed to Saipan tells you how seriously Imperial General Headquarters took this fight. The terrain was a defender’s paradise. The island is roughly 12 1/2 m long and 5 1/2 m wide at its broadest point. Mount Tapocha dominates the center at 1554 ft, the highest point in the Maranas.

Limestone cave systems honeycomb every ridge. The Japanese had spent months fortifying these natural positions, connecting caves with tunnels and placing artillery pieces that could be rolled out to fire and then pulled back inside, building mutually supporting machine gun positions with interlocking fields of fire.

Sugarcane fields 6 feet tall provided concealment for defenders. ravines and draws channeled attackers into natural kill zones. A Japanese prisoner taken early in the battle said that if the Americans had waited three months, the island would have been impregnable. What they found was bad enough. The Americans landed on June 15th, 1944 with two Marine divisions a breast.

The second Marine division hit the beaches near Cheron Canoa on the western coast. The fourth marine division landed to the right near Aggginan Point on the eastern shore. The landings were opposed from the waterline. Japanese artillery and mortar fire hit the Amtraks in the lagoon. Casualties on the beaches were severe, roughly 2,000 across both divisions in the first 48 hours, but the Marines got ashore, established a beach head, and began pushing inland.

The 27th Infantry Division began landing the next day, June 16th, as core reserve. Elements of the 165th and 105th Infantry Regiments came ashore in chaotic conditions. The Navy had not been informed of the Army’s night landing plan, and the beach organization was confused. By June 18th, Major General Ralph Smith had come ashore to take personal command.

His first task was to clear the southern tip of the island, including a CTO airfield in the Napaton Point pocket. This is where I need to stop and give you the background on the 27th Division because what happened before Saipan shaped everything that happened on it. If you’re finding this valuable, subscribing genuinely helps.

It tells the algorithm this kind of deep research is worth showing to more people. Now, back to the 27th Division. The 27th was a New York National Guard division federalized in October of 1940. That single fact shaped its entire trajectory. National Guard divisions carried their state identity, their state politics, and their state patronage networks into federal service.

The 27th Officer Corps had been built not on competitive selection or rigorous military education, but on connections within the New York Guard establishment. Many senior officers, particularly at the regimental and battalion level, lacked the tactical schooling that regular Army officers received at Fort Benning or Levvenworth.

This was not unique to the 27th. It was a systemic weakness across virtually every National Guard division activated for the war. The Army knew it was a problem, but was slow to address it because firing guard officers meant fighting state governors and congressmen. The 27th had a second problem that compounded the first.

Throughout 1942 and 43, the army used the division as a replacement pool. Trained soldiers were stripped out individually and shipped overseas as replacements for other units. Then raw recruits were backfilled in. By the time the division reached the central Pacific, perhaps only 20% of its original guardsmen remained.

The cohesion that makes a National Guard division distinctive, the fact that men from the same town served together, that sergeants know their privates families, was gone. What wore the 27th Division shoulder patch on Saipan was effectively a new division with old leadership. The man commanding this patch together formation was Major General Ralph Corbett Smith.

He was not a guard political appointee. He was a regular army officer, a World War I veteran who had been wounded at the muse Argon and earned two silver stars. He was a recognized expert on French military affairs, fluent in French, a graduate of the Akol de Gair. He was by all accounts an intellectual and a gentleman.

I will tell you much more about him later. For now, what matters is that he was a professional officer handed a division with deep structural problems that predated his command by years. Holland Smith, the Marine Lieutenant General commanding the fifth amphibious corps, already had his mind made up about the 27th before any of them set foot on Saipan.

The history between them mattered enormously. At Mcinatal in November 1943, the 165th Infantry Regiment of the 27th Division had been assigned to capture Bhutaritari Island, garrisoned by roughly 800 Japanese, most of them naval construction troops rather than elite combat soldiers. It took 4 days. Holland Smith was furious. He believed a marine regiment would have taken the island in hours.

He visited Macken during the fighting, found soldiers he considered to be malingering away from the front and erupted. He screamed at them. An army investigation later found that Holland Smith never actually reached the front line and that the soldiers he bered were supply troops performing their assigned duties in rear areas.

He also told reporters that the front was as quiet as Wall Street on a Sunday. The riflemen of the 165th, who had been fighting through the palm groves under Japanese sniper fire for 72 straight hours, losing men to concealed positions they could not see, might have had a different description. There is an additional claim that has circulated through the literature for decades.

Holland Smith argued, and some marine historians have repeated, that the 27th Division’s slowness at Min indirectly caused the sinking of the escort carrier USS Lisk Bay by a Japanese submarine on November 24th, 1943. The reasoning goes that if man had been taken faster, the fleet would not have been loitering offshore, presenting a target.

The sinking killed 644 sailors, including Rear Admiral Henry Malinics. The argument has some logic, but most historians consider it inconclusive. The submarine attack was enabled by gaps in the destroyer screen and the failure to maintain zigzag courses, factors unrelated to the ground campaign’s duration.

At anyway in February 1944, elements of the 27th were again placed under Marine Command. This time, company D of the 106th Infantry broke and ran during a Japanese night counterattack on Iniway Island. This was a genuine failure and it hardened Holland Smith’s conviction that the 27th was unreliable. By the time Saipan planning began, Holland Smith’s staff held the 27th in what Philip Cra records in the official Army history campaign in the Marianas as little esteem, a position bordering on scorn.

I think this background is essential because it tells you that Holland Smith arrived on Saipan with a verdict already rendered. The 27th was guilty before the evidence was in. The question was never whether Holland Smith would find fault. The question was what he would do when the performance he expected to be poor turned out to be poor.

And here’s the contradiction that Army critics seized on then, and historians have noted since. If Holland Smith genuinely believed the 27th was unreliable, why did he assign it the most difficult sector on the island? Why place a division you do not trust in the center of your line in the most heavily defended terrain and designate it the main effort? The army’s answer was that Holland Smith set the 27th up to fail and then used the predictable result as justification for the decision he wanted to make all along.

I’m not convinced it was that calculated. Holland Smith needed three divisions to cover the island’s width and the 27th was what he had. But the inconsistency between his stated distrust and his tactical dispositions is real and it undermined his case. Before I take you into Death Valley, I need to explain the Nefutin Point situation because it became one of Holland Smith’s formal charges against Ralph Smith.

When the 27th Division cleared southern Saipan after landing, a pocket of approximately 1,200 Japanese soldiers remained dug in at Nafan Point, the island’s southeastern tip. Holland Smith wanted them contained and bypassed so the 27th could join the northward attack. He left behind the second battalion, 105th infantry, fewer than 600 men to hold a 3,000yard front against those 1,200 Japanese.

Ralph Smith, concerned that such a thin line could not hold, issued supplemental orders to the battalion specifying how to conduct the containment. Holland Smith later cited this as insubordination, claiming Ralph Smith had contravened core orders by issuing his own instructions to a unit Holland Smith had effectively detached.

The official army history calls this charge a rather flimsy legal peg. The core orders never explicitly removed the 105th from the 27th Division’s chain of command. And without Ralph Smith’s orders, those frontline troops would have had no tactical instructions at all. I think this charge tells you more about Holland Smith’s desire to build a case than about any genuine command failure by Ralph Smith.

Now, let me take you into the terrain that determined everything. On June 22nd, Holland Smith launched his three division attack northward. The lineup placed the second marine division on the left along the western coast, the fourth marine division on the right along the eastern coast, and the 27th infantry division in the center.

The center of the island met Death Valley and Purple Heart Ridge. The names were earned in blood. Death Valley was a roughly 3/4 mile wide plateau of relatively open farmland, flanked on the west by the sheer rock face of Mount Tapoch, and on the east by the densely wooded hill masses of Purple Heart Ridge.

The Japanese held the high ground on both sides. They had spent months preparing these positions. Artillery pieces were imp placed deep inside caves, rolled forward on rails to fire, and then pulled back out of sight. Mortars were pre-registered on every approach route, every trail junction, every piece of open ground. Machine gun nests with interlocking fields of fire covered every avenue of advance.

An estimated 4,000 Japanese soldiers defended this single sector. Philip Crow’s official history describes it as without question the most difficult and most heavily defended piece of terrain on the island. One observer compared the soldiers situation to the British light brigade at Balaclava.

You’re advancing across the open floor of a valley with the enemy shooting at you from the ridgeel lines on your left and your right simultaneously. Every step forward brings fire from three directions. The 76 tank battalion committed 72 Sherman tanks to support the infantry advance through Death Valley. By the end of the first day, only 18 remained operational.

Japanese anti-tank guns hidden in caves knocked out tank after tank. The soft ground bogged others. Mines disabled still more. Without armor support, the infantry was exposed. A single mortar barrage killed 31 soldiers of the third battalion. 106th Infantry in under 60 seconds.

Entire squads were pinned for hours by a single wellpositioned machine gun firing from a cave aperture that could only be neutralized by crawling up to it under fire and throwing in a satchel charge or a demolition pack. And the 27th lacked the flamethrowing tanks that the Marine divisions on the flanks possessed.

The one weapon specifically designed for cave reduction in the Pacific. I want to be clear about context. The Marine divisions were taking enormous casualties, too. Over the course of the battle, the Second Marine Division would lose roughly 1,200 killed and 4,500 wounded. The fourth Marine Division would lose nearly a thousand killed and 3,500 wounded.

This was savage fighting for every unit on the island. But the terrain mattered. The Marines were advancing up through relatively open coastal strips on either flank. Their terrain was not easy. There were Japanese positions to reduce everywhere. But it was not Death Valley. A comparison of advance rates between divisions fighting through fundamentally different tactical conditions is not a comparison at all.

It is an illusion of equivalence. On June 22nd and 23rd, the front line bent into a dangerous U shape. The Marine divisions pushed forward on both flanks. The 27th stalled by the kill zone of Death Valley fell behind. In places the gap reached 1500 yards. Both Marine divisions inner flanks were now exposed to Japanese fire from the high ground that the 27th had not yet cleared.

This was a legitimate tactical crisis and Holland Smith was right to be alarmed. The gap endangered Marines on both sides of the line. But the gap also existed because Holland Smith had designed the operation that way. He placed his least trusted division in the hardest terrain with no reinforcement, no additional armor, and no flame tanks.

His operations orders consistently arrived late, often issued after 2,300 hours for attacks scheduled at dawn, giving subordinate commanders no time for reconnaissance or coordination. When the predictable result occurred, when the division in impossible terrain advanced slower than the divisions on open ground, Holland Smith interpreted it as a leadership failure rather than a terrain problem.

What happened next should have ended his career, not Ralph Smith’s. Before I walk you through this relief itself, there is a structural issue that most accounts skip over, and it is essential to understanding why this controversy became so explosive. The command structure on Caipan was inherently unstable.

Holland Smith, a Marine Lieutenant General, commanded the fifth amphibious corps. His core contained two marine divisions and one army division. He reported to Vice Admiral Turner, the amphibious force commander who reported to Admiral Spruent commanding the fifth fleet. There was no Army general anywhere in the chain of command between Ralph Smith and the Navy admirals above Holland Smith.

This meant that an army major general commanding army soldiers trained in army doctrine was subordinate to a marine general who neither understood nor respected that doctrine who was in turn subordinate to navy admirals whose primary concern was the fleet’s exposure timeline rather than the ground tactical situation. The entire structure was a recipe for exactly the collision that occurred and the doctrinal difference between the army and the marines on Saipan was not trivial.

It went to the heart of the controversy. Marine doctrine in the Pacific emphasized speed and aggression, hit the beach, push in land fast, accept heavy casualties to maintain momentum, because the longer the fleet sits offshore supporting you, the more vulnerable those ships are to Japanese air and submarine attack. The Navy’s timetable drove the Marines tempo.

Get it done fast or the ships leave. Army doctrine shaped by the European theater and by army institutional culture going back decades emphasized firepower and methodical reduction of enemy positions. Suppress the position with artillery and mortar fire. Maneuver around it if possible.

Reduce it with engineers and demolition teams if not. Accept a slower pace of advance to keep casualties manageable and preserve combat power for the next operation. Neither approach was wrong. They were designed for different operational problems. As historian Sharon Tosy Lacy has written, neither approach was superior.

They reflected different service cultures shaped by different operational requirements. The marine approach made sense when the fleet survival depended on speed. The army approach made sense when you were fighting through fortified cave systems and limestone ridges that could not be bypassed and did not yield to suppressive fire alone, which is precisely what the 27th faced in Death Valley.

The tragedy of Saipan was not that the 27th fought like an army division. It was that no one in the command structure had the authority or the willingness to reconcile two fundamentally different approaches to the same tactical problem. Holland Smith expected the 27th to fight like Marines when it fought like the Army Division. was trained in army methods and facing terrain that rewarded those methods.

He interpreted the doctrinal difference as a leadership failure. In my view, that misreading is the core error in this entire episode. There is one more piece of context I need to give you before we get to the relief. The war correspondents. The press corps on Saipan was overwhelmingly embedded with the Marine Divisions.

Robert Sherid of Time magazine, who would write the single most damaging account of the 27th Division, was a Marine correspondent through and through. He had covered Terawa. His sympathies, his sources, and his access were all marine. The loose publications, time, and life had a documented institutional relationship with the Marine Corps dating back to Guadal Canal.

Hurst newspapers, by contrast, championed MacArthur and the Army. The information war between the services was being fought through competing press relationships. And on Cypan, the Marines had the superior media operation by a wide margin. When shared wrote that the 27th froze in their foxholes, he was writing from the Marine perspective for a marine friendly publication using Marine sources without ever setting foot in the Army sector or interviewing a single soldier from the 27th Division.

His account became the dominant narrative not because it was the most accurate, but because the Marines media allies gave it the widest circulation. That narrative has persisted for 80 years. I think the evidence no longer supports it. On June 23rd, the 27th launched its attack. Holland Smith later claimed it jumped off between 55 minutes and 2 hours behind schedule.

The 106th Infantry, which had just been pulled from the Nefutan Point Containment Mission and rushed north to the main line, was thrown into Death Valley with no time to reconoid the terrain ahead. They were immediately pinned by devastating fire. The 165th Infantry fighting along Purple Heart Ridge to the east registered only marginal gains against fortified cave positions.

Meanwhile, the Marine divisions continued to push forward on both flanks. The gap widened further. Holland Smith leveled two formal charges against Ralph Smith. The first regarding the Nefutin point orders I have already discussed. The second was the central accusation. The 27th Division’s slow advance on June 22nd and 23rd had uncovered the flanks of both Marine divisions, creating an unacceptable tactical situation.

On June 24th, Holland Smith went to Vice Admiral Richmond Kelly Turner aboard his command ship. Turner agreed that Ralph Smith should be relieved. Together, they boarded Admiral Raymond Spruent’s flagship, the USS Indianapolis. Spruce listened to Holland Smith’s case and authorized and directed the relief. Those were Spruent’s own words.

This was not passive acquiescence. It was an active order from the theat’s senior naval commander. In Spruent’s assessment, no other action appeared adequate to accomplish the purpose. The entire decision, from Holland Smith’s first conversation with Turner to Spruent’s authorization took place aboard naval vessels.

No army officer was consulted. No one from the 27th Division was asked to explain the situation in their sector. No one inspected Death Valley. That afternoon, a captain from the agitant general’s corps entered Ralph Smith’s command post and handed him a typed message on fifth amphibious corps stationary. Ralph Smith read it, placed it in his pocket without a word, and continued directing the battle. He did not protest.

He did not argue. A second message ordered him to pack personal belongings and be on a Hawaii bound plane before daybreak. At 5:17 in the morning on June 25th, Ralph Smith and a single aid boarded a Navy patrol plane. He was not permitted to say goodbye to his officers or his men. No ceremony, no explanation to the division.

The only time in the entire war that a Marine general fired an Army general and it was executed with a typed memo in a pre-dawn flight off the island. Major General Sanderford German, a 6’5, 250lb artilleryman already on Saipan as the designated garrison commander, assumed temporary command of the 27th. Two days later, Major General George W. Grryer Jr.

was flown in from Hawaii to take permanent command. German’s initial assessment seemed to vindicate Holland Smith. He reported to Holland Smith that the problem was to get the 27th to advance. He noted a lack of offensive spirit. He observed that a battalion would run into one machine gun and be held up for several hours.

He fired several officers he considered inadequate, including a regimental colonel. This sounded like exactly the kind of aggressive leadership Holland Smith had said was missing. But here is where the story turns. After German actually fought through Death Valley himself, after he spent days in the terrain and experienced the Japanese defenses firsthand, he reversed his assessment entirely.

He concluded that Holland Smith was, in his own words, too prejudiced to make an impartial assessment of any army unit. German had arrived expecting to find a division that would not fight. He found instead a division fighting through terrain that punished every attempt to advance. The tactical record confirms German’s reversal.

It took six more days of bitter, grinding combat to secure Death Valley after Ralph Smith’s relief. New commanding general, same terrain, same Japanese resistance, same rate of advance, same heavy casualties. Philip Crawl delivers the verdict in the official army history with devastating simplicity. It is doubtful whether the relief of General Ralph Smith brought about any marked change one way or the other in the aggressiveness of the 27th Division.

If the problem had been leadership, the new leader should have produced a different result. The result was identical. The problem was the ground. Now, let me tell you about July 7th, 1944. Because what happened that morning destroyed forever the claim that the 27th Division would not fight. By July 6th, the battle had ground northward for three weeks.

Roughly 4,300 surviving Japanese, a mix of Imperial Army soldiers, walking wounded armed sailors, and even some civilians carrying weapons were cornered in the island’s northern tip near Marpy Point. They had no ammunition resupply. They had almost no food. They had no hope of reinforcement. Lieutenant General Seido, Vice Admiral Nagumo, and Major General Ki Ietta all committed ritual suicide on the evening of July 6th.

But before he died, Sido dictated his final order. Whether we attack or whether we stay where we are, there is only death. However, in death there is life. We must utilize this opportunity to exalt Japanese manhood. I will advance with those who remain to deliver. Still another blow to the American devils. The Japanese consumed whatever beer and sake remained. They gathered in the darkness.

They armed themselves with whatever they could find. Rifles, bayonets lashed to bamboo poles, sharpened sticks, rocks. Men on crutches prepared to hobble forward. Men with arms and slings stuffed grenades into their belts. At approximately 0445 on July 7th, the officers came first, waving samurai swords and screaming, and behind them came the wave.

This was the largest bonsai charge of the entire Pacific War. Estimates put the attacking force at 4,300 men, charging into roughly 1100 American soldiers of the first and second battalions, 105th infantry regiment, nearly 4 to1 odds. The attack burst through a 300-yard gap between the two battalions. The sheer mass of the charge overwhelmed the initial defensive positions within minutes.

Both battalions were overrun. Command posts were destroyed. Communication lines were severed. The Japanese tide surged more than a thousand yards through the American lines, penetrating deep into the 27th Division’s rear area and overrunning a battery of the 10th Marine Artillery Regiment. Those Marine artillerymen, to their enormous credit, depressed their 105mm howitzers and fired point-blank canister rounds into the oncoming mass of men until their positions were physically overrun and the gun crews killed. Some soldiers of

the 105th were pushed off the coastal cliffs entirely and driven into the surf. Navy destroyers standing offshore eventually rescued them from the water. For hours in the early morning darkness, and then in the harsh tropical daylight, isolated pockets of American soldiers fought completely surrounded.

Lieutenant Colonel William J. O’Brien organized the defense of his sector with two pistols, rallied fleeing troops, commandeered a jeep mounted 50 caliber machine gun, and fired belt after belt into the attackers until he had no ammunition left. He was found dead, surrounded by more than 30 Japanese bodies.

Private Thomas Baker, severely wounded and unable to move, refused to be carried to safety because he would slow his comrades down. He asked to be propped against a tree with a pistol in eight rounds. His comrades did what he asked and left him. They found him dead the next morning, pistol empty.

Eight Japanese bodies arranged in a semicircle in front of his position. Captain Benjamin Salomon, the regimental dentist serving as surgeon for the second battalion aid station, killed several Japanese soldiers who infiltrated the medical tent, then dragged a 30 caliber machine gun outside and repositioned it to cover the evacuation of the wounded.

He fired until the barrel was nearly melted. 98 Japanese dead were counted around his body. His Medal of Honor was delayed until 2002, 58 years after his death, partly because regulations at the time restricted combat decorations for medical personnel. By 1800 hours, soldiers of the 27th Division and Marines who had moved forward to support the counterattack had regained all the lost ground.

The numbers from that single morning are staggering. First and second battalions, 105th Infantry Regiment, 406 killed, 512 wounded, roughly 900 casualties out of,00 men engaged. Japanese dead from the charge totaled 4,311. 2295 counted in front of the American positions. 2016 found behind the American lines killed during the counterattack.

Threeostumous medals of honor. O’Brien Baker Salomon. Robert Sherid of Time magazine had previously written that the 27th Division soldiers froze in their foxholes, a characterization based entirely on marine sources. Shared never visited the 27th sector, never interviewed its soldiers, never walked its ground. Historian Jeffrey Perro later observed that the article devastated the men of the 27th, and their morale never recovered.

I think those casualty figures, 406 dead from two battalions in a single morning. 900 total casualties out of 1100 men make Sherid’s characterization not just wrong, but grotesque. The Army’s institutional response to Holland Smith’s relief of Ralph Smith was furious, sustained, and ultimately self-defeating. Lieutenant General Robert C. Richardson Jr.

, the senior army commander in the Pacific Ocean areas, made the controversy his personal crusade. On July 4th, 1944, 5 days before Saipan was even declared secure, Richardson convened a board of inquiry at his headquarters on Aahu. The board was chaired by Lieutenant General Simon Bolivar Buckner Jr., who would later command the 10th Army at Okinawa and die there to a Japanese artillery round.

The board heard testimony from July 7th through July 26th. It called only Army witnesses. It examined only Army records. It made no attempt to consult Marine Corps or Navy testimony or records. Its four conclusions were carefully worded. Holland Smith had full legal authority. The orders were properly issued. Holland Smith was not fully informed about conditions in the 27th Division zone, and the relief was not justified by the facts.

Holland Smith dismissed the findings as whitewash, pure and simple, with no more judicial standing than a kangaroo court. Admiral Ernest King, chief of naval operations, called the board’s work unilateral and suspect. Then Richardson escalated further. He flew to Saipan personally, reviewed Army troops, and distributed decorations for valor.

All without informing Holland Smith, a deliberate breach of military protocol designed to humiliate the Marine commander on what was technically still his turf. When Richardson confronted Holland Smith face to face, his words became the most quoted passage in the entire controversy. I want you to know that you cannot push the army around the way you have been doing.

You and your core commanders are not as well qualified to lead large bodies of troops as general officers in the army. Yet you dare to remove one of my generals. You Marines are nothing but a bunch of beach runners. Anyway, what do you know about land warfare? Richardson’s formal recommendation to General George Marshall branded Holland Smith as prejudiced, petty, and unstable.

Ralph Smith recommended that no army combat troops ever again serve under Holland Smith. Major General Grryer, Ralph Smith’s permanent replacement, left Caipan convinced that Holland Smith was so prejudiced against the army that no army division under his command could expect honest evaluation. The controversy climbed to the joint chiefs.

Major General Thomas Handy advised Marshall that Holland Smith’s fitness for command was open to question due to deep-seated prejudice. His extraordinary recommendation was that both Smiths be removed from the Pacific. Lieutenant General Joseph McNney, the deputy chief of staff, found failures everywhere. Holland Smith’s core staff work was below acceptable standards, but Ralph Smith had failed to exact the performance expected from a well-trained division.

On November 22nd, 1944, Marshall wrote Admiral King that relationships between the services had deteriorated beyond healthy rivalry. King rejected further investigation. The matter was officially dropped. Officially. And if this sounds familiar, if you have ever watched two departments in the same organization tear themselves apart over a personnel decision while the actual mission suffers, you’re not imagining it.

The pattern is older than any of us. Let me tell you about the two men at the center because their characters illuminate the collision. Holland McTier Smith was born April 20th, 1882 in Hatchichubby, Alabama. He graduated from Auburn, earned a law degree from the University of Alabama, practiced briefly, admitted he was a terrible lawyer, and was commissioned a Marine second lieutenant in 1905 after being rejected for an army commission.

That rejection is a documented fact. Whether it planted a lifelong resentment against the army is speculative, but historians, including Harry Gay, have noted the connection. His nickname, howland mad, came from service in the Dominican Republic in 1916. Marine General Victor Kruac quoted him as saying, “The greatest weapon is controlled anger.

The greatest defeat is uncontrolled anger.” Kruak added that Holland Smith was terrifying when he elected to be mad, but he never actually lost his temper. He elected to be mad. The rage was calculated. Holland Smith’s greatest contribution was not any single battle. It was amphibious doctrine. He championed the landing vehicle tract.

He fought for Higgins boat production. He directed the fleet exercises that transformed amphibious assault from a theoretical concept into America’s decisive operational capability in the Pacific. He trained six marine and six army divisions. He was by any fair reckoning the father of modern American amphibious warfare.

The Encyclopedia of Alabama offers a more complicated assessment. Although he craved battlefield command, Smith was a more able trainer and administrator than he was a field commander. I think that tension defines him. The man who built the doctrine was not necessarily the man who should have been commanding the assault.

Ralph Corbett Smith was born November 27th, 1893 in South Omaha, Nebraska. Not a West Pointer, he graduated from Colorado State College and took flying lessons from Orville Wright. His pilot’s license signed by Wright bore the number 13. He served under Persing in Mexico and France, was wounded at the M Argon, earned two silver stars, studied at the Sorbon and the French Eldair.

He was a gentleman, an intellectual, and a man of extraordinary personal restraint. His operations officer said he had never once seen Ralph Smith angry. A friend observed that his extreme consideration for all other mortals would keep him from being raided among the great captains. Ralph Smith himself later admitted with characteristic cander that he did not think he was really a combat commander.

That is a remarkable and honest self assessment. And I think it tells you something the official records obscure. Ralph Smith was not incompetent. He was an administrator in a combat commander’s job, leading a division with systemic deficiencies he did not create across terrain that would have stalled any unit. What Ralph Smith did after his relief tells you everything about his character.

He prepared a meticulous 34-page report documenting his perspective. He briefly commanded the 98th Infantry Division in Hawaii. His fluent French eventually rescued his career. He served as military atache to de Gaul’s government in Paris. He retired in 1948 to Stanford’s Hoover Institution. and he never once publicly commented on Holland Smith or the relief for the rest of his life. Not a word.

Over half a century of dignified silence. Holland Smith, by contrast, published coral and brass in 1949. The memoir was so inflammatory that the Marine Commodant, the Secretary of Defense, and even Robert Shered urged him not to publish it. Shered, the same correspondent who had written that the 27th froze in their foxholes, refused to co-author the book and tried to correct its inaccuracies.

Admiral Harry Hill threatened to sue, writing privately that poor old Holland was throwing away everything he had gained in his entire career just to get it off his chest. He was a very bitter individual. Ralph Smith died January 21st, 1998 at age 104. He was the oldest surviving American general officer and the last surviving American divisional commander of World War II.

Holland Smith died January 12th, 1967 at 84. So, who was right? I have spent more time with this story than almost any other subject I have researched for this channel, and my answer is that both sides held legitimate grievances while behaving as though their piece of the truth was all of it. The Marine case rests on observable tactical reality.

The 27th’s stalled advance created a dangerous gap that endangered both Marine divisions. The official Army history itself concedes this. Cra writes that the conclusion seems inescapable that Holland Smith had good reason to be disappointed with the 27th’s performance on the two days in question. Holland Smith had seen the 27th underperform at Mon and Nuetto.

Admiral Spruent and Turner both approved the relief. Even the Buckner board, stacked as it was, confirmed his authority. The army cases equally strong. The 27th was assigned the most heavily defended terrain on the island. Comparing advance rates across fundamentally different ground is misleading at best, dishonest at worst. Holland Smith never inspected Death Valley.

His operations orders arrived too late for proper coordination. The 27th lacked flame tanks and the relief produced no measurable tactical improvement. Six more days to clear the same ground under different generals. In my view, the truth is this. Holland Smith had a legitimate tactical problem. The gap in the line was real and it was dangerous.

But his response was shaped by prejudice as much as by tactical necessity. He made the most consequential decision of his career. The relief of a general officer in combat without performing the basic due diligence of walking the ground his soldiers were fighting over. Ralph Smith led a division with genuine deficiencies in lower level leadership and staff work.

Deficiencies that both Army and Marine investigators identified, but those deficiencies were rooted in systemic Army failures in National Guard mobilization. They were not Ralph Smith’s creation. And the terrain he was asked to clear would have stalled any division in the Pacific. I believe this controversy matters not because one man was right and the other was wrong.

It matters because it reveals what happens when institutional rivalry corrupts command judgment. The Army and the Marine Corps were fighting each other almost as hard as they were fighting the Japanese. And the men who paid for that institutional failure, as they always do, were the privates and sergeants and lieutenants dying in Death Valley.

While their generals argued about whose fault it was, the consequences were immediate. Holland Smith was promoted to Fleet Marine Force Pacific in August 1944. It sounded like an advancement. It was a removal from Tactical Command. At Eoima in February 1945, his role was largely supervisory. for Okinawa.

In April 1945, Admiral Spruent and Turner wanted Holland Smith to command the assault forces. Admiral Nimttz overruled them, specifically citing the Saipan controversy and what he described as justifiable animosity between senior staffs. Nitz’s fitness report on Holland Smith noted that his usefulness had been impaired by wrangles and disharmony that might have been avoided.

Holland Smith was not invited to the Japanese surrender ceremony on the USS Missouri. Okinawa went instead to Army Lieutenant General Simon Believer Buckner Jr., the same officer who had chaired the board investigating the Saipan relief. The command was structured as the 10th Army with both Army and Marine Corps under unified army control, explicitly designed to prevent a repeat of what happened between the two Smiths.

The institutional lesson was unmistakable. No Marine general would again exercise operational command over Army ground forces in the Pacific. The broader disparity that the controversy reflected is worth naming. John McManis has documented that the army deployed 21 infantry and airborne divisions in the Pacific theater versus the Marines six divisions.

Army ground soldiers suffered nearly twice the total casualties that the Marines did. And yet it is the Marine narrative amplified by correspondents like Shered and publications like Time and Life that dominates the popular memory of the Pacific War. An army soldier on Saipan captured the frustration with words that could have been written yesterday.

Our men are getting awfully tired of reading about the exploits of the Marines out here. We have been able on many occasions to identify pictures of Marines in action as being pictures of Army troops. The standing joke now is that the Marine secret weapon is the Army. The 27th Division went on to fight at Okinawa in April 1945 where it was assigned to the 10th Army under Buckner.

Once again, it drew criticism from Marine officers for its pace of advance. Once again, the criticism ignored the terrain and the Japanese defenses. Once again, the division took devastating casualties. The 27th was committed to the assault on the Shury line, the most heavily fortified defensive position in the Pacific War, and fought there for weeks in conditions that made Death Valley look manageable.

Its soldiers never escaped the stigma of Saipan. That stigma had been built on Robert Sherid’s Time magazine article, Holland Smith’s Relief Decision, and Coral and Brass. Three sources, all shaped by marine institutional interests, none based on a fair assessment of the ground truth. The men of the 27th Division carried that reputation for the rest of their lives.

Some of them are still alive. Their sons and grandsons are in this audience. They deserve better. The historioggraphic trajectory on this controversy has shifted significantly over the past few decades. Crow’s official army history from 1960 was balanced but carried an institutional army perspective.

Holland Smith’s Coral and Brass from 1949 was nakedly partisan and contained acknowledged inaccuracies. Harry Gayy’s How and Mad versus the Army published in 1986 was the first booklength treatment and it sided decisively with Ralph Smith. Gaye interviewed Ralph Smith personally, but not Holland Smith, which critics have noted creates an inherent tilt.

Sharon Tossi Lacy’s Pacific Blitzkrieg from 2013 used newly discovered primary sources and is probably the most balanced modern treatment. John McManus’s Island Inferno from 2022 provided a long overdue corrective to the marine centric narrative of the Pacific War. A 2013 thesis from Dominican University argued that Holland Smith’s memoir, though grossly inaccurate, became the standard account through strong marine public relations and press relationships.

The scholarly consensus has moved toward a position that both Smiths bore significant responsibility and that the inner service system was the primary failure. But popular memory, shaped by 80 years of Marine narrative dominance, has been slower to catch up. The final numbers from Saipan tell a story that no argument can diminish.

Total American casualties across all forces, roughly 3,100 killed, 13,000 wounded, more than 300 missing. Approximately 16,500 total. Japanese dead exceeded 25,000. Only 1,800 were captured. About 8,000 civilians also perished. Many by suicide at the cliffs of Marpy Point, driven by Japanese propaganda that told them the Americans would torture them.

The 27th Infantry Division alone, roughly 900 killed, 24,00 wounded, over 100 missing. More than 3,400 total casualties in 25 days of combat. The 105th Infantry Regiment suffered 148 casualties, 485 killed, 836 wounded, 87 missing. The worst regimental losses in the division driven overwhelmingly by the July 7th bonsai charge.

Three medals of honor, all postumous. O’Brien, Baker, Salomon, Philip Crowell, the army historian who spent years weighing every piece of evidence, every report, every testimony, wrote the final assessment with the care of a man who knew no one would accept it. To resolve the controversy of Smith versus Smith conclusively and to the satisfaction of all is probably impossible. I think he was right.

And I think the impossibility is itself the verdict on a system that could not manage its own rivalries while its people were dying. That is the story.