The Gentle Warrior: General Oliver Prince Smith, USMC

Abstract

Kopets reviews "The Gentle Warrior: General Oliver Prince Smith, USMC" by Clifton La Bree.

The Gentle Warrior: General Oliver Prince Smith, USMC. By Clifton La Bree. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-87338-686-8. Maps. Photographs. Notes. Bibliography. Index. Pp. xv, 268. $32.00.

General Oliver Smith's long face, lanky frame, and shock of white hair went well with his quiet, temperate, and contemplative manner. During his tour as the commanding general of the 1st Marine Division in Korea, war correspondents quoted him as saying, "Retreat, hell! We're just attacking in a different direction!" But that remark could not have come from this Marine Corps officer: he never cussed. Clifton La Bree, an amateur historian, attempts here a biography of General Smith's thirty-eight years in the Corps (1917-55).

O. P. Smith built his well-deserved reputation as a soldier-scholar as an instructor in Quantico and a graduate of the prestigious Ecole Superieure de Guerre in Paris. He commanded a battalion on Iceland (1941-42), a regiment on New Britain (1944), served as assistant commander of the Ist Marine Division on Peleliu (1944), then commanded that division in Korea (1950-51). The author gets Smith's first twenty-six years in the Marine Corps out of the way in twenty-six pages, then breezes through the Pacific War so he can move on to Korea and devote the majority of Gentle Warrior to Smith's command of the 1st Division.

Knowledgeable readers will find Gentle Warrior a shoddy and jaundiced account of its subject and surrounding events. Consider the following: the 2d Marine Division landed on the island of Betio in the Tarawa Atoll, not the island of Tarawa (pp. 52, 81); La Bree miraculously moves Seoul thirteen miles closer to its port of Inchon (p. 107); he confuses Courtney Whitney with Charles A. Willoughby (p. 111); he ignores the origins of MacArthur's request for the 1st Marine Division (Marine Lt. Gen. Lemuel C. Shepherd's visit to Tokyo); he believes the Ist Marine Aircraft Wing was an organic unit of the Ist Marine Division-it was not and never has been; and he races past 0. P. Smith's formation of the Ist Division at Camp Pendleton (pp. 101-3).

La Bree almost gets the ambush in Hell Fire Valley during the Chosin campaign right, but he steps on a landmine by putting Army Capt. Charles Peckham in charge of the convoy (p. 154). Readers who make it this far will want to evacuate the author to medical triage after his apologetic rendition of Roy E. Appleman's East of Chosin (1987) (vi). 160-68).

Professional historians will not have to listen long to the author's passive voice to find other flaws in Gentle Warrior. La Bree's documentary research is superficial at best. lie trusts oral history more than after-action reports and official operational accounts. He also habitually substitutes quotes from secondary sources for his own analysis. Gentle Warrior, in short, amounts to little more than a collection of excerpts from the voluminous collection of General Smith's personal papers at Quantico. I counted no fewer than sixty block quotations from that source in only 225 pages of text. (This sum excludes the dozen or so block quotations from other sources.) Much to this reviewer's disappointment, Gentle Warrior is neither credible biography nor good history. We can only hope someone else comes along and does a better job with the rich corpus of material 0. P. Smith left behind.