Word: hollander
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Equipment was more than a problem: there wasn't any. Holland Smith started practicing with two ancient ship's launches whose engines frequently did not work. He experimented with Boat Builder Andrew Jackson Higgins on a fast, high, stout-bottomed boat that could bounce over shallow reefs and hit the sand hard enough to get men into shallow water...
...Ever Forget . . ." Late in 1940 Holland Smith took his brigade and his single alligator to the Caribbean for seven months' hard training in beachhead landings. He threw in his course in Marine philosophy: "Don't ever forget you are the best fighting man in the world." After he returned he was made a major general...
Before the U.S. was at war, Holland Smith was a corps commander. He was training not only his marines but also the 1st Army Division in amphibious operations. Later he trained the 9th Army Division. But when the doughboys fought well on beach heads in Africa, Sicily, Italy, General Smith only read about it. In 1942 he was transferred to the West Coast, where he gave postgraduate training courses in amphibious warfare to the 7th Army Division (before it went to Attu), the 3rd Marine Division (which took Bougainville), the five regiments which landed on Kiska...
This time when his pupils went into action on Attu, Holland Smith was allowed to watch them from an airplane. Before the troops sailed for Kiska, Smith wanted a patrol sent in to find out if the Japs had really pulled out. The patrol was not sent...
...Smith ached for a combat assignment. And at last he got it. Last September, just four years after he started teaching his marines how to be amphibious but modern, he got his Central Pacific combat corps command. There on the Pacific atolls, where professionals die but professionals are made, Holland Smith, the top U.S. professional of amphibious warfare, was chosen to put his graduates through their public examination...