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<em>Richard Albert Smith </em>was born in Dubuque, Iowa, 7 August 1911. He was the only son of Albert Hugo Smith and Lola Lichtenberger Smith, who were also parents of four daughters. Dick’s genealogy provided a fitting background for a West Pointer. His paternal forebears were of French and German extraction and were descendants of the first pioneers in the Dubuque area of Iowa. In his own day, Albert H. Smith was a recognized authority on public transportation. Dick’s maternal antecedents migrated to America from Germany in 1752, and three of the Lichtenbergers were patriots in the Revolutionary War. Migrating to Illinois, subsequent generations of Lichtenbergers participated in the Winnebago and Black Hawk Wars. In Illinois, the Lichtenbergers were owners and operators of the first and most successful lead mines in that area.</div>
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Growing up in Dubuque, Dick enjoyed the life of the typical American boy. He was active in the Boy Scouts and participated in swimming, track, camping, and canoeing on the Mississippi. Foreshadowing his Army Branch selection, he developed as an excellent rider, beginning on his own pony. He took part in community affairs, played the saxophone, and acted in school theatricals. He attended the Methodist Episcopal Church and was a member of the DeMolay Masonic Youth. After graduating from Dubuque High School, Dick attended the University of Iowa for one year, awaiting an appointment to West Point. He was a member of Delta Upsilon Fraternity at the University.</div>
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Dick entered the United States Military Academy in 1930, from the 3d Congressional District of Iowa. As a cadet he manifested the active, balanced life which his background and youth had foreshadowed. He was on the track team all four years, ran crosscountry as a Yearling, was a rope climber on the gym team for three years. He made corporal Second Class year and bore the C Company guidon as a First Class Sergeant. Athletics and military activities were balanced by attendance at hops, enjoyable visits from his sisters, additional reading, and only a moderate addiction to “red comforter.” In temperament, Dick was always considerate and rather reserved; contemplative rather than articulate; quiet and dignified, not boisterous, in manner; sincere and earnest in convictions and friendships. Following his boyhood preference in the field of action, he chose the Cavalry upon graduation.</div>
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Dick served at Fort Brown, Brownsville, Texas, where he was assigned as platoon leader, Troop B, 12th Cavalry, from 1934 to 1937. During that assignment Dick received a silver bowl inscribed: “Teddy Roosevelt Award, Cavalry Leadership Test for Small Units, Won in 1st Squadron, 12th Cavalry, 1st Platoon, Troop B.” There he played on the post polo team, and there he met his bride-to-be, Katherine Marie Wilson, daughter of Felix E. Wilson and Edith Wilson Burnett. Dick and Katherine were married at Mission, Texas, 5 May 1937, just before his promotion to first lieutenant, on 12 June. In due course, about a year later, on 17 May 1938, a darling daughter, Katherine Gail Smith, arrived. The Smiths were ordered to Fort Riley, Kansas, where Dick attended the 1938-39 Regular Course at the Cavalry School. After graduating from the Regular Course, Dick served briefly as Commander, Special Weapons, Machine Gun Troop, 2d Cavalry at Fort Riley, before seeking overseas service, which was granted with orders to the Philippines.</div>
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The Smiths arrived in the Philippines in February 1940. Dick was assigned as a battery commander serving with mines and 155 guns; in off duty hours, he led the scoring in the officers’ bowling league. Thus began what was to be a sadly truncated life in the 91st Coast Artillery on Corregidor. Gratification over promotion to captain in September 1940, was tempered shortly by rumors of war and eventual evacuation of his beloved family in time to escape the Japanese attack in December 1941. Dick remained with the garrison which began its heroic but tragic defense of Corregidor, from which questionable vantage point they witnessed the fall of Bataan and the beginning of the “Death March” by their comrades on the mainland.</div>
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Personal details of Dick’s capture are not available, but they were unquestionably similar to the heart-breaking accounts of those last days up to 6 May 1942, variously described elsewhere, and movingly recorded in the diary of Colonel E. Carl Engelhart ’20, a sturdy and courageous survivor of Corregidor. After the fall of Bataan, the Japanese relentlessly shelled “The Rock,” eventually blasting virtually every gun emplacement, with the aid of position coordinates obtained by pre-war Japanese “tourist” visitors. After some two weeks of gloating over the destruction they had wrecked upon “The Rock,” the Japanese separated Filipinos from Americans, Dick among these, and packed the latter into launches and ships for the trip to Manila, and thence up Dewey Boulevard in tropical heat past cowed natives, to Bilibid Penitentiary. There, eagle colonels were detained. Dick and the others were jammed into boxcars and taken to Cabanatuan, some seventy miles north of Manila.</div>
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Dick spent two and a half years at Cabanatuan Prison No. 1, of the three near the town of that name. During this period he was assigned as commissary officer for Prisoner of War Group II. Lieutenant Colonel Benson Guyton, a POW survivor, who was a barracks leader says; “I knew him as an officer who worked at a job in a most creditable manner, even though a prisoner of war. Dick lived in a double bunked ‘bahai’ with eight other officers; three chaplains, three ex-first sergeants who had been commisioned second lieutenants, a warrant officer, and First Lieutenant Henry Ford, United States Army Reserve. One of the chaplains, Father John A. Wilson, was Dick’s upper bunk mate until being shipped to Japan on 1 October 1944. He was the only officer of the nine in the hut to survive. He writes: ‘Dick often spoke of his love for horses, but his main concern was for his family. Living that way one gets very well acquainted with another, in that close proximity.’”</div>
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Dick survived the severe conditions of this phase of his captivity which included work details of the most enervating and debasing nature. Previous wounds and diseases of all kinds went untreated. Burial details handled an average of forty corpses every morning. Prisoners foraged for food to eke out a starvation diet, under which most went from 150 pounds and over, to about 85 pounds. As Carl Engelhart writes: “Malnutrition, which had begun before the fall of Corregidor, had resulted in loss of the subcutaneous layer of fatty tissue. Skin did not shrink, so a naked man presented a weird appearance, with drooping folds of skin pinned to his middle by his belly button—the buttocks having been replaced by pendulous drapes of skin—flatter areas looked like a tattooed picture of surface veins and arteries. It was extremely uncomfortable to sit down—we no longer had a personal cushion. If I should look down, my face would fall away from my skull.”</div>
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By the fall of 1944, MacArthur’s successes had led the Japanese to move able-bodied prisoners to Japan rather than leave them to be liberated and possibly fight against their captors. Of course, there were no “ablebodied” prisoners. Dick was one of those less physically debilitated prisoners selected for the trip to Japan from Cabanatuan Prison No. 1, and by mid-October 1944 was sent with other such selectees to Bilibid for subsequent shipment to Japan. While at the marshalling point at Bilihid, they endured American air attacks on the facility and were subjected to further dire forebodings at the news that the prisoner of war ship previously dispatched from Manila, the <em>Arisan Maru</em>, had been unwittingly torpedoed by the Americans 24 October 1944, with no survivors.</div>
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On 13 December 1944, Dick, with over 1,600 other prisoners of war shuffled along, no longer able to march, out of Bilibid, down to the pier, and on to the <em>Oryoku Maru,</em> the first of three “Hell Ships” on which Dick was to suffer. The ship got under way at dawn next day; but by the time it had moved north off Subic Bay American planes attacked the unmarked ships. Prisoners packed in three stifling hot holds of the ship could only pray. They suffered wounds of varying degrees from bullets and fragments, but the pain was lessened when they learned the attacks had made a shambles topside. The ship anchorerd and the prisoners realized the Japanese could slaughter them in retaliation, and claim American attacks were responsible for the deaths. However, another horrible night of filth, pain, thirst and hunger passed without Japanese action. Dawn brought another American air attack, this time with bombs, which hit the ship, causing it to shudder. Shortly, the guards ordered the prisoners out of the holds and over the side, to swim to the shore of Subic Bay, some 600 yards away. As they swam to shore, waving prisoners conveyed to the fliers that they had bombed a prisoner of war ship. When the prisoners had been herded to shore, on to some nearby tennis courts, Englehart’s tally showed only 1,341 wretched survivors out of the 1,619 departing Manila, accounted for, Dick among them.</div>
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After five days on shore, where the naked and starving prisoners, suffering from the sun in daytime and from cold at night, stripped and ate all the green grass between the tennis courts, the survivors from the <em>Oryoku Maru</em> were moved north by truck, to San Fernando. There, on 27 December 1944, Dick and some 1,041 others were loaded on to the <em>Enoura Maru</em>, which immediately became a floating Devil’s Island. Its holds were filthy with dust, straw, and manure, having contained horses on the trip down from Japan. Rations were cut to one half cup of rice and three ounces of water. The worst asthma sufferer gasped away his life, his face awash from his streaming eyes. Others died of untreated injuries. Moving north, the <em>Enoura Maru</em> anchored at Takao, Formosa, on New Year’s Eve 1944. The prisoners sat in their open holds: freezing at night, miserably fighting off flies drawn by animal and human excrement, dehydrated, starving, feeble with dysentery for seven days. On 6 January 1945 reports of very large, new American planes reached the prisoners. They turned out to be B-29s. On 9 January the planes returned and scored three bomb hits on the unmarked ship, producing terrible casualties, particularly in the forward holds; 250 were killed and 150 wounded. No attention, nor care was given to the prisoners, as the Japanese, themselves, seemed to remain in shock for two indescribably horrible days. Then, the broken bodies and limbs were heaped into cargo nets, lowered into launches, taken ashore and cremated. Dick, along with remaining survivors, was moved on to the <em>Brazil Maru</em>, which had come alongside for the transfer.</div>
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On 13 January the third “Hell Ship” moved out of Takao and went on a twisting northward course through the Ryukus toward Japan. It was very cold. Men were dying of starvation and exposure. Ration was one third cup of rice and three ounces of water, frequently salt sea water. All day long there was a continuing murmuring moaning in the hold. A brief cessation of this sound meant discovery that another comrade had expired and that his body was being stretched out under the hatch, nude, his ragged remnants of clothing being passed on to some one else who, for perhaps a short time, might still get a small benefit from its meager cover. This daily toll ran from six to more than a score. Englehart says; “The effect of this extreme privation was to produce sleepiness. Some slept more, and more, and peacefully, did not awaken.” And that is how Dick finally passed away. Lieutenant Fraleigh writes: “At night four of us would sleep lying spoon style, in order to try to keep two men warmer. We would trade positions hourly.” Arthur (Pete) Peterson ’30 wrote: “It turned extremely cold and Dick caught pneumonia. He died in his sleep in my arms on about the 26th or 27th of January, 1945, at sea between Formosa and Japan.” A prisoner of war chaplain offered a commitment prayer. Thus, after months and years of struggle to survive, Dick, like so many of his comrades, relinquished his life for his country. In the words of Father Wilson: “I can assure you that Dick Smith was a fine officer, many times under the most adverse conditions, a genuine credit to the Army and West Point.” And as he said earlier: “Living that way, one gets to be very well acquainted with another in that close proximity.”</div>
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Dick was awarded the Purple Heart, posthumously. He is also entitled to the following: Presidential Unit Citation, American Defense Service Medal with Foreign Service Clasp, American Campaign Medal, Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal with One Bronze Service Star, World War II Victory Medal, Philippine Defense Ribbon, and Honorable Service Lapel Button WWII.</div>
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Dick is survived by his widow, now Mrs. Edgerly B. Marsh, of Oceanside, CA; by his daughter, Mrs. J.D. Murphy, of Thousand Oaks, CA; two granddaughters: Katherine and Jennifer; and by four sisters: Mrs. Olive S. Douglass, of Newport Beach, CA; Mrs. L.C. Hampton, of Costa Mesa, CA; Mrs. H.J. McConnell, of Costa Mesa, CA ; and Mrs. J. Rust Hoge, of Lafayette, CA.</div>
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<em>—Johnny Stevens ’34</em></div>