Cornelius Cole "Corney" Smith Jr. (July 18, 1913 – April 27, 2004) was an American author, military historian, illustrator and painter. A survivor of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he was an officer in the United States Marines during World War II and retired at the rank of colonel. After leaving military service in 1947, he held a number of important positions including his employment as an architect for the Arabian-American Oil Company and a museum curator for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography. After receiving his MA and Ph.D. degrees in history at Claremont Graduate School, he spent the 1950s as chief of the Historical Division for the 15th Air Force, Strategic Air Command.
He began his writing career relatively late in life, at age 57, and was a prolific author of books on military history and the American frontier of the Southwestern United States. In addition to his own father's biography, Don't Settle for Second: Life and Times of Cornelius C. Smith (1977), he also authored biographies on Arizona frontiersman William Sanders Oury and Russian soldier-of-fortune Emilio Kosterlitzky. His book A Southwestern Vocabulary: The Words They Used (1984) detailed over 500 terms of slang of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico and is widely cited by historians of the "Old West".
Early life
Cornelius Cole Smith Jr. was born at Fort Huachuca in Arizona on July 18, 1913. His father, Cornelius Cole Smith, Sr., was commanding officer of the 5th U.S. Cavalry at the time of his birth and had served as a colonel in the Philippines during the Philippine Insurrection and Moro rebellion. Smith came from a prominent military family whose lineage could be traced as far back as the American Revolutionary War; his grandfather, Gilbert Cole Smith, had served an officer in the Union Army's famed California Column during the American Civil War and was also a direct descendant of brothers Granville and William Sanders Oury, William being one of couriers sent out by Colonel William B. Travis' during the Siege of the Alamo.
His early life growing up on the frontier military post was described by childhood friend H. B. Wharfield in his 1968 book Fort Yuma on the Colorado River,
A few years following his father's retirement from the military, he and his family moved to Riverside, California, in 1930, where they lived in the historic Victorian Charles E. Packard House; the home remained in the Smith family for over 30 years before Cornelius Jr. sold it in 1963. Cornelius Smith Jr. graduated from Riverside Polytechnic High School the following year. He briefly attended Riverside City College where he earned a track scholarship to the University of Southern California, and graduated in 1937.
Military service during World War II
The year of his college graduation, Smith became a commissioned officer in the Marine Corps Reserve as a second lieutenant. He was present at the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, where he was serving as officer of the day at the Marine barracks in the Pearl Harbor Navy Yard. He was initially alerted of the attack by the officer of the guard, Second Lieutenant Arnold D. Swartz, while drinking coffee with Marine Gunner Floyd McCorkle in the officers' section of the mess hall. As "sharp blasts" began shaking the building, the three men ran out onto the lanai where they witnessed the first Japanese naval planes diving on Ford Island.
During the attack, he led a four-man rescue party which pulled between fifteen and twenty sailors from oil-soaked and burning water; he modestly recounted his actions in later years saying only that his rescue party did "pretty good". He searched in vain among the wounded and dying at the Naval Hospital for his friend Harry Gaver Jr., son of Black-Foxe Military Institute commandant Major Harry Gaver, who had been killed on the USS Oklahoma earlier that morning. He later said, while standing among Marines firing at enemy planes flying over the Navy Yard, that "every Leatherneck's face wore a look of shame"; "Here we are with our pants down and the striking force of our Pacific Fleet is settling on the bottom of East Loch, Pearl Harbor. Who wouldn't be ashamed?" He wrote a personal account of the battle, based on his own wartime diary, for the Proceedings of the United States Naval Institute, "...A Hell of a Christmas," (December 1968) years later.
From May 1941 to October 1945, Smith served overseas and held commands at all levels from a platoon to a battalion. He spent much of his time in the Philippines where his father had served, as an officer with the 14th U.S. Cavalry, during the Philippine Insurrection and Moro rebellion at the turn of the 20th century.