MG Ralph C. Smith commanded the 27th Infantry Division during World War 2. He commanded the Division during the difficult Saipan landings in 1944. MG Smith’s remarkable life can best be summarized by this January 28, 1998 NY Times obituary: Maj. Gen. Ralph Corbett Smith, a rugged Nebraskan who was decorated for bravery in World War I, commanded an infantry division in combat in the Pacific in World War II and became the oldest surviving general officer of the United States Army, died on Wednesday at his home in Palo Alto, Calif. He was 104. The cause of death was a lung ailment, said a friend, Roger Mansell. General Smith was also an early aviator and was given flying lessons, as a young officer, by Orville Wright, Mr. Mansell said, and his pilot's license, signed by Wright, bore the number 13, because he was the 13th person to receive one. In later years, when asked how he achieved such great age, General Smith used to say wryly: ''I get up in the morning and I'm still here. That's how I got this way.'' He was born in South Omaha, Neb., was raised partly in Colorado, attended Colorado State College and served in the Colorado National Guard. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Army in 1916 and was involved in the Army's unsuccessful punitive expedition -- whose commanding general was John J. Pershing -- against Francisco Villa, the Mexican revolutionary known as Pancho, just before the United States entered World War I. In that war the future general Smith won the Silver Star with an Oak-Leaf Cluster for two instances of bravery with the Infantry in France. He was wounded in action in the Meuse-Argonne offensive in 1918. Between the world wars his duties including teaching at West Point and attending, and then instructing, at the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kan. He was a temporary colonel when the United States entered World War II. In 1942, he became a major general and took command of the 27th Infantry Division. In 1943, troops of his division captured Makin Atoll -- in the Gilbert Islands in the Pacific -- which became the first central Pacific island to be reconquered by the Allies. In 1944, the general's division took part in the hard struggle for the mountainous island of Saipan in the western Pacific. But he was relieved of his command by Lieut. Gen. Holland M. Smith of the U.S. Marine Corps, commander of the Fifth Amphibious Corps, who contended that the 27th Division had ''failed to attack on time.'' An all-Army board of inquiry later exonerated Gen. Ralph Smith, and he went on to be military attache at the United States Embassy in Paris and CARE's chief of mission for France. While he worked for CARE he also oversaw operations in other western European countries. After retiring from the Army in 1948, General Smith was a fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institute on War, Revolution and Peace. The other honors he received included French, British and Belgian decorations.