Ships
- USS South Dakota (BB-57) Captain from 20 September 1943 · Relieved on 17 March 1944
Allan Edward Smith was born in Detroit on 19 January 1892 and graduated from the United States Naval Academy with the Class of 1915. He is the officer shipmates called Hoke, distinct from the Allen Smith who finished the Academy in 1927. Smith was promoted to commander in 1936. From 25 September 1939 to 15 June 1940 he commanded the destroyer-minelayer Gamble. He became a captain on 1 July 1941.
The night battle off Guadalcanal on 14–15 November 1942 fell to another captain of the battleship. Thomas L. Gatch had South Dakota that night. Washington sank the Japanese battleship Kirishima. South Dakota took heavy damage and did not sink Kirishima. Smith was not in command.
Smith came to South Dakota (BB-57) after the ship returned to the Pacific. Lynde D. McCormick had commanded her from February 1943, including the cruise with the British Home Fleet. Smith relieved McCormick as captain on 20 September 1943 at Havannah Harbor, Efate, in the New Hebrides, days after the battleship arrived from Norfolk by way of the Panama Canal.
Through the winter of 1943–1944, South Dakota operated with the fast carriers in the central Pacific. In November she screened the carriers covering the landings on Makin and Tarawa. On 8 December 1943 her guns carried out the battleship’s first shore bombardment, against Nauru. She remained in action through the Marshall Islands operation and the mid-February 1944 carrier raid on Truk. Ralph S. Riggs relieved Smith on 17 March 1944. Smith later received the Legion of Merit for the way he fought the ship through long stretches of air attack and bombardment.
He was promoted to rear admiral in 1944 and moved from the battleship to cruiser command. On 13 June a cruiser division under him bombarded Matsuwa in the Kurils, and on 26 June it shelled Kurabu Zaki on Paramushiro, while American forces opened the campaign in the Marianas. He also served as acting commander of the Seventeenth Naval District at Kodiak. By autumn he commanded Cruiser Division 5. That command carried out a diversionary bombardment of Marcus Island ahead of the Leyte landings, then struck Iwo Jima repeatedly from November 1944 into January 1945 and shelled Chichi Jima and Haha Jima. At Okinawa in 1945 his cruisers and destroyers bombarded the island in support of the landing. Further awards of the Legion of Merit marked the Kuril and Iwo Jima bombardments.
After the war Smith rose to vice admiral. In January 1950, as commander of the Cruiser Force, Atlantic Fleet, he directed the salvage that refloated the battleship Missouri after she grounded in Chesapeake Bay. From September 1950 he commanded the United Nations Blockading and Escort Force in the Korean War, Task Force 95, the ships that kept the blockade on both coasts of Korea. He later commanded the Thirteenth Naval District at Bremerton. His decorations included the Navy Distinguished Service Medal. Smith died in Seattle on 2 July 1987, at the age of ninety-five, and was buried in the Naval Academy Cemetery at Annapolis.