Ships
- USS Indianapolis (CA-35) Captain from 15 November 1932
John M. Smeallie was a United States Navy officer of the Naval Academy class of 1905. As a junior officer he commanded the destroyer Decatur from 1907 until 20 December 1908, in succession to Chester W. Nimitz. On 21 December 1908 he took the destroyer Barry and remained in her until 30 December 1909.
By the autumn of 1932 he was a captain, and the Navy gave him a new heavy cruiser to place in service. Indianapolis (CA-35), a Portland-class ship of about 9,800 tons, carried nine 8-inch guns and was designed for 32 knots. New York Shipbuilding laid her down at Camden, New Jersey, on 31 March 1930 and launched her on 7 November 1931. Lucy Taggart, daughter of Thomas Taggart, a former mayor of Indianapolis, sponsored the ship. Smeallie assumed command when Indianapolis was commissioned at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on 15 November 1932. At the ceremony he called the cruiser a fifteen-million-dollar insurance policy against war. She was slated to join the fleet on the West Coast, and the crew stood massed on the stern for the photographs made that day.
Her first cruise was a shakedown through the Atlantic and Guantánamo Bay, running into the early months of 1933, followed by training in the Canal Zone and in the Pacific off the Chilean coast. After an overhaul at the Philadelphia Navy Yard she went north to Maine. On 1 July 1933 she embarked President Franklin D. Roosevelt at Campobello Island and sailed the same day. She reached Annapolis on 3 July and hosted six members of the cabinet. The president went ashore, and on 4 July Indianapolis left Annapolis for the Philadelphia Navy Yard.
On 6 September 1933 Secretary of the Navy Claude A. Swanson made Indianapolis his flagship for an inspection of the Pacific. The cruise took her through the Canal Zone to Hawaii and on to the fleet in the San Pedro and San Diego area, with Smeallie still in command. He remained her commanding officer until 10 December 1934.
He later advanced to rear admiral and held that rank by the summer of 1939. The cruiser he had commissioned went on to a long war. From 1943 to 1945 Indianapolis served as flagship for Raymond Ames Spruance while he led the Fifth Fleet in the Central Pacific. On 30 July 1945, after she had carried components of an atomic bomb to Tinian, a Japanese submarine sank her in the Philippine Sea.