Ships
- USS Honolulu (CL-48) Captain from 15 June 1938
Oscar Smith was born on 8 January 1887 and was a captain in the United States Navy, a rank he had held since 1 September 1935, when he took the light cruiser Honolulu (CL-48) into commission. On 15 June 1938 he assumed command at the New York Navy Yard as her first commanding officer.
Honolulu was a Brooklyn-class cruiser, the second Navy ship named for the capital of Hawaii. She had been launched at the same yard in August 1937, with Helen Poindexter, daughter of the territorial governor of Hawaii, as sponsor. Smith’s task was to take a new treaty cruiser, armed with fifteen 6-inch guns and built for fleet work, through her first years at sea.
The opening cruise was a long shakedown. Honolulu exercised in the Caribbean and crossed the Atlantic to England, where she called at Portsmouth. In September 1938 she sailed from Portsmouth for the United States with a shipment of gold bullion moving from the Bank of England to the Federal Reserve Bank in New York. She then remained with the Atlantic forces for fleet problems and further Caribbean exercises.
On 24 May 1939 Smith took Honolulu out of New York for the Pacific Fleet. The ship reached San Pedro, California, on 14 June. For the rest of 1939 she trained along the West Coast, and through the first half of 1940 she continued operating from Long Beach.
Smith left Honolulu in July 1940, when Captain Harold Dodd relieved him. The cruiser then went to Puget Sound for overhaul and later that year shifted her base to Pearl Harbor. Smith stayed in the Navy and was named a temporary commodore on 12 April 1943.