Ships
- USS Monssen (DD-436) Captain, 14 March 1941 – 28 October 1942
Roland Nesbit Smoot was a United States Navy officer who, as a commander, led the destroyer USS Monssen (DD-436) from the day she entered service through the first year of the Pacific war. He later rose to vice admiral. In the late 1950s he commanded the American headquarters responsible for the defense of Taiwan.
He assumed command on 14 March 1941, when USS Monssen (DD-436) was placed in commission. She was a new Gleaves-class fleet destroyer, built to screen heavier ships with guns, torpedoes, and depth charges. For the rest of 1941 he trained the crew and operated her with the Atlantic Fleet on the patrol and escort duty then assigned to American destroyers.
In the months after Pearl Harbor the ship went to the Pacific. In April 1942 Monssen was part of the screen around the carrier Hornet when that force closed the Japanese home islands and Army bombers flew from Hornet to strike Tokyo and other cities. The raid itself did limited material damage. The destroyers' share of it was the long ocean passage, keeping submarines away from the carriers on the way in and on the withdrawal.
Smoot then took Monssen south. From August 1942 into late October she worked in the waters off Guadalcanal, screening transports and larger warships and taking her turn at the patrol and gunfire duties that fell to destroyers while the Marines held the island. Those weeks were a steady round of escort, night watches, and air attack, with Japanese surface forces still able to come down the Slot.
His tour ended on 28 October 1942, and he left the ship in the Solomons. Monssen remained on that station. In the night surface action off Guadalcanal on 12–13 November 1942 she was sunk, and many of her crew were lost. By then command had passed to Charles Edward McCombs.
Smoot remained in the Navy and reached flag rank. In 1958, as a vice admiral, he commanded the United States Taiwan Defense Command in Taipei during the bombardment of Kinmen and the crisis over the offshore islands. The command linked the Seventh Fleet to the defense of Taiwan and the Nationalist-held islands, and he spoke in public with unusual bluntness about holding that line. He retired in the early 1960s. The destroyer he had commissioned and taken to war was already gone, lost off Guadalcanal in November 1942, and the post he was remembered for was high command on the Taiwan Strait while that water was still an active front of the Cold War.