The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (28 page)

Yet was the situation really as bleak as MacArthur and the Joint Chiefs
believed, or Truman feared? To Matthew Ridgway’s mind—and nearly his mind alone—the answer was clearly no when he arrived on December 23, 1950, in Korea. Optimism, if grounded in logic rather than blind hope, was critical for restoration. And no one was more rational in those dark days than Matthew Ridgway. First, despite the fear of “Chinese hordes,” there was not such a great numeric disparity, at least if one considered the entire Korean peninsula and its larger environs—and the vast superiority enjoyed by American-led United Nations forces both at sea and in the air. As the army reeled backward, it was often forgotten that MacArthur still had nearly 550,000 ground, air, and naval forces at his theater command. Included in the Eighth Army and Tenth Corps alone were over 178,000 American infantry and marine troops. The Communists did not seem to take into account that the United States had vast naval and air resources based nearby in Japan and in the Philippines. They could be easily supplied, and facilities there were nearly impregnable from attack, given the superiority of the American fleet and strategic air force. The problem for General Peng Dehuai’s combined Korean and Chinese Communist forces was not that they did not outnumber the United Nations coalition, but that they did not outnumber it enough to counterbalance overwhelming American firepower and supplies.
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True, the enemy had reached the outskirts of Seoul by the New Year with total forces in the peninsula numbering nearly half a million North Korean and Chinese troops. But the Communists were for the most part becoming tired, sick, cold, and daily more distant from their thinning supply lines, which were under constant UN attack. They certainly did not have adequate artillery to support their huge forces. As they pressed their attacks, the Chinese bunched up—as if the disheartened Americans would not have adequate firepower to break up such formations. Never in modern military history had such a large army marched so far without guaranteed air superiority, or indeed much air or artillery cover at all. That lapse would soon be their undoing, as Ridgway realized. Were the Chinese really the Genghis Khan–like warriors of myth that frightened the Eighth Army into running back from the Yalu—or instead poorly clothed and fed Chinese conscripts who had lost the advantage of surprise and were colder and hungrier every mile they advanced southward from the Yalu?

Postwar analysis from the Communist side has emphasized the ongoing crisis in Chinese supply, which was pounded by U.S. air forces and
artillery. By the new year, Peng Dehuai was already requesting a hiatus in offensive operations from his Chinese superiors. Few in the Chinese government appreciated the heavy toll on his forces from American air and artillery barrages; the Red Army’s superiors back in Beijing were proving as out of touch with the battlefield as were their American counterparts in Washington—a problem familiar to weary frontline generals in many wars.

Most of the Americans’ problems, Ridgway concluded, were caused not by mere numbers or enemy superiority. Instead, the United States army in Korea had been plagued by lack of good leadership. It also suffered from a divided command, murky objectives, poor public relations, public indifference at home, and a sudden and unwarranted panic at the appearance of the ideologically driven Chinese. Indeed, in recent years, historians have reexamined the precipitous withdrawal of the Eighth Army from the Yalu under General Walker and have argued that such a lengthy and rapid retreat was not necessarily foreordained, or perhaps completely necessary: “The rank-and-file might have responded had the leadership been up to it. But it was not. Eighth Army as a whole panicked and fled; it was a shameful performance.” Much of the subsequent two years would be spent trying to regain areas so readily given up by Walker during his precipitous retreat.
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In some ways, the evacuation of the marines on the eastern side of the peninsula was even more shocking, given that the 1st Marine Division had fought a successful retreat to Hungnam and had established a defensible perimeter, inflicting twenty-five thousand Chinese casualties during its withdrawal. Ridgway saw that the marines, at least, had been as much ordered as forced to retreat. He also concluded that even if the Eighth Army had soon to abandon its thin line along the Imjin River, roughly along the 38th Parallel, and evacuate Seoul a second time (January 3–4, 1951), he would still not be overly concerned. The key was to trap and destroy large numbers of Communists, even if that meant fighting for a time south of the capital. Ridgway had confirmed there were already four fallback lines of trenches and barbed wire, all mined and guarded by artillery—in succession all the way back to the stronghold at Pusan if necessary. Yet he felt that such a long withdrawal would not be necessary, given that soon the enemy would overrun its base of supplies and begin thinning as it dispatched soldiers to occupy ground—just as the Americans themselves had experienced on the way up to the Yalu. Somewhere in the Chinese command, there was a counterpart to the
reckless MacArthur, an overconfident zealot who was wildly demanding that his stretched Communist columns could nevertheless race all the way to Pusan.

Other considerations gave the calm Ridgway even more optimism amid the general gloom, despite his unfamiliarity with Korea. While General Walker had been a fine Second World War armored commander under General George S. Patton, and while his accidental death had been tragic, Ridgway carefully began to sense that Walker may well have been as impulsive in retreating past the 38th Parallel as he had been in advancing beyond it—far outracing the pursuing Communists, losing contact with the enemy altogether, creating the impression that defeated troops had no chance against throngs of Asian Communists, and needlessly destroying infrastructure in retreat.

Later historical assessments have agreed with Ridgway. “There is little doubt,” one historian of the Korean War concluded, “that there was a ‘bugout’ mentality among many men in Eighth Army in December 1950. They wanted to be going south fast and keep going. The command echelon of Eighth Army also seems to have wanted to put a lot of distance between themselves and the Chinese in early December 1950—in order to save the army, they usually said.”
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Walker’s tragic demise, in an ironic sense, relieved Ridgway of the worry that his own radical restructuring of the Eighth Army was a referendum on Walker’s serious faults that had contributed further to MacArthur’s flawed command. Ridgway was free to reinvent the Eighth Army, while Walker was canonized—perhaps in the tradition of General Simon Bolivar Buckner, whose untimely death on Okinawa in July 1945 aborted an uncomfortable but growing consensus that his unimaginative strategy had led to thousands of needless American casualties.

Moreover, by mid-December 1950, the growing replacement of slower F-80 Shooting Stars with late model American F-86 Sabres signaled the end of the enemy MiG-15’s brief air superiority. If Ridgway could hold on, and Americans could recapture bases near the 38th Parallel, the B-29s and propeller-driven fighter bombers might resume, with jet fighter escort, the daylight bombing of the north—especially of vulnerable Chinese supply lines—without interdiction by enemy jet fighters.
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Ridgway also knew that despite superior morale, and some fine Soviet weaponry, Chinese Communist forces were ill-equipped. Some
Communist forces were without adequate food and medicines and armed with only grenades. Soon, massive American resupply would guarantee further advantages in artillery, tanks, machine guns, and supplies. Ridgway immediately saw the paradox of Korea in a way that MacArthur somehow did not. If in late November 1950 the well-supplied Americans could not get sufficient socks, shoes, caps, jackets, and rations to their troops far to the north on the Yalu, how could the less organized Chinese do any better for their own cold and hungry soldiers outside Seoul? While most in the West were terrified of the Chinese, Ridgway saw that the cold and geography affected both sides equally, and the enemy would probably suffer more than the better-clothed Americans. Later, Chinese internal assessments of poor supply, outbreaks of disease, the toll from air attacks, frostbite, and lack of supplies all supported Ridgway’s hunch that the Communists were in dire straits and would not be able to go much farther south than Seoul.
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The genius of Ridgway would be found in restoring morale and allowing the Chinese to extend their lines as they rushed headlong to the south. The key, then, was to rebuild, gradually withdraw intact, stock up, and wait for the moment when exposed Chinese columns would be most vulnerable to counterattack—hopefully far north of Pusan, and before the American public gave up on the war. If the Chinese had crafted a new, terrifying way of fighting, so could the Americans—one tailored precisely to address Chinese weaknesses. By establishing fortified lines, ringed with minefields, supplied by air, replete with plentiful artillery, and under constant bomber cover, Americans would bide their time and soon obliterate oncoming Chinese light infantry.

Moreover, Ridgway, again perhaps alone, saw that in this sort of limited war, holding ground was not so important. America could find success without necessarily going all the way back to the Yalu River to reunite the peninsula. Instead, killing off Communist forces would teach the Chinese (and by extension the Russians) the lethality of American firepower and the strength of the country’s will. Success in Korea might create a deterrent that would extend even to Western Europe. That would remind both Stalin and Mao of the wages of taking on American airpower and artillery.

Were South Korea to be restored with defense guarantees, were the Chinese and North Koreans to lose hundreds of thousands without achieving any of the objectives of the July 1950 invasion of the south, and were the Americans to establish a means of checking Communist offensives on the ground—without provoking a wider nuclear war and while keeping Western Europe and Japan safe—then victory could be achieved after all. Ridgway would see to that—and thereby educate the public that a stalemate in a limited war far away in Korea was more a victory than a defeat. Ridgway, in other words, saw that the ultimate objectives of the North Koreans and Chinese were to push the United States out of Korea and reunite the peninsula under Communist control. And yet if he were to try the same in reverse, it might prove strategically untenable, given the geography of Korea and its distance from the United States. During the Battle of the Bulge, Ridgway had been one of the few American generals who had almost immediately grasped the folly of the German offensive—undertaken without proper supply, reserves, or air support—and in Korea he sensed the same opportunities for counterattack and American advantage against the present Chinese offensive, likewise when most others did not.

Ridgway also calmly reviewed the prior first six months of the war (June to December 1950). He realized that in just two weeks in June and July 1950 after the North’s surprise invasion, the United States held the Pusan perimeter through a massive buildup of men and matériel. Then, less than a month after the Communist attack, the United States had, before the entrance of enemy jets, achieved air superiority over the entire peninsula. And just ninety days after North Korea crossed the 38th Parallel, the Communists were outnumbered and surrounded at Inchon. Four months after the North Koreans’ attack, they were facing annihilation at the Yalu. Indeed, by October 1950, the North Koreans had ceased to exist as effective fighting forces. China had changed the equation, coupled with loss of morale on the part of Americans, who went from the promise of “home by Thanksgiving” or “by Christmas” to confronting hundreds of thousands of new enemies in the frigid north. The one constant in this strange seesaw war was American firepower: its lethal artillery and constant air strikes, coupled with Korea’s relatively bleak open terrain, meant that the strung-out Chinese might pay the terrible price, whether on the offensive or in retreat.
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Finally, Ridgway sensed that the growing political animus between MacArthur and Truman had led to a directionless policy on the ground in Korea. To Ridgway, two considerations were thus paramount: First, keep out of the political fray, without either undercutting his superior, MacArthur, or spouting off about administration politics limiting his own options; second, utilize the preoccupations of his superiors to gain a
free hand in restoring sound strategy and tactics to the front without intrusive oversight. So while MacArthur from Tokyo kept sending to his select Republican supporters back-channel doom-and-gloom appraisals of the front he rarely visited, Ridgway on the battlefield quietly remained upbeat. In direct communications, he assured the somewhat confused Joint Chiefs that far from the war being lost, his Eighth Army could soon restore South Korea entirely to the 38th Parallel.
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In about eleven weeks after Ridgway’s arrival, Seoul was recaptured from the Chinese and North Koreans. In little more than three months, South Korea was in fact saved and its borders restored to or beyond the 38th Parallel. As Ridgway summed it up, “In less than
three months
. . . the Communist thrust into South Korea had been met and brought to a stop, and the invading forces all but destroyed. In less than
two weeks
the Communist offensive, begun on New Year’s Day, was halted. And in exactly
three weeks
from the second evacuation of the South Korean capital on January 4, 1951, the United Nations Command passed over to the offensive.”
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