The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (29 page)

As Americans regained their confidence in early 1951, Ridgway found himself fighting on almost every diplomatic front. MacArthur did not always welcome Ridgway’s good news from the battlefield that could contradict his own bleak narrative, that the politicians had wrecked his marvelous offensive to the Yalu. The mercurial and politically expedient Joint Chiefs at first expected all American forces to be evacuated from Korea, then in an about-face Seoul to be quickly retaken, then again the 38th Parallel to be restored, and then perhaps modest American advances beyond it—all these contortions predicated solely on Ridgway’s own prior battlefield success. Truman backed Ridgway’s efforts—but in part mostly for leverage against MacArthur and to ensure that in time the latter could be replaced by a successful, less controversial commander. Others like General Dwight Eisenhower and General James Van Fleet would come to praise Ridgway’s “tremendous victory.” But after Korea was saved, both began to fault him—as a ground commander in Korea and theater overseer in Tokyo, and for not repeating MacArthur’s folly of heading up to Manchuria, or at least advancing to the 39th Parallel. As a general rule in the Korean War, when Americans faltered, critics immediately claimed they had been too foolhardy; and when they successfully advanced, the same opportunistic critics railed that they had not properly capitalized on their success.
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If Ridgway did not always receive ample credit from superior officers,
the Pentagon quietly came to appreciate his amazing achievement. Before Ridgway’s arrival, there was desperate talk of invading China, inviting Taiwanese troops into Korea, and using atomic weapons. Yet once the Americans retook Seoul, all such desperate planning quietly ceased. Secretary of the Army Frank Pace visited Korea and summed up Ridgway’s brief four-month command of the Eighth Army before he assumed MacArthur’s old role as supreme commander in Tokyo: “Matt, you have worked not only a military miracle, but a spiritual one with this army.”
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Even more controversially, a confident and victorious Ridgway persuaded American leadership not to press for the entire reunification of Korea, one of the most fateful decisions in American military history. When North Korean strongman Kim Jong-il in the new millennium boasted about sending a nuclear rocket toward Hawaii and promising a Seoul “in flames”—nearly sixty years after the Korean War armistice—that determination to stop at the 38th Parallel was still rightly questioned. A present-day unified—and non-nuclear—Korea would have extended to millions more a quality life, enriched the world with even more goods, and vastly reduced the chance of nuclear war in the Pacific. Yet in fairness to Ridgway’s decision to stop at the 38th Parallel in spring 1951, a few considerations need to be emphasized.

What made him a great savior general, in the manner of Belisarius or Sherman, was his recognition that the risks he ran—rushing to turn the American army from defense to offense in a matter of days—would not be fatal to his cause should the unforeseen occur. In contrast, going far into North Korea not only might end in failure, but in theory result in such a failure as to endanger the entire American effort to save a viable South Korea.

The Joint Chiefs instructed both Ridgway and Van Fleet in May 1951 to hold roughly at the 38th Parallel—in response to diplomatic decisions about the larger strategic picture in the Far East and in reaction to the loss of public support for another offensive stage of the war. Had they thought and ordered otherwise, Ridgway would have dutifully led the offensive northward. In other words, the decision was not Ridgway’s alone—even though his personal view that it was unwise to reinvade the north had in turn influenced the Truman administration not to risk another race to the Yalu.

Ridgway was not in command in summer 1953, when the final armistice was signed. Critics of his decision two years earlier to stop at the 38th Parallel had plenty of opportunity to restart the war and drive the
Communists back beyond the Yalu—had they believed Ridgway was wrong that there were not sufficient American forces, United Nations support, approval of the American people, and surety that China and Russia would not send massive reinforcements to prevent the loss of the North. As Ridgway himself put it,

At the end of the campaign, our battle line would have been stretched from 110 miles to 420 miles, and the major responsibility for holding it would have been ours, for it would have been beyond the capability of the ROK [the Republic of (South) Korea] army. The questions then would have been: Will the American people support an army of the size required to hold this line? Will they underwrite the bloody cost of a Manchurian campaign? Will they commit themselves to an endless war in the bottomless pit of the Asian mainland? I thought then and I think now that the answer to these questions was “No.”
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The enemy tested Ridgway immediately. The Chinese resumed attacking just as he arrived at the front. Between December 31 and January 5, the Communists began a third phase of their offensive, following both the October crossing of the Yalu (October 27–31, 1950) and the second-stage massive concentration against the Eighth Army (beginning on December 9, 1950). Seoul fell again on January 3–4, at the end of Ridgway’s first week on the job. But unlike the retreat from the Yalu, Ridgway withdrew slowly under heavy air and artillery support, hoping the advancing Chinese would butt up against nearby prepared lines and be easily targeted by air strikes. They were. By January 15, their offensive sputtered and wore itself out—just ten days after the American loss of Seoul. More than eight thousand enemy troops were lost to American bombing alone.

As the Chinese and North Koreans tired, Ridgway’s new army readied for his first counteroffensive. This time troops were assured that their officers were acquainted with Chinese tactics. They had firm supply lines, and, if successful, they would not rush pell-mell again across the 38th Parallel to ensure approving headlines back home. The subsequent American turnabout was nearly unbelievable. On December 26, 1950, Ridgway had officially taken command of the retreating Eighth Army. On January 15, during “Operation Wolfhound,” United Nations forces
had ceased their retreat and sent reconnaissance patrols to reestablish contact with the enemy. Ten days later the Eighth Army and Korean counterparts turned around and headed north back to the Han River. In three weeks, Korea was an entirely different war. Suddenly the cruel winter cold was not America’s enemy, but its ally.

On February 5, 1951, “Operation Roundup” saw the Tenth Corps advancing on the eastern flank. The fourth Chinese offensive, far from pushing the United Nations contingents back to Pusan, stalled on February 17. In response, a counteradvance, dubbed by Ridgway “Operation Killer,” helped to set the stage for the collapse of North Korean and Chinese forces south of the Han River. It was followed by yet a third American-led offensive, “Operation Ripper,” in which the Eighth Army retook Seoul on March 14 for the second and final time, while the Ninth and Tenth Corps, under difficult conditions, crossed the Han to the east.

Ridgway had under his direct command some 150,000 American and South Korean front-line combat troops. His aggregate allied theater forces on the ground almost matched the combined Chinese and North Korean armies. As word got out of Ripper’s success, Ridgway was deluged with congratulations from Generals Eisenhower and Bradley, Dean Rusk, and George Marshall—who all at various times had approved and disapproved of crossing the 38th Parallel, as the situation changed.

By April 5 there was yet another advance, “Operation Rugged,” in which the American-led coalition recrossed parts of the 38th Parallel and occupied a new front dubbed “Line Kansas.” A Chinese “Fifth Phase” offensive only temporarily pushed the Americans southward, who regrouped and fought their way back to their previous positions. In Ridgway’s view, only such a steady series of offensives could get the Eighth Army back to, or slightly beyond, the 38th Parallel before the peacetime public back home revolted entirely at the staggering human and material cost of the war—and at some point would call an end to such a back-and-forth war of advance, retreat, and advance.

Truman finally relieved General MacArthur on April 11 and promoted Ridgway in his place—a move the president had long wished to make, but now found politically and militarily feasible given that the United Nations forces were once again at the 38th Parallel. General Ridgway had saved Korea. He had not criticized Truman’s limitations on theater operations. And he had established a cadre of officers who were convinced that they could preserve the Rhee government without widening the war to China. MacArthur may have been an icon in America,
but he was increasingly felt to be irrelevant on the ground in Korea—again, due to Ridgway’s restoration of the American cause.

Truman also astutely wagered that after public anger over MacArthur’s firing quieted down, an irate American people might soon come to the same conclusion. With the failure of the fifth Chinese offensive, and the appointment of General James Van Fleet to take over Ridgway’s field command of the Eighth Army, Ridgway’s promotion to theater commander ensured there would be no more public strategic arguments between military leaders and the Truman administration. In short, Ridgway’s direct command of the battlefield ended after less than four months—with a stabilized front and United Nations forces in control of nearly all of South Korea. The war was back where it started six months earlier, something the Communists had never anticipated.

There would be off-and-on fighting around the 38th Parallel for the next two years, as both sides sought military advantage to influence the chronically stalled armistice talks that had begun in June 1951. In April 1952, after more than sixteen months in Korea and Japan, Matthew Ridgway was promoted to Supreme NATO Commander in Europe and left the Korean theater entirely, a year before the final armistice agreement. Eighth Army commander General Van Fleet would also be transferred before the armistice; he left Korea nine months after Ridgway, in February 1953. The Korean War for all practical purposes ended with the signing of the armistice treaty on July 27, 1953, with Generals Mark Clark and Maxwell Taylor in command of a mostly quiet front roughly along the 38th Parallel.

What had Matthew Ridgway actually done in roughly one hundred days on the ground, between late December and early April 1951, to ensure this remarkable turnaround that had saved South Korea?

Most important, he sparked a radical change in morale. Ridgway was at first appalled when he arrived at the front: “The men I met along the road, those I stopped to talk to and to solicit gripes from—they too all conveyed to me a conviction that this was a bewildered army, not sure of itself or its leaders, not sure what they were doing there, wondering when they would hear the whistle of that homebound transport.”
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How did he turn the defeated in spirit to confident attackers? Ridgway immediately embarked on two sweeping changes. He insisted that soldiers be resupplied far more rapidly with warm clothing, hot food, regular mail service, and up-to-date weapons. One-third of the American troops, he discovered upon arrival in Korea, lacked proper winter
protection. His concern with comfort was not intended to reward soldiers for retreating, but rather to demonstrate concern for their ordeal—and, more important, to ready them for the offensive challenge ahead. A restoration of fighting spirit, Ridgway argued, is something that “cannot be imposed from above, but that must be cultivated in every heart, from on up. It is rooted, I believe, in the individual’s sense of security, of belonging to a unit that will stand by him, as units on both sides and in the rear stand by all other units.”
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Ridgway forbade the use of the common slang term “bug out” to describe the collapse of the Eighth Army at the Yalu, even as he sought to ensure that it never happened again. Soldiers who met him on arrival found him “courteous.” He publicly managed to praise MacArthur, even as he was determined never to repeat his superior’s rash advance to the Chinese border—a decision made hundreds of miles away without knowledge of morale, terrain, or weather. Ridgway changed both strategy and attitudes without giving the impression that both General MacArthur and General Walker had committed grievous errors. Walker was dead and MacArthur in the midst of a political campaign of sorts; Ridgway felt that criticism of either would be a simple waste of time.
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Soon the defeated Eighth Army would be asked to fight in a more aggressive and more dangerous fashion, often in the hills away from supply depots below. “It was not their doing,” Ridgway lamented, “that had brought them far under strength to this unfortunate country with major shortages in weaponry and insufficient clothing and food, and had spread them across an area far too wide for them to maintain an effective front.” One of the hardest tasks for a general is to ask a defeated army to go back on the offensive when it is assured that it will suffer for the immediate future even more casualties before it eventually suffers less in victory. If the men could see that their commander was as cold as they were, walking among them, and dressed and eating like them, they would appreciate that their officers were one with them.

Ridgway was even more concerned about the defeatist mood among Walker’s officer corps: “Every command post I visited gave me the same sense of lost confidence and lack of spirit. The leaders, from sergeant on up, seemed unresponsive, reluctant to answer my questions. Even their gripes had to be dragged out of them and information was provided glumly, without the alertness of men whose spirits are high.”
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He approached the problem in the same fashion that all successful generals have done. First, he would lead subordinate officers by example. The
Eighth Army main headquarters was 150 miles behind the lines; Ridgway moved it to the front. He immediately began driving to and flying over the advanced positions, meeting division commanders within his first few days of command—in much the same way that Major General George S. Patton had restored morale and confidence to shattered and retreating American forces under the command of a far distant and incompetent Major General Fredendall at the Kasserine Pass in February 1943.