The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (30 page)

Ridgway, just as Sherman had schooled himself about the topography of Georgia, memorized the battlefield and mastered the terrain: “Every road, every cart track, every hill, every stream, every ridge in that area where we were fighting or which we hope to control—they all became as familiar to me as the features of my own backyard.”
⁵⁵
Ridgway relieved several high officers—at one time or another the generals of at least five divisions—whom he deemed defeatist or “mediocre.” The Pentagon was not pleased that Ridgway was promoting colonels and sending back sacked generals for whom there were no pre-retirement billets in Washington. But Ridgway pushed to reenergize the existing leadership with offensive zeal. “Don’t want to see your defense plans,” he told commanders in the field, “want to see your attack plans.” He demanded that field officers, like his central command, get close to the fighting. Colonels and generals were to visit other battlefield posts to integrate tactics and support.
⁵⁶

He insisted that the Joint Chiefs and the political leadership back in Washington cease leaking to the press contingency plans for a retreat to Pusan or off the peninsula. Instead, he said, they should let it be known that the Americans would retake Seoul. Ridgway made his nonnegotiable objectives clear almost immediately to the shaky South Korean government.
⁵⁷

“Corrective measures,” Ridgway argued, “could not be confined to Korea alone, however, for some of our major weaknesses had their roots in failures at home.”
⁵⁸
In response, by late January 1951, Ridgway had drafted a comprehensive manifesto, “Why Are We Here? What Are We Fighting For?” He had its talking points distributed to all the soldiers under his command. Because during the fiasco of December, soldiers loudly had complained that they had no business in a barren wasteland fighting Chinese while their South Korean allies often ran from the fight, Ridgway felt the entire American presence in Korea needed a uniform and easily referenced rationale. Why, after all, would a mechanic
from New Jersey or an Iowa farmer risk dying in the bloom of youth in Korea to keep his far distant nuclear-armed homeland safe? Ridgway argued that what would win Korea was not just superior discipline and matériel, but confidence in American civilization and national purpose. If soldiers did not believe, they would not win.
⁵⁹

In his characteristically upbeat message to the troops, Ridgway systematically covered all the reasons for American intervention in his newly released manifesto: legal—the United Nations had authorized, and the U.S. Congress had funded, the defense of South Korea; moral—the Americans were fighting to preserve the freedom of the Korean people, to whom they had given their word and bond; political—his command was struggling to ensure Western freedoms to anyone who was willing to fight alongside for them, in what had become a global struggle to oppose a Communist creed that sought to end the freedom of the individual; and practical—the fight inside Korea was simply part of a larger war in which America was threatened by aggressive Communist totalitarianism. How well the United States fought abroad would determine to what degree it was safe at home. Or as Ridgway put it, “The real issues are whether the power of Western civilization, as God has permitted it to flower in our own beloved lands, shall defy and defeat Communism; whether the rule of men who shoot their prisoners, enslave their citizens, and deride the dignity of man, shall displace the rule of those to whom the individual and his individual rights are sacred.”

Modern critics often caricature Ridgway’s lofty rhetoric about Western civilization versus savagery—inasmuch as he tried to persuade his troops that the stakes were no less than the survival of Western culture, that Korea was the stage for a Manichean struggle between godless world Communism and liberal Christian democracy. Even his contemporary civilian superiors expressed unease with Ridgway’s brutal labels for his offensives—names like Operation “Ripper” and “Killer”—that might unduly frighten the American public about the nature of a supposed “police action.”

But Ridgway knew that this kind of war was new to American soldiers, not seen since the turn-of-the-century insurrection in the Philippines. It was simple to grasp the urgency of an existential global struggle like World War II. Asking soldiers to go into battle on behalf of “containment” was less easy to explain. Better, Ridgway felt, to emphasize how cruelly the Communists fought, and how such savagery was integral to their plans for global domination. That larger, more existential
struggle might motivate an American soldier in a way that the doctrine of American geopolitical containment surely would not.

As part of this effort, early on Ridgway pushed to integrate the troops under his command—an issue that had been under consideration for nearly a decade and enjoyed the support of the Truman administration but had stalled through bureaucratic infighting, congressional opposition, and lethargy within the Army. Yet as Ridgway began to repel the Chinese assault, his moral authority grew, and by April 1951 he began integrating African Americans in the Korean theater into previously segregated units under his command. By July, most combat forces were integrated, and by the end of the war, all U.S. armed forces were for the most part desegregated.
⁶⁰

Ridgway’s optimism soon proved infectious. Even by late January, Army Chief of Staff General J. Lawton Collins was reporting back from a visit to Korea that morale had almost immediately improved. Soon MacArthur himself was mixing in occasional upbeat appraisals in his otherwise gloomy reports. True, the improved American spirit in itself did not overnight stop the momentum of thousands of Chinese as they stormed into Seoul. But as stated, Ridgway noted that advantages were already accruing to the allies—increased troops, better equipment, new and superior weapons, more supplies, shorter lines of supply, more training for the South Koreans—that would soon tip the scales back in favor of the Americans.
⁶¹

Ridgway changed tactics as well. He spread out his officers to hills and rough terrain. Advance would not be confined to roads. Soldiers would fight the Chinese at night. Unit commanders at the front would themselves have control over tactical air and artillery support. Control of terrain was to be considered fluid. Hurting the enemy rather than merely protecting a fixed line was the key. “There was nothing but our own love of comfort that bound us to the road. We too could get off into the hills, I reminded them, to find the enemy and fix him a position. I repeated to the commanders as forcefully as I could, the ancient Army slogan: Find them! Fix them! Fight Them! Finish Them!”
⁶²

Ridgway, as promised to his officers in December, now in the new year would dress like, live among, eat with, and become one with the nearly frozen troops on the ground. “Ridgway’s concept of leadership,” David Halberstam correctly concludes, “was better suited for a more egalitarian era. He intended not to impose his will on his men, but to allow the men under him to find something within themselves that would
make them more confident, more purposeful fighting men. It was their confidence in themselves that would make them fight well, he believed, not so much their belief in him.”
⁶³

Finally, Ridgway won over the press in a variety of ways, after his initial efforts to block real-time reporting. When the lines held, he gave credit to subordinates. When MacArthur flew in to take credit for much of what Ridgway had accomplished, the latter tactfully sent private memos back to MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo suggesting that the general’s boasts of quick restoration of the theater and impending offensives might violate confidentiality and tip off the enemy—sound military advice that the publicity-hungry but militarily astute MacArthur could accept without loss of face. Matthew Ridgway understood the power of imagery, especially the notion of confidence that an optimistic commander exudes. In the spirit of Patton’s pearl-handled pistols, Ridgway charged about with a grenade on one shoulder strap, a medical kit on the other—a veritable “Prince Hal in suspenders and airborne jump trousers.” When some press accounts described the medical kit as a second matching grenade, his men dubbed Ridgway “Old Iron Tits.”

So be it, Ridgway thought, if it sent the public the message that they had a fighter on the ground to stop the Communists. Appearances mattered—if MacArthur looked like a stodgy, grandfatherly grandee poring over a map, a robust Ridgway would instead appear as if he was either off to or emerging from the front lines, in need of explosive power to stop the enemy and ready to treat his own wounds in the ordeal. He roamed the battlefield with his men in the manner of a scruffy Grant or Sherman, but chose also to demand the most minute details from his officers in the field, in emulation of George S. Patton or the Duke of Wellington, a man of order who might impose his mastery of order upon an amorphous and disorderly army. If he was heroic in his insistence of keeping at the front and risking his person, Ridgway was also “antiheroic” in his leadership style by trying to convey to his men that their general was dressed like them and would share the same dangers, one way or other.
⁶⁴

Ridgway’s picture would appear on the covers of
Life
and
Newsweek
over the next two years, and he was plastered on the front page of all the major papers. The Ridgway square jaw, erect posture, and enigmatic expression—part grimace, part smile—conveyed exactly the right image to disheartened troops and a weary home front: a can-do American unworried about either the freezing cold or the hundreds of thousands of Chinese on the peninsula, neither depressed that the war was to be lost nor falsely jubilant that it was already won. In contrast, MacArthur played constantly to the cameras, but he instead appeared aged, tired, and frail—and in fact was all three. Since no one seemed to accept responsibility for the orphaned war, Ridgway filled the void and often thereby earned the unfair charge of narcissism—in the fashion leveled at both “Uncle Billy” Sherman and “King” David Petraeus.
⁶⁵

General Matthew Ridgway arrived in Korea at age fifty-five in mid-winter. Here, in Grant-like fashion, the determined Ridgway appears with winter cap and in the dress of a common soldier, with his trademark grenade strapped to his right shoulder. Photo by Carl Mydans/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.

When he assumed command of the Eighth Army in December 1950, few American officers were better qualified for the multifaceted challenges in Korea than Matthew Ridgway. He was fifty-five years old and had been in the Army since 1917, almost thirty-three years—a graduate of
West Point, and son of a West Point graduate. At forty-nine, Ridgway had parachuted into Normandy on D-Day as commanding general of the 82nd Airborne Division after a distinguished record in Italy. Later he commanded a corps during the disastrous failed Allied attempt to vault over the Rhine (Operation Market Garden) in September 1944. Ridgway fought against the German Ardennes Offensive, known more popularly as the Battle of the Bulge, and he had helped restore American lines after a near collapse—a similar winter temporary disintegration analogous to the later Korean bug-out, and also followed by overreach and vulnerability to a counterattacking enemy. Ridgway finished the European theater as an airborne corps commander and was promoted to lieutenant general. In both Europe and Korea, Ridgway found himself on the front lines and on isolated occasions in actual combat. Based on his past performance, the trademark live grenade attached to his chest was not for mere show.
⁶⁶

His philosophy of war was Thucydidean: Because human nature remained constant and transcended changes in culture and technology, the principles of war remained eternal. They were unchanging—whether fighting against Germans or Communist Chinese, whether in the age of gunpowder or in the new nuclear age. Personal leadership, the closer to the front the better, was as important in Korea as in the past—both to anticipate crises and in demonstrable fashion to share hardships with the rank and file.
⁶⁷

Yet Matthew Ridgway could not have been an easy person to know. If he seemed a soldier right out of central casting—formal, ramrod-straight, and in excellent physical condition—he was also a stern, often self-righteous moralist, judgmental and outspoken in his tastes, a man respected and admired rather than liked or enjoyed. He found MacArthur a publicity-mad egotist. Yet in his own, more understated way, Ridgway successfully courted the press and framed the American recovery around his own indomitable will. Before Korea, Ridgway had argued successfully to defer a poorly thought-out and potentially suicidal airborne assault on Rome in September 1943 in the last hours before the planes were due to take off. He had landed on D-Day and helped to save the scattered and error-plagued airdrop. It was Ridgway who would later persuade President Eisenhower not to send ground troops to save the French at Dien Bien Phu.