The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq
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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.
Who Was Matthew Ridgway?
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.
At times, Ridgway’s loud Puritanism seemed at odds with his own private life. He married three times. He idolized his young third wife, yet left for Korea without even telling her exactly when he had departed. While he confronted superiors with blunt talk, Ridgway had a sense of detachment about himself that ensured his principles would outweigh career considerations. That very self-control may have led, in the fall of 1945, while he was on postwar occupation duty, to a serious heart attack. After blacking out and waking up in a hospital, Ridgway rejected his doctor’s advice that he be relieved of duty and return immediately to the United States for extensive tests. Instead, after a brief recuperation, he promptly went back to work—and went on to live for another forty-eight years.68
General Douglas MacArthur is photographed here in Manila in 1945, five years before the outbreak of the Korean War. MacArthur was one of the most photographed figures of the postwar era and enjoyed sizable support for a 1948 presidential run—making Ridgway’s task to save MacArthur’s war a diplomatic and military minefield. Photo courtesy of the National Archives and Records Administration.
Despite the general consensus that Ridgway was the “perfect” soldier, at one point almost every senior officer who mattered in Korea was suspicious, jealous, or hostile to him. MacArthur claimed credit for his success and gave private interviews deprecating Ridgway’s abilities while assuring Ridgway personally and publicly that he had MacArthur’s full support—a duplicity Ridgway himself only years later came to fathom. Indeed, MacArthur freely lampooned Ridgway to the media. He called his strategy of incrementally regaining ground from the Communists as “an accordion war,” implicitly to be contrasted with MacArthur’s swashbuckling Inchon gamble and march to the Yalu to end the conflict for good.69
Dwight D. Eisenhower would later write a book wrongly claiming that General Van Fleet, not Ridgway himself, had retaken Seoul—a month before Van Fleet had even arrived in Korea. Van Fleet would suggest that he was later stopped by
Ridgway from realizing MacArthur’s dream of reuniting Korea. After Ridgway’s later testimony before a Senate hearing that Eisenhower’s planned defense cutbacks endangered national security, and because of near-constant fighting with the administration over its proposed massive budget cuts to the Army, Eisenhower did not reappoint Ridgway for a second term as Army chief of staff. Ridgway retired at sixty in 1955, in some bitterness at having been on the bad side of the most popular and influential American of the age. His friend and former subordinate General Maxwell Taylor would replace him and find success in implementing many of Ridgway’s ideas about more flexible military responses in the nuclear age, given his superior political instincts and more engaging personality. We forget today that the subsequent half-century tradition of fighting “limited wars” in the nuclear age was first established by Matthew Ridgway, though it is rarely credited to him. At best, for decades Ridgway’s achievement was largely forgotten. At worst, generals and politicians in hindsight blamed him for not reuniting all of Korea, although most at one time or another had early despaired of saving even the south.70
Ridgway and Eisenhower would subsequently clash again over possible intervention in Vietnam, and over a score of other issues: Ridgway’s criticism of Eisenhower’s neoimperialistic notions about Southeast Asia; Eisenhower’s failure to defend military officers from the demagogic tactics of Senator Joe McCarthy; and Ridgway’s adamant argument that nuclear weapons did not preclude the possibility of conventional war or the need for large conventional ground forces. Since Ridgway may not have been the first choice of Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Joe Collins to replace General Walker, it was not always clear whether Ridgway could rely on Collins’s unwavering support. Even when he was promoted to theater commander to assume MacArthur’s billet, Ridgway was not consulted about his own replacement to lead the Eighth Army, General Van Fleet. The latter, in fact, was neither Ridgway’s favorite nor even considered particularly friendly, but he nonetheless was a talented commander who would work well with his superior.71
The blunt-talking Ridgway earned controversy for the rest of his long postwar career. As NATO commander he offended Europeans by surrounding himself almost exclusively with American officers, apparently in the belief that there was no advantage in disguising the reality that the United States contributed an inordinate amount of manpower and treasure to the alliance. Few subsequent supreme commanders have followed his chauvinistic example. Always the iconoclast, he would be pilloried by the right as too liberal in his reluctance to commit U.S. ground troops abroad, while the left saw him as hopelessly reactionary; he was caricatured both as an ossified defender of military tradition and as a rebel within the brotherhood of officers. Conservatives came to believe that he had stopped unnecessarily at the 38th Parallel; liberals felt he was too promiscuous in his use of lethal force, causing collateral damage among Korean civilians.
During the 1960s, Ridgway set out his past differences with military icons like Eisenhower, MacArthur, and Van Fleet, and his own contemporary unease with the Vietnam War, in two memoirs, in part drawn from a series of magazine articles such as Soldier: The Memoirs of Matthew B. Ridgway and The Korean War: How We Met the Challenge; How All-Out Asian War Was Averted; Why MacArthur Was Dismissed; Why Today’s War Objectives Must Be Limited. In the latter, the lengthy subtitles announced Ridgway’s didactic intentions to shed light on the complex character of Douglas MacArthur, who is sometimes savagely derided for theatrics and ego but nevertheless praised for his astute strategic and geopolitical sense. During the Vietnam War, Ridgway offended hawks by loudly explaining why an optional land war in Vietnam was unfeasible and unnecessary. He probably disturbed doves even more by insisting that we must win any war that we undertake, even if it was begun foolishly and was poorly conducted. The cultural upheaval of the 1960s and 1970s repelled him, especially the attacks on the United States government by antiwar protesters at a time of national conflict.
Without the support of Matthew Ridgway, it is doubtful that combat brigades in Korea would have been so successfully racially integrated. Yet the reformer who had pushed for racial integration within the ranks during the Korean War—calling segregation both “anti-American and un-Christian”—later loudly opposed the full integration of women into the armed services. Even more adamantly, he fought the volunteer army, insisting that military service was critical to inculcate democratic values among the nation’s youth—and, more controversially, to prevent decadence among idle and comfortable teenagers.72 Ridgway was not shy in promulgating traditional views on military service that were becoming largely repugnant to a modern audience—namely, that military preparedness and sacrifice were critical to a society not merely for its protection and survival, but also to ward off the dangers of affluence and leisure, which always tend to enervate a prosperous democratic people in times of peace.
Yet in the dark days of the early 1950s—when the Soviet Union had exploded nuclear bombs (an atomic bomb in 1949, a hydrogen bomb in 1953), when China and much of Korea, like Eastern Europe, had gone Communist, when there were both Communist witch hunts and plenty of Communist sympathizers inside the government—Matthew Ridgway provided a needed antidote to Douglas MacArthur’s insubordination and attempted usurpation of civilian control over the military. One of Ridgway’s first acts as MacArthur’s replacement in April 1951 was to issue a directive to all senior American ground, naval, and air commanders in the theater to remember their commitment to civilian oversight—and not to exceed limitations placed on their commands by those in Washington worried about the outbreak of World War III.73
Later, Ridgway saw his reinforcing of respect for civilian oversight as one of his greatest achievements: “Once a policy is set, however, it is the military man, in keeping with the oath he takes and with the very phrasing of his commission, who should either execute that policy or resign from the service. General MacArthur would have introduced a wholly different doctrine from this.” Without the genius of Matthew Ridgway and his restoration of Korea, it is hard to imagine that Truman either would have been confident enough to have relieved MacArthur, or, having once dismissed him, would have eventually won back some grudging public support for his controversial decision. In that sense, Ridgway saved the Truman presidency. That nuclear weapons were not used in Korea was largely due to the skill and sobriety of Matthew Ridgway.74
Ridgway’s personal life after Korea was as checkered as his professional one. As a public defender of traditional American values, Ridgway was not merely married three times and divorced twice, but was wedded finally to a spouse twenty-three years his junior. He and his wife, Penny, lost their only son, Matthew, to a freak accident in Canada. After that tragedy, Ridgway never quite recovered his optimism. By the late 1960s he usually waded into popular controversy only to offer blunt, often insightful, but in the end polarizing, if not cranky, assessments. His two daughters from a second marriage remained mostly estranged from him until his death.
Matthew Ridgway finally received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1986, at the age of ninety-one—thirty-five years after his remarkable tenure as commander of the Eighth Army in Korea. In his citation, President Ronald Reagan remarked of Ridgway, “Heroes come when they’re needed; great men step forward when courage seems in short supply.” Ridgway’s contemporaries George Marshall and Omar Bradley earlier had praised him as one of the finest American soldiers America produced.
Yet even then controversy followed the old iconoclast. The year before, Ridgway had been invited by then president Ronald Reagan to accompany him on a controversial visit to the German military cemetery at Bitburg, where, it was belatedly discovered, some Waffen SS troops were buried. Rather than cancel the goodwill ceremony between the American and German governments, the Reagan administration—amid growing popular anger in the United States—had desperately searched for a senior American officer who might go to Bitburg and salvage the ill-advised visit. Ridgway, as one of the highest-ranking surviving American Second World
War generals, met former adversary Luftwaffe General Johannes Steinhoff. Both placed wreaths on the graves of the dead in a public ceremony of reconciliation, a token that seemed to have offered moral cover for the embarrassment of the Reagan administration’s poorly researched choice of cemeteries. In turn, Ridgway’s gesture was seen by a cynical press that had forgotten Korea as justification for the long-overdue award from a grateful Reagan.75
Five years later, after the awarding of the Medal of Freedom in 1986, Ridgway received the Congressional Gold Medal, just two years before his death. But four decades after Korea, most Americans had forgotten the details of the horrific winter of 1950–51, Ridgway’s tenure in Tokyo, and his long battles to avoid both a strategy of a monolithic nuclear response and a large ground war in Asia. They did not remember the Korea of 1951, whose salvation had long been overshadowed by the tragedy of Vietnam.
Dwight Eisenhower and Omar Bradley are often considered America’s preeminent twentieth-century American military heroes, George S. Patton as the embodiment of American audacity. Douglas MacArthur is enshrined for his return to the Philippines. Matthew Ridgway might have outshone them all—had Korea not been a “police action” more comfortably forgotten, and had he not, in his subsequent long life, been so blunt and unpredictable in his assessments.
At a time of increasing wealth and leisure at home, when in the early 1950s Americans were already beginning to express doubts about both the morality and competency of their culture, Matthew Ridgway was a throwback to an earlier age of little self-doubt. To Ridgway, the American system was superior to all others, its Constitution was near perfect; and its people were freer and more prosperous precisely because of an exceptional national character that encouraged and rewarded rugged individualism. True, he fought furiously in Korea to save the geopolitical stature of the United States. But in both his speeches and his communiqués, Ridgway made clear that the war was a larger referendum on his own civilization—one that he was not about to lose, either for himself or for the people who had sent him so far from home.76