At this critical juncture, as in the days after Unsan, Marshall was surprisingly passive. It was probably his weakest moment in a long and distinguished career. Why he failed puzzled some of the others. Perhaps, thought some of his admirers, his long and unhappy personal relationship with MacArthur, one that went all the way back to World War I, was part of the problem. Perhaps, they thought, Marshall was a little more loath to set limits as he might have for another officer, for fear of becoming the caricature that MacArthur had created of him. But it had to be more than that. Was it the very nature of the job itself as Marshall saw it—that the job of secretary of defense was to support the commander, or the uniformed Chiefs, and not to impose his own will on men in uniform? In effect, did it mean that he was much freer to stand up to MacArthur when he was a senior figure at State than when he was at Defense? Or was he uneasy about usurping the powers of the Joint Chiefs? Had, in effect, his very strength, his modesty, his sense of a proper hierarchy, become a weakness? Certainly that was part of it. But finally it is important not to lose sight of the fact that the George Marshall of 1950 was not the George Marshall of World War II, that the crushing hours and burdens of both the war and the postwar era had taken their toll, that his health was slipping and he was simply not as strong a man physically or intellectually as he had been in that earlier incarnation. What made it worse was his standing among them: they instinctively deferred to him, took their signals from him, and now there were no signals.
MacArthur’s mood swings, some of the Washington people thought, were reflected in his estimates of the size of the Chinese forces facing him. Typically, he had gone almost overnight from grave underestimation to significant overestimation. The numbers he and Willoughby liked to use for Chinese troop strength before they struck were piddling, perhaps sixty thousand in country. Now MacArthur told Joe Collins, who had come to visit him, that he faced five hundred thousand men on the battlefield and his airpower was hamstrung in dealing with them because of the Manchurian sanctuaries.
The impotence of Washington angered one senior officer, Lieutenant General Matt Ridgway, more than all the others. He had been uneasy with MacArthur’s drive north from the moment it began. The dangers were too great, the ordinary infantrymen placed at too much risk. There seemed to be too little thought of the consequences. Now, with the front collapsing on them, the troops still at risk, and no clear strategy at hand, Ridgway was appalled by the failure of MacArthur to rise to the occasion. He was equally appalled by the lack of purpose and command in Washington, the willingness of the men one rank above him to be part of this strange vacuum of leadership.
Of all the senior military men in Washington, Ridgway became the most outspoken as MacArthur seemed to unravel. Ever more bad news kept coming in, and no one in Washington was standing up to take charge. The Joint Chiefs continued to make the most tentative suggestions to MacArthur, who treated their recommendations with complete contempt, while demanding more and more troops—he seemed to want four additional divisions, divisions they simply did not have. The good thing about the success of Inchon, they had all believed just a few weeks earlier, was that they were going to get a division back for Europe. The last thing they wanted, with American military strength stretched so thin elsewhere, was to pour more troops into the Korean theater. “We want to avoid getting sewed up in Korea” was the way George Marshall had once noted it at a meeting. Then he added the crucial kicker: “But how could we get out with honor?”
There were, Ridgway thought, too many meetings where nothing was being decided, where everyone was sitting around waiting for someone else to do something. The other generals, Ridgway wrote, were still “in an almost superstitious awe of this larger than life military figure who had so often been right when everyone else had been wrong.” On Sunday, December 3, the senior national security and military men, including the Joint Chiefs, Acheson, and Marshall, all sat through yet another long meeting where, in Ridgway’s mind, they were once again unable to issue an order, to correct, in his words, a situation going from “bad to disastrous.” Finally, Ridgway asked for permission to speak and then—he wondered later whether he had been too blunt—said that they had all spent too much damn time on debate and it was time to take some action. They owed it to the men in the field, he said, “and to the God to whom we must answer for those men’s lives to stop talking and to act.” When he finished, no one spoke, although Admiral Arthur Davis, who had replaced Al Gruenther as the director of the JCS staff, handed him a note saying, “proud to know you.” Then the meeting broke up. Ridgway started talking to Hoyt Vandenberg, the Air Force chief of staff, whom he had known since he was an instructor and Vandenberg a cadet back at West Point.
“Why don’t the Chiefs send orders to MacArthur and tell him what to do?” Ridgway asked his old friend.
Vandenberg shook his head. “What good would that do? He wouldn’t obey the orders. What can we do?”
At this point, Ridgway, in his own words, simply exploded. “You can relieve any commander who won’t obey orders, can’t you?” Ridgway would never forget the look on Vandenberg’s face: “His lips parted and he looked at me with an expression both puzzled and amazed. He walked away then without saying a word and I never afterward had occasion to discuss this with him.”
IN THE MEANTIME, MacArthur’s army was in full-scale retreat. The Big Bugout, some called it. The retreat covered some 120 miles in ten days, even though the Chinese, momentarily at least, had little offensive capacity to press any advantage. That rush south represented the total disintegration of a fighting force, as Max Hastings wrote, “resembling the collapse of the French in 1940 and the British at Singapore in 1942.” They were fleeing, one British officer wrote later, “before an unknown threat of Chinese soldiers—as it transpired, ill-armed and on their feet or horses.” As the surviving men of the Second Division pulled back, they passed huge bonfires visible from miles away, as vast stores of equipment, supplies that had still been coming into the country when the great offensive started, were destroyed, lest the gear be captured by the Chinese. Some of the men were still in their summer-weight uniforms, and hearing that winter uniforms, which had finally arrived in country, were being burned, they tried to get near the stores of equipment, only to be turned away at gunpoint by MPs.
1951 18. HIGH TIDE OF THE CHINESE ADVANCE, JANUARY 1951
In early December, the remnants of the Second Division gathered at Pyongyang. There, any hope for digging in and drawing a strong defensive line in an arc moving east from the North Korean capital—let alone retreating in an orderly fashion—disappeared. The Pyongyang railroad station was a mob scene. American troops, confused and despairing, hoping to depart by train as quickly as possible, waited in passenger cars first for two days with no locomotive ever becoming available. Meanwhile thousands of frightened, angry Korean refugees poured into the city, hoping to flee south. In their anger they began looting everything in sight. The search for a locomotive seemed interminable. Some of the headquarters people were trying to protect the division’s records, but it soon became clear that if they got out at all, the only thing they would get out with was the men themselves, and they started burning Division records and military currency. There was for the men waiting on the train a terrible sense of shame. Finally, early in the afternoon of December 4, a locomotive was produced, and four hours later the train left.
By December 7, they had found a bivouac area at Yongdongpo, near Seoul. They were in bad shape in all ways. “Going through it all was god-awful, the terror when the Chinese hit, the terrifying run through The Pass, but it was during the chaos after we broke contact and moved south, unable to put it all back together, that I was ashamed of my Army, not the men in my unit, or the men in my division, not after the hell they had been in, but of the men who were in charge of us,” said Sam Mace. “We’d fight again, I knew, and I knew we could fight well if we were led well, but that was a moment of complete disgrace and of shame.”
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br /> WALTON WALKER ALWAYS drove recklessly. He and his driver regularly pushed their jeep too hard on Korea’s terrible, narrow, icy roads. But it had seemed just a minor idiosyncrasy of a man under far too much pressure in a role that had never fit him, until the morning of December 23, 1950. Walker, his driver, his aide, and his bodyguard were all in the jeep speeding on the northbound lane of a road where the vehicles heading south were badly stacked up. Suddenly, a weapons carrier from a South Korean division swung into his lane, and there was no time to avoid an accident. The jeep flipped and all four men were thrown into a ditch. The other three lived. Walker died almost instantly. At the time of his death he was exhausted and beaten down, sure he was about to be relieved. That would have been a singularly inglorious way to end a career. He was completely dispirited: everything he had done to hold his troops together on the Pusan Perimeter would be forgotten, and instead, the disaster up along the Yalu would be his epitaph. He would get his fourth star and, ironically, high praise from Douglas MacArthur as well, but he would get both posthumously.
The man who would relieve him was slightly younger than the men of the Eisenhower-Bradley-Patton generation. Matt Ridgway had been on the rise at the end of World War II, ticketed to lead an airborne corps against Japan just as the war ended—a prized assignment. He had already been the recipient of a Time magazine cover story, a significant mark of fame in that era. He was the rare figure, so good at what he did that both Washington and Tokyo, apart on almost everything else, agreed that he was the right man—indeed the only man—to succeed Walker. When he got the news about Walker’s death, MacArthur immediately asked for Ridgway. His standing in Washington was, if anything, even higher. If Truman and the JCS had been able to choose their own man at the outbreak of the war, then Ridgway almost surely would have gotten the Tokyo command. He was the best the American Army had. He had become, even before he took command in Korea, the standard against which other officers were measured: Was he as good as Ridgway? Was he a younger Ridgway? He was fierce, purposeful, relentless—the perfect man to take command at a bad time in a bad place in a war that had suddenly gone from bad to worse, and to put back together an Army that was unraveling. He did not varnish things for his superiors; nor did he waste much energy being warm or chummy. Everything about his manner—to superiors, subordinates, and the men who fought under him—implied that they were employed in a serious, deadly business, and no time was ever to be wasted.
“If Ridgway had been there from the start as the Eighth Army commander,” said Jack Murphy, the young West Point graduate who won the DSC in his first few days at the Naktong and later became an amateur historian of the war, “there would have been no domination of the Eighth Army by Tokyo, no defeat at Kunuri, no panicking when the Chinese hit, and no surprise that they had entered in such large numbers. You would have had a command on location that knew the terrain and the difficulties that it created. You would not have had a distant command in another country, fighting what was a very different and much more comfortable war, but not really knowing what was going on. You would have had no tricks played with the intelligence about the Chinese. You would have had Grade A intelligence, and you would have had a lot better corps, division and regimental commanders, a lot sooner in the game.” The GIs admired him, even if they did not love him. They knew that he did not play games, that he had a genuine feel for them and their hardships, that he would be on their side if they had legitimate grievances, and that, most assuredly, had he been their commander from the start, they would not have headed north in summer-weight uniforms (if they had headed north at all). Now he was going to take over the Eighth Army. Ridgway got the news on the night of December 22. He did not tell his wife, Penny, until the next day; then he packed a few things and set off for Tokyo.
If ever an American officer was perfectly suited for a particular moment in American military history it was Matthew Bunker Ridgway when he was summoned to take over the shambles of a dysfunctional Eighth Army. He was the flintiest of men, rather humorless, fiercely aggressive, as unsparing of himself as he was of others. One could not think of him except as a soldier—and not a peacetime soldier either. Though he had none of the grandiosity of MacArthur, he had his own mystique and his own very personal and quite lofty sense of his role in history. He believed that he and the men he commanded were the direct descendants of those who had gone before them, dating back to Valley Forge, and that they owed a great deal to those who had preceded them in uniform. It was as if George Washington and the men who fought at Valley Forge were always looking over their shoulders. Ridgway sometimes talked in an almost mystical way of those who had fought in the Revolution or the Civil War, and of the need for his men to be worthy of the hardships they had suffered.
Though he was fiercely anti-Communist, he was not, like MacArthur, on an ideological crusade. The enemy was the enemy and should be analyzed on the basis of its actual strengths and weaknesses. If ideology made the Chinese or North Koreans better, more committed soldiers, then attention should be paid to that fact. When he first heard that North Korean troops had crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, he immediately wondered whether, in his words, it represented “the beginning of World War III…Armageddon, the last great battle between East and West.” He immediately told his aides to watch for any unusual Soviet troop movements throughout the world. At the same time, he pushed his superiors, Bradley and Collins, to ask for at least a partial mobilization. “If we take this action and war does not come, we have lost money. If we do not take it and war does come we risk disaster.”
Ridgway was in his own way a very serious hawk, but unlike MacArthur, he accepted that this was a limited war, that the civilians running it had pressures on them officers in the field might not grasp, and that the main battlefield might end up being thousands of miles away from Korea, most likely someplace in Central Europe, where the Soviets had placed so many armored divisions. In August 1950, knowing that pressure was even then building to relieve Walton Walker, Joe Collins had asked Ridgway what command he would prefer. Ridgway had immediately answered that, if this country were headed for World War III, he would prefer to fight in Europe. But in August, when it became clearer that Korea was an isolated war, Ridgway’s attitude changed. Only the fact that relieving Walker might have caused an even greater crisis of confidence among American forces had prevented him from getting the command earlier.
He was an imposing man, forceful and trim, never an extra pound on him, five-ten but, thanks to the sheer force of his personality, seemingly much bigger. He was a Spartan. He worried that America was in decline because of the country’s ever greater materialism; he warned that it was becoming a place where people never walked anymore and that the nation’s men were becoming softer every year. His views, ironically, were not all that different from those of the Chinese commanders who launched their successful assault on American troops. He believed a loss of fiber had contributed to the disappointing early performance of America’s young men in Korea. They had become too dependent on their machines and their technology. The first thing he intended to do when he took over the command was get them out of the warmth of their jeeps and trucks and make them patrol exactly as their predecessors had done, climbing the hills on foot. If they shared nothing else with their enemy, they would share the cold.
Ridgway bristled with personal purpose: he had an innate sense of how to lead, of what motivated fighting men—and what did not. There were at least three moments in his career when his country had reason to think of him as someone who, by dint of intelligence and character, set himself apart from his peers. The first was when he led the airborne assault on France on D-day in June 1944. The second was in 1954, after elite French forces had been trapped by the Vietminh at Dien Bien Phu and pressures grew on the Americans to come to their aid. At that time, as chief of staff of the Army, he wrote a memo so forceful in assessing the extremely high cost of an American entry into the war in French Indochina (and the potential lack of popularit
y among the Vietnamese of such a war) that President Dwight Eisenhower, on reading it, put aside any idea of intervention. And the third was when he took over the shattered Eighth Army, in late December 1950, and in two short months reinvigorated it, thereby blunting a powerful Chinese offensive that threatened to drive UN forces into the sea or push the Americans into using atomic weapons.
But there was an earlier, perhaps even more instructive moment that caught his character perfectly, thought the military historian Ken Hamburger. By June 1944, he was already the Great Ridgway and people listened to him. But in September 1943, he had managed to talk his superiors out of what would surely have been an ill-fated and tragic airborne assault on Rome. He had done that at a moment when he had comparatively little status in the upper echelons of the military hierarchy. It was in the middle of the Italian campaign, and the Italian government, officially still part of the Axis along with Germany and Japan, was about to make a separate peace with the Allies. Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the Italian commander, had suggested that an American airborne division make a parachute jump into Rome to link up with the Italian Army, which would then turn its guns on the Germans. Ridgway’s division was slated to make the jump, but to him, everything about the plan smelled wrong. He had no way to validate the words of Badoglio—would he do as promised, and even if he did, would it make any difference, given the formidable quality of the German troops in the Italian capital? The risk to his men, Ridgway thought, was unacceptable. So he had begun to fight his way through a rather casual command structure that was all too ready to take Badoglio’s word at face value.
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Page 66