The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  Even as D-day for this mission approached, with all his superiors signed on, surprisingly few questions had been asked about Badoglio’s ability to pull off his sudden switch. When Ridgway first challenged his superiors, they were initially quite indifferent to his concerns. At the last minute, Ridgway sent one of his deputies, Maxwell Taylor, on a daring mission behind German lines to meet with the Italians and recon the situation. Better, he believed, Taylor’s eyes and ears than Badoglio’s promises. Taylor reported back that all of Ridgway’s doubts were valid: the Italians were in no position to fight as promised, and his airborne division might well be completely destroyed. Then, with his men already in their planes and the engines warming up, the mission was called off. That night Ridgway had shared a bottle of whiskey with a close friend, and then, drained by the closeness of disaster, he began to cry. To do what he had done at that moment, to place his entire career on the line, was, Hamburger thought, the mark of an uncommon soldier, someone whose courage away from the battlefield was the same as that on it.

  There was a constancy to his code of honor. He had been assigned to command the Eighteenth Airborne Corps in the final battle for Japan, but then the war had ended quickly. MacArthur had invited him to attend the surrender on the battleship Missouri, a great honor, but he refused to accept—only the men who fought in the Pacific, he believed, should attend. Still, there was no false modesty to him—he knew he was good, and that was not by happenstance. Bill Sebald, the American ambassador to Japan, wrote a draft speech that Ridgway was to give on his arrival in Tokyo at the moment in 1951 when he finally replaced MacArthur as the commander of all American forces in the Far East and became as well the de facto governor-general of Japan. In it, Sebald had him saying “with due humility.” Ridgway edited the phrase out. “Bill, I’m humble only before my own God, not before the Japanese people or anyone else.” Subordinate officers were loath to fail to meet his expectations. He was a man who believed in the basics: infantrymen should get out and patrol; they should know their fields of fire; they should be smart and aggressive; and they should take the battle to the enemy. He was not a man who went around threatening to relieve subordinates. He would simply relieve them.

  He was not caught up in the vainglory of war. He never tried to sugarcoat what war was about. When he nicknamed his first major Korean offensive Operation Killer, he received a note from Joe Collins suggesting that such a name might be difficult for the Army’s public relations people to deal with. Ridgway was not moved by the objections of PR people on this or any other issue. The name, he had been told, was too bloodthirsty and lacked sex appeal. Later he wrote, “I did not understand why it was objectionable to acknowledge the fact that war was concerned with killing the enemy…. I am by nature opposed to any effort to ‘sell’ war to people as an only mildly unpleasant business that requires very little in the way of blood.”

  He was aware that he was in charge of the most precious kind of national resource—the lives of young men who were dear to their parents. “All lives on a battlefield are equal,” he once said, “and a dead rifleman is as great a loss in the eyes of God as a dead General. The dignity which attaches to the individual is the basis of Western Civilization, and this fact should be remembered by every Commander.” That did not mean he did not fight the enemy with full ferocity or take a certain pleasure from a battlefield littered with their dead, for he always knew the alternative, a battlefield littered with American dead. After the battle of Chipyongni, when the Chinese finally broke and the Americans killed thousands of them in flight with air and artillery strikes, one of the company commanders spoke of the battlefield as covered with “fricasseed Chinese.” Ridgway liked that phrase and, on occasion, would bring it up with other commanders.

  There was a vast unacknowledged difference in his and MacArthur’s concepts of leadership, produced not merely by greatly different temperaments but by different visions of leadership in very different eras. So much of MacArthur’s own energy went into building the commander up as a great man—as if, for the men in the ranks, fighting under so great a general would in itself make them great as well. Ridgway’s concept of leadership 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. His job was to teach them to find that quality in themselves. Like MacArthur, however, he knew the importance of myth and was skilled at creating his own. “Old Iron Tits” was his nickname, based on the belief that it was two grenades he had pinned to the harness in front of his chest (one was a grenade, the other a medical kit). But the message was clear—Matt Ridgway was always ready to fight.

  He had been intimately involved in Korea from the moment the war started; in effect, he was the Joint Chiefs’ man on the war. When the bazookas used by American troops had been unable to penetrate the skin of Russian T-34 tanks in the early days of the war, he was the one who personally shepherded the new 3.5 bazooka through its manufacturing and distribution process, with his own men making sure any delays in the system were quickly pinpointed and corrected. He created a kind of pre-FedEx super-supply system that soon negated a critically important North Korean advantage in armor and so helped stop their assault on Pusan. He was not part of any Army cliques, but he was a Marshall man—Ridgway dedicated his book on Korea to Marshall as the greatest American soldier since Washington.

  Ridgway arrived in Korea on December 26, 1950. The first thing he remembered was the cold—“It stuck to the bone,” he noted. He had already flown to Tokyo and met with MacArthur, who told him, “The Eighth Army is yours, Matt. Do what you think best.” That statement in itself signaled the end of one phase of the Korean War—in the past, everything had been run out of Tokyo. Now the command was his. The question was: could he keep his troops from being driven off the peninsula? Because Korea was such a grinding war, with such an unsatisfactory outcome, not many military men emerged from it as heroes. Grim wars that end in stalemates may produce men who are heroes to other soldiers, but not to the public at large. To George Allen, one of the CIA’s ablest men, and a man who had briefed Ridgway regularly, he was nothing less than “the most underrated senior U.S. military officer of his immediate postwar generation, superior in most respects to his contemporaries—Mark Clark, Joe Collins, Omar Bradley, Maxwell Taylor, Arthur Radford, Arleigh Burke, the lot.” Thus Ridgway was revered in years to come not so much by ordinary Americans, who had largely turned away from the war, but by the men who fought there and knew what he had done. In Korea he was the soldier’s soldier. General Omar Bradley, a plainspoken Midwesterner not readily given to superlatives, wrote years later of his performance in Korea, “It is not often in wartime that a single battlefield commander can make a decisive difference. But in Korea, Ridgway would prove to be the exception. His brilliant, driving, uncompromising leadership would turn the battle like no other general’s in our military history.”

  On arrival, Ridgway almost immediately started to tour forward positions. He was appalled by what he found: defeatist attitudes on the part of his commanders, low morale, and almost no military intelligence of any significance. He visited one corps commander who did not even know the name of a nearby river. “My God almighty!” he later said of that particular piece of ignorance. How could there be decent intelligence when all the American units had broken off contact with the enemy and were fleeing south? “What I told the field commanders in essence,” he later wrote, “was that their infantry ancestors would roll over in their graves if they could see how road-bound this army was, how often it forgot to seize the high ground along its route, how it failed to seek and maintain contact in its front, how little it knew of the terrain, and how [it] seldom took advantage of it.” He was sickened by finding an army broken in spirit, “not in retreat, but in flight,” as Harold (John
ny) Johnson, who had been at Unsan, said. Ridgway thought the corps commanders shockingly weak, the division and regimental commanders too old and more often than not out of touch as well as ill-prepared for this war. Before he took the command, he had already spoken to Joe Collins about the need to be tough with the senior people in the field. “You must be ruthless with your general officers. Be ruthless with them because everything depends on their leadership.”

  Nothing enraged him more than the maps at the various headquarters he visited. Each American unit, it seemed, was surrounded by little red flags, each flag indicating a Chinese division. But many of his units simply had no idea how many Chinese were near them, because they were not sending out patrols. Not to know the location and strength of the enemy was in his eyes as great a sin as a commander could commit. He changed that quickly. He was everywhere in those days. He visited each headquarters, not just Division and Regimental, but sometimes Battalion and Company, arriving in his little plane flown by Mike Lynch, landing where he had no business showing up and often where no airstrip existed. What he wanted was for the most forward units to go out and find the enemy. They were to patrol, patrol, patrol: “Nothing but your love of comfort binds you to the roads,” he kept repeating. “Find the enemy and fix him in position. Find them! Fix them! Fight them! Finish them!”

  Very quickly he promulgated a new Ridgway rule of mapping. He would look at the local map with a red flag or two on it and ask when the last time was that the unit had had contact with the Chinese. At first the usual answer was four or five days—for most American units were in fact staying as far away from the Chinese as possible. With a gesture of complete contempt, Ridgway would then reach out and take the flags off the map. The new rule was that a red flag could stay on a map only if the unit had made contact in the previous forty-eight hours. The unstated corollary of this rule was equally simple: if the commander of the Eighth Army, a known and feared hard-ass, returned and found the situation unchanged, it would quite likely not just be the little red flags that would disappear, but the unit commander as well.

  Because he was Ridgway, he had the kind of leverage with Tokyo that Walton Walker could only have dreamed of. If he wanted an officer for a command who was still serving back in the States or even in Tokyo, that major or lieutenant colonel or brigadier was on his way the next day. Unlike the men back in Washington, he did not fear a showdown with MacArthur if need be. The generals in Washington had been intimidated in the past by MacArthur, but now Ridgway was the man in Korea, and MacArthur, in Tokyo, was effectively the man on the sidelines. Ridgway might as a courtesy keep MacArthur clued in, but there was no question as to who was in command. For the men back in Washington, civilians and military, the change was a great relief. Ridgway might have his needs—a lot more artillery units—but he understood the problems Washington was dealing with, the fact that his command was only part of a larger geographical puzzle. For the first time since the war began, Washington and the command in Korea shared the same vision that this was to be something new, a limited war, and thus spoke the same language.

  37

  WITH RIDGWAY’S ARRIVAL, MacArthur, his forces defeated by the Chinese along the Chongchon and Yalu rivers, had lost not only his great gamble but in effect his command as well. Blame Washington for the limits imposed on him, he might; call it a victory because his troops had been on a giant recon patrol, he also might; but the senior (and middle level) military men who understood what had really happened in late November and early December knew exactly who the architect of the disaster was. Now he spoke ever more pessimistically of what he needed: four more divisions at least and a full air campaign against the Chinese mainland in order to destroy China’s industrial capacity. Almost everything he wanted implied an even larger war, when by contrast the administration, its European allies, and surely the American people wanted less of a war. What Washington hoped for was some kind of stalemate, superior U.S. hardware against superior Chinese demographics. The most immediate question in Washington was: could the United Nations troops hold or would Korea be another Dunkirk?

  The collision between the general and the president, which had been in the offing since the very beginning, was now about to take place, and at full force, at a terrible moment. The general wanted to expand the war, and the president, fearful of possible military confrontations elsewhere, wanted to localize and then end it. MacArthur had moved fatefully from being a military man, at least ostensibly carrying out the orders of the president and his military superiors, to becoming a dissenting policy man, armed with the exceptional powers and influence granted by his long service, his uniform, and his formidable political allies in Congress and the media. There was a certain inevitability to this and, in the weeks after the Chinese entrance, a series of escalating incidents. Effectively moved aside as the principal military officer by the arrival of Ridgway, MacArthur now embarked on a course of his own, as openly disobedient as a commander in the field could be in dealing with civilian policies, while pushing solutions viewed by senior officials in Washington, London, and other allied capitals as catastrophic.

  That MacArthur was promoting a completely divergent agenda was obvious to Ridgway the moment he arrived in Tokyo. The two men spent an hour and a half together on December 26, 1950, much of the time taken up by a monologue delivered by MacArthur. It was quickly clear what the commander in the Far East wanted. “There isn’t any question that MacArthur wanted to go to war,” Ridgway would say later, “full war with Communist China. And he could not be convinced by all the contrary arguments…. He reluctantly acted in accordance with the policy, but he never did accept it. He wanted to go to war with China.” That would become ever clearer in the weeks ahead. As a start, he wanted to use Chiang’s troops in a strike against the mainland, telling Ridgway that the way was open because so many of Mao’s troops had been shifted to Korea. “China is wide open in the south,” he told Ridgway. Ridgway, in his own way distinctly a hawk, momentarily agreed with him, even though southern China being open to invasion was then a genuinely dubious proposition. The Communist Army was, by now, so large that Mao could afford to send a half million men into Korea and yet keep vast numbers of troops in reserve, precisely where Chiang might be expected to strike; and even if the road were open, whether Chiang’s defeated troops were the ones to go down it was another question entirely. In the past, MacArthur had shown little respect for Chiang’s troops, though he had felt the administration had not treated Chiang personally with the proper respect.

  If Ridgway was more hawkish in some ways than others in the administration, if he had an even darker, more sinister view of the Communists than many of the staunchly anti-Communist men he was working with, he also knew the limits of the hand he had been dealt. Washington wanted to bring the Chinese to the negotiating table without investing significantly more resources in Korea. (“We are fighting the wrong nation,” Acheson told Bradley at the time. “We are fighting the second team, whereas the real enemy is the Soviet Union.”) That, Ridgway knew, would be his job, and it would be a bloody one—to make the Chinese pay so high a price that victory would seem as out of reach to them as it already seemed to Washington. He believed he could fulfill that mission. He was certain that American troops, well led, could damn well give a better account of themselves than they had just done up at Kunuri. He did not believe that the Chinese could easily push them off the peninsula as many in both Tokyo and Washington feared. “Ironically,” as Clay Blair wrote of Ridgway’s success in the weeks to come, “he would greatly undermine MacArthur’s position and his own deeply held views about how to deal with the threat posed by world communism. He would in effect become an instrument of what many might call ‘appeasement.’”

  If there was going to be an unspoken limit on the number of divisions allotted him, then he would compensate with far greater firepower, especially more artillery—which was why he so quickly pressed for more artillery units. He was shocked—given the enormous potential advantag
e that artillery offered and the limits that the Chinese and North Korean styles of warfare placed on them—that the Americans had not emphasized their advantage in big guns earlier. Now he asked for ten more National Guard and Reserve artillery battalions. The use of artillery as a key factor in the kind of grinding war he was already envisioning was obvious. After all, the United States was rich with weaponry and ammunition but wanted to conserve its manpower; and the Chinese were desperately limited in their ability to bring in heavy guns, which, in any case, would be vulnerable to U.S. airpower. Ridgway intended to even out the demographics in the crudest, cruelest way possible—with long-range guns. The new artillery units were ordered in country as quickly as possible. Like others before them, the men of these units were originally supposed to go to Japan for training, but the pressures of the war being what they were, they debarked in Korea instead.

  From the start Ridgway believed the war could be fought as what he called a meat grinder. On January 11, just two weeks after he had arrived in country, he wrote his friend Ham Haislip, the Army’s vice chief of staff, “The power is here. The strength and the means we have—short perhaps of Soviet military intervention. My one overriding problem, dominating all others, is to achieve the spiritual awakening of the latent capabilities of this command. If God permits me to do that, we shall achieve more, far more than our people think possible—and perhaps inflict a bloody defeat on the Chinese which even China will long remember, wanton as she is with the sacrifice of lives.”