The Cold War (18 page)

In the heat of battle, Ridgway also revealed an unrivaled capacity to taunt the enemy. One of his favorite stunts was to stand in the middle of a road under heavy artillery fire and urinate to demonstrate his contempt for German accuracy. Aides and fellow generals repeatedly begged him to abandon this bravado. He ignored them.

Ridgway's experience as an airborne commander spurred the evolution of another trait that made him almost unique among American soldiers—a readiness to question, even to challenge, the policies of his superiors. After the disaster of the Sicily drop, Eisenhower and other generals concluded that division-size airborne operations were impractical. Ridgway fought ferociously to maintain the integrity of his division. Winning that argument, he found himself paradoxically menaced by the widespread conclusion that airborne assault could solve problems with miraculous ease.

General Harold Alexander, the British commander of the Allied invasion of Italy, decided Ridgway's paratroopers were a God-given instrument for disrupting German defense plans. Alexander ordered the 82nd Airborne to jump north of Rome, seize the city, and hold it while the main army drove from their Salerno beachhead to link up with them. Ridgway was appalled. His men would have to fly without escort—Rome was beyond the range of Allied fighters—risking annihilation before they got to the target.

There were at least six elite German divisions near the city, ready and willing to maul the relatively small 82nd Airborne. An airborne division at that point in the war had only eight thousand men. Their heaviest gun was a 75mm pack howitzer, “a peashooter,” as Ridgway put it, against tanks. For food, ammunition, fuel, transportation, the Americans were depending on the Italians, who were planning to double-cross the Germans and abandon the war.

Ridgway wangled an interview with General Alexander, who listened to his doubts and airily dismissed them: “Don't give this another thought, Ridgway. Contact will be made with your division in three days—five at the most.”

Ridgway was in a quandary. He could not disobey the direct orders of his superior
without destroying his career. He told his division to get ready for the drop, but he refused to abandon his opposition, even though the plan had the enthusiastic backing of Dwight Eisenhower, who was conducting negotiations with the Italians from his headquarters in Algiers. Eisenhower saw the paratroopers as a guarantee that the Americans could protect the Italians from German retribution.

Ridgway discussed the dilemma with Brigadier General Maxwell Taylor, his artillery officer, who volunteered to go to Rome incognito and confer with the Italians on the ground. Ridgway took this offer to General Walter Bedell Smith, Alexander's American chief of staff, along with more strenuous arguments against the operation.

Smith persuaded Alexander to approve Taylor's mission. Taylor and an air corps officer traveled to Rome disguised as captured airmen and met Field Marshal Pietro Badoglio, the acting prime minister, who was in charge of the negotiations. Meanwhile, plans for the drop proceeded at a dozen airfields in Sicily. If Taylor found the Italians unable to keep their promises of support, he was to send a radio message with the code word “innocuous” in it.

In Rome, Taylor met Badoglio and was appalled by what he heard. The Germans were wise to the Italians' scheme and had reinforced their divisions around Rome. The 3rd Panzer Grenadier Division alone now had 24,000 men and 200 tanks—enough firepower to annihilate the 82nd Airborne twice over. A frantic Taylor sent three separate messages over different channels to stop the operation, but word did not reach the 82nd until sixty-two planes loaded with paratroopers were on the runways warming their engines. Ridgway sat down with his chief of staff, shared a bottle of whiskey, and wept with relief.

Looking back years later, Ridgway declared that when the time came for him to meet his maker, his greatest source of pride would be not his accomplishments in battle but his decision to oppose the Rome drop. He also liked to point out that it took seven months for the Allied army to reach the Eternal City.

Repeatedly risking his career in this unprecedented fashion, Ridgway was trying to forge a different kind of battle leadership. He had studied the appalling slaughters of World War I and was determined that they should never happen again. He believed “the same dignity attaches to the mission given a single soldier as to the duties of the commanding general…. All lives are equal on the battlefield, and a dead rifleman is as great a loss in the sight of God as a dead general.”

In the Normandy invasion, Ridgway had no difficulty accepting the 82nd's task. Once more, his men had to surmount a mismanaged airdrop in which paratroopers drowned at sea and in swamps and lost 60 percent of their equipment. Ridgway found himself alone in a pitch-dark field. He consoled himself with the thought that “at least if no friends were visible, neither were any foes.” Ten miles away, his second in command, James Gavin, took charge of most of the fighting for the next twenty-four hours. The paratroopers captured only one of their assigned objectives, but it was a crucial one, the town of Sainte-Mère-Eglise, which blocked German armor from attacking Utah Beach. Ridgway was given a third star and command of the XVIII Airborne Corps.

By this time he inspired passionate loyalty in the men around him. Often it surfaced in odd ways. One day he was visiting a wounded staff officer in an aid station. A paratrooper on the stretcher next to him said, “Still sticking your neck out, huh, General?” Ridgway never forgot the remark. For him it represented the affection one combat soldier feels for another.

Less well known than his D-Day accomplishments was Ridgway's role in the Battle of the Bulge. When the Germans smashed into the Ardennes in late December 1944, routing American divisions along a seventy-five-mile front, Ridg-way's airborne corps again became a fire brigade. The “battling bastards of Bastogne”—the 101st Airborne led by Brigadier General Anthony McAuliffe— got most of the publicity for foiling the German lunge toward Antwerp. But many historians credit Ridgway's defense of the key road junction of Saint-Vith as a far more significant contribution to the victory.

Ridgway acquired a visual trademark, a hand grenade attached to his para-trooper's shoulder harness on one side and a first-aid kit, often mistaken for a second grenade, on the other strap. He insisted both were for practical use, not for picturesque effect like Patton's pearl-handled pistols. In his jeep he carried an old .30-06 Springfield rifle, loaded with armor-piercing cartridges. On foot one day, deep in the Ardennes forest, trying to find a battalion CP, he was carrying the gun when he heard a “tremendous clatter.” Through the trees he saw what looked like a light tank with a large swastika on its side. He fired five quick shots at the Nazi symbol and crawled away on his belly through the snow. The vehicle turned out to be a self-propelled gun. Inside it, paratroopers who responded to the shots found five dead Germans.

This was the man—now at the Pentagon, as deputy chief of staff for administration and training—whom the army chose to rescue the situation in Korea
when the Chinese swarmed over the Yalu River in early December 1950 and sent EUSAK (the Eighth U.S. Army in Korea) reeling in headlong retreat. Capping the disarray was the death of the field commander, stumpy Major General Walton “Johnnie” Walker, in a jeep accident. Ridgway's first stop was Tokyo, where he was briefed by the supreme commander, Douglas MacArthur. After listening to a pessimistic summary of the situation, Ridgway asked, “General, if I get over there and find the situation warrants it, do I have your permission to attack?”

“Do what you think best, Matt,” MacArthur responded. “The Eighth Army is yours.”

MacArthur was giving Ridgway freedom—and responsibility—he had never given Walker. The reason was soon obvious: MacArthur was trying to distance himself from a looming disaster. Morale in the Eighth Army had deteriorated alarmingly while they retreated before the oncoming Chinese. “Bugout fever” was endemic. Within hours of arriving to take command, Ridgway abandoned his hopes for an immediate offensive. His first job was to restore this beaten army's will to fight.

He went at it with incredible verve and energy. Strapping on his parachute harness with its hand grenade and first-aid kit, he toured the front for three days in an open jeep in bitter cold. “I held to the old-fashioned idea that it helped the spirits of the men to see the Old Man up there in the snow and sleet … sharing the same cold miserable existence they had to endure,” he said. But Ridgway admitted that until a kindhearted major dug up a pile-lined cap and warm gloves for him, he “damn near froze.”

Everywhere he went, Ridgway exercised his fabulous memory for faces. At this point he could recognize an estimated five thousand men at a glance. He dazzled old sergeants and MPs on lonely roads by remembering not only their names but where they had met and what they had said to each other.

But this trick was not enough to revive EUSAK. Everywhere Ridgway found the men unresponsive, reluctant to answer his questions, even to air their gripes. The defeatism ran from privates through sergeants all the way up to generals. Ridgway was particularly appalled by the atmosphere in the Eighth Army's main command post in Taegu. There they were frantically planning how to avoid a Dunkirk.

In his first forty-eight hours, Ridgway had met with all his American corps and division commanders and all but one of the Republic of Korea division commanders. He told them, as he had told the staffers in Taegu, that he had no
plans whatsoever to evacuate Korea. He reiterated what he had told Korean president Syngman Rhee in their meeting: “I've come to stay.”

But words could not restore the nerve of many top commanders. Ridgway's reaction to this defeatism was drastic: He cabled the Pentagon that he wanted to relieve almost every division commander and artillery commander in EUSAK. He also supplied his bosses with a list of younger fighting generals he wanted to replace the losers. This demand caused political palpitations in Washington, where MacArthur's growing quarrel with President Harry Tru-man's policy was becoming a nightmare. Ridgway eventually got rid of his losers, but not in one ferocious sweep. The ineffective generals were sent home singly over the next few months as part of a “rotation policy.”

Meanwhile, in a perhaps calculated bit of shock treatment, Ridgway visited I Corps and asked the G-3 to brief him on their battle plans. The officer described plans to withdraw to “successive positions.”

“What are your attack plans?” Ridgway growled.

The officer floundered. “Sir—we are withdrawing.” There were no attack plans.

“Colonel, you are relieved,” Ridgway said.

That is how the Eighth Army heard the story. Actually, Ridgway ordered the G-3's commanding officer to relieve him, which probably intensified the shock effect on the entire corps. Many officers felt, perhaps with some justice, that Ridgway was brutally unfair to the G-3, who was only carrying out the corps commander's orders. But Ridgway obviously felt that the crisis justified brutality.

As for the lower ranks, Ridgway took immediate steps to satisfy some of their gripes. Warmer clothing was urgently demanded from the States. Stationery to write letters home, and to wounded buddies, was shipped to the front lines, and steak and chicken were added to the menu, with a ferocious insistence that meals be served hot.

Regimental, division, and corps commanders were told in language Ridgway admitted was “often impolite” that it was time to abandon creature comforts and shed their timidity about getting off the roads and into the hills, where the enemy was holding the high ground. Again and again Ridgway repeated the ancient army slogan “Find them! Fix them! Fight them! Finish them!”

As he shuttled across the front in a light plane or a helicopter, Ridgway studied the terrain beneath him. He was convinced a massive Communist offensive was imminent. He not only wanted to contain it, he wanted to inflict maximum punishment on the enemy. He knew that for the time being, he would have to
give some ground, but he wanted the price to be high. South of the Han River, he assigned Brigadier General Garrison Davidson, a talented engineer, to take charge of several thousand Korean laborers and create a “deep defensive zone” with a trench system, barbed wire, and artillery positions.

Ridgway also preached defense in depth to his division and regimental commanders in the lines they were holding north of the Han. Although they lacked the manpower to halt the Chinese night attacks, he said that by buttoning up tight, unit by unit, at night and counterattacking strongly with armor and infantry teams during the day, the U.N. army could inflict severe punishment on anyone who had come through the gaps in their line. At the same time, Ridgway ordered that no unit be abandoned if cut off. It was to be “fought for” and rescued unless a “major commander” after “personal appraisal” Ridgway-style—from the front lines—decided its relief would cost as many or more men.

Finally, in this race against the looming Chinese offensive, Ridgway tried to fill another void in the spirit of his men. He knew they were asking one another, “What the hell are we doing here in this God-forgotten spot?” One night he sat down at his desk in his room in Seoul and tried to answer that question.

His first reasons were soldierly: They had orders to fight from the president of the United States, and they were defending the freedom of South Korea. But the real issues were deeper—“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.” In that context, Ridgway wrote, “the sacrifices we have made, and those we shall yet support, are not offered vicariously for others but in our own direct defense.”

On New Year's Eve, the Chinese and North Koreans attacked with all-out fury. The Eighth Army defenders, Ridgway wrote, “were killing them by the thousands,” but they kept coming. They smashed huge holes in the center of Ridgway's battle line, where ROK divisions broke and ran. Ridgway was not surprised; having met their generals, he knew most had little more than a company commander's experience or expertise. Few armies in existence had taken a worse beating than the ROKs in the first six months of the war.