The Cold War (19 page)

By January 2 it was evident that the Eighth Army would have to move south of the Han River and abandon Seoul. As he left his headquarters, Ridgway pulled from his musette bag a pair of striped flannel pajama pants “split beyond repair in the upper posterior region.” He tacked them to the wall, the worn-out
seat flapping. Above them, in block letters, he left a message: to the commanding general chinese communist forces with the compliments of the commanding general eighth army. The story swept through the ranks with predictable effect.

The Eighth Army fell back fifteen miles south of the Han to the defensive line prepared by General Davidson and his Korean laborers. They retreated, in Ridgway's words, “as a fighting army, not as a running mob.” They brought with them all their equipment and, most important, their pride. They settled into the elaborate defenses and waited for the Chinese to try again. The battered Communists chose to regroup. Ridgway decided it was time to come off the floor with some Sunday punches of his own.

He set up his advanced command post on a bare bluff at Yoju, about one third of the way across the peninsula, equidistant from the I Corps and X Corps headquarters. For the first few weeks, he operated with possibly the smallest staff of any American commander of a major army. Although EUSAK's force of 350,000 men was in fact the largest field army ever led by an American general, Ridgway's staff consisted of just six people: two aides, one orderly, a driver for his jeep, and a driver and radio operator for the radio jeep that followed him everywhere. He lived in two tents, placed end to end to create a sort of tworoom apartment and heated by a small gasoline stove. Isolated from the social and military formalities of the main CP at Taegu, Ridgway had time for “uninterrupted concentration” on his counteroffensive.

Nearby was a crudely leveled airstrip from which he took off repeatedly to study the terrain in front of him. He combined this personal reconnaissance with intensive study of relief maps provided by the Army Map Service—“a priceless asset.” Soon his incredible memory had absorbed the terrain of the entire front, and “every road, every cart track, every hill, every stream, every ridge in that area … we hoped to control … became as familiar to me as … my own backyard,” he later wrote. When he ordered an advance into a sector, he knew exactly what it might involve for his infantrymen.

On January 25, with a thunderous eruption of massed artillery, the Eighth Army went over to the attack in Operation Thunderbolt. The goal was the Han River, which would make the enemy's grip on Seoul untenable. The offensive was a series of carefully planned advances to designated “phase lines,” beyond each of which no one advanced until every assigned unit reached it. Again and again Ridgway stressed the importance of having good coordination, inflicting maximum punishment, and keeping major units intact. He called it “good
footwork combined with firepower.” The men in the lines called it “the meat grinder.”

To jaundiced observers in the press, the army's performance was miraculous. Rene Cutforth of the BBC wrote, “Exactly how and why the new army was transformed … from a mob of dispirited boobs … to a tough resilient force is still a matter for speculation and debate.” A
Time
correspondent came closest to explaining it: “The boys aren't up there fighting for democracy now. They're fighting because the platoon leader is leading them and the platoon leader is fighting because of the command, and so on right up to the top.”

By February 10 the Eighth Army had its left flank anchored on the Han and had captured Inchon and Seoul's Kimpo Airfield. After fighting off a ferocious Chinese counterattack on Lincoln's birthday, Ridgway launched offensives from his center and right flank with equal success. In one of these, paratroopers were used to trap a large number of Chinese between them and an armored column. Ridgway was sorely tempted to jump with them, but he realized it would be “a damn fool thing” for an army commander to do. Instead, he landed on a road in his light plane about a half hour after the paratroopers hit the ground.

M-1s were barking all around him. At one point a dead Chinese came rolling down a hill and dangled from a bank above Ridgway's head. His pilot, an ex-infantryman, grabbed a carbine out of the plane and joined the shooting. Ridgway stood in the road, feeling “that lifting of the spirits, that sudden quickening of the breath and the sudden sharpening of all the senses that comes to a man in the midst of battle.” None of his exploits in Korea better demonstrates why he was able to communicate a fierce appetite for combat to his men.

Still another incident dramatized Ridgway's instinctive sympathy for the lowliest private in his ranks. In early March he was on a hillside watching a battalion of the 1st Marine Division moving up for an attack. In the line was a gaunt boy with a heavy radio on his back. He kept stumbling over an untied shoelace. “Hey, how about one of you sonsabitches tying my shoe?” he howled to his buddies. Ridgway slid down the snowy bank, landed at the boy's feet, and tied the laces.

Fifty-four days after Ridgway took command, the Eighth Army had driven the Communists across the 38th Parallel, inflicting enormous losses with every mile they advanced. The reeling enemy began surrendering by the hundreds. Seoul was recaptured on March 14, a symbolic defeat of tremendous proportions to the Communists' political ambitions. Ridgway felt “supremely confident”
his men could take “any objective” assigned to them. “The American flag never flew over a prouder, tougher, more spirited and more competent fighting force than was the Eighth Army as it drove north beyond the parallel,” he declared. But he agreed with President Truman's decision to stop at the parallel and seek a negotiated truce.

In Tokyo his immediate superior, General Douglas MacArthur, did not agree and let his opinion resound through the media. On April 11, Ridgway was at the front in a snowstorm, supervising final plans for an attack on the Chinese stronghold of Ch'orwon, when a correspondent said, “Well, General, I guess congratulations are in order.” That was how he learned that Truman had fired MacArthur and given Ridgway the job of supreme commander in the Far East and America's proconsul in Japan.

Ridgway was replaced as Eighth Army commander by Lieutenant General James Van Fleet, who continued Ridgway's policy of using coordinated firepower, rolling with Communist counterpunches, and inflicting maximum casualties. Peace talks and occasionally bitter fighting dragged on for another twenty-eight months, but there was never any doubt that EUSAK was in Korea to stay. Ridgway and Van Fleet built the ROK army into a formidable force during these months. They also successfully integrated black and white troops in EUSAK.

Later, Ridgway tried to combine his “profound respect” for Douglas MacArthur and his conviction that President Truman had done the right thing in relieving him. Ridgway maintained that MacArthur had every right to make his views heard in Washington, but not to disagree publicly with the president's decision to fight a limited war in Korea. Ridgway, with his deep concern for the individual soldier, accepted the concept of limited war fought for sharply defined goals as the only sensible doctrine in the nuclear age.

After leaving the Far East, Ridgway would go on to become head of NATO in Europe and chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under President Eisenhower. Ironically, at the end of his career, he would find himself in a MacArthuresque position. Secretary of Defense Charles E. “Engine Charlie” Wilson had persuaded Ike to slash the defense budget, with 76 percent of the cuts falling on the army. Wilson latched on to Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's foreign policy, which relied on the threat of massive nuclear retaliation to intimidate the Communists. Wilson thought he could get more bang for the buck by giving almost half the funds in the budget to the air force.

Ridgway refused to go along with Eisenhower. In testimony before Congress,
he strongly disagreed with the administration's policy. He insisted it was important that the United States be able to fight limited wars without nuclear weapons. He said massive retaliation was “repugnant to the ideals of a Christian nation” and incompatible with the basic aim of the United States, “a just and durable peace.”

Eisenhower was infuriated, but Ridgway stood his ground—and then proceeded to take yet another stand that angered top members of the administration. In early 1954 the French army was on the brink of collapse in Vietnam. Secretary of State Dulles and a number of other influential voices wanted the United States to intervene. Alarmed, Ridgway sent a team of army experts to Vietnam to assess the situation. They came back with grim information.

Vietnam, they reported, was not a promising place to fight a modern war. It had almost nothing a modern army needed: good highways, port facilities, airfields, railways. Everything would have to be built from scratch. Moreover, the native population was politically unreliable, and the jungle terrain was made to order for guerrilla warfare. The experts estimated that to win the war, the United States would have to commit more troops than had been sent to Korea.

Ridgway sent the report up through channels to Eisenhower. A few days later, he was told to have one of his staff give a logistic briefing on Vietnam to the president. Ridgway gave it himself. Eisenhower listened impassively and asked only a few questions, but it was clear to Ridgway that the president understood the implications. With minimum fanfare, Eisenhower ruled against intervention.

For reasons that still puzzle historians, no one in the Kennedy administration ever displayed the slightest interest in the Ridgway report—not even Ken-nedy's secretary of state, Dean Rusk, who, as assistant secretary of state for Far Eastern affairs in 1950–51, knew and admired what Ridgway had achieved in Korea. As Ridgway left office, Rusk wrote him a fulsome letter telling him he had “saved your country from the humiliation of defeat through the loss of morale in high places.”

The report on Vietnam was almost the last act of Ridgway's long career as an American soldier. Determined to find a team player, Eisenhower did not invite him to spend a second term as chief of staff, as was customary. Nor was he offered another job elsewhere. Although Ridgway officially retired, his departure was clearly understood by Washington insiders as that rarest of things in the U.S. Army, a resignation in protest.

After leaving the army in 1955, Ridgway became chairman and chief executive officer of the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research in Pittsburgh. He retired
from this post in 1960 and lived to the age of ninety-eight. He died in 1993.

When Ridgway was leaving Japan to become commander of NATO, he told James Michener, “I cannot subscribe to the idea that civilian thought per se is any more valid than military thought.” Without abandoning his traditional obedience to his civilian superiors, Ridgway insisted on his right to be a thinking man's soldier—the same soldier who talked back to his military superiors when he thought their plans were likely to lead to the “needless sacrifice of priceless lives.”

David Halberstam is among those who believe that Ridgway's refusal to go along with intervention in Vietnam was his finest hour. Halberstam called him the “one hero” of his book on America's involvement in Vietnam,
The Best and the Brightest.
But for the student of military history, the Ridgway of Korea towers higher. His achievement proved that the doctrine of limited war can work, provided those fighting it are led by someone who knows how to ignite their pride and confidence as soldiers. Ridgway's revival of the Eighth Army is the stuff of legends, a paradigm of American generalship. Omar Bradley put it best: “His brilliant, driving uncompromising leadership [turned] the tide of battle like no other general's in our military history.” Not long after Ridgway's arrival in Korea, one of the lower ranks summed up EUSAK's new spirit with a wisecrack: “From now on there's a right way, a wrong way, and a Ridgway.”

DENNIS E. SHOWALTER

In Korea, jets fought jets for the first time in history. The world's first actual jet encounter took place near the Yalu River on November 8, 1950, when MiG-15s, the best and newest Soviet frontline fighters, attacked a formation of American B-29s escorted by F-80 jets. Lieutenant Russell Brown brought down the first Communist jet to be lost over Korea. “As Communist troops swept across the Yalu … and sliced through overextended and overconfident U.N. ground forces,” Dennis E. Showalter writes here, “the MiG-15 seemed poised to reverse the course of the air war.” It never did, largely because it soon came up against a fighter that was its equal, the F-86 Sabrejet. For the next two and a half years, the planes would duel over the area of North Korea south of the Yalu and bordering the Yellow Sea that U.N. pilots nicknamed “MiG Alley.”

The first MiG-15 pilots were mainly Soviets and Poles. Chinese pilots did not show up until the spring of 1951, and there were never many North Koreans. (We sometimes forget how genuinely international the Korean War was.) “Incidents” may have occurred during the Cold War, but this was the only instance in those four decades and more when Americans and Russians traded shots in anger over a prolonged period. According to a CIA report in the summer of 1952, “a de facto air war exists over North Korea between the UN and the USSR.” Apparently, as many as seventy-two thousand Soviet air personnel rotated in and out of Chinese airfields, those frustratingly “privileged sanctuaries” that U.N. airmen were forbidden to attack. (There were times when U.N. pilots violated this order.) The original Soviet airmen belonged to elite units that had been stationed around Moscow. Their initial mission was to intercept and destroy the B-29 bombers, propeller-driven behemoths from
World War II, that were destroying what little transportation and manufacturing infrastructure North Korea possessed, much of it in MiG Alley. But the Soviet pilots, many of whom were Eastern Front veterans, regarded Korea as an opportunity for a refresher course in aerial combat; younger men made it their finishing school. Although their MiG-15s bore the red wing stars of the Soviet air force, the pilots otherwise took elaborate precautions to conceal their identities. They dressed in Chinese uniforms, refrained as much as possible from speaking Russian in radio transmissions, and never (except through the rare mistake) flew over U.N.-held territory or over the sea. It is recorded that one MiG-15 pilot, downed behind U.N. lines, shot himself rather than be captured and interrogated. Another, who crashed in the sea and managed to swim free of his sinking aircraft, was strafed and killed by fellow pilots as a U.N. patrol boat rushed to rescue him. Stalin did not want to present the West with a pretext for starting World War III. American leaders were just as wary. Even after he learned of the Soviet involvement, President Dwight D. Eisenhower kept quiet, out of fear that conservatives in Congress might push for retaliation if they got wind of it.