The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (75 page)

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 (Johnny) 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.

W
ITH 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 advantage 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.”

In mid-January, when Joe Collins came through Asia to see MacArthur and Ridgway, he told Ned Almond he would soon be getting his third star. That was like a last tip of the hat, a final courtesy for MacArthur. Collins had come out with another member of the Joint Chiefs, Hoyt Vandenberg of the Air Force. Their first stop had been with MacArthur on January 15. Just a few weeks before, his dark cables might have struck terror in them. Now he was just an old man they had to check in with but whom they no longer feared and whose estimates and projections they no longer trusted.

When Collins and Vandenberg left Tokyo to see Ridgway in Korea, they found him in a significantly more optimistic mood than they expected, sure, as he had written Haislip, that the job was doable and he could do it. His confidence was contagious—and those who did not share it would soon find themselves at other jobs. He was changing the Eighth Army as quickly as he could into an effective fighting force. He understood something that few others realized at the time. The Second, the Twenty-fifth, and the Seventh divi
sions had taken heavy casualties, but the physical damage to the Eighth Army was less than everyone imagined; the real damage had been psychological or emotional. Those divisions had lost a great deal of equipment, yes, but that could be replaced. The surprise that had resulted from stumbling into a giant Chinese trap and fighting a brand-new enemy in such poorly chosen terrain had magnified the sense of damage, and the resulting defeat had crushed his army’s
morale
. That was what had to be rebuilt—the spiritual or psychological side of his force.

Collins cabled Bradley that night with a fairly positive view of the visit. It was, noted J. D. Coleman, who both fought in the war and then became a historian of Korea, the first good news anyone had gotten back at the Pentagon in almost two months. Bradley later called it “a turning point. For the first time we began to think the Chinese could not throw us out of Korea, even with the self-imposed limitations under which we were fighting.” When Collins returned to Washington, he briefed Truman on how well Ridgway was doing and how the morale of the Army was improving. He and Vandenberg had found MacArthur to be a querulous old man, dreaming of a war they had no intention of fighting. Ridgway by contrast was unintimidated by those early Chinese victories and the awesome size of their force; he seemed to have his finger on the strength and weakness of every unit and was full of confidence about what his forces could do. That was the way he had commanded in World War II, up front with his lead unit so that he could have as immediate a sense as possible of what was happening and which units might need help—an airborne division, after all, was not a place where you lingered back at your own CP. He was, his talented World War II deputy Jim Gavin, a famed airborne commander in his own right, once said, always drawn to the cutting edge of battle. “He was right up there every minute. Hard as flint and full of intensity, almost grinding his teeth with intensity; so much so that I thought that man’s going to have a heart attack before it’s over. Sometimes it seemed as though it was a personal thing: Ridgway versus the Wehrmacht. He’d stand in the middle of the road and urinate. I’d say: ‘Matt, get the hell out of there. You’ll get shot.’ No! He was defiant. Even with his penis he was defiant.”

As Ridgway began to change the command structure and get rid of some of his division and corps commanders, the great question among many senior officers was what he was going to do about Ned Almond. A number of senior officers in the Eighth Army (and, of course, Marine officers) regarded Almond as a co-conspirator in the disastrous events up north and had hoped that he would be quickly moved aside. But Almond was not going to be relieved. He was aggressive at least, and Ridgway had a serious need for aggressive commanders, but from now on he was going to have to play it straight—there
would be no gamesmanship nor end runs around Matt Ridgway. He would for a time be allowed to keep command of a corps—Ridgway was appalled by how weak his other corps commanders were—but he would have to give up his job as chief of staff. Neither Ridgway nor Joe Collins (for somewhat different reasons) wanted the look of a bloodbath at the top, and neither wanted to cross MacArthur unnecessarily. Almond was still MacArthur’s boy. If there was to be a major confrontation, let it be over something more important. So Almond remained in place, the officer everyone was watching. He would get his third star—MacArthur had lobbied hard for that—but his wings were going to be partially clipped. Bill McCaffrey had accompanied Almond on the day he met with Ridgway for the first time. It had been a long meeting and hardly a happy one. Almond had gone inside alone with Ridgway, with McCaffrey waiting outside. McCaffrey could tell from Almond’s mood afterward that he was badly shaken. He had emerged quite deflated, still a corps commander, but that and nothing more: a man who had just been told in a very tough way the new rules of the headquarters and that he was no longer going to play games with the Eighth Army commander.

The changes in the fighting force began, of course, with the commanders. Major General John Coulter of Ninth Corps, who had performed so badly along the Chongchon, was seemingly promoted, given a third star, and sent off to a staff job in Tokyo; it was part of the code of the Army that when a senior officer failed in combat, great effort should be taken to protect his reputation and any sense of disgrace minimized, in no small part to show that the Army did not make mistakes. Ridgway did not immediately relieve the First Corps commander, Shrimp Milburn, who was an old friend. But there was a widespread belief that Milburn bore some of the responsibility for the disaster at Unsan, so Ridgway moved his own headquarters up to Milburn’s, as a means of prodding him to be more aggressive.

There, his presence dominated the scene. Among headquarters officers, he became known as “the man who came to dinner” and “an honor we didn’t deserve.” In contrast to MacArthur, who never spent the night in Korea and who saw the war primarily in theoretical terms, Ridgway was there all the time. He wanted the fighting men in the field to know that he shared their knowledge and their hardships, and he wanted field commanders to know that he could not be fooled. His presence put everyone to a constant test of excellence. The corps chief of staff later said of that period, “Oh God! He came to
every
briefing
every
morning…. He’d go out all day with the troops, then when he came back at night I’d have to brief him again—on
everything,
even minor things like which way the water drained in our sector.” Though Milburn was kept on for a time, Ridgway relieved proxies as a means of delivering his message.
Ridgway sat in on an early briefing with the corps G-3 Colonel John Jeter, and promptly made his displeasure with Corps known. During the briefing, Jeter went through a list of fallback positions. Ridgway asked what his attack plans were. Jeter answered that there were no attack plans. The next thing anyone knew, Jeter was gone, and word of it spread throughout the entire Eighth Army. It was probably not fair, relieving Jeter instead of Milburn, but nothing in Korea was fair then. Soon three division commanders were on their way home. They would be praised for what they had done, given medals and honorable new jobs, but the Eighth Army was not going to retreat anymore. Ridgway intended that they move forward whether they liked it or not. With that came a grudging nickname: “Wrongway Ridgway.”