The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (74 page)

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.”

W
ALTON 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 popularity 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.

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.