The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  The list goes on. “There is no evidence that any effort was made by Faith . . . to establish communications when the means were at hand to do so through the daily radio contact of the TACP [tactical air control party] with pilots overhead,” noted Roy Appleman, formerly an official Army historian. “It apparently never dawned on Faith or his principal staff officers that this means of establishing communications with the 1st Marine Division at Hagaru-ri, and through it with the 7th Infantry Division and X Corps, was available.”

  Faith, posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor, was “both the beneficiary and the victim of officer personnel policies,” concluded Kirkland. The histories of the Chosin fight tend to take their cue from the official accounts compiled by Army historians. As Kirkland noted, the lead Army historian, Appleman, chose not to write anything critical of Faith. “About Faith, I have not placed in the [manuscript for the book East of Chosin] any unfavorable views that may have been uttered to me by others—only the favorable,” Appleman wrote in a letter. “I owe his memory and personal valor that much. I do not know if anyone could have done better in the exact circumstances. I do believe he overlooked some possibilities open to him while he was at the inlet. This is the extent of my criticism. I place far greater blame on higher command for the result.”

  Sadly, Kirkland noted, Faith’s lack of combat experience would not have made him stand out in the Army units sent to Korea that year: “Of the six generals initially assigned to command divisions in Korea, four had not held a combat command at any level during the Second World War.” Had the commanders above him been more seasoned in combat, they might have been better prepared to assist Faith, especially with communications and support. “The communications breakdown . . . bordered on command criminal negligence,” concluded historian Shelby Stanton. Maj. Gen. David Barr, Faith’s commander in the 7th Division, had been a chief of staff for Gen. Jacob Devers in the earlier war. Likewise, Kirkland observed, of the eighteen colonels commanding infantry regiments in the initial phase of the Korean War, fifteen had never before led units in combat.

  In reading histories of the Korean War, when new regimental and division commanders are discussed, it is striking how often they are introduced with phrases such as “had not previously led troops in combat.” Instead they had spent World War II in the Pentagon war-planning division, or had trained troops, or had been a staff planner in the Mediterranean Theater, or had been a corps chief of staff. This extended even to the chief of staff for Gen. Almond, Clark Ruffner, who had spent World War II as the chief of staff for his father-in-law, Gen. Robert “Nelly” Richardson, who oversaw Army troop training in the Pacific. In Korea, the Marines still had a bad taste in their mouth from Richardson, who had played a major role in the Army’s querulous response to the firing of Army Gen. Ralph Smith by Marine Gen. H. M. Smith during the Battle of Saipan, in 1944.

  Trying to be fair to officers can be lethal to the soldiers they lead on the battlefield. The Army was using the Korean War to give the staff officers of the earlier war “their chance” to command in combat—with disastrous results. Well before Chosin, the Army had recognized that it had a problem with inexperienced combat leadership in the war. In August 1950, the Army sent a team of expert colonels and lieutenant colonels to Korea. They produced a thick report that, among other things, warned that the Army’s approach to filling command slots with inexperienced officers “has often resulted in poor leadership, especially at the regimental and lower levels. The career program has been detrimental to combat efficiency.” Some commanders were found to lack “the ability to command under adverse conditions, resulting in a defeatist attitude.” Gen. Mark Clark, then commander of Army Field Forces, sent the report to Gen. J. Lawton Collins, the Army chief of staff, along with a “Dear Joe” cover letter explaining that “the detrimental effect of the [officers’] career program on combat efficiency is an inescapable corollary of the program as a whole which seeks, by variations in assignment, to produce well-rounded and versatile officers.” In response to complaints about the quality of officership, the Army tried to change its approach. In February 1952, it instituted a new program to send better officers, especially colonels, to Korea. The focus of the program was to find and deploy “officers considered by their seniors to be potential high-level commanders, but who had not had a combat command during World War II.”

  This supposed “solution,” which actually intensified the leadership problem, is inexplicable until one remembers that the Army of this era was focused on the Soviet threat. If World War III came, the Army’s plan was to field eighty or more divisions, so it was desirable to have on hand as many seasoned officers as possible to lead regiments and divisions in combat. The United States had to keep its eye on the Red Army in Central Europe, and it feared that Korea, a secondary theater, might be a Communist diversion intended to weaken it in Europe. Even so, the approach the Army took meant that for the rest of the Korean War, complaints about the character and competence of Army officers would be rampant.

  The Marine Corps, by contrast, was dealing with the more immediate threat of doubts in Washington about whether the Corps should even continue to exist, so it had an incentive to send its best commanders to Korea. After the initial emergency of the war, when it sent anyone it could find, the Marines tried to stick to their practice of requiring anyone commanding a unit to have led the next-lower level of unit in combat. Thus, a colonel leading a regiment had to have overseen a battalion that fought, and a battalion commander needed to have done so with a company. O. P. Smith had been an assistant division commander on Peleliu. The officers leading his regiments were some of the best the Corps has ever had. Col. Homer Litzenberg, who had a reputation for crankiness with both superiors and subordinates, had not only commanded in the Pacific War—he had been relieved there. Despite that, Smith said later, “I gave him the 7th Regiment. He was difficult to handle but he did a good job with the 7th. I had no complaint. I gave him good fitness reports, and he made brigadier general. And he made major general, but he could not get along. They tried him out at Lejeune and pulled him out, tried him out at Parris Island, and pulled him out—he was just too tough on his subordinates.”

  Lt. Col. Raymond Murray, commanding officer of the 5th Marines, had fought at Guadalcanal. He then received command of a battalion after Col. Lewis “Chesty” Puller, the regimental commander, not only relieved his predecessor but busted that officer from lieutenant colonel to lieutenant. At Guadalcanal, Ray Davis sometimes had the mission of extinguishing grass fires touched off by Japanese strafing before the flames ignited bombs stored there. “I spent many a moment standing atop a 500-pound bomb beating out a fire around it,” he would recall. “It’s a good thing they weren’t fused, but still it was a hairy way to spend an afternoon.” At the age of twenty-eight, Davis led a battalion at Tarawa and then at Saipan, which he considered the toughest fight he had ever faced; he was seriously wounded there and received a Navy Cross to join his two Silver Stars. Chesty Puller, “perhaps the most famous Marine of all time,” who had received an extraordinary four Navy Crosses even before the Korean War, was alongside Davis at Chosin, still commanding a regiment. As a battalion commander at Guadalcanal, Puller had held off the Japanese at Henderson Field, despite being shot twice and being hit by three pieces of shrapnel. Smith’s operations chief, Col. Alpha Bowser, had commanded an artillery battalion on Iwo Jima. His chief engineer, Lt. Col. John Partridge, was a veteran of Saipan, Tinian, and Iwo Jima. Capt. William Barber, who received the Medal of Honor for his leadership of the encircled Fox Company, had led a platoon at Iwo Jima.

  One would expect that it must have given the Army pause to receive such a devastating analysis, one that clearly argued that its officer management policies had led to disaster in the Korean War. But Kirkland said that the Army, even decades after the event, chose to ignore him. He said he offered his article to Parameters, the journal of the Army War College, for which he had written bef
ore, but was turned down. Instead he published it in Armed Forces & Society, an obscure academic journal specializing in military sociology.

  • • •

  MacArthur’s reaction to the disasters of the Gauntlet and Chosin Reservoir, which resulted directly from his impulse to drive the Communists from Korea and from his misapprehension of Chinese intent and capabilities, was typical of his behavior, though it was still surprising. He had just taken an amazing gamble. In October 1950, the United States had a total of twelve divisions globally. Seven of those were under MacArthur’s control in Korea, and he sent them, as one historian put it, “in an uncoordinated rush toward the border of a hostile nation that possessed an army of more than 5,000,000 in 253 divisions. . . . All this was done in the face of explicit Chinese warnings not to do so and in defiance of orders from the Joint Chiefs of Staff.” MacArthur responded to his military setback by launching a series of blistering public attacks on the Truman Administration. Most notably, he told U.S. News & World Report that he had been handicapped by Washington’s limits on him, “without precedent in military history,” and accused Western leaders of being “somewhat selfish” and “short-sighted.”

  Lt. Gen. Matthew Ridgway, the Army’s G-3, or deputy chief for operations, and others were puzzled about why MacArthur was being allowed to talk like that. After a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Chosin battles, Ridgway approached the Air Force chief, Hoyt Vandenberg. He asked why the Joint Chiefs did not just issue direct orders to MacArthur telling him what to do. “What good would that do?” Gen. Vandenberg responded, shaking his head. “He wouldn’t obey orders. What can we do?”

  Ridgway was exasperated by such talk. He knew what he would do. “You can relieve any commander who won’t obey orders, can’t you?” Vandenberg’s astonished reaction to this suggestion, he remembered, was such that “his lips parted and he looked at me with an expression both puzzled and amazed.”

  Privately, Ridgway blamed MacArthur for the debacle at Chosin. “I regard General MacArthur’s insistence on retaining control from Tokyo, 700 miles from the battle areas, as unwarranted and unsound,” he wrote years later. “In my opinion, this was largely responsible for the heavy casualties and the near disaster which followed.” He also said that Army schools “could well choose this operation as a perfect example of how not to plan and conduct a campaign.”

  This was the general to whom Ridgway would report just a few weeks later.

  CHAPTER 12

  Ridgway turns the war around

  Not long after the end of the Chosin retreat, on the morning of December 23, 1951, in Korea, Lt. Gen. Walton Walker, the overall ground commander in Korea, notorious for ordering his driver to speed, had his jeep doing forty miles per hour on a road glazed with ice as they headed north from Seoul toward the nearby town of Uijeongbu. His driver was trying to pass a convoy cautiously moving at ten miles an hour when the jeep slammed into the back of a South Korean weapons truck, throwing Walker from the jeep and killing him. On the same day, Ridgway was ordered to replace him. There long have been rumors that one reason the succession could occur so quickly was that MacArthur had been on the verge of firing Walker and already had lined up a replacement. No hard evidence of this has ever surfaced, but there was enough talk of it that Korea veteran T. R. Fehrenbach, in his history of the ground war there, remembered that “for days a whisper had run through command channels of the Eighth Army that Walker was through.”

  In Washington, on the other side of the world, it was still the evening of December 22. Ridgway was sipping a highball at a pre-Christmas cocktail party when he got word that he was to take command in the war. He flew out of Washington the next night. The approach he would take in his first hours, days, and weeks in command was perhaps as fine a performance as any by an American general in the twentieth century. Had it occurred in World War II, the Ridgway takeover likely would be immortalized in film. But it happened in the small, divisive, unpopular Korean War and so, unfortunately, has largely been forgotten.

  • • •

  Ridgway had enjoyed maybe the most satisfying career of his generation of Army officers. He had worked under MacArthur at West Point, where he stood out for his organizational skills and in fact turned down a job offer from the New York Giants, who in the early 1920s stood atop the baseball world, just as the Yankees would later. But he was closer to Marshall, whom he first met in 1919, than he ever was to MacArthur. Ridgway and Marshall served together several times—in the 15th Infantry Regiment in China in 1925–26, at Fort Benning’s Infantry School in 1929–30, and in Chicago in 1933–36. At the Infantry School, Ridgway remembered, Marshall had been a strong and constant presence:

  There was hardly a tactical exercise, during the time that I attended that course, that he did not personally attend. . . . He put great emphasis on simplifying our very complicated field orders at that time. They had grown up in the staff procedures during World War I, so that it took you hours to really digest an attack order, or something. He put great insistence on stripping that thing down to essentials. He put great emphasis on an officer being able to stand up and dictate an order orally, and somebody just take down notes.

  Marshall was staying at Maj. Ridgway’s house at the Presidio, in San Francisco, in 1939 at about the time he was notified that he had been selected to be the next chief of staff of the Army, back when that job was far more significant than it is today. That same year, Marshall and Ridgway carried out their special mission in South America to secure military transit rights through Brazil. Years later, after commanding in the Korean War and then being Army chief of staff, Ridgway would dedicate his book The Korean War to Marshall.

  In World War II, Ridgway enjoyed a meteoric rise. He began the war as a colonel who prepared and delivered Marshall’s morning briefing, summarizing developments in the war over the previous twenty-four hours. Copies of the briefing also were delivered to Secretary of War Stimson and President Roosevelt. From there he went on to be assistant commander of the 82nd Airborne Division, then to command that division in Sicily and Normandy, and finally he commanded the airborne corps at the Battle of the Bulge and in Germany.

  In the crucible of Normandy, Ridgway’s division, with just twelve battalions, lost fourteen battalion commanders in four weeks. He found combat in the Bulge later that year to be even tougher. “No one knew where anyone else was,” he said. “Just sheer luck that I wasn’t picked up by the Germans.”

  One of the hard lessons he took away from that war was that

  the best of troops will fail if the strain is big enough. . . . I have commanded in World War II the finest troops the U.S. had. . . . I have seen individuals break in battle, and I have seen units perform miserably. The latter was always because of poor leadership. But sometimes, failure of the individual was not due to leadership. It just gets to the point where a man can’t take it anymore—that’s all. . . . I saw men in Normandy in a few cases where the strain was too damn much for them. Casualties were very, very heavy, men were falling all around them, and they just walked off crying. Always be easy on a man like that. Help him get back to the rear. Nine times out of 10 he will come out of it all right. Sometimes he can be ruined for life, though.

  This was a sharp contrast to the attitude Patton had shown in World War II. Ridgway was indeed different from Patton and MacArthur—a younger man, with a more modern approach to leadership and a strong democratic streak. Once, explaining why he did not like to speak to soldiers from stages or platforms, he said, “I always disliked standing above people. I’m no better than they are. In rank, yes; in experience, yes; but not as a man. . . . When reviewing troops I would never permit them to raise a reviewing stand. I always stood there on the field, six to eight feet from the right flank of the unit going by. Then I could look into the eyes of the men going by. Looking into their eyes tells you something—and it tells them something, too.” Knowing how to read the mood
of soldiers is also part of being a general, and Ridgway would give a memorable display of that skill during his first days in Korea that winter of 1950–51.

  Ridgway’s actions in the weeks after his arrival were a model of how to revitalize the spirit and reverse the fortunes of a sagging military force. He left Washington determined to switch the Americans in Korea to the offensive. He stopped in Tokyo to see MacArthur, his first problem to defuse. He did not trust the aging commander, nor did he think that MacArthur had handled the war well. He also knew that MacArthur had considered relieving Walker. “Everybody in life has their fallibilities and MacArthur had them to an extraordinary extent, which apparently he concealed from the public,” Ridgway said later. “I was well aware when I reported to General MacArthur on the day after Christmas of 1950 that I was on dangerous ground. I’d have to be very careful. I knew his temperament. I knew there would be no hesitancy in relieving me if I did something he disliked. But he couldn’t have been more generous.”

  Ridgway would have to be especially careful not to get caught in the crossfire between Gen. MacArthur and President Truman. Ridgway thought MacArthur had failed in his duty to Truman, writing later that “beginning in 1950, the presidential authority was treated with disrespect, insidiously at first, then with increasing boldness, and finally with flagrant, if not with deliberate disobedience of orders.” Unlike MacArthur, Ridgway believed Truman was pursuing an understandable and explainable strategy in the war: