The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  I thought the president had made it unmistakably clear that his primary concern was not to be responsible for initiating World War III. . . . His instructions to MacArthur were categoric, and disregarded in most cases, that he did not want to start World War III. MacArthur had been pressing to attack China, to bring [Nationalist] Chinese troops onto the Korean Peninsula, and to impose a blockade of the Chinese coast.

  After meeting with MacArthur in Tokyo, Ridgway flew to Korea. That afternoon, he released a letter to his troops. “You will have my utmost,” he vowed. “I shall expect yours.”

  The next morning, he set out to study the rugged terrain on which he would fight. He climbed into a B-17 bomber, crawled along its catwalk across the bomb bay and into the bombardier’s compartment, and ordered the pilot to fly the old four-engined warplane over the hills and rivers of central Korea at an altitude of just three thousand feet. Ridgway sat in the Plexiglas-enclosed nose with a map unfolded across his lap and looked down. “The granite peaks rose to six thousand feet, the ridges were knife-edged, the slopes steep, and the narrow valleys twisted and turned like snakes,” he recalled. “The roads were trails, and the lower hills were covered with shrub oaks and stunted pines, fine cover for a single soldier who knew how to conceal himself. It was guerrilla country.”

  After he landed, Ridgway took care of politics, visiting South Korean president Syngman Rhee for thirteen minutes and assuring him that the Americans would not abandon him. “I intend to stay,” he told Rhee. At that point, he said, the Korean leader’s “impassive face broke into a broad smile. He took my hand in both of his.”

  Next, and most important, he headed out to spend three days visiting his battlefield commanders and assessing their states of mind, asking himself each time, “Is he confident, does he know what he is doing, does he know the terrain in his area?” These sessions proved even more worrisome to him than did the rugged landscape. He was taken aback to find out that some generals were not moving around the front lines of their assigned sectors. “These division commanders did not know the terrain,” he concluded. Seeing some prominent mountains, he asked one of the commanders their names. “He did not know them. He didn’t even know the name of the river that ran through his sector. I asked what about that ground over there—is that feasible for armor? Well, he did not know that either.” It was a worrisome finding for Ridgway. Lower echelons were equally dismaying. He found battalion commanders “roadbound,” neglecting the surrounding ridges and also failing to cooperate with adjacent units. “Your infantry predecessors would roll over in their graves the way you have been conducting operations here,” Ridgway told one officer. His next step was to see as many enlisted soldiers as possible. This also was a surprise to him. “The troops were confused—they had been badly handled tactically, logistically. . . . They didn’t know just what was going on.”

  When Ridgway visited the front lines, the lack of confidence was palpable throughout the ranks. “I could sense it the moment I came into a command post. I could read it in their eyes, in their walk. I could read it in the faces of their leaders, from sergeants right up to the top. They were unresponsive, reluctant to talk. I had to drag information out of them. There was a complete absence of that alertness, that aggressiveness, that you find in troops whose spirit is high.” His overall conclusion: “The consensus from private to general was, ‘Let’s get the hell out.’ That was the prevalent spirit through the Eighth Army. . . . The only way to go was up. It couldn’t get worse.” Lt. Col. Walter Winton, his aide, later succinctly summarized the war situation as “Weather terrible, Chinese ferocious, morale stinko.”

  Ridgway also was troubled to find that the Eighth Army’s headquarters was located in a warm, comfortable, well-lit building some 180 miles south of the front lines. It was Fredendall in North Africa all over again. He found the Eighth Army’s staff “very mediocre.” He ordered the headquarters moved northward, far closer to the front, and there made his office out of two eight-by-twelve tents, where he would sit for hours to study a giant relief map of the Korean Peninsula. At his first meeting with Marine Gen. O. P. Smith, the Chosin commander, Smith informed him that the Marines did not want to serve under Almond anymore. “I told him frankly that we had been put out on a limb and we’d gotten ourselves off that limb, that we’d lost some confidence in higher command,” Smith recalled. It was a damning comment—Smith was effectively firing his superiors. A sympathetic Ridgway promised that he would do his best to see that the Marine division would not again be placed under Almond’s command.

  Ridgway dropped down several echelons of command to both encourage and assess commanders below the level of general officers. He told them to begin patrolling vigorously, at first in small groups and then in company and battalion size. This was designed to boost both their confidence and their knowledge of the terrain. “Ridgway was such a breath of fresh air,” recalled one of the best regimental commanders, Col. John Michaelis. “Spit and fire. I’ll never forget. He came to my CP in a jeep, grenades hung on his shoulder harness, brisk-walking, beetle-eyed, looking right at you.” Ridgway told Michaelis that if his regiment could attack and hold the ground, he would be reinforced by a division in twenty hours, and by a full corps a day after that. All Ridgway was saying was that success would be recognized and strongly supported, but it was not the message that Michaelis had been hearing from his previous commanders.

  The forty-eight-hour tour of the battlefield led Ridgway to two conclusions. First, despite his aggressive intentions, it was just not the time to launch a major attack. “What was perfectly, clearly apparent was that this army was in no condition for a major offensive action,” he recalled. Second, he would need some new commanders. “The leadership I found in many instances sadly lacking, and I said so out loud. The unwillingness of the army to forgo certain creature comforts, its timidity about getting off the scanty roads, its reluctance to move without radio and telephone contact, and its lack of imagination in dealing with a foe whom they soon outmatched in firepower and dominated in the air and surrounding seas—these were not the fault of the GI but of the policymakers at the top.” But, he thought, “you can’t relieve them right away. . . . You’d tear the whole thing apart.” Instead, “little by little, we ease them out.”

  The lively correspondence that followed between Ridgway and Army chief of staff Gen. J. Lawton Collins is fascinating to read even now, six decades later. “Everything is going fine,” Ridgway wrote in one of his first messages, on January 3, 1951. “We shall be in for some difficult days but I am completely confident of the ability of the Eighth Army to accomplish every mission assigned.” Not just the substance but the style of his language was a world away from MacArthur’s pompous, Latinate, and overwrought messages.

  Five days later, Ridgway dropped the other shoe in a long letter to Collins warning that both he and Collins would need to “be ruthless with our general officers if they fail to measure up.” He explained, in an underlined sentence, that he was concerned by “a lack of aggressiveness among some Corps and Division commanders.” In a separate message sent the same day, he also asked Collins to send him three “young, vigorous, mentally flexible Brigadiers already marked for high command by reason of demonstrated leadership.” Ridgway already was contemplating replacing some division commanders. In fact, that was item six on his agenda for a meeting with his senior commanders the same day. In a meeting a few days later, he stated flatly to MacArthur’s new chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Doyle Hickey: “Can’t execute my future plans with present leaders.” He repeated that phrase in a follow-up memorandum to Collins.

  Ridgway’s reliefs

  Ridgway’s first sacking in Korea became notorious, probably intentionally so. Ridgway was being briefed by Col. John Jeter, the operations chief (or G-3) of I Corps. He grew uneasy when Jeter dwelled on a series of defensive positions the corps planned to take as it fell back. “What are your attack plans?” the general asked.<
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  There were none. “Sir, we are withdrawing,” Jeter said.

  “You are relieved,” Ridgway snapped, or so went the story that rocketed around the Army in Korea. In fact, Ridgway did not say exactly that—he acted more formally, going through channels—but the effect was the same: Jeter was ousted, and word got out, probably as Ridgway intended. (This was at least the second snap relief of Jeter’s career: Late in World War II, he had been fired as a regimental commander by Maj. Gen. Donald Stroh, then commander of the 8th Infantry Division, but was given command of another regiment in another division.) Jeter was replaced by Col. Harold K. Johnson, who thirteen years later would become chief of staff of the Army—and who would react differently to a wave of firings by one division commander in Vietnam.

  Ridgway was sending a message. He was preparing for a sweep of most of the Army’s leadership in Korea. He was doing what Pershing had done in World War I and Marshall in World War II: conducting a housecleaning of generals. Over the following three months, he relieved one of his corps commanders ( John Coulter, who was shuffled into a liaison job and retired a year later), five of his six division commanders, and fourteen of his nineteen regimental commanders.

  But in Korea there was a key difference that would make Ridgway’s reliefs far more difficult to carry out: He was commanding not in a world war, but rather in a small, limited, controversial “police action.” The Marshall model did not work as well in such circumstances. In response to pressure from the Pentagon, he would take pains to disguise the moves as normal rotations. He did that so successfully that even today some historians insist that Ridgway did not relieve generals but simply rotated out the tired—a contention that is disproved by a review of Ridgway’s correspondence at the time.

  Ridgway’s first relief of a general set off alarms in Washington. On January 14, Maj. Gen. Robert McClure was fired by Ridgway and Almond after just thirty-nine days in command of the 2nd Division, where he had replaced Maj. Gen. Laurence Keiser, who himself had been sacked. Two days later, Ridgway received a classified message of concern from Lt. Gen. Edward Brooks, the Army’s chief of personnel: “Press here has played up relief of McClure. With return of Barr and Church already scheduled plus possibility of Gay and Kean, Gen. [Wade Hampton “Ham”] Haislip fears if not handled most skillfully, what has appearance of wholesale relief of senior commanders, may well result in congressional investigation.”

  Ridgway apparently did not take the admonition to heart. In mid-February, he got a rocket from the Army vice chief of staff himself, Gen. Haislip, who warned him that the reliefs might raise too many questions in Washington’s political circles. “We are still very much concerned about the proposed rapid release of officers in Korea as it may result in a Congressional investigation and a loss of all the new confidence the people are now showing,” wrote Haislip, who is remembered now, if at all, for having introduced Dwight Eisenhower to Mamie Doud in 1915. “I suggest very strongly that you go slowly and think of the possible effect on us that each proposed change may cause.” Collins, the Army chief, who had been an advocate of swift relief during World War II, had shifted his position and now worried about the way it would look to the public. Haislip added that Collins, in his public remarks, was being less than candid about the reliefs that had occurred so far, of the 7th Division’s Barr and the 24th Division’s John Church: “Thus far Joe has justified Barr’s and Church’s return by stating that we will take advantage of their experience in training but the more who come home the more unconvincing such an answer will be.”

  Ridgway was a protégé of Marshall’s, but the system of generalship Marshall employed in World War II was being strained by the politics of this very different war. “Dear Ham,” Ridgway wrote back apologetically. “I am disturbed lest I may have acted in deviation from your wishes in the matter of this home coming [sic] general officers.”

  Ultimately, Ridgway would be permitted to go forward with his planned series of reliefs—as long as he did them slowly and did not discuss them much in public. While this might have soothed Congress, the low-key approach might have made the reliefs more alarming internally than they would have been. Normally, command of a division in combat is a stepping-stone to the top jobs in the Army, but in this case, as often happened with reliefs in World War II, the removed commanders moved to training posts in the United States and thence to obscure retirements. (Of the ousted generals, Barr was sent to the Armor School at Fort Knox, Kentucky; Church to the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia; and the 2nd Division’s Keiser to the Infantry Replacement Center at Indiantown Gap, Pennsylvania. The 25th Division’s William Kean was given command of III Corps at Camp Roberts, California, while Hobart “Hap” Gay, who had led the 1st Cavalry Division, was tucked away as the deputy commander of the Fourth Army at Fort Sam Houston, on the outskirts of San Antonio, Texas.) Despite his efforts to play down the reliefs, Ridgway was unambiguous in describing his approach to the novelist James Michener: “Try to find good men to fill the key spots. Give them full authority for individual action, but check them relentlessly to see they speed the main job. And if they don’t produce, fire them.” He had captured the Marshall system in a nutshell, but subsequent events would prove his comment to be more an epitaph than a prescription for it.

  “Dear Matt,” Collins, the Army chief of staff, wrote on May 24, 1951, in a long letter that approved the relief of John Coulter. “I expect he will elect to retire, which I hope he will do with no trace of bitterness.” But he told Ridgway that if he insisted on getting rid of another corps commander, Frank “Shrimp” Milburn, Ridgway would need to find a place to park him, because there was nowhere for him in the Army back in the continental United States. “It would be very helpful if you feel Shrimp has lost some of his steam as a Corps commander, if you could use him as a Deputy Commander to Van Fleet.” Ridgway also requested the removal of several South Korean commanders, including one corps commander.

  Interestingly, one commander Ridgway did not seek to relieve was Almond. Almost certainly, he did not want to pick a fight with MacArthur, who had been Almond’s protector. But he also liked the Army officer’s aggressive streak and knew that all he needed to do was occasionally restrain the crusty Virginian: “Almond was a very able officer. Almond is one of the few commanders I’ve had that, instead of ever having to push at all, I would have to keep an eye on unless he, maybe in his boldness, would have jeopardized his command or executed a risky operation.” Still, Ridgway said he saw how others were rubbed the wrong way by Almond, who, he once observed, “was apt to be pretty rough on other people’s sensibilities, and he could be cutting and intolerant.”

  Ridgway’s wave of reliefs in Korea in early 1951 would prove to be a fulcrum point for the U.S. Army in its history of how it handles its leaders. Ridgway was firing an entire group of generals, yet at the same time he had been told by the Pentagon to veil his moves. The Army was in an odd position, fighting what Mark Clark, always politically sensitive, would call “the most unpopular war in United States history.” Truth be told, the war was not even much welcomed inside the Army. “He [Ridgway] told me he had a hell of a time getting generals to want to come to Korea,” remembered Roger Cirillo, a historian of the modern U.S. Army. Also, the optics of relief are more difficult in a war that is going badly than in one in which victory is increasingly apparent, as was the case with most World War II reliefs after mid-1943. It is human nature that it is more difficult to admit to a failure when one is failing broadly.

  These firings by Ridgway also came during the one-year period in which George Marshall stepped in as defense secretary. Ridgway almost certainly knew that his old mentor would approve of the reliefs. Painfully aware that his mental powers were declining, Marshall decided to step down after just one year as secretary of defense. When Dean Acheson, who knew Marshall from the State Department, argued with Marshall against his leaving, he was surprised to see a flash of irritation from the
old general. Marshall then confessed to Acheson that “he had increasing difficulty in recalling proper names even when he knew the persons well. He was much humiliated by the weakness.” Marshall’s memory deteriorated rapidly in the ensuing years. He would die in October 1959.

  • • •

  In just a few short months of dynamic action, Ridgway turned the Korean War around. At the end of January 1951, the Americans for the first time not only stopped a full divisional assault by the Chinese but “virtually annihilated” the attackers. A few weeks later, the Eighth Army drove the Chinese back, taking a key airfield near Seoul. With the same number of troops that MacArthur had overseen in defeat in the fall of 1950, Ridgway turned back a Chinese offensive in the spring, with half of the fourteen Chinese divisions in Korea badly mauled and generally withdrawing north of the 38th parallel.

  Strong, determined, considered leadership went a long way. When Ridgway arrived, “it was a disintegrating army,” said Harold K. Johnson, a staff officer and then regimental commander in Korea who later became Army chief of staff. “It was something that was bordering on disgrace. In a matter of about six weeks Gen. Ridgway had turned a defeated army around.” To be sure, not everyone was impressed with Ridgway. Allan Millett, the preeminent American historian of the Korean War, called him “as mean-spirited an American officer as ever wore stars.” Ridgway, wrote Millett, “had a short temper and made snap judgments of people and operations that could not be challenged. Ridgway could be jealous, moody, hyper-competitive and harsh in public comments about his peers. He had a tendency to cut corners yet expect perfection of subordinates, and he held a Copernican view of the Army that put Matthew B. Ridgway in the center of that universe.”