The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq

by Victor Davis Hanson

  What made him a great savior general, in the manner of Belisarius or Sherman, was his recognition that the risks he ran—rushing to turn the American army from defense to offense in a matter of days—would not be fatal to his cause should the unforeseen occur. In contrast, going far into North Korea not only might end in failure, but in theory result in such a failure as to endanger the entire American effort to save a viable South Korea.

  The Joint Chiefs instructed both Ridgway and Van Fleet in May 1951 to hold roughly at the 38th Parallel—in response to diplomatic decisions about the larger strategic picture in the Far East and in reaction to the loss of public support for another offensive stage of the war. Had they thought and ordered otherwise, Ridgway would have dutifully led the offensive northward. In other words, the decision was not Ridgway’s alone—even though his personal view that it was unwise to reinvade the north had in turn influenced the Truman administration not to risk another race to the Yalu.

  Ridgway was not in command in summer 1953, when the final armistice was signed. Critics of his decision two years earlier to stop at the 38th Parallel had plenty of opportunity to restart the war and drive the Communists back beyond the Yalu—had they believed Ridgway was wrong that there were not sufficient American forces, United Nations support, approval of the American people, and surety that China and Russia would not send massive reinforcements to prevent the loss of the North. As Ridgway himself put it,

  At the end of the campaign, our battle line would have been stretched from 110 miles to 420 miles, and the major responsibility for holding it would have been ours, for it would have been beyond the capability of the ROK [the Republic of (South) Korea] army. The questions then would have been: Will the American people support an army of the size required to hold this line? Will they underwrite the bloody cost of a Manchurian campaign? Will they commit themselves to an endless war in the bottomless pit of the Asian mainland? I thought then and I think now that the answer to these questions was “No.”50

  The Ridgway Record (April 1951)

  The enemy tested Ridgway immediately. The Chinese resumed attacking just as he arrived at the front. Between December 31 and January 5, the Communists began a third phase of their offensive, following both the October crossing of the Yalu (October 27–31, 1950) and the second-stage massive concentration against the Eighth Army (beginning on December 9, 1950). Seoul fell again on January 3–4, at the end of Ridgway’s first week on the job. But unlike the retreat from the Yalu, Ridgway withdrew slowly under heavy air and artillery support, hoping the advancing Chinese would butt up against nearby prepared lines and be easily targeted by air strikes. They were. By January 15, their offensive sputtered and wore itself out—just ten days after the American loss of Seoul. More than eight thousand enemy troops were lost to American bombing alone.

  As the Chinese and North Koreans tired, Ridgway’s new army readied for his first counteroffensive. This time troops were assured that their officers were acquainted with Chinese tactics. They had firm supply lines, and, if successful, they would not rush pell-mell again across the 38th Parallel to ensure approving headlines back home. The subsequent American turnabout was nearly unbelievable. On December 26, 1950, Ridgway had officially taken command of the retreating Eighth Army. On January 15, during “Operation Wolfhound,” United Nations forces had ceased their retreat and sent reconnaissance patrols to reestablish contact with the enemy. Ten days later the Eighth Army and Korean counterparts turned around and headed north back to the Han River. In three weeks, Korea was an entirely different war. Suddenly the cruel winter cold was not America’s enemy, but its ally.

  On February 5, 1951, “Operation Roundup” saw the Tenth Corps advancing on the eastern flank. The fourth Chinese offensive, far from pushing the United Nations contingents back to Pusan, stalled on February 17. In response, a counteradvance, dubbed by Ridgway “Operation Killer,” helped to set the stage for the collapse of North Korean and Chinese forces south of the Han River. It was followed by yet a third American-led offensive, “Operation Ripper,” in which the Eighth Army retook Seoul on March 14 for the second and final time, while the Ninth and Tenth Corps, under difficult conditions, crossed the Han to the east.

  Ridgway had under his direct command some 150,000 American and South Korean front-line combat troops. His aggregate allied theater forces on the ground almost matched the combined Chinese and North Korean armies. As word got out of Ripper’s success, Ridgway was deluged with congratulations from Generals Eisenhower and Bradley, Dean Rusk, and George Marshall—who all at various times had approved and disapproved of crossing the 38th Parallel, as the situation changed.

  By April 5 there was yet another advance, “Operation Rugged,” in which the American-led coalition recrossed parts of the 38th Parallel and occupied a new front dubbed “Line Kansas.” A Chinese “Fifth Phase” offensive only temporarily pushed the Americans southward, who regrouped and fought their way back to their previous positions. In Ridgway’s view, only such a steady series of offensives could get the Eighth Army back to, or slightly beyond, the 38th Parallel before the peacetime public back home revolted entirely at the staggering human and material cost of the war—and at some point would call an end to such a back-and-forth war of advance, retreat, and advance.

  Truman finally relieved General MacArthur on April 11 and promoted Ridgway in his place—a move the president had long wished to make, but now found politically and militarily feasible given that the United Nations forces were once again at the 38th Parallel. General Ridgway had saved Korea. He had not criticized Truman’s limitations on theater operations. And he had established a cadre of officers who were convinced that they could preserve the Rhee government without widening the war to China. MacArthur may have been an icon in America, but he was increasingly felt to be irrelevant on the ground in Korea—again, due to Ridgway’s restoration of the American cause.

  Truman also astutely wagered that after public anger over MacArthur’s firing quieted down, an irate American people might soon come to the same conclusion. With the failure of the fifth Chinese offensive, and the appointment of General James Van Fleet to take over Ridgway’s field command of the Eighth Army, Ridgway’s promotion to theater commander ensured there would be no more public strategic arguments between military leaders and the Truman administration. In short, Ridgway’s direct command of the battlefield ended after less than four months—with a stabilized front and United Nations forces in control of nearly all of South Korea. The war was back where it started six months earlier, something the Communists had never anticipated.

  There would be off-and-on fighting around the 38th Parallel for the next two years, as both sides sought military advantage to influence the chronically stalled armistice talks that had begun in June 1951. In April 1952, after more than sixteen months in Korea and Japan, Matthew Ridgway was promoted to Supreme NATO Commander in Europe and left the Korean theater entirely, a year before the final armistice agreement. Eighth Army commander General Van Fleet would also be transferred before the armistice; he left Korea nine months after Ridgway, in February 1953. The Korean War for all practical purposes ended with the signing of the armistice treaty on July 27, 1953, with Generals Mark Clark and Maxwell Taylor in command of a mostly quiet front roughly along the 38th Parallel.

  What had Matthew Ridgway actually done in roughly one hundred days on the ground, between late December and early April 1951, to ensure this remarkable turnaround that had saved South Korea?

  Most important, he sparked a radical change in morale. Ridgway was at first appalled when he arrived at the front: “The men I met along the road, those I stopped to talk to and to solicit gripes from—they too all conveyed to me a conviction that this was a bewildered army, not sure of itself or its leaders, not sure what they were doing there, wondering when they would hear the whistle of that homebound transport.”51

  How did he turn the defeated in spirit to confident attackers? Ridgway immediately embarked on two sweeping ch
anges. He insisted that soldiers be resupplied far more rapidly with warm clothing, hot food, regular mail service, and up-to-date weapons. One-third of the American troops, he discovered upon arrival in Korea, lacked proper winter protection. His concern with comfort was not intended to reward soldiers for retreating, but rather to demonstrate concern for their ordeal—and, more important, to ready them for the offensive challenge ahead. A restoration of fighting spirit, Ridgway argued, is something that “cannot be imposed from above, but that must be cultivated in every heart, from on up. It is rooted, I believe, in the individual’s sense of security, of belonging to a unit that will stand by him, as units on both sides and in the rear stand by all other units.”52

  Ridgway forbade the use of the common slang term “bug out” to describe the collapse of the Eighth Army at the Yalu, even as he sought to ensure that it never happened again. Soldiers who met him on arrival found him “courteous.” He publicly managed to praise MacArthur, even as he was determined never to repeat his superior’s rash advance to the Chinese border—a decision made hundreds of miles away without knowledge of morale, terrain, or weather. Ridgway changed both strategy and attitudes without giving the impression that both General MacArthur and General Walker had committed grievous errors. Walker was dead and MacArthur in the midst of a political campaign of sorts; Ridgway felt that criticism of either would be a simple waste of time.53

  Soon the defeated Eighth Army would be asked to fight in a more aggressive and more dangerous fashion, often in the hills away from supply depots below. “It was not their doing,” Ridgway lamented, “that had brought them far under strength to this unfortunate country with major shortages in weaponry and insufficient clothing and food, and had spread them across an area far too wide for them to maintain an effective front.” One of the hardest tasks for a general is to ask a defeated army to go back on the offensive when it is assured that it will suffer for the immediate future even more casualties before it eventually suffers less in victory. If the men could see that their commander was as cold as they were, walking among them, and dressed and eating like them, they would appreciate that their officers were one with them.

  Ridgway was even more concerned about the defeatist mood among Walker’s officer corps: “Every command post I visited gave me the same sense of lost confidence and lack of spirit. The leaders, from sergeant on up, seemed unresponsive, reluctant to answer my questions. Even their gripes had to be dragged out of them and information was provided glumly, without the alertness of men whose spirits are high.”54 He approached the problem in the same fashion that all successful generals have done. First, he would lead subordinate officers by example. The Eighth Army main headquarters was 150 miles behind the lines; Ridgway moved it to the front. He immediately began driving to and flying over the advanced positions, meeting division commanders within his first few days of command—in much the same way that Major General George S. Patton had restored morale and confidence to shattered and retreating American forces under the command of a far distant and incompetent Major General Fredendall at the Kasserine Pass in February 1943.

  Ridgway, just as Sherman had schooled himself about the topography of Georgia, memorized the battlefield and mastered the terrain: “Every road, every cart track, every hill, every stream, every ridge in that area where we were fighting or which we hope to control—they all became as familiar to me as the features of my own backyard.”55 Ridgway relieved several high officers—at one time or another the generals of at least five divisions—whom he deemed defeatist or “mediocre.” The Pentagon was not pleased that Ridgway was promoting colonels and sending back sacked generals for whom there were no pre-retirement billets in Washington. But Ridgway pushed to reenergize the existing leadership with offensive zeal. “Don’t want to see your defense plans,” he told commanders in the field, “want to see your attack plans.” He demanded that field officers, like his central command, get close to the fighting. Colonels and generals were to visit other battlefield posts to integrate tactics and support.56

  He insisted that the Joint Chiefs and the political leadership back in Washington cease leaking to the press contingency plans for a retreat to Pusan or off the peninsula. Instead, he said, they should let it be known that the Americans would retake Seoul. Ridgway made his nonnegotiable objectives clear almost immediately to the shaky South Korean government.57

  “Corrective measures,” Ridgway argued, “could not be confined to Korea alone, however, for some of our major weaknesses had their roots in failures at home.”58 In response, by late January 1951, Ridgway had drafted a comprehensive manifesto, “Why Are We Here? What Are We Fighting For?” He had its talking points distributed to all the soldiers under his command. Because during the fiasco of December, soldiers loudly had complained that they had no business in a barren wasteland fighting Chinese while their South Korean allies often ran from the fight, Ridgway felt the entire American presence in Korea needed a uniform and easily referenced rationale. Why, after all, would a mechanic from New Jersey or an Iowa farmer risk dying in the bloom of youth in Korea to keep his far distant nuclear-armed homeland safe? Ridgway argued that what would win Korea was not just superior discipline and matériel, but confidence in American civilization and national purpose. If soldiers did not believe, they would not win.59

  In his characteristically upbeat message to the troops, Ridgway systematically covered all the reasons for American intervention in his newly released manifesto: legal—the United Nations had authorized, and the U.S. Congress had funded, the defense of South Korea; moral—the Americans were fighting to preserve the freedom of the Korean people, to whom they had given their word and bond; political—his command was struggling to ensure Western freedoms to anyone who was willing to fight alongside for them, in what had become a global struggle to oppose a Communist creed that sought to end the freedom of the individual; and practical—the fight inside Korea was simply part of a larger war in which America was threatened by aggressive Communist totalitarianism. How well the United States fought abroad would determine to what degree it was safe at home. Or as Ridgway put it, “The real issues are whether the power of Western civilization, as God has permitted it to flower in our own beloved lands, shall defy and defeat Communism; whether the rule of men who shoot their prisoners, enslave their citizens, and deride the dignity of man, shall displace the rule of those to whom the individual and his individual rights are sacred.”

  Modern critics often caricature Ridgway’s lofty rhetoric about Western civilization versus savagery—inasmuch as he tried to persuade his troops that the stakes were no less than the survival of Western culture, that Korea was the stage for a Manichean struggle between godless world Communism and liberal Christian democracy. Even his contemporary civilian superiors expressed unease with Ridgway’s brutal labels for his offensives—names like Operation “Ripper” and “Killer”—that might unduly frighten the American public about the nature of a supposed “police action.”

  But Ridgway knew that this kind of war was new to American soldiers, not seen since the turn-of-the-century insurrection in the Philippines. It was simple to grasp the urgency of an existential global struggle like World War II. Asking soldiers to go into battle on behalf of “containment” was less easy to explain. Better, Ridgway felt, to emphasize how cruelly the Communists fought, and how such savagery was integral to their plans for global domination. That larger, more existential struggle might motivate an American soldier in a way that the doctrine of American geopolitical containment surely would not.

  As part of this effort, early on Ridgway pushed to integrate the troops under his command—an issue that had been under consideration for nearly a decade and enjoyed the support of the Truman administration but had stalled through bureaucratic infighting, congressional opposition, and lethargy within the Army. Yet as Ridgway began to repel the Chinese assault, his moral authority grew, and by April 1951 he began integrating African Americans in the Korean theater into previously segr
egated units under his command. By July, most combat forces were integrated, and by the end of the war, all U.S. armed forces were for the most part desegregated.60

  Ridgway’s optimism soon proved infectious. Even by late January, Army Chief of Staff General J. Lawton Collins was reporting back from a visit to Korea that morale had almost immediately improved. Soon MacArthur himself was mixing in occasional upbeat appraisals in his otherwise gloomy reports. True, the improved American spirit in itself did not overnight stop the momentum of thousands of Chinese as they stormed into Seoul. But as stated, Ridgway noted that advantages were already accruing to the allies—increased troops, better equipment, new and superior weapons, more supplies, shorter lines of supply, more training for the South Koreans—that would soon tip the scales back in favor of the Americans.61

  Ridgway changed tactics as well. He spread out his officers to hills and rough terrain. Advance would not be confined to roads. Soldiers would fight the Chinese at night. Unit commanders at the front would themselves have control over tactical air and artillery support. Control of terrain was to be considered fluid. Hurting the enemy rather than merely protecting a fixed line was the key. “There was nothing but our own love of comfort that bound us to the road. We too could get off into the hills, I reminded them, to find the enemy and fix him a position. I repeated to the commanders as forcefully as I could, the ancient Army slogan: Find them! Fix them! Fight Them! Finish Them!”62