The Airborne Grenadier

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As usual on a Marine jump-off, the leathernecks were not losing any time. Corporal Ardrick Hammon of Alton, Ill., radioman for an artillery observer, slogged his way north, so loaded with fighting and communications gear that he could stoop to tie the flapping lace of one combat boot. He felt a tap on his shoulder, looked into a lean face under a pile cap with three stars and a paratrooper's silver badge on it.

"Don't you want your shoe tied.'' asked Lieut. General Matthew Ridgway.

"No, sir," Hammon replied.

Ridgway knelt down and tied the shoe. "Is that too tight?" he asked.

"No, sir," said the abashed Hammon.

It was an odd gesture for a lieutenant general. Hammon and his fellow marines would never forget it. But for Matthew Bunker Ridgway, a soldier who possesses a passionate sense of detail, an instinct for the bonds that unite a commander and his troops, and a nice flair for showmanship, it was no effort at all. A few minutes later the general climbed into his helicopter and whirred off to another sector of his front line.

This week, with the precision of a machine, the marines and other divisions of Ridgway's Eighth Army ground their way northward over the mountains of central Korea. Their general's orders were simple: "Use every daylight hour to seek out and destroy the enemy. Inflict maximum casualties and sustain a minimum of your own. Withdraw to strong defensive positions at night. Search every piece ground. Do not push on until you have eliminated every Communist."

Such a tone may have sounded over-optimistic for an army facing an enemy three times its size, with huge reserves ot trained manpower behind him. But in fact, it sensibly understated the Eighth Army's present capability. In the last two weeks battle Ridgway's men had inflicted an estimated 30,000 casualties on Chinese and North Korean Communists, at small to themselves.

Politically, this had taken a handsome international bargaining point from the Chinese Communists, who had hoped to intimidate the United Nations by the threat of their "inevitable victory in Korea. Militarily, the U.N. army had regained its self-confidence and vindicated the contention of U.S. artillerymen that a compact, mobile fighting force, long on organization and heavy in firepower can stand up against the mass levies of a Communist war machine.

When last week's U.N. attack began, Matt Ridgway, an austerely handsome man of 56, tramped alongside the lead tank of a column, critically watching the two lines of infantrymen shuffle up the road a few hundred yards ahead. Neatly hooked to the web harness he wore over his trench coat were a paratrooper's first-aid kit and the hand grenade that has become as famous a trademark as George Patton's pearl-handled pistols.

Not Quite Impossible. Each day Ridgway shuttled across the front in his helicopter, marshaling his troops as carefully as a Roman general. When he left the column on Thursday, he headed for the landing strip where Captain Mike Lynch picked him up in an L17 liaison plane. Back at his headquarters, he said goodbye to General Mark Clark, Army Field Forces commander, who had visited Korea on an inspection trip. Then he went out to do some more inspecting of his own.

He brought to his G.I. a complaint that the envelopes G.I.s used for letters home were sticking together.* He ordered a division G-4 to provide fresh meat for his units seven out of ten days. When the G-4 mentioned the lack of refrigerators, Ridgway snapped, "The winter will give you time to work out the refrigeration problem." Back at his headquarters, he called in to his aide, Lieut. Colonel Walter Winton, "Walter, get word to Signal Corps to brush up on message pickups.

We've forgotten a thing we knew 30 years ago. The aircraft will need cable with weight on it, and the message center will need a couple of fish poles [used to hold messages aloft so liaison planes can snap them up in flight]. By God, I haven't seen a message pickup since I've been here.

In his hectoring, driving way, Matt Ridgway had changed Eighth Army out of all resemblance to the command, riddled with defeatism, that he had found two months before. Said one staff officer, He will give you a job that is almost impossible, but not quite impossible. It can be done."

Eighth Army's late commander, General Walton ("Johnny") Walker, was a steady, courageous battle leader who was inclined to flounder in staff work and had 11ttle imagination. After the Chinese Communists smashed into North Korea, neither Walker's starched generalship nor the remote-control direction of Douglas Mac-Arthur's staff in Tokyo could give the Army the direction it needed. Ridgway can. Omar Bradley called him "one of those tremendously valuable Army officers who are both outstanding commanders and amazingly competent staff officers. He can plan an action and he can execute it "

"Lord of Creation." Matt Ridgway began his Army career informally some 45 years ago, when he used to shout a sentry's challenge to visitors from the porch of the family quarters at Fort Walla Walla, Wash. His father, Colonel Thomas Ridgway, was a Regular Army artilleryman who had served with an international contingent in China during the Boxer Rebellion.

Matt entered West Point, in the class of 1917* He managed the football team played on the hockey squad. Commented the West Point yearbook: "Beyond doubt the busiest man in the place."

Like Eisenhower, Ridgway missed the fighting in World War I. But his overseas assignments between wars included China, Nicaragua and the Philippines. In central America he learned to speak Spanish, which later helped make him a lion of Washington's Latin American society.

Before World War II, Ridgway had been building a reputation as a staff officer. In 1942 he got his first big field assignment, first as assistant division commander, then commanding general of the 82nd Division, succeeding Omar Bradley.

A few weeks after he took over, the Pentagon decided to convert the 82nd into one of the first two U.S. airborne divisions. To show his men what paratrooping might be like, Ridgway, who had no particular airborne qualifications, hied himself to Fort Benning to make a parachute jump. "It was the most glorious feeling in the world," he told the dubious infantrymen. "You feel like the lord of creation floating way up above the earth.

For the next three years the 82nd's war diary read like a history of the development of airborne operations. Ridgway and his staff, with few precedents to go by, wrote their own field manuals as they went along. Ridgway jumped into battle with the division at Normandy, later led XVIII Corps at Nijmegen and the Ardennes. He had helped make airborne operations one of the Army's finest weapons.

A fellow officer says: "It makes him personally offended to be shot at." In Normandy, Ridgway and an aide were surprised by a German tank which rumbled up from the rear. The aide dived into a hole. Ridgway whipped his rifle to his shoulder and fired. For some inexplicable reason, the tank turned and clanked away. "I got him," bellowed Ridgway.

There was none of this recklessness about Ridgway's planning. He has been known to discuss nine different ways in which the enemy might react to a given move. He ruthlessly drove his subordinates. Once, after decorating a division commander for bravery, he dressed him down for not advancing quickly enough. After one of his best staff officers had made a rough landing during the Normandy jump, Ridgway sent for him. Flattered, the colonel expected congratulations on his safe arrival. Instead, Ridgway, noticing that he had lost his helmet, snapped, "Where the hell's your equipment?"

The Air Was Tense. After the war, Ridgway took off his jump boots to become again a military diplomat as U.S. representative on the U.N. Military Staff Committee and chairman of the Inter-American Defense Board in Washington. There, in 1946, he met a pretty, black-eyed widow of 30 named Mary ("Penny") Anthony, secretary to a Navy committeeman. After a year's courtship, they were married.

It was Ridgway's third marriage. The first two ended in divorce; with neither of his ex-wives is Ridgway on speaking terms.

In August 1949, after a tour as commander of the Caribbean area, Ridgway was brought back to the Pentagon to become deputy chief of staff for administration. (For a long time, Pentagon insiders have predicted that Ridgway will be Chief of Staff one of these days.) Paratrooper Ridgway pushed hard for building up the "vertical envelopment" war.

His aides at the Pentagon had no easier job than his officers in Europe. He would pound the desk with rage when someone gave him an evasive answer. Asked what it was like to work for Ridgway, an aide said, "Tense." "Ridgway tense?" "No," said the officer, "we're tense."

Out of the office, Ridgway could relax. He likes small dinner parties, has a reputation as a conversationalist, compounds drinks with a generous hand.

But even the tidy Ridgway house (Quarters No. 7) at Fort Myer has the breath of military austerity. The living room looks like a room a man had decorated. There is not a paper or a letter showing in the pigeonholes of the desk. Until Christmas week, one of the sights of the post was the general and 21-month old Matt Jr. standing together on their porch at dusk, stiff as ramrods, saluting the colors.

At 11:15 on the night of Dec. 22, while the Ridgways were attending a party next door to their house, the general was called to the telephone. He talked briefly to Lawton Collins, then rejoined the party. Next morning, over coffee in their second-floor study, he said gently, "Penny, I've got something to tell you. I'm going to Korea to replace Johnny Walker, who's been hurt."

Packing was no problem for Ridgway. He keeps a list of every article in all his 20-odd suitcases and trunks, as well as a master list of every item of clothing, furniture, etc., that he owns.

No More Bugout. When Matt Ridgway stepped off the plane in Korea, he lost no time stating his objectives. To President Syngman Rhee, worried by evacuation rumors, he said, "I aim to stay."

In some respects Eighth Army was not badly off. It had not lost much heavy equipment in the retreat from the north. Most of its troops were veterans who had learned how to fight in Asia.

But neither supplies nor training could raise the morale of a discouraged army. "Bugout fever"--a habitual desire to break contact and head southward--was epidemic. The men, retreating over ground they had once captured, thought moodily of another Pusan perimeter.

Basically, Eighth Army's defeatism was the result of a mistaken premise. Most of the troops still thought of the war in terms of a police action, with a definite beginning and end. They had not realized that the intervention of the Chinese Communists, while it defeated the police action, did not mean the end of the war.

Ridgway, who saw that the new U.N. objective in Korea was the attrition, if not the destruction, of the Chinese Red armies, set his troops right. The one hope was to kill as many Communists as possible. "Real estate," he declared, "is, here, incidental."

The general stumped every command post in Korea with his new slogan. Some men were skeptical. A captain sneered, "I was energetic like that when I came here first, too." But most Eighth Army commanders thought their new boss sounded good. Said one colonel, "I got the idea that here is a man who is not going to stand for any foolishness. We had talked about getting to the Yalu and getting home by Christmas . . . Well, I decided to quit thinking about a set time limit on this and decided we are here to fight. I don't like it in Korea, but I don't like to go away whipped, either."

After he took command, Ridgway fought a careful delaying action until he got his divisions regrouped to his satisfaction. Then he started the slow-moving northward movement.

The Long Bitter Lesson. The tactics of the new Eighth Army advance were far different from the heedlessness of last November's dash toward the Yalu. Ridgway worked his divisions ahead very slowly, sent armored spearheads in front to keep constant contact with the Reds. His offensive moved like a cautious driver going down a hill in second, careful not to lose control and anxious to avoid being hit at an intersection.

There was no bypassing the enemy. A unit would push into an area, then consolidate and mop up before moving on. But, despite the slower pace, Ridgway encouraged greater mobility. He ordered his G-4 section to strip down its cumbersome supply system. Eighth Army's infantry began to hear the old paratrooper slogan: "Throw away the extra weight."

Ridgway explained his approach: "The infantry has learned a long, bitter lesson. It was learned before at Kasserine Pass--you must dominate the heights before you can operate in the valleys. We have neglected that principle at times and have paid through the nose. Perhaps it was because we are lazy; it is hard work to climb those hills--I've climbed them. But we have made a phased advance, with coordination between units, leaving no hostile hill masses between them. Working behind the air and artillery, the infantry has gone in and killed the enemy in their foxholes . . ."

A famous U.S. regimental commander realistically summed up Ridgway's effect on the new Eighth Army: "He not only made us attack but he made us win. He made this into a professional army. The boys aren't up there fighting for democracy now. They are fighting because the platoon leader is leading them and the platoon leader is fighting because of the command, and so on right up to the top." A Pointer Is Stationary. Well into 1942, after the other officers of the 82nd Division had switched to jeeps, Ridgway reviewed troops mounted on a horse. The grenade that Ridgway now carries in his harness has caused as much comment among G.I.s and marines in Eighth Army as the horse did in the 82nd Division. Although the general is aware of the showmanship value of his grenade, no one who knows his past record doubts that he would welcome a chance to throw it. Cracked a marine sergeant, after seeing Ridgway at close quarters, "At least the damn grenade wasn't polished like somebody said it was."

The Eighth Army commander lives in a comfortable trailer at his headquarters. Each morning he is at his desk for the 6 o'clock briefing, and he insists on being briefed in a hurry. One morning an officer, late, hurried into the briefing session, his pointer nervously waving over the map as he tried to locate the areas in his notes. Snapped Ridgway: "Please put that pointer on something."

Although he often gets in bed by 9, he is apt to get up and write down plans he has been mulling over. Aides keep nine pads and pencils scattered at strategic points around his quarters. He frequently hands a sheaf of notes to one of them when he turns out at 5:30.

Ridgway is a man of formidable energy. In Africa during World War II, he would go out evenings and scan the horizon. Anyone who wandered near would be accosted with, "Look at that peak. Let's climb it." And off the general and the unfortunate would go. His aides used to duck into the nearest tent when the general came out to scan the evening sky. At home he plays deck tennis, handball, likes camping and hunting. In Korea he gets most of his exercise by walking. Sometimes, to channel some of his physical energy, he climbs a hill and strides endlessly back & forth along the skyline above his camp. Said an aide, "It is a terrifying sight."

Ridgway's job in Korea would wreck many a younger man's endurance. The tactical responsibility rests squarely on him--as it never did on Walton Walker. This is partly because of Ridgway's more independent personality, partly because MacArthur's headquarters now realizes that a field army in Korea cannot be successfully run from Tokyo.

Contrary to rumor, however, Ridgway does not bypass Tokyo and deal directly with Washington. He has his hands too full running his tactical operations to worry much about overall strategy in Asia. The Reds still possess great power. Ridgway's mission is to keep jabbing, keep destroying as much of that power as he can without compromising the safety of his own forces. He will make no predictions on whether these tactics will be successful in the end. "A war," he said, "is like a football game. You can't count on a thing until the last gun is fired."

* This week the Air Force announced that it had delivered 27 tons of new envelopes and writing paper to U.N. troops in Korea. *Among other members of his class: Generals J. Lawton Collins and Mark Clark.

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