The Face Is Familiar

(See Cover)

When Lieut. General James Alward Van Fleet arrived in Korea last month to take charge of the Eighth Army, he remarked professionally: "This looks like a good place to fight." Korea is not much like the plains of northern France, where he won his first fame as a combat commander; it is more like mountainous Greece, where as U.S. "adviser" to the Greek army he licked the Red guerrillas. But it is like both in that it is a hard-fought battlefield; and that, as the Army discovered rather late in Van Fleet's career, is the kind of place where he can make the most of an extraordinary talent as a troop commander.

In Greece, as in Korea, the enemy struck from a sanctuary to the north. In Greece, the Red forces could escape across the frontier to Russian satellites to rest, regroup and get new supplies; in Korea, the Chinese Reds are using Manchuria in the same way. In Korea, Van Fleet is picking up where he left off in Greece--fighting other, much more numerous enemy contingents in the same global conflict. The enemy face is now Mongolian instead of Mediterranean--but it is familiar.

When Matt Ridgway took up his new jobs in Tokyo, he said to Van Fleet: "I won't get in your hair, Van." But Van Fleet is carrying on Ridgway's strategy--to save the maximum allied lives by maneuver, to kill the maximum enemy troops by massed firepower. Last week, in the lull that followed the abortive and costly first phase of the enemy offensive, he told his troops that they had won a "great victory." But he warned them that the Communists could still strike another hard blow.

Commander at Work. Van Fleet, who got word of his new job while he was on leave at his brother's Florida orange grove took over his new command at a few hours' notice; but he quickly sized up the Eighth Army and its strategic and tactical situation. Last week, while conferring with a regimental commander on the battlefront, Van Fleet pointed with his big forefinger to a terrain feature on the map. "Is your second battalion still in this position?" he asked the colonel. The officer looked astonished at the Army commander's detailed knowledge, then grinned. "Yes, sir," he said, "it still is."

When Commander in Chief Ridgway (with whom Van Fleet had fought side by side in France) arrived last week for a tour of the front, the two three-star generals boarded Ridgway's C-54 at Eighth Army headquarters at Taegu and flew north. They landed first near I Corps headquarters of Lieut. General Frank ("Shrimp") Milburn. The three of them piled into a jeep, looking from the rear like three G.l.s out to scrounge chickens. Then Ridgway and Van Fleet transferred to light liaison planes, in four hours covered most of the Korean front, talked to eight division and corps commanders. Back in Taegu, they had a quick chat with President Syngman Rhee. Then Ridgway flew off to Tokyo and Van Fleet went back to his office. A backbreaking round of staff conferences, briefings, paper work and interviews with VIPs and correspondents awaited him.

In Taegu, Van Fleet lives in a one-story grey stucco house which the late Walton Walker and Ridgway occupied before him. He gets up at 5 or earlier, shaves and drinks coffee (he seldom takes any other breakfast). Then he attacks his paper work where he left it the night before. His office is a bare converted schoolroom, with a faded red and blue rug and a thicket of tactical maps.

Commander's Rise. Van Fleet, at 59, has the lithe, easy movements of a star footballer, which he once was. He is not the swaggering type of general, but his big frame exudes power and confidence; that, and kindliness, are his ways of getting what he wants.

His public manner is abrupt; he is at his best in informal talk. In Korea, he made an immediately favorable impression on his division commanders. Said one: "With me, they're all sons of bitches until they prove themselves otherwise. I've rarely met an Army commander who impressed me as much as Van Fleet on first meeting. Those blue eyes look right at you."

Van Fleet's trademark is a .45 pistol with an ivory handle; otherwise he dresses plainly. Last fortnight, during constant tours of the front, he got soaked to the skin in an open jeep, spent one night in a tent, once made his pilot fly in weather so bad that his aide's pilot refused to fly (and the aide followed in a jeep).

Born in New Jersey, raised in Florida, he was a topnotch fullback at West Point, taught R.O.T.C. and (while he was an instructor in military science and tactics) successfully coached football at the University of Florida. In 1944, when many of his West Point classmates--including Omar Bradley and Dwight Eisenhower--had won general's stars, Van Fleet was still a chicken colonel commanding a regiment. His superiors had recommended him for a star, but General George Marshall (then Army Chief of Staff) had tossed the recommendation in the wastebasket. Marshall, notoriously inexact in his memory of proper names, was confusing Van Fleet with another colonel, who was a heavy drinker. Marshall heatedly declared that he did not want drunken generals, refusing promotion to Van Fleet. Special irony: Van Fleet is a teetotaler.

"I'll Take Van Fleet." In the spring of 1944, a few weeks before Dday, General J. Lawton Collins (now Army Chief of Staff), who was then commanding the VII Corps, roamed the English countryside looking for a crack assault regiment to spearhead the invasion of Utah Beach. He found what he was looking for in an outfit in which he had served as a youngster in Germany in 1919; it was the 8th Regiment of the 4th Infantry Division, and it was commanded by Colonel Van Fleet, who was already a grey-haired 52.

Storming ashore with big, burly Van Fleet at its head, the 8th did well on D-day at Utah Beach. In the early phase of the Normandy fighting, Matt Ridgway's 82nd Airborne Division was in trouble with German armored counterattacks near Sainte-Mere-Eglise. "I jumped in my car," Collins recalls, "and headed up toward Van Fleet's command post. When I got there, I found him urging his men rapidly up to cut off the German counterattack on Ridgway. He had things well in hand, had seen Ridgway personally, and knew all about the tactical situation. He was fighting his regiment up to the hilt."

The German attack was beaten back. Collins phoned General Bradley, commander of the U.S. First Army: "Brad, I'll take Van Fleet as a division commander right now." In six months Van Fleet was a major general, commanding the 90th Division, in eight months a corps commander himself. After the war, General Eisenhower called Van Fleet's battle record the best of "any regimental, division or corps commander we produced."

"We're Lucky to Have Him." Early in 1948, after tours of administration duty in the U.S. and Germany, Van Fleet arrived in Athens to take command of JUSMAPG (Joint U.S. Military and Planning Group) in Greece. Some diplomats and diplomacy-minded generals in Washington feared that Van Fleet's simplicity and candor would make him a bull-in-the-china-shop among the proud, sensitive Greeks. What the Greeks needed was just someone to smash some china--and break the paralysis of their army. Van Fleet did just that, and they liked him for it. He became a popular hero to Greeks, who affectionately nicknamed him "Van Flit."*

Soldier Van Fleet got General Alexander Papagos, a fine soldier, appointed commander in chief, persuaded the Greeks to seize the initiative, and got after the rebels in their lairs. By the end of 1949, the guerrillas were reduced to 3,000 effectives, announced that they were "suspending operations." Says General Collins: "I think Van Fleet saved Greece. We're lucky to have someone like him for Korea."

When the Chief of Staff summoned him to his Korean command, Van Fleet was in command of the Second Army at Fort George G. Meade, Md., where he lived a quiet life with his wife Helen. His three children are "service"--his son is in the Air Force and his two daughters are married to Army officers--and he has seven grandchildren. (His major diversion after he left Greece was a lion-hunting safari in Africa with his son James. Van Fleet bagged one lion, his son two. When a rhinoceros appeared, which the Van Fleets had no license to shoot, they climbed a tree.)

Elusive Victory. Last week, after three weeks on the new job, Van Fleet summed up his impressions of the enemy: "They have gained much of their strength through fear and propaganda, and they have a complete or almost complete disregard for their losses in lives. I suppose that here, as in Greece, they maintain the same tight control, the same iron discipline, down to the smallest unit. I suspect that here, too, they kill those of their wounded whom they cannot evacuate. We do not throw lives away. But when we get the enemy as we have him now, where we can meet him and use our characteristics, our firepower, our supply and communications and mobility, the Chinese Communist hasn't got a chance."

In Korea last week, the weather was warm, the sky was blue, the fields were sprouting fresh green. During the lull in the fighting, G.I. laundry hung on the barrels of tank guns; some soldiers went swimming in the Han. In spite of their high spirits and their confidence in themselves and their commander, the troops were homesick. Despite his optimism, the Eighth Army's Commander Van Fleet could not promise them a decisive victory that would send them home soon--not until someone persuaded Washington, as he had persuaded the Greeks, to seize the initiative, to take the offensive, to go after the Communists in their lairs.

* Last Sunday, the Greek Orthodox Easter, the general visited the Greek battalion in Korea, who welcomed him as a vividly remembered friend. He remembered some of them, too. After the inspection, he went to a table where Metaxa Brandy and red-dyed Easter eggs were set. It is an Orthodox custom for two friends each to take an egg and strike them together; he whose egg remains unbroken is supposed to be the better man. Van Fleet tried this with the Greek commander, and there was much good-natured guffawing when the American's egg cracked.

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