Fifties (19 page)

Matthew Bunker Ridgway was arguably the preeminent American soldier of this century. He was an upper-class American; his father had been a judge in Brooklyn, an uncle helped design the New York subway system, and his mother, Julia Starbuck Ridgway, had been a concert pianist. To Matt Ridgway, the military was not just a career, it was a calling. His sense of duty had a touch of the mystical to it. “He was,” noted a West Point contemporary, Russell Reeder, “a twelfth-century knight with a twentieth-century brain.” Even in the peacetime Army he seemed different—not merely better read and more serious, but more committed than other men. George Catlett Marshall, whose protégé he became, had to warn him repeatedly about pushing himself too hard. When World War Two began, Ridgway found himself in command of the 82nd Division, then the All-American Division. “He was,” said Jim Gavin, who replaced him in the 82nd when Ridgway became a corps commander, “a
great
combat commander. Lots of courage. He was right up front every
minute. Hard as flint and full of intensity, almost grinding his teeth with intensity; so much so, I thought, that man’s going to have a heart attack before it’s over. Sometimes it seemed as though it was a personal thing: Ridgway versus the Wehrmacht. He’d stand in the middle of the road and urinate. I’d say, “Matt, get the hell out of there. You’ll get shot! No! He was defiant. Even with his penis he was defiant.”

Upon arriving in Korea, he spent the first few days visiting every front-line unit, wearing his trademark grenade pinned to one shoulder strap. Many soldiers had the impression that he wore two grenades; actually, the other object was a medical kit. From this came his nickname, Old Iron Tits. He was appalled by MacArthur’s distance from the battlefield, by the paucity of division and regimental commanders at the front, and by the lack of daily intelligence on the enemy, a result of not enough patrolling.

This army had completely lost its confidence, he decided. Morale was nonexistent. The men seemed to go about in a daze, “wondering when they would hear the whistle of that homebound transport.” They were surprisingly poorly fed and poorly clothed, given the wealth of the nation back at home. Worse, they had become far too dependent upon their wheels to fight an enemy that had no wheels. In truth, he thought the soldiers were dangerously close to going soft. “There was nothing but our own love of comfort that bound us to the road,” he later wrote. “We could get off into the hills too.” What he wanted to create “was a toughness of soul as well as body.” He chewed out the division and regimental commanders right after the start of the New Year. They knew too little about the front, and they were spending too much time in their CPs. If the ordinary soldiers had gotten soft, it was because their commanders had allowed them to do so.

He knew exactly what he wanted to do: take the high ground, employ his artillery effectively, create far stronger defensive positions, and fight better at night by using massive numbers of flares. He was going to grind the Chinese down, erode their vast numbers with his superior artillery. He analyzed the strengths of the Chinese army, how they had compensated for their lack of materiel. He would illuminate the nighttime battlefield with flares from C-47s, and make each Chinese offensive too expensive. His own confidence grew day by day. Within two weeks of arriving, he wrote his old friend Ham Haislip that it could be done. “The power is here,” he wrote. “The strength and means we have—short perhaps of Soviet military intervention. My own overriding problem, dominating all others, is to
achieve the spiritual awakening of the latent capabilities of this command. If God permits me to do that, we shall achieve more, much more than our people think possible—and perhaps inflict a bloody defeat on the Chinese which even China will long remember, wanton as she is in the sacrifice of lives.” That might be, but he was taking no chances that his forces would be driven into the sea, as some had feared. Back at Pusan he prepared a super defensive line back at the Pusan port—a monster trench, protected by barbed wire and powerful artillery positions. Just in case.

At the same time he was pushing subordinates like Mike Michaelis to be even more aggressive. He visited Michaelis’s regimental headquarters. “Michaelis,” he asked. “What are tanks for?” “To kill,” Michaelis had answered. “Take your tanks north,” Ridgway had said. “Fine, sir,” Michaelis had answered. “It’s easy to take them there. It’s getting back that’s going to be the most difficult. They always cut the road behind you.” “Who said anything about coming back?” Ridgway answered. “If you can stay up there 24 hours I’ll send the [25th] Division up. If the Division can stay up there 24 hours, I’ll send the [1] Corps up.”

He was everywhere. No unit, no matter how small, was safe from his visit. “The man who came to dinner,” one high official at 1 Corps headquarters called him sardonically. Another high officer said, “Oh God! He came to
every
briefing,
every
morning ...” But it was working. He was slowly breathing life back into an army that had been not merely defeated but humiliated. His goals were modest. Real estate was important to him only as a means of giving the United Nations some leverage when it came to the final negotiations for peace. Yet even as Ridgway steadied his forces, MacArthur was still issuing apocalyptic cables to Washington, saying that unless we widened the war, we were going to be driven off the Korean peninsula.

In mid-January, Joe Collins and Hoyt Vandenberg visited the Eighth Army and were much impressed. Collins later went back and gave a surprisingly optimistic briefing to Truman, the cabinet, and the Chiefs. It was a different army. “Ridgway alone,” said Collins, “was responsible.” It was a personal triumph of the rarest sort. As Omar Bradley, not a man who lightly used superlatives, wrote in his autobiography, “It is not often in wartime that a single battlefield commander can make a decisive difference. But in Korea, Ridgway would prove to be the exception. His brilliant, driving, uncompromising leadership would turn the tide of battle like no other general’s in our military history.” In Washington they stopped talking about being driven out of Korea or using the atomic weapon. Years later,
noting that America had considered the use of an atomic weapon, Max Hastings, the British military historian, said of Ridgway and the men under his command: “The men who turned the tide on the battlefield in Korea in the first weeks of 1951 may have also saved the world from the nightmare of a new Hiroshima in Asia.”

Not surprisingly, the better Matt Ridgway did, the more difficult Douglas MacArthur became. It was becoming clear that the earlier failure of the Eighth Army was that of its commander. (In 1954 MacArthur told Jim Lucas, one of his more favored journalists, that Ridgway was the worst of his field commanders—this view to be published after MacArthur’s death: Such was the bitterness of a man whose reputation had been so badly damaged by the defeat along the Yalu.) MacArthur still made cameo visits to Korea, accompanied by his press coterie, usually on the occasion of a major success. Ridgway finally had to send a message filled with flattery asking him not to come, since it was clear to the Chinese that every MacArthur trip usually coincided with the start of an offensive. At the same time MacArthur’s provocations of the administration escalated; there were regular interviews with journalists in Tokyo in which he criticized the idea of a limited victory. True victory, he said, was the unification of Korea. By this time the top British military were convinced that MacArthur personally wanted war with China.

The British were not alone in such suspicions. Omar Bradley wrote that “his legendary pride had been hurt. The Red Chinese had made a fool of the infallible ‘military genius’ ... the only possible means left to MacArthur to regain his lost pride and military reputation was now to inflict an overwhelming defeat on those Red Chinese generals who had made a fool of him. In order to do this he was perfectly willing to propel us into all-out war with Red China, and possibly with the Soviet Union, igniting World War III and a nuclear holocaust.”

Knowing that the Truman administration planned to announce on March 24 that it would seek a cease-fire as the first step in arranging a settlement with the Chinese, MacArthur cut the ground out from under the President by making his own announcement. He taunted the Chinese, virtually calling them a defeated army, saying that China’s “exaggerated and vaunted military power” lacked the industrial base necessary for modern warfare. If only, he continued, the restrictions imposed on him were lifted, he would strike so viciously that they would be doomed to military collapse. It was not just an insult to the Chinese but a slap in the face to the President, who was seeking a means to peace.

Truman was furious. It was then that the President decided to
fire his general. “I’ve come to the conclusion that our Big General in the Far East must be recalled,” he wrote in this diary. A few days later, MacArthur, who surely must have known what he was doing, drove the last nail into his own coffin. He wrote a letter to Joe Martin, the Republican House minority leader, supporting Martin’s view that Chiang’s troops should be called into this war. MacArthur knew the letter would be released by Martin: It was filled with grand statements about the real battleground being Asia. But the final sentence was the killer: “There is no substitute for victory.”

Truman talked the problem over with his top advisers, who warned him that firing MacArthur would initiate the biggest political battle of his administration. Truman had hoped to bring some grace to the denouement by sending a personal emissary to break the news to the general, but word leaked out, and MacArthur heard the news over the radio. That seemed to underscore the heartlessness of the decision. Still, the scandal was preferable to dealing with a provocative and disobedient commander in the field.

In Tokyo, when he heard, MacArthur turned to his second wife, and said, “Jeannie, we’re going home at last.” The next day MacArthur told Ridgway, who had come to replace him, that he had been fired because Truman was mentally unstable. He knew this, he said, because he had close friends who knew Truman’s doctor. The President, MacArthur claimed, would not live more than six months. Ridgway found the conversation a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a supreme egotist: In the world according to MacArthur, it was Truman who was irrational.

The firing was as divisive an act as anyone could remember—in terms of class, religion, culture, and geography. It was not just that everyone had an opinion about what had happened, it was that everyone had to voice it. There were fights in bars between strangers and fights on commuter trains between men who knew each other and who had, up to that moment, been friends and had concealed their political differences. Acheson, who always managed to keep his sense of humor about the attacks from the right, got into a cab soon after the anger had erupted. The driver turned around to look at his passenger. “Aren’t you Dean Acheson?” he asked. “Yes, I am,” Acheson answered. “Would you like me to get out?” It was a story he loved to tell.

It was to that nation, that outpouring of emotion, that MacArthur came home. At first it seemed like one vast parade that would never end. It began in Tokyo, on the morning of April 16, 1951, where nearly 250,000 Japanese lined the streets to bid their postwar ruler farewell, many of them waving small Japanese and American
flags. The next stop was Hawaii, and at Hickam Field the crowd was estimated by reporters at 100,000. In San Francisco some 20,000 people came out to the airport; the crowd surged forward, swallowing up Governor Earl Warren in the process. The next morning nearly 500,000 people watched him deliver a brief speech at city hall. There he told not only the audience but also millions watching on television that he did not intend to enter politics. He hoped, he said, that his name would never be used in a political way. “The only politics I have is contained in a single phrase known well to all of you—‘God Bless America!’”

The last big stop on MacArthur’s return was Washington. He arrived near midnight, and again the crowd at the airport was immense, though it included no member of the Truman cabinet. In Washington MacArthur was to address a joint session of Congress. It was MacArthur at his most formidable, powerful, theatrical, manipulative, and wonderfully selective with the record. Among other things, he claimed in his speech that the Joint Chiefs agreed with his policies in Korea, which was a boldfaced lie. He seemed to back off from a direct confrontation with China (“No man in his right mind would advocate sending our ground forces into continental China”), but at the same time he called for a blockade which was an act of war, the removal of restrictions on Chiang, and logistical support so the Nationalists could invade the mainland.

Then came the peroration, marvelously rich in memories and pure nostalgia: “I am closing my fifty-two years of military service. When I joined the Army even before the turn of the century, it was the fulfillment of all my boyish hopes and dreams. The world has turned over many times since I took the oath on the plain at West Point, and the hopes and dreams have long since vanished. But I still remember the refrain of one of the most popular barracks ballads of that day, which proclaimed most profoundly that—‘Old soldiers never die; they just fade away.’ And like the old soldier of that ballad, I now close my military career and just fade away—an old soldier who tried to do his duty as God gave him the light to see that duty. Good-bye.”

The response seemed to divide along party lines. Representative Dewey Short, a Missouri Republican, said afterward, “We saw a great hunk of God in the flesh, and we heard the voice of God.” To former president Herbert Hoover, MacArthur was “the reincarnation of Saint Paul into a great General of the Army who came out of the East.” Truman, typically, was blunter: “It was nothing but a bunch of damn bullshit.”

EIGHT

“T
HERE NEVER WAS A
country more fabulous than America,” wrote the British historian Robert Payne after visiting America in the winter of 1948–49. “She sits bestride the world like a Colossus; no other power at any time in the world’s history has possessed so varied or so great an influence on other nations ... Half of the wealth of the world, more than half of the productivity, nearly two-thirds of the world machines are concentrated in American hands; the rest of the world lies in the shadow of American industry ...” Driven by the revolutionary vision of Henry Ford, the United States had been the leader in mass production before the war; ordinary Americans could afford the Model-T, while in Europe where class lines were sharply drawn, the rather old-fashioned manufacturers preferred building expensive cars for the rich. In addition they fought such heretics as Ferdinand Porsche,
who wanted to make the
Volksauto,
or people’s car, a German version of the Model T. World War Two only widened the existing gap. It ravaged Europe, but taught those running America’s industries to meet brutal schedules and norms that only a few years previously would have been considered impossible. The war had diverted the economy to the military from the consumer, but once the war was over, the consumer was not to be denied.