The passing of General Ridgway this summer brought forth a flood of commentary on the life of this extraordinary warrior. Line of Departure publisher and award-winning designer of Inchon, James Werbaneth describes his encounters with Ridgway. When I was a junior at Shady Side Academy, outside of Pittsburgh, in the spring of 1978, a special assembly was hurriedly called on a warm spring day. The president of the school was on the Memorial Hall stage with a much older man. He was introduced as a neighbor of the Academy who had offered to speak on military history and current defense issues. His name was General Matthew B. Ridgway. He didn't give what anyone would call a speech or a lecture, electing instead to field a lot of questions from the floor. Many had to do with disarmament and the current state of the military, issues with which he was still well informed. Some questions were also quite stupid, but the general answered these with a lot more consideration and patience than they might have deserved. I spent three years at Shady Side, a school so good at luring guest speakers that they included formal visits by the US ambassador to the United Nations, the supreme naval commander of NATO, and an impressive array of corporate executives, writers and scholars. But this far less formal talk by General Ridgway, and another the next year, were by far the most important to me. Actually, in later years, the more that I learned about military history and the general's role in it, the more I appreciated his visits to Shady Side. General Ridgway died on July 26, 1993, at the age of ninety-eight. With him the United States lost its best soldier of this century, and someone whom I had come to think of as the greatest living American. The basis of this judgment is his phenomenal achievement in reversing the course of the Korean War. When he assumed command of the Eighth Army in December 1950, after Lieutenant General Walton Walker's death in a jeep accident, General Ridgway found the United Nations forces dispirited and in retreat, under the shock of the Chinese intervention. He stopped the retreat, then sent the UN forces back on the offensive. The goal was not to reoccupy North Korea up the Yalu, a mistake the first time around, but to kill as many Chinese as possible, deliberately retaking territory in a broad-front advance. The effort worked; morale climbed in the UN army, and the prospects of a new Pusan Perimeter, or outright withdrawal to Japan, were replaced by the certainty of punishing the enemy. In the end it succeeded in forcing the Communists to the negotiating table. General Ridgway did this the old fashioned way, through personal leadership at the front, and a belief in his troops' capabilities that was both certain and undeniable. This was the highest achievement of a superb career. In World War II, General Ridgway commanded the 82nd Airborne Division, then the XVIII Airborne Corps. Then in the Korean War, after Douglas MacArthur was cashiered, he left the Eighth Army to assume overall command in the Far East. Finally, he finished his career as chief of staff of the army. Upon retirement, he settled outside of Pittsburgh. But his achievements as commander of the Eighth Army were the most impressive. I seriously doubt that any of the other distinguished soldiers of his generation (or many others) could have duplicated this feat: Patton had the brash flair, but not the sense of steady purpose, and was terribly suited for leading a coalition army; Eisenhower was the best at holding together coalitions, but neither he nor Omar Bradley had Ridgway's flamboyance and charisma; MacArthur had the offensive spirit, but not the ability to exploit it in an appropriate measure. Moreover, he had an outstanding concern for the welfare of his men. He recognized that combat leaders and staff officers have a massive responsibility to their soldiers, and demanded that they deliver the competent, effective leadership and support that their men deserved. In retirement, he continued to acknowledge the contributions of the enlisted men. One Pittsburgh veteran of the 82nd Airborne, who stayed in touch with the general, remembered getting a call from him years after World War II, thanking him for the services he performed for his country. When, wondered the veteran, did any other four-star general so thank a sergeant? One of the quirks of history and celebrity is that General Ridgway did not receive all the blazing adulation of Patton, Eisenhower and MacArthur. But the leadership of Matthew Bunker Ridgway in Korea deserves to be remembered as one of the greatest feats of American military leadership. In the end, posterity will recognize him as one of the finest soldiers that his country ever produced, in this or any other century. Back to Cry Havoc #4 Table of Contents Back to Cry Havoc List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 1993 by David W. Tschanz. This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com