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The Korean War (Da Capo Paperback)

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Matthew Ridgway is a fairly unknown general in US military history. This is unfortunate because he was incredibly insightful and capable. In fact, he was probably the United States' best general of the Cold War.

_The Korean War_ is an account of his experiences commanding first the Eighth US Army and then the entire United Nations Command against the Communists. He entered the war at a time of catastrophic defeat. The Chinese Communists had forced the Eighth Army into a disastrous retreat, the longest in US military history. Ridgway took command of the Eighth Army and forged it into a more capable weapon. By doing so, he was able to halt the Communist advance and retake much lost ground.

_The Korean War_ explains how Ridgway did this. Moreover, though, the book demonstrates his ability to grasp how the Cold War meant that the US needed to fight different kinds of wars. Total war was now very dangerous because it could result in a Third World War with the Soviet Union or a much larger war with China. Ridgway, therefore, endorsed the necessity of fighting limited wars. He developed this stategy as well as an operational approach of attrition. He wanted to wear down the Communists and force them to concede in negotiations. He focused on reducing the risk of escalation and minimizing his own losses in order to form a sustainable strategic and operational approach. As such, Ridgway played a formative role in the development of US strategy in the Cold War. This book explains how and why he did so. It is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand conventional military strategy during the Cold War.

Matthew Ridgway was arguably the finest general officer to serve in United States forces in the 20th Century. Whether one agrees with this ranking or not, no one can dispute that he performed a feat of leadership unmatched by any senior general in American military history - he took an American army that had suffered the greatest defeat in its history and rebuilt it through the force of his personality and gifts of leadership and turned it around and had it successfully on the offensive in only one month. Had he done nothing else, his fame would be unmatched, yet he additionally kept the United States out of the Indochina morass that ten years later would be Vietnam - when there were no Ridgways to warn of the dangers of commitment there.

General Matthew Ridgway commanded the U.S. Eight Army in Korea from December 1950 until April 1951 when he succeeded General Douglas MacArthur as Supreme Commander of the United Nations forces in Korea and Supreme Commander of the U.S. Far East Command. The Korean War is his personal account of the military and political aspects of the conflict and his view of the implications the Korean conflict would have on future U.S. foreign policy.

Ridgway does a fine job of explaining the impetus for U.S. involvement in a war on the Korean peninsula, a war in which America was incredibly unprepared and downright disinterested. Ridgway's analysis of the U.S. failure to anticipate the invasion is insightful. The U.S. believed the next war would be another global conflict similar to World War II in which Korea would play very little importance. Ridgway states that the U.S. was not concerned with Korea mainly because it was beyond the traditional U.S. defensive perimeter that would be protected against the next global conflagration. Furthermore, Ridgway points out that the U.S. had faith in the United Nations to forestall any serious aggression and, in the event of a failure, the U.S. felt confident in the power of its nuclear deterrence. Ridgway claims confidence in these factors left America believing in a psychological Maginot line in Korea.

Little fault can be found with Ridgway's analysis of the North Korea's invasion of South Korea and subsequent unprepared U.S. entry into the Korean War. Ridgway states "diplomacy is only as strong as the military muscle willing to be put forth." The amount of military muscle put forth is driven by the resolve of the American populace and with Korea there was little. Had the U.S. demonstrated or even indicated a resolve to protect the South Korea, the invasion probably could have been averted. Ridgway dedicates much time to the civil-military dispute between General MacArthur and President Truman during which MacArthur was eventually relieved and replaced by Ridgway. Ridgway claims that the outcome of this dispute settled once and for all the debate over military versus civilian supremacy when determining the course of U.S. policy.

From the beginning of the Korean War, MacArthur had his sights set on a victory that was not the limited to South Korean liberation but included to global destruction of Communism. President Truman on the other hand was mindful of the politics at home and abroad and did not support MacArthur's calls for the isolation and destruction of China and all of Communism. Truman knew what MacArthur refused to recognize -- that America would not rise to fight World War III as it did to fight World War II. Additionally, Truman was very aware that the new dynamics of the Cold War and of nuclear proliferation were changing the face of warfare and bringing to light a new concept of conflict, limited war.

Ridgway does a superb job of analyzing the conflict between MacArthur and Truman as only someone who was intimately involved at that level could. MacArthur was a military officer trained to fight the wars of the nation, and he was perhaps unmatched in his prowess; however, Ridgway argues, in a democracy the politics of war should be left to the civilians. MacArthur believed that with the right resolve the U.S. could defeat China, but America did not posses the necessary resolve. Ridgway blames MacArthur for much of the confrontation and paints MacArthur as narcissistic. While this may be true, MacArthur's personal failings cannot be the sole cause for the abrupt end to his career. More importantly it may be the failings of the civilian leadership that did. MacArthur had to be relieved to protect the tenets of American democracy, but had the civilian leadership intervened earlier, as it is empowered to do so, perhaps MacArthur could have departed with the dignity he earned and deserved.

One area where Ridgway does miss the mark is in his evaluation of the Korean War's final outcome. Ridgway sees the armistice in Korea as a U.S. victory, not a total victory, but as the first resounding defeat for Communism, and the "battle that began to turn back the tide." Korea may have been a military victory against Communism, but it was foreign policy failure. The U.S. created the Korean War by neglecting Korea as a nation and its strategic importance. Moreover, the U.S. failed to anticipate North Korean and Chinese intentions even with substantial intelligence, and it failed to convey to these countries U.S. resolve in the region.

Written in 1967 near the height of the Vietnam War, Ridgway's book takes lessons learned from a superb historical account of the war and uses them as a basis for critical evaluation of U.S. involvement in Vietnam. In modern warfare, Ridgway sees no room for open-ended warfare. He states U.S. objectives of world policy should be defined with care, should lie within the range of (U.S.) vital national interests and that their accomplishment should be within (U.S.) capabilities. He believes U.S. objectives in Vietnam at the time were "not set within this frame." History eventually proved him correct. Most importantly Ridgway addresses the impact that nuclear weapons had on the Korean conflict and what they will have on future warfare. The U.S. had only two choices in Korea - truce or broadened war, which could have led to the use of nuclear weapons. Nuclear weapons could have brought the U.S. victory, but that would have forced America to cede the moral high ground. Ridgway questions this cost and uses this as the basis for accepting the concept of limited war and the fact that traditional victory may be a thing of the past. He states, "we had finally come to realize that military victory was not what it had been in the past. It might even elude us forever if the means we used to achieve it brought wholesale devastation to the world or led us down the road of international immorality past the point of no return."

One of the finest books written on The Korean Conflict by a man who ought to know as much as anyone about combat and Korea. As a personal hero of mine in WWII he took over an army totally unfit to fight and win against the new enemy, the Chinese. How he turned this sorry situation around is spelled out in many other books. The General simply tells his story about how he helped to make the 8th Army combat effective again. As far as I'm concerned South Korea is the nation it is today partially because of him. This book pulls few punches and the truth rings clear to anyone who has worn our nation's uniform in battle.

In many military history classes, this book is taught under strict instruction and with numerous other sources to collaborate and contradict the text that Ridgeway has written. Without a balanced, structured, approach to this book, a reader will come away with an incomplete and biased view of the Korean War.

The nuanced evaluations of the relationship between MacArthur and Truman are a thinly veiled contrast to his own relationship with President Eisenhower. Disagreements between the two while Ridgeway was Chief of Staff ultimately ended a career that many assumed would continue. Additionally, Ridgeway is widely noted as a student of Patton - some going so far to allege that Ridgeway viewed himself as Patton's successor. The portrayal of MacArthur as narcissistic serves to make MacArthur's dismissal justified while Ridgeway's appears to be an injustice. The added bonus is that by tarnishing MacArthur, Ridgeway bolsters the image of himself as a successor to Patton. This memoir was published a year after Ridgeway's retirement - surely such thoughts were on this mind while it was written. While interesting, Ridgeway's take on the Truman/MacArthur relationship is unreliable and self serving.

Another self serving aspect is the diminished acknowledgement Ridgeway gives to James Van Fleet, widely considered today to be the true genius of the Korean War and the father of the modern South Korean military. This is one of the primary reasons why this book must be supplemented with other, unbiased sources.

The greatest tragedy of this work is the way that Ridgeway develops his assessments on the effectiveness of limited versus total war. From the first chapter, a palatable white man's burden emerges from his narrative. While many of his descriptions are factually true, his conclusions about many sociological aspects of Korean culture are inaccurate. This ultimately invalidates many of his arguments about the outcome of the Korean War as a victory. The Korean people suffered - and still continue to - long after hostilities ceased. What infuriates many scholars is his refusal to acknowledge in a book written over a decade after the war that his "limited war" may have brought just as much misery and suffering as the total war he avoided. That its publication coincided with his retirement over disagreements about the scope of American involvement in Vietnam bitterly punctuates his assessments.

None of this means that "The Korean War" isn't relevant or valuable as a text. The Korean War is undoubtedly complex and this is one piece and one perspective that help an individual gain knowledge. However, this book should not be read without some kind of supplement. The classic "This Kind of War" by T.R. Fehrenbach and "From Pusan to Panmunjom" by Paik Sun Yup provide excellent counterbalances to this flawed memoir.

I am a retired US Army colonel. During my time on active duty, I was an instructor and department chair at the US Army War College. During that time we used incidents from the Korean War for the purpose of historical case study. So I believe I can comment on this book with some authority.

At the outset, however, I must confess that I am biased toward the author. I believe that Matthew B. Ridgway was the greatest general between Eisenhower and Abrams. I say that because he overcame what I believe is the greatest challenge that any commander could possibly face: taking command of a beaten, demoralized army and leading it to victory. In holding this opinion, I find myself in distinguished company. No less a luminary as General Omar Bradley described Ridgway's work turning the tide of the Korean War as "the greatest feat of personal leadership in the history of the Army."

Ridgway's battlefield achievements are well documented and need no embellishment here. What I find even more interesting is his contribution to the art of high-level joint and multinational command. Matthew B. Ridgway is the only man I know of to have commanded three of the unified commands created as a result of the National Security Act of 1947: the Caribbean Command, the Far East Command, and the European Command. He was single-handedly the man who made the Allied military command structure work during the Cold War, first on the battlefields of Korea and then in Europe. He re-oriented America's strategic thinking to deal with the new kind of threat posed by the Soviet Union and communist China, and contributed materially to the implementation of the resulting strategy. That is an unmatched record of achievement.

His book on the Korean War is a personal history. Those looking for detailed tactical or operational studies will have to look elsewhere. But the book is well worth reading to appreciate the character that was required to turn the Korean War around in the dark days following Chinese intervention. The best parts of the book deal with that.

Ridgway's solutions to the problems he faced were first and foremost practical. When he assumed command of the EIGHTH Army there were no bombastic speeches; no self-promoting public appearances; no laying of blame on his predecessor, his subordinates, or his superior. Ridgway called his corps commanders together and as a team they identified the problems and worked out solutions. For the most part, these solutions were just good soldiering - better use of the terrain, more disciplined movements, more attention to intelligence analysis. But in two ways Ridgway did more than improve procedure - he installed a new collective ethos in the entire EIGHTH Army. He made sure that everyone knew that the Army was going to attack the enemy, not run from him. And he made sure everyone knew what he was fighting for. Ridgway believed that one of the main reasons for poor morale was the fact that the soldiers did not understand this new form of war. So he issued a simply worded circular explaining in straightforward language what was at stake and why it was worth every person's sacrifice. The results were impressive.

Ridgway's voice in this book assures the reader on every page that he is sharing the thoughts of a man of character - of self-discipline, loyalty, selfless service, modesty, and the willingness to accept responsibility and admit mistakes - which Ridgway himself said is the "bedrock on which the whole edifice of leadership rests." His language is direct and lucid, suggesting that he was a man both cultivated and rugged. It is a good American book.

Another point I found interesting was Ridgway's discussion of African-American soldiers. Contrary to popular belief, President Truman did not desegregate the Army with a stroke of his pen in 1948. Many `all-black' units deployed to Korea. Ridgway is the man who desegregated them, and as one would expect, he did it for both practical reasons - desegregation facilitated a more efficient use of military manpower - and for moral reasons - it was the right thing to do. He did not do it overnight, but rather in a methodical sequence, battalion by battalion, making sure that military discipline never suffered. [Representative Charles Rangel's 503rd Field Artillery Battalion, for example, was an `all-black' unit well into 1951.] In the early days of the Korean War there was a lot of controversy over the alleged poor performance of all-black units like the 24th Infantry Regiment. After Ridgway's tour in command there was no more controversy because there were no more segregated units. Each soldier stood on an equal footing regardless of color.

Ridgway is very mild in his criticism of the poor battlefield decisions and misjudgments made before his arrival in theater, even though those decisions and misjudgments were the proximate cause of the appalling situation he inherited. His most critical comments are directed toward the employment of X Corps in the summer and fall of 1950, but even here his criticism is nothing compared to what can be found in other sources. He is rather more harsh in his criticism of the EIGHTH Army's chain of command, from van Fleet on down, in their reaction to the prisoner of war riots on the island of Koje-do in early 1952. Overall, however, he is fair and even-handed in his treatment of all of his subordinates.

His most serious criticism is reserved for MacArthur, who died three years before this book was written.

Ridgway takes MacArthur to task for one thing and one thing only - insubordination. He very carefully recounts his respect and professional relationship with MacArthur, which began when MacArthur was superintendent of the Military Academy and Ridgway was Director of Athletics. He consciously does not second-guess any of MacArthur's operational decisions, even though some of them were disastrous. He demolishes the criticisms of the most vociferous MacArthur detractors - especially the ones that portrayed the great general as a war monger. All those make Ridgway's real critique of MacArthur more persuasive and more worthy of the reader's consideration. Ridgway argues that MacArthur's sin was in thinking that any theater commander, regardless of how well renowned and esteemed, could set strategic policy for the United States as a whole. MacArthur's public pronouncements that the President did not appreciate the true value of Asia in the nation's overall strategy undercut the President's overall authority, and that is what could not be tolerated.

The book's conclusions regarding the place of the Korean War in the larger context of the Cold War are well written and well reasoned. Ridgway certainly has the credibility to reject conclusively the "no- substitute-for-victory" school of strategy and his thoughts on the use of the military as one of the nation's instruments of power in a large, global struggle, with nuclear annihilation as a potential outcome, are worth considering.

The jacket blurbs on the back cover of the book promise a `shocking' commentary on the Vietnam War, which was in full swing when the book was written. The truth of the matter is they are not so shocking and, considering how good the rest of the book is, rather disappointing. Ridgway criticizes the effort in Vietnam as not being directed toward any "concrete and pragmatic political objectives" that "conform to our vital national interests." There is nothing new or shocking in any of that. But by innuendo, he levels a more serious charge, using a quotation from President Eisenhower's MANDATE FOR CHANGE that suggested that the loss of Vietnam would mean the "loss of valuable deposits of tin and prodigious supplies of rubber and rice." In Ridgway's defense, the year 1967, the year the book was written, was the so-called "Year of the Big Battles" in Vietnam, when General Westmoreland was waging the war pretty much as an American show with the South Vietnamese military sidelined. So if one were prone to distrust American motives in the war, 1967 would probably be the year of greatest suspicion. But I still find that to take that quote out of context to insinuate the American effort in Vietnam was a case of neo-imperialism goes too far and does Ridgway no credit.

Some editorial comments:

The book has a lot of pictures, but they are not good quality. I suspect that in the original hard-cover edition they were better.

The book has a map section, but the maps are of the `broad arrow' variety. Supplementing this book with the WEST POINT ATLAS or the OFFICIAL US ARMY HISTORY OF THE KOREAN WAR would be a good idea for the serious military reader.

Overall, I am glad I read this book.

After the 23rd RCT got out of Chip Yong ni, Gen Ridgway stopped his jeep, got out & asked several of us walking down the road if we were from the 23rd; yes we said & then he thanked us for holding on till the 52nd tank bat. could break the trap & relieve us - (we were surounded for three weeks - Feb 51). It knocked me out out to think a Gen would do this , so I didnt say anything, but a few of the others thanked him for stopping. Ever since, when I think of that damned place(it stunk, & the temp hit 20 below) I sure wish I had responded to his nice gesture. Mac would never in a million years done this. I've looked at maps in the library to find out where Heartbreak & the Punchbowl were, but this execellent book provided the answer. Once started reading, I couldn't put it down. Great book. Ridge was a good man, & a damned good Gen. May he rest in peace. pfc jscanlan

General Matthew B. Ridgway presents facts in a clear concise and informative way. This is a history buffs book. Well Done. A good Read.

Gen. Matthew Ridgeway is so full of himself that he cannot err. He is quick to point out his perfection by comparing himself to others of his calling, and although forced by history and fact to admit the other fine leaders of the 8th army did actually perform well in Korea, he is obviously reluctant to write of anything unless the sentence begins with "I". His book is garbage, and I'm ashamed to have served under him in that war.