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| Affiliation | Nonpartisan |
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| Name | Matthew B. Ridgway |
| Address |
, , United States |
| Email | None |
| Website | None |
| Born |
March 03, 1895
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| Died | July 26, 1993
(98 years)
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| Contributor | Thomas Walker |
| Last Modifed | Juan Croniqueur
Dec 08, 2023 11:33pm |
| Tags |
Army -
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| Info | The general who became Chief of Staff after leading U.S. forces in Normandy and United Nations troops in Korea, died at home in Fox Chapel, Pennsylvania, a suburb of Pittsburgh. Was 98. Died of cardiac arrest, said his lawyer, G. Donald Gerlach.
He also planned and executed the Army's first major Airborne assault, in Sicily in WWII, and was a soldier-diplomat who served on several international commissions. In April 1951 he succeeded General of the Army Douglas MacArthur as commander of United Nations forces in Korea and of allied occupying forces in Japan. In June 1952 he replaced General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe. In 1953 he was appointed Army Chief of Staff by President Eisenhower, under whom he had served in WWII. But what should have been the capstone of distinguished military career ended in bitter frustration for him in 1955, when he retired after finding himself in almost constant disagreement with Eisenhower, the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At one point, the President bluntly told him that his views were "Parochial" because he did not accept new strategy of using the threat of atomic bombs delivered by airplanes as nation's chief line of defense and de-emphasizing the role of the foot soldier. He objected to the strategy as failing to adequately develop concepts of using airpower, nuclear weapons and ground soldiers in conjunction in distant conflicts. But he continued to fight budget cuts for the Army.
"Throughout my 2 years as Chief of Staff," he recalled later, "I felt I was being called upon to tear down, rather than build up, ultimately decisive element in a properly proportioned fighting force on which the world could rest its hope for maintaining the peace or, if the catastrophe of war came, for enforcing its will upon those who broke that peace."
Although he was otherwise known as an unflamboyant officer, he had one habit that became his trademark. Just as General George S. Patton was famous for wearing twin pearl-handled revolvers in WWII, he always had a hand grenade attached to one shoulder strap on his battle jacket, and a first aid kit on the other. "Some people thought I wore the grenades as a gesture of showmanship," he said years later. "This was not correct. They were purely utilitarian. Many a time in Europe and Korea, men in tight spots blasted their way out with hand grenades."
Matthew Bunker Ridgway was proud of the fact that he an "Army Brat," son of Colonel Thomas Ridgway, an artillery officer, and the former Ruth Starbuck Bunker. He was born March 3, 1895, Ft Monroe, Virginia, where his father was stationed. He said in his memoirs "Soldier," (Harper & Brothers, 1956) that his "earliest memories are of guns and Marching men, of rising to the sound of the reveille gun and lying down to sleep at night while the sweet, sad notes of 'Taps' brought the day officially to an end." He was reared on several Army posts and grad from English High School in Boston in 1912.
His first attempt to enter West Point was unsuccessful because he failed geometry on his entrance examination. But he succeeded on second try and in 1913 he entered the academy, where be became undergraduate manager of the football team. He graduated in 1917, was commissioned a Second Lieutenant of Infantry and, in anticipation of being sent to fight in WWI, was quickly promoted to First Lieutenant and then to temporary Captain. But he did not go overseas; instead, he went to Eagle Pass, Texas, where he commanded an Infantry company.
In 1918 he returned to West Point, became an instructor in Spanish and later manager of the athletics program. In 1925 he completed the Company officers course at the Infantry School at Fort Benning, Georgia, and was given his first overseas assignment, command of a company in the 15th Infantry in Tsientsin, China.
Routine Infantry duty in U.S. followed. But in 1927, because of his fluency in Spanish, he was asked by Major General Frank Ross McCoy to become member of a U.S. mission to Nicaragua, charged with supervising free elections in that war-torn republic. He had hoped to be part of the Army's pentathlon team in 1928 summer Olympic Games in Amsterdam, but he recalled later that he had realized that "I could not reject so bright an opportunity to prepare myself for any military-diplomatic role that the future might offer." It was the first of several diplomatic assignments.
He sat on a commission that adjudicated differences between Bolivia and Paraguay, and in 1930 became a military adviser to Theodore Roosevelt, Jr., then Governor General of Philippines. His success in that assignment led to his appointed to the Army's Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. After completing that 2-year course in 1937, he became one of the elite Army officers marked for quick advancement and top leadership. By then had been promoted to Major and had come under the wing of George C. Marshall, then a Brigadier General, who, as Army Chief of Staff designate, took him to Brazil on a special assignment.
In September 1939, when WWII erupted in Europe, was sent to the war plans Division of War Department's General staff in Washington, DC. It was much-desired assignment because it was from war plans Division that senior officers were selected for higher command. By August 1942 he was a Brigadier General and in command of newly activated 82nd Infantry Division. When it became one of the Army's first 2 Airborne divisions he remained in command and won his Paratrooper wings. In North Africa in the spring of 1943, he planned the Army's first major night Airborne operation, part of the invasion of Sicily. The invasion, which began on July 10, 1943, led to a rapid conquest of the western half of the island. By the end of the month all resistance had ceased. That first Airborne attack, involving Paratroopers dropped from airplanes and troops flown into enemy territory on gliders, made American military history, but it was carried out with severe losses. Both enemy and Allied antiaircraft gunners shot down more than a dozen of the 82nd's transport planes. These and other losses resulted from staff failure, mistaken instructions and the newness of such an operation. As a result, he, along with other Airborne commanders like Maxwell D. Taylor and James M. Gavin, had a difficult time persuading higher command of the ultimate effectiveness of landing soldiers and equipment by parachute and gliders.
Although he had not jumped into battle with his troops in the Sicilian campaign, he insisted on a combat jump into Normandy before D-Day, June 6, 1944. The citation to the OLC on his DSC said that in the Normandy jump he "exposed himself continuously to fire" and "personally directed the operations in important task of securing the bridgehead over the Merderet River." His recollection of his jump was slightly less reverential. "I was lucky," he said. "There was no wind and I came down straight, into a nice, soft, grassy field. I recognized in the dim moonlight the bulky outline of a cow. I could have kissed her. The presence of a cow meant the field was not mined."
A few months after D-Day, he was given command of the new 18th Airborne Corps and directed its operation in the vicinity of Eindhoven, the Netherlands, in the Ardennes and along the Rhine River. His troops battled the German "Ruhr Pocket" and finally, on May 2, made a historic link up with Soviet troops on the Baltic. "General Ridgway has firmly established himself in history as a great battle leader," General Marshall said later. "The advance of his Army corps to the Baltic in the last phase of the war in Europe was sensational to those fully informed of the rapidly moving events of that day."
The war over, he, early in 1946, went to London as Eisenhower's military adviser to the U.S. Delegation to the United Nations Assembly. He helped draft a plan for an international United Nations force to curb aggression, a force that he himself was destined to command a few years later in Korea. In the late 1940's, he was commander of U.S. forces in Caribbean, a post more diplomatic that military.
By late Dec 1950 was a Lieutenant General, serving as Army Deputy Chief of Staff in the Pentagon, when word came that Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker, commander of the 8th Army in Korea had been killed in a jeep crash. The 8th Army was then in full retreat from Chinese Communist forces, which had opened a massive counteroffensive a month before, and was fleeing back across 38th Parallel, which divided South and North Korea. He was named Walker's successor and was soon on his way to Korea. Was credited with rallying United Nations forces, whose morale had been severely strained by heavy losses and bitterly cold weather. He stayed conspicuously at the front lines, exhorting his troops to concentrate on killing the enemy rather than trying to regain ground. But in a series of hard-fought counteroffensives, he succeeded in driving the Communist forces out of all but the northwestern corner of South Korea, seizing strategic territory north of the 38th Parallel.
Then in 1951 came the epic clash between his superior, General Douglas MacArthur, who was overall allied commander in the Far East, and President Harry S. Truman. General MacArthur, embittered by the Chinese Communist forces' victory south of the Yalyu River in North Korea, proposed various steps to defeat the enemy, including "unleashing" the Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan against mainland China. President Truman, afraid that such measures might widen the war, ruled out General MacArthur's ideas. Then the General made the disagreement public. Ridgway wrote later, in his 1967 book, "The Korean War," that the confrontation was a "clash of wills, bordering closely on insubordination." On April 11, 1951, Truman removed Genera MacArthur, a national hero, from his command in the Far East, provoking a public uproar, and named Ridgway to succeed him. James A. Van Fleet replaced Ridgway as commander of United Nations forces in Korea, where the war settled into a stalemate while peace talks dragged on for two years at Pananmujon, near the 38th Parallel. Fighting ended on July 27, 1953, when Chinese and North Koreans signed an armistice with United Nations and South Korean forces.
In Tokyo, he generally followed occupation policies established by MacArthur. The occupation essentially ended with the signing of a peace treaty in San Francisco on September 8, 1951. The next year he succeeded Eisenhower as Supreme Commander of Allied Forces in Europe. In 1953, he received what he was to call "the toughest, most frustrating job of my whole career," his appointment as Army Chief of Staff.
Seeing what he regarded as dangerous efforts to downgrade the role of the Army, clashed repeatedly with Charles E. Wilson, Secretary of Defense, and Admiral Arthur Radford, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Finally, a few months short of his original retirement date, he left the Army in June 1955.
In retirement in Pittsburgh, the old soldier grew increasingly dissatisfied with nation's military policy. He summed up his resentments in 1979, after Pentagon ordered paratroopers to stop wearing the Airborne's distinctive red beret, symbol of paratrooper spirit. After urging that order be reversed, General Ridgway asserted: "I publicly protested the adoption of the volunteer Army, now a demonstrated failure and perhaps a disaster. I publicly deplored the dismantling of Selective Service and the admission of women into our service academies. Every one of those actions is now looming as potentially detrimental to the esprit and effectiveness of our armed forces - a blow at discipline, without which no military unit is worth its keep."
In 1986, he was awarded Presidential Medal of Freedom. The citation said: "Heroes come when they are needed. Great men step forward when courage seems in short supply. WWII was such a time, and there was Ridgway."
In 1991, he was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal by General Colin Powell, the current Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
His first marriage, to former Caroline Blount, ended in divorce. A second marriage, to Margaret Wilson, also ended in divorce. In 1947 married Marjory Anthony Long. In addition to his wife, Marjory, who is known as Penny, he is survived by 2 daughters, Constance and Shirley. A graveside service is to be held at Arlington National Cemetery at 1:30 PM Friday, July 30, 1993. He had 2 daughters by his first marriage, Constance and Shirley, with whom he had lost touch. A son from third marriage, Matthew B. Ridgway, Jr., died in train accident in 1971.
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