Word: eighth
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Eighth Army officer took pains to deny that the Eighth had assumed the offensive: "This is not a general advance, we're just sparring for an opening...
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...
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...
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...
...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...