Word: fleetly
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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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...
...Greece, as in Korea, the enemy struck from a sanctuary to the north. In Greece, the Red forces could escape across the frontier to Russian satellites to rest, regroup and get new supplies; in Korea, the Chinese Reds are using Manchuria in the same way. In Korea, Van Fleet is picking up where he left off in Greece-fighting other, much more numerous enemy contingents in the same global conflict. The enemy face is now Mongolian instead of Mediterranean-but it is familiar...
When Matt Ridgway took up his new jobs in Tokyo, he said to Van Fleet: "I won't get in your hair, Van." But Van Fleet is carrying on Ridgway's strategy-to save the maximum allied lives by maneuver, to kill the maximum enemy troops by massed firepower. Last week, in the lull that followed the abortive and costly first phase of the enemy offensive, he told his troops that they had won a "great victory." But he warned them that the Communists could still strike another hard blow...
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...