Word: ridgway
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...Lord of Creation." Matt Ridgway began his Army career informally some 45 years ago, when he used to shout a sentry's challenge to visitors from the porch of the family quarters at Fort Walla Walla, Wash. His father, Colonel Thomas Ridgway, was a Regular Army artilleryman who had served with an international contingent in China during the Boxer Rebellion...
Like Eisenhower, Ridgway missed the fighting in World War I. But his overseas assignments between wars included China, Nicaragua and the Philippines. In central America he learned to speak Spanish, which later helped make him a lion of Washington's Latin American society...
Before World War II, Ridgway had been building a reputation as a staff officer. In 1942 he got his first big field assignment, first as assistant division commander, then commanding general of the 82nd Division, succeeding Omar Bradley...
...weeks after he took over, the Pentagon decided to convert the 82nd into one of the first two U.S. airborne divisions. To show his men what paratrooping might be like, Ridgway, who had no particular airborne qualifications, hied himself to Fort Benning to make a parachute jump. "It was the most glorious feeling in the world," he told the dubious infantrymen. "You feel like the lord of creation floating way up above the earth...
...next three years the 82nd's war diary read like a history of the development of airborne operations. Ridgway and his staff, with few precedents to go by, wrote their own field manuals as they went along. Ridgway jumped into battle with the division at Normandy, later led XVIII Corps at Nijmegen and the Ardennes. He had helped make airborne operations one of the Army's finest weapons...