Word: ridgway
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When last week's U.N. attack began, Matt Ridgway, an austerely handsome man of 56, tramped alongside the lead tank of a column, critically watching the two lines of infantrymen shuffle up the road a few hundred yards ahead. Neatly hooked to the web harness he wore over his trench coat were a paratrooper's first-aid kit and the hand grenade that has become as famous a trademark as George Patton's pearl-handled pistols...
...Quite Impossible. Each day Ridgway shuttled across the front in his helicopter, marshaling his troops as carefully as a Roman general. When he left the column on Thursday, he headed for the landing strip where Captain Mike Lynch picked him up in an L17 liaison plane. Back at his headquarters, he said goodbye to General Mark Clark, Army Field Forces commander, who had visited Korea on an inspection trip. Then he went out to do some more inspecting...
...brought to his G.I. a complaint that the envelopes G.I.s used for letters home were sticking together.* He ordered a division G-4 to provide fresh meat for his units seven out of ten days. When the G-4 mentioned the lack of refrigerators, Ridgway snapped, "The winter will give you time to work out the refrigeration problem." Back at his headquarters, he called in to his aide, Lieut. Colonel Walter Winton, "Walter, get word to Signal Corps to brush up on message pickups...
...hectoring, driving way, Matt Ridgway had changed Eighth Army out of all resemblance to the command, riddled with defeatism, that he had found two months before. Said one staff officer, He will give you a job that is almost impossible, but not quite impossible. It can be done...
...leader who was inclined to flounder in staff work and had 11ttle imagination. After the Chinese Communists smashed into North Korea, neither Walker's starched generalship nor the remote-control direction of Douglas Mac-Arthur's staff in Tokyo could give the Army the direction it needed. Ridgway can. Omar Bradley called him "one of those tremendously valuable Army officers who are both outstanding commanders and amazingly competent staff officers. He can plan an action and he can execute...