General Matthew Ridgeway - 31 July 1993

Generals, they used to say, die in bed – and one of them has just gone, to whom we the North Atlantic Treaty Nations and the United Nations owe a good deal, General Matthew Ridgway.

He was too old to be known much to at least one generation and the good war he came to be famous in is I find practically unknown to two generations, a good war. The phrase will disturb some people and give aid and comfort to the wrong sort of soldier, let's begin at the beginning and recall that generals die in bed is an old idiom and was used as a title for one of the bitterest and most disillusioned memoirs of the First World War at a time in the late 1920s when practically all the books about the recent war were bitter and disillusioned.

No wonder after what was it 20-odd million dead that nobody had a good word to say for war, even 20 years after the first horror was over, it was possible it was done to rouse vast numbers of intelligent people with the rather senseless slogan "against war and fascism" at the very moment when the boring, the highly unpopular Mr Winston Churchill was pointing out that German fascism was so powerful and threatening that the only way to be successfully against it was to fight it. All the documentaries and revived wartime movies now give a picture of Hitler as a man everybody recognised as a psychopath from the beginning but right up to Poland he had his distinguished admirers, Mr Lloyd George, the Duke of Windsor, Bernard Shaw among them, but if not to them then to everybody else he did turn out to be a monster of such frightful mien, such an unrelieved villain, that when the Second War was over and won even old sociologists and some notable pacifists reluctantly admitted that for all its grief and savagery there can be a good war.

Since then, Europe its appetite for retaliation on any battlefield was thoroughly sated and nobody cared to leap into war as a necessary procedure against what they deemed to be either an act of wrongdoing or a threat to their national interests. But America, less physically crippled and less emotionally drained by the World Wars, found itself in the spring of 1950 with a leader, an old infantry captain who felt no conflict in his mind, no tossing and turning at night over the thought that there could come a time when America would, ought to go to war again.

Like most soldiers, President Harry Truman had a gut detestation of war that most people who've never been in one think is their sole possession. In that spring of 1950, the time Truman passionately believed had come to go to war again, I'm talking about a war that for most people under 50 never happened and for many more people is unknown and un-honoured as the first United Nations War, Korea. I don't believe except during the few years it was happening, I've talked about it since I think its worth looking over for a minute or two because mainly Americans in the beginning thought it was a good war, one that ought to be fought on principle and also because the General who died this week came to some fame in it and then was forgotten.

In that spring of 1950, suddenly one night the North Koreans invaded their South. Mr Truman called an emergency meeting of his Secretary of State Acheson, secretary of defence, a veteran General of the Second War Bradley and listened to them elaborate in great detail why the United States should not vote in the Security Council of the United Nations to do what the Security Council was set up to do, namely to mobilise its members to resist plain acts of aggression.

What made Mr Truman come scurrying back to Washington for this meeting from his sick mother in Missouri was the exciting knowledge that for the first time in the history of the United Nations, not only was the Soviet Union boycotting the Security Council, they were in a huff because communist China was not being admitted to the club, but the Soviets had no representative in New York. And since there were no jets around then it would take them two days to fly a man there in their fastest giant prop plane. In a word, the Security Council would not hear the usual Soviet veto.

At that suddenly called White House meeting, Harry Truman listened for a naturally gabby man he was a remarkable listener and then, according to Secretary Acheson, and to the astonishment of the sitting experts, Mr Truman stood by a globe and gave a fast comprehensive lecture on the history and conquests of Genghis Khan and of the warlords of this century and the probable effect on communist China of America's doing nothing. Then he said, 15 years ago when Mussolini marched in to Abyssinia, the League of Nations met and argued and gassed and did nothing. That was the virtual end of the League of Nations, if we do nothing in Korea that will be the end of the United Nations. Mr Secretary, he said to the red face and the bristling moustache of Dean Acheson, "Mr Secretary, get yourself up to New York tonight, call the Council and say we're going in, as long as there's no Russian there, the council will vote so help us for the first maybe the last time will vote unanimously".

It's exactly what happened and there's no doubt whatever that at the time, Americans of all stripes of opinion felt that Truman had done the right thing and that South Korea must be defended. And the audacious, cavalier, the brilliant General MacArthur was in command in the whole Far East to see that the war would be over by Christmas. But it wasn't, it went on and on in atrocious weather in a barren landscape and a turn that depressed everybody, the Chinese Communists came roaring in and gave a massive shove to the American Eighth Army sending them reeling down into South Korea.

At that moment, the Eighth Army's commander was killed in a jeep accident and a lieutenant general back in Washington was rushed out to succeed him, his name was Matthew Ridgway. He made a point, an original point for a new commander of going at once to the front line and staying there and telling his beleaguered forces to forget for the time being retaking the lost ground; just, he suggested, kill the enemy in large numbers. He did, however, in the process force the Chinese back and overran their strategic base in the North and that brought us to the spring of 1951, which I will never forget I was down in the big band of Texas going after white tailed deer with a roguish district attorney and we came at lunchtime on a forest ranger.

The first thing he said was, "Well old Harry gone and done it." "What he gone and done?" we asked. "Why he fired MacArthur." This man was clearly a bonehead who listened to gaudy rumours in the local saloon. The truth was Truman had fired MacArthur who to break the stalemate of the war wanted among other audacities to unleash Chiang Kai-shek's Taiwan forces against the Chinese mainland. MacArthur was warned by Truman not to go on complaining in public about United Nations war policy. Nevertheless, he wrote a piece in open condemnation of the president and the policy. Overnight, Mr Truman stunned first MacArthur and then the rest of America by sending him an abrupt brief telegram "You are hereby relieved of all your commands in the Far East period".

At that moment, Mr Truman appointed MacArthur's successor, he was the lieutenant general who'd taken over the retreating Eighth Army in Korea, praised it and sent it forward again, he was Matthew Ridgway. And it was he who wound up in MacArthur's vacant headquarters in Tokyo in charge of the American occupation of Japan. The war in Korea dribbled and staggered to a two-year stalemate before an amnesty between the three contending parties, the UN, South and North Korea.

General Ridgway came home from Japan after the signing of the Japanese peace treaty and as Eisenhower retired from making war and devoted himself to making the presidency. Ridgway succeeded him as supreme commander of all allied forces in Europe and there he drafted a master plan for the first international United Nations force to be at the ready for threats to the general peace – it was the blueprint for the UN Army in Korea that he came to command. Also, while he was in Europe, Ridgway believing like very few top soldiers at the time in the need and the primacy of a NATO fighting force, increased NATO's troop strength from 12 to 80 divisions and then he came back to Washington to be the army's chief of staff, the toughest most frustrating job he said of my whole career.

He fought from the first day the military and the civilian politicians who envisaged all future wars as a combination of air power and atomic weapons. Atomic weapons, he maintained, could not ever be used and massive air power he'd seen in Korea can be more wasteful of money and men than, as he liked to say, an infantryman or a paratrooper with a grenade in his hand. One of his last achievements was a logistical report to Eisenhower, which persuaded him not to follow the French and send Americans into combat in Vietnam, would this his report had been seen or at least obeyed by Kennedy and Johnson.

Ridgway's view of war, the next war, the value of manpower in a world in which there is a taboo on atomic weapons was never popular and when he advocated it he was too old to be listened to. He died this week at the age of 98. Looking back now, we can see that Ridgway was wiser than many more famous and more flamboyant soldiers. Of course, after every war we argue about the conduct of it, its origins and even plain facts become questions. I'm reminded of a little scene at Versailles in 1919 at the signing of the peace treaty, when in the final act the German foreign minister moved forward to sign his name, he turned to the little, tough old French leader Clemenceau and said "I wonder what history will say about all this", Clemenceau shuffled to the table signed his name, turned to the large German and said "History will not say that Belgium invaded Germany".

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