The Fifties

by David Halberstam

As Omar Bradley, not a man who lightly used superlatives, wrote in his autobiography, “It is not often in wartime that a single battlefield commander can make a decisive difference. But in Korea, Ridgway would prove to be the exception. His brilliant, driving, uncompromising leadership would turn the tide of battle like no other general’s in our military history.” In Washington they stopped talking about being driven out of Korea or using the atomic weapon. Years later, noting that America had considered the use of an atomic weapon, Max Hastings, the British military historian, said of Ridgway and the men under his command: “The men who turned the tide on the battlefield in Korea in the first weeks of 1951 may have also saved the world from the nightmare of a new Hiroshima in Asia.” Not surprisingly, the better Matt Ridgway did, the more difficult Douglas MacArthur became. It was becoming clear that the earlier failure of the Eighth Army was that of its commander. (In 1954 MacArthur told Jim Lucas, one of his more favored journalists, that Ridgway was the worst of his field commanders—this view to be published after MacArthur’s death: Such was the bitterness of a man whose reputation had been so badly damaged by the defeat along the Yalu.)