The Airborne Grenadier

(See Cover)

As usual on a Marine jump-off, the leathernecks were not losing any time. Corporal Ardrick Hammon of Alton, Ill., radioman for an artillery observer, slogged his way north, so loaded with fighting and communications gear that he could stoop to tie the flapping lace of one combat boot. He felt a tap on his shoulder, looked into a lean face under a pile cap with three stars and a paratrooper's silver badge on it.

"Don't you want your shoe tied.'' asked Lieut. General Matthew Ridgway.

"No, sir," Hammon replied.

Ridgway knelt down and tied the shoe. "Is that too tight?" he asked.

"No, sir," said the abashed Hammon.

It was an odd gesture for a lieutenant general. Hammon and his fellow marines would never forget it. But for Matthew Bunker Ridgway, a soldier who possesses a passionate sense of detail, an instinct for the bonds that unite a commander and his troops, and a nice flair for showmanship, it was no effort at all. A few minutes later the general climbed into his helicopter and whirred off to another sector of his front line.

This week, with the precision of a machine, the marines and other divisions of Ridgway's Eighth Army ground their way northward over the mountains of central Korea. Their general's orders were simple: "Use every daylight hour to seek out and destroy the enemy. Inflict maximum casualties and sustain a minimum of your own. Withdraw to strong defensive positions at night. Search every piece ground. Do not push on until you have eliminated every Communist."

Such a tone may have sounded over-optimistic for an army facing an enemy three times its size, with huge reserves ot trained manpower behind him. But in fact, it sensibly understated the Eighth Army's present capability. In the last two weeks battle Ridgway's men had inflicted an estimated 30,000 casualties on Chinese and North Korean Communists, at small to themselves.

Politically, this had taken a handsome international bargaining point from the Chinese Communists, who had hoped to intimidate the United Nations by the threat of their "inevitable victory in Korea. Militarily, the U.N. army had regained its self-confidence and vindicated the contention of U.S. artillerymen that a compact, mobile fighting force, long on organization and heavy in firepower can stand up against the mass levies of a Communist war machine.

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.

Not 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 of his own.