COMMAND: The Airborne Grenadier

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He 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.

We've forgotten a thing we knew 30 years ago. The aircraft will need cable with weight on it, and the message center will need a couple of fish poles [used to hold messages aloft so liaison planes can snap them up in flight]. By God, I haven't seen a message pickup since I've been here.

In his 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."

Eighth Army's late commander, General Walton ("Johnny") Walker, was a steady, courageous battle 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 it "

"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.

Matt entered West Point, in the class of 1917* He managed the football team played on the hockey squad. Commented the West Point yearbook: "Beyond doubt the busiest man in the place."

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.

A few 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.