COMMAND: Education of a General

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Holding Attack. Last April, Mark Clark was head of the Army Field Forces, a job which required him to supervise the state of training of U.S. troops at bases in the U.S. One morning while he was on tour and taking a shower at Camp Roberts in California, an orderly came to report an incoming telephone call. "Who is it?" Clark yelled through the rush of running water. Cried the orderly: "Somebody who says his name's Bradley." On the phone, Omar N. Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Clark that he was ticketed for the Tokyo job, to succeed Matt Ridgway.

Clark flew back to Washington, conferred long and hard with top military and civilian policymakers, and visited the U.N. in New York, where he talked with Trygve Lie and Warren Austin. He took off for Japan with a briefcase stuffed with reports, which he read en route.

With half an eye Mark Clark, who has studied Communist strategy before, could see what the Communists' year-long truce operation really was. It was not "negotiating" at all; it was a Communist holding attack—that is, an action by which your enemy pins you down on one sector while he builds up preponderant force on another sector. Breaking up this attack was soon to engage Clark's major attention, but when he landed at Tokyo's Haneda airport he had to deal at once with an urgent crisis—the Dodd-Colson coup engineered by the Red prisoners on Koje Island.

Mark Clark moved promptly to clean up the mess; although he cleared all his moves with Washington, he initiated most of them himself. He published the disgraceful messages that led. to Dodd's release—lest the Communists strengthen their propaganda barrage by publishing them first. He reversed the verdict of an Army inquiry board which cleared Colson and Dodd of blame, and persuaded Washington to bust them to colonels. He detached the now celebrated Haydon L. Boatner from a combat job and sent him to Koje with orders to regain control of the prison camp. Boatner did.

Clark sized up the rest of his domain. To run the Eighth Army, he has a tried and proven combat man in General James Van Fleet. U.S. relations with the troublesome Syngman Rhee government are handled through the embassy in Pusan (although, in the ambassador's absence, Van Fleet in person recently admonished Rhee). U.S. business with the Japanese government, sensitive and proud of its new sovereignty, is transacted through the embassy in Tokyo, where Mark Clark's old friend from North Africa days, Robert Murphy, is ambassador.

Buddy System. Whereas relations between Ambassador Bob Murphy and Matt Ridgway used to be on the stiff and formal side, Clark and Murphy soon began to settle things with friendly chats on the telephone.

In an age when the line between political and military affairs is blurred or nonexistent, Clark believes in what he calls the "buddy system"—a political man and a military man working together. "I've seen too many places," he says, "where the political and the military spent most of their time fighting each other, despite the fact that they were on the same side. In the past, many American generals were inclined to say of politics: 'To hell with it, let's talk politics later.' But you can't do it this way any more."