Old Pro

(See Cover)

With sirens wailing, two shiny jeeps with .30-caliber machine guns mounted on their hoods rattled last week along a dusty South Korean road, passing long truck convoys plodding north. Weary G.I. truck drivers were slow at first to give the jeeps the right of way, but after a startled doubletake they pulled over in a hurry. On the fenders of the lead jeep were two small shiny metal flags, one carrying the three stars of a lieutenant general, the other bearing the letters "CG--8." In the lead jeep, his big hand grasping an arm rest, was grim-faced Walton Harris Walker, 60, commanding general of the Far East Command's Eighth Army.

MacArthur's ground commander in Korea bulged a little in his sharply pressed suntans. But from his gleaming three-starred helmet to his shiny low boots, he looked every inch a fighting man, which he was. Few G.I.s who saw him along that road would forget him; most of them were likely to see him again. General Walker is the frontline, show-yourself type of general.

The two jeeps hurried on past the dried river beds and bare hills of inland Korea --country that reminded Walker of his familiar territory of west Texas. Here & there along the road the general stopped. Sometimes he smiled and politely asked enlisted men for information, such as the location of regimental or battalion command posts. Occasionally he turned on his parade-ground voice in a blast of censure. A luckless 1st Cavalry shavetail got it:

"Damn it, lieutenant, don't you know better than to park your jeeps on both sides of the road? You're blocking traffic."

Caught In the Glare. Getting to the front, General Walker made his business short and to the point. On a long, flat stretch of road (used at the moment as an improvised landing strip for liaison planes), he went over the situation with one of his division commanders. Then he started visiting colonels and majors. Sometimes, gesturing at map positions with a stubby forefinger, he made crisp suggestions for trimming lines or improving positions. Sometimes he silently absorbed information, left without a word.

Day after day Walker went back to the front, frequently using airplanes, including grasshopping liaison craft, and always refusing fighter cover. One trip took him to the east coast to inspect the 1st Cavalry's landing area at Pohang (see above). Walker had always been a man to avoid the limelight, a quality which had long endeared him to less modest superiors. Now he was, willy-nilly, caught in the glare of public attention and public concern.

Philosophy of a Gamecock. "This," said Walker last week, "is the first time in my 43 years of military experience that I have had to do anything else but attack." It was a permissible exaggeration: the Korean situation was fantastically different from Walker's World War II battle experience, passed entirely as a corps commander under the late George Patton, hard-riding master of the armored attack. Walton Walker's career under Patton did not begin until 48 days after Dday. The Normandy invasion had been preceded by tremendous planning and mountainous buildup; Walker's XX Corps (and the rest of Patton's Third Army) was held in England until the beachhead was soundly secured.* Eisenhower had held the Third Army back for the U.S. forces' Sunday punch.

Patton once said admiringly to another officer, as Walker was passing by: "There goes a fighting son-of-a-bitch." Patton himself had been described as a "purebred gamecock with brains," and he felt that Walker had satisfactorily absorbed his own battle philosophy. This was expounded in such Pattonisms, usually decked with profanity, as: "Never take counsel of your fears." "Don't worry about your flanks, let the enemy worry about them." "The way to get out of enemy fire is to advance out of it." And so on.

"Go In & Take It." In nine months of 1944-45, Walker's XX Corps traveled --some of the time at top speed--from Normandy to Austria. It was Courtney Hodges' First Army that smashed the hole in the German line, at Avranches, and it was the XX Corps and the rest of the Third Army that poured through the gap. The XX Corps' first major job was to clear the north bank of the Loire, but some of Walker's units helped to beat back the enemy counterattack at Mortain and pincer the German Seventh Army at Falaise.

Walker's armored spearheads reached the Seine at Melun. The Seine crossings were savagely contested; Walker directed one himself, under fire on the riverbank. Within days, the XX Corps lanced through the battleground that had been dismally fought over for years in World War I--Reims, Epernay, Chateau-Thierry, Verdun. Walker pushed on across the Meuse, but with the enemy in rout, Patton ordered him to "sit down" 40 miles short of Metz. The Third Army, which needed 450,000 gallons of automotive fuel a day, was almost out of gas.

By the time gas arrived, the enemy had collected himself somewhat. Without much trouble Walker crossed the Moselle north and south of Metz, but units of the XX Corps had to fight in the forbidding network of forts around Metz for two more months.

Said General Patton in his memoirs: "I directed General Walker to stop fooling around . . . and go in and take it." Walker did. It was the first time in the era of gunpowder that Metz had been taken by storm./-

Slashing Envelopment. During the Battle of the Bulge, in which most of the Third Army was pulled out of line to carve a spectacular corridor north to isolated Bastogne, the XX Corps' principal job was to hold the whole of Patton's depleted former front. Walker did it by mining and wiring in depth, plus aggressive patrolling. When the Bulge was erased, Walker was thirsty for action--and he got it. In a roaring campaign he cleaned up the Saar-Moselle triangle, seizing the key German stronghold of Trier, then took a leading part in the Third Army's thrust to the Rhine north of Coblenz and slashing envelopment of the Palatinate.

No such windfall as the Remagen bridgehead fell into Walker's lap, but he crossed the Rhine at Mainz without fanfare, in assault boats. After that, the XX Corps' hardest fighting was at Kassel, where the Germans fought wildly and vainly to prevent Allied encirclement of the Ruhr. The Reich's back was broken and the rest of the XX Corps' progress, though not bloodless, was relatively easy. After Weimar, Jena, Nurnberg, Regensburg, Walker in early May reached Linz, in Austria, the farthest point of the Third Army's advance.

Military Fundamentalist. Toward the end of the war, Walker had become such an expert in the tactical management of armor that Patton considered creating an all-armored corps of three divisions and putting Walker in charge of it. "Johnnie" Walker's colleagues do not remember that he ever argued with anything Patton ever said, or, in fact, answered anything to a Patton order except "Yes, sir." A military fundamentalist, Walker believes wholeheartedly in the ancient military dictum that a man must learn to obey orders before he can give them. Of Patton's many commendations, Walker prized this one the most: "Of all the corps I have commanded, yours has always been the most eager to attack and the most reasonable and cooperative."

Like Patton, Walker believes that generals should visit the front constantly and take their chances in battle, not only to see (and correct) what is going on, but to encourage the troops. Like Patton, he believes in assiduous visits to the wounded (but not to "battle fatigue" cases). Patton always insisted that the officers around him wear neckties; now, in tieless Douglas MacArthur's area, Walker often goes without one.

Shotgun v. Pistol. Walton Walker is not a colorful prima donna, or an affable diplomat, or a profound strategist, or an egoist with a flair for drama. Military historians will probably not quarrel lengthily over his capabilities; psychologists will not find him an enigma. In World War II he fought as Patton wanted him to; in Korea, he will fight as MacArthur wants him to--however much retreats and holding actions may go against his grain. If ordered to hold, he will stand and fight to the last man, including Walton Walker. He is, in every sense of the phrase, an "old pro"--which is just what the U.S. needs at this dismal point in Korea.

Walker is not interested in golf, polo or social functions, prefers hunting & fishing. He does not smoke, but takes an occasional drink and likes a joke if it is not complicated or highbrow.

Walker's profanity is infrequent and mild. He likes movies, prefers comedies and westerns. Walker is a religious man, as was Patton, but, unlike Patton, Walker does not refer to God as if the Deity were his G3.

Walker is an admirer of Wyatt Earp, famed U.S. marshal of Tombstone in the old West, who (says Walker) did most of his work for law & order with a shotgun, not a revolver. In Korea last week, in addition to his service .45, Walker was toting a Savage automatic shotgun for close-range protection. "I don't mind getting shot at from long range," he explained, "but I'm damned if anybody is going to assassinate me."

Little Girls Up Trees. There was nothing in his early life that was not routine, or that did not lead straight to the role of an old Army pro. He was born (1889) in Texas--in the cotton country at Belton (pop. 6,300). Son of a mild-mannered dry-goods merchant, grandson of two Confederate officers, Walton early told his family that he was going to be a general. In boyhood war games, he called himself Jeb Stuart, ran little girls up trees with his wooden sword. He went to a military school in Texas, then to Virginia Military Institute and West Point, graduating in 1912. He married a Baltimore girl and they have one son, 1st Lieut. Sam Sims Walker (West Point, '46), now with the 82nd Airborne Division at Fort Bragg, N.C.

In World War I, Walker reached the temporary rank of lieutenant colonel, was twice decorated for gallantry. .After that war, his career was routine, except for three years on the International Railroad Patrol in China. He spent 15 years in the permanent rank of major, attended some of the best thought-of service schools, taught tactics for a while at West Point.

Hard Training, Easy Combat. In 1942, as a major general commanding the IV Armored Corps, Walker began to attract attention as a tough guy by the way he ran California's Desert Training Center for U.S. armored forces bound for Africa. He insisted on field conditions at all times for the troops (e.g., tents, no barracks), and put his officers, even elderly ones, through rigorous field tests, such as a 25-mile hike in eight hours, nine miles in two hours, five miles in one hour. "His idea," a colleague explained, "was to make training so damned hard that combat would seem easy."

After the war, Walker served for a while as commander of the Fifth Army, a peacetime administrative area based in Chicago. This, of course, was not his dish. In 1948 he went to Japan to take command of the Eighth Army from Robert Eichelberger, who was retiring.

"What Can You Do?" A first-class trainer of combat troops, Walker was helpless to prevent the deterioration of occupation troops in Japan as fighting units and fighting men--a natural peacetime process aided by several circumstances. For recruiting purposes, the Army had to sugar-coat the pill of occupation duty; the sugarcoating got thicker than the pill. In Japan, life was soft and easy. The people were friendly, the girls complaisant, beer & bars plentiful. War seemed far away. Occupation soldiers spent their time putting down Communist agitators, collecting taxes, and chasing smugglers--or tending 60ft-drink machines, punching typewriters and driving colonels' cars.

More than a year ago, MacArthur ordered Walker to improve the state of the troops' combat readiness. He plunged in dutifully, but this spring Walker figured he still had a year to complete the job. There was nothing he could do about the fact that his four divisions had been cut way below strength by Defense Secretary

Louis Johnson's economy drive. In Korea last week, a front-line officer said bitterly: "What can you do with a damn two-battalion infantry regiment? You have no base to deploy around, no reserve--and no tactics, because all our tactics are founded on the assumption that you have three full battalions to maneuver with."

Into the Sea? Two weeks before the North Koreans struck, tough, shark-mouthed Walton Walker said to his command: "Your mission and mine is to maintain the splendid Eighth Army in the state of readiness which will assure success in any role we may be called on to assume. In this I am confident we shall not fail."

Last week the whole U.S. had a question to ask of Walker: Would the U.S. get pushed off Korea into the sea? He, of course, did not know for sure. He only knew he would do his level best--which, on the record, was abundantly good--to prevent it. In public he said what he had to say and what came natural to an old soldier: "There is no question whatever about the outcome of this struggle. We shall win."

-Walker actually got to France ahead of the XX Corps as temporary replacement for Major General Charles Corlett, the XIX Corps (First Army) commander, who was ill. /- Attila the Hun took Metz in 451 A.D. In the Franco-German war of 1870, the French surrendered it rather than starve. The Germans held it at the beginning of World War I and took it without a fight in World War II.

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