Bulldog's End

Lieut. General Walton Harris ("Johnnie") Walker had earned a new nickname for himself in Korea. In World War II, as one of the late George Patton's favorite corps commanders, he had become a specialist in the armored attack. In Korea he had had to turn to defensive tactics--first in the Pusan perimeter, where, with no reserves, he smartly shuttled front-line units from one crisis to another; more recently in North Korea, where he directed the pullback that saved his Eighth Army from destruction. Walker's new nickname: "Little Bulldog."

Last week sudden death came to the Little Bulldog. From his command post he was riding to the front north of Seoul, to present unit citations to the 24th Division (first in Korea) and the British Commonwealth 27th Brigade, and a Silver Star to his son, Captain Sam Walker, a 24th Division combat officer. A three-ton truck driven by a South Korean pulled out of line in a southbound column, directly in the path of Walker's jeep. The general's driver could not avoid a collision. Walker was thrown to the road. He was dead when an ambulance got him to a field hospital two miles away.* Viewing his father's shrouded body, Captain Sam Walker wept. General MacArthur revealed that he had recently recommended a promotion for Walker to the four-star rank of a full general.

To command of the Eighth Army, MacArthur announced the appointment of Lieut. General Matthew Bunker Ridgway, U.S. pioneer of the airborne assault in World War II, who was in Washington last week as deputy to Army Chief of Staff J. Lawton Collins. Born at Fort Monroe, Va. 55 years ago, Ridgway planned the first large-scale U.S. parachute-troop operation in Sicily (1943). Through no fault of his, that one was a snafu, but he kept on tirelessly pushing the airborne doctrine, jumped with his troops (the 82nd Airborne Division) in Normandy, later became commander of an airborne corps.

A strapping, austere man, Ridgway used to beat enlisted men's time around an obstacle course, kept fit by chopping wood. Although every inch a fighting general, he is also a literate soldier who has been discovered reading Marcel Proust. As a postwar theater commander in the Mediterranean and Caribbean, he showed administrative talent, and considerable diplomatic flair as the U.S. member of the U.N. Military Staff Committee.

In Korea, Matt Ridgway would not need culture and diplomacy: he would need all his ability as a fighting commander to stave off a powerful, ruthless foe.

*Just five years ago Walker's World War II chief, George Patton, was killed in an automobile wreck near Mannheim, Germany.

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