Ridgway, Matthew Bunker

Ridgway, Matthew Bunker (1895–1993) U.S. army general, army Chief of Staff. Born at Fort Monroe, Virginia, to an army family, Ridgway spent World War I in the United States; in the following years he undertook a variety of assignments, including the command of a company at Tientsin, China, work on resolving a border dispute between Bolivia and Paraguay, and service in the Philippines. With the outbreak of World War II, Ridgway became commander of the Eighty-second Airborne Division, with the rank of major general. In 1943 he led his troops in the invasions of Sicily and Salerno. Ridgway and his troops parachuted onto the Cotentin Peninsula, Normandy, as a leading element of the D-Day Landing (June 6, 1944); Ridgway was named commander of the Eighteenth Corps, which he led in the Battle of the Bulge (1944–45) and into Germany. Ridgway was named commander of the Mediterranean theater of operations, and at war's end, he was one of the most honored U.S. commanders. In December 1950, when fighting broke out in Korea, he was made commander of the Eighth Army there, taking over control of the ground war, stopping the Chinese advance, and restoring the unit's morale. In March 1931, Ridgway retook Seoul and pushed north of the thirty-eighth parallel, which divided North and South Korea. When President Harry S. Truman relieved Gen. Douglas MacArthur of his command in Korea, Ridgway was chosen to replace him. In 1952 Truman named him to head the North Atlantic Treaty Organization(NATO), headquartered in Brussels, replacing Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower; in October 1953 Eisenhower named him army Chief of Staff. In this position, Ridgway advocated reliance on conventional forces rather than massive nuclear retaliation, the hallmark of Eisenhower's “New Look” defense strategy. He also opposed U.S. involvement in Vietnam following the French defeat at Dien Bien Phu (1954). In 1955 he retired from the army and joined the Mellon Institute, from which he continued to criticize American involvement in Vietnam.