
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: TUESDAY, July 27, 1993                   TAG: 9307270132
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-2   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Los Angeles Times
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Short

KOREA GENERAL MATTHEW RIDGWAY DIES

Gen. Matthew Ridgway, who galvanized a "beaten" army in Korea into a fighting force capable of routing communist troops three times its size, died Monday in his sleep at his suburban Pittsburgh home. He was 98.

Ridgway died of heart failure, according to his attorney, Donald Gerlach. The general died in Fox Chapel, Pa., where he had lived since 1955.

The World War II commander of the legendary 82nd Airborne Division led the Army's first major airborne operation in Sicily and also led his paratroopers in the D-Day landing in Normandy.

Ridgway was named commander of the U.S. Eighth Army and United Nations ground forces in Korea in late 1950, when North Korean and Chinese communist troops had bludgeoned his forces and threatened to drive them into the sea.

Ridgway wasted no time putting his personal stamp on the war. A day after assuming command, he interrupted a British staff officer's briefing on contingency withdrawal plans with the comment: "I'm more interested in your plans for attack."

In short order, all of Ridgway's officers were busy drawing up attack plans "in a change of spirit and purpose so swift that none would have believed it possible," James Michener wrote in Life magazine.

by CNB