Gen. Matthew B. Ridgway, Hero of 2 Wars, Dies at 98 : Army: In World War II, he led major airborne operations. He also commanded U.N. forces in Korea.

Gen. Matthew B. 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, said his attorney, Donald Gerlach. The general died in Fox Chapel, Pa., where he had lived since 1955 when he retired as Army chief of staff to become chairman of the Mellon Institute in Pittsburgh.

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

Ridgway was named commander of the 8th Army and United Nations ground forces in Korea in late 1950 after North Korean and Chinese Communist troops had bludgeoned the forces and threatened to drive them into the sea.

Ridgway wasted no time putting his 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, 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 A. Michener wrote in Life magazine. “In Korea the man has become enveloped in a great legend--a legend vastly complimentary and almost wholly true.”

Wearing his trademark paratrooper’s harness with a hand grenade strapped to his chest, Ridgway was a familiar and inspiring figure at risky forward positions--so much so that his superiors at the Pentagon, fearing he might become a casualty, placed Gen. James Van Fleet on alert just in case he might be needed to take over Ridgway’s command.

Ridgway’s arrival in Korea “electrified the tired 8th Army,” wrote military historian S.L.A. Marshall. “It was beaten when he took command; hopes had diminished throughout the nation; his superiors had lost confidence.

“His spirit and action shamed the doubters and restored faith--a prime example of the power of one man to change a situation decisively.”

Gloomy talk of a U.N. evacuation evaporated in the wake of his troops’ successes. Just three months after his arrival, U.N. forces had retaken Seoul, the South Korean capital, and pushed north to the 38th Parallel dividing the war-ravaged Korean Peninsula.

Meanwhile, Gen. Douglas A. MacArthur’s long-running feud with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President Harry S. Truman over MacArthur’s insistence on widening the war led to Truman firing the general and naming Ridgway to succeed him as commander of the unified U.N. forces in April, 1951.

By June, Chinese boasts of an inevitable Communist victory had been silenced, and Beijing used diplomatic channels to pass the word that it was ready to begin truce talks.

The son of an Army artillery colonel, Ridgway was born March 3, 1895, at Ft. Monroe, Va. After graduating from West Point in 1917, he said it had never occurred to him to choose any service other than the infantry.

After 15 months with an infantry company at Eagle Pass, Tex., on the Mexican border, Ridgway returned to West Point to teach Spanish and supervise athletics. A variety of assignments followed, 15 in one 17-year stretch, as he began an agonizingly slow climb up through the peacetime Army’s ranks. Fifteen years would pass before he became a major in 1932.

As a colonel in 1939, Ridgway showed grimly accurate foresight in proposing plans for a training maneuver based on the assumption that the Pacific fleet had been knocked out at Pearl Harbor.

Criticism of his “fantastic” plan “was instantaneous and vociferous,” Ridgway said. Nonetheless, the War Department gave him permission to run logistics tests, and top railway officials joined the effort to help test the Army’s ability to get troop and cargo trains across the continent to cope with a theoretical landing of enemy armies on the West Coast.

“Two years later when the Pacific fleet had been temporarily knocked out at Pearl Harbor, and men and munitions were pouring across the country, this knowledge came in very handy,” Ridgway said.

That Sunday morning in December, 1941, when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, Ridgway had just arrived at Ft. Benning, Ga., from a staff job in Washington for a brushup course in field tactics. With the United States entry into World War II, Ridgway joined the reactivated 82nd Infantry Division as second in command and soon succeeded Gen. Omar Bradley as the division’s commander.

When he was asked if he would like to convert the division into an airborne unit, Ridgway replied: “I’ve never heard of one, but I would be happy to do it.”

He made his first parachute jump at age 47 and later told his wary troopers that jumping was “the most glorious feeling in the world. You feel like the lord of creation floating way above the Earth.”

Only later would he describe the landing as like jumping from a fast freight to a hard roadbed.

During the invasion of Sicily in September, 1943, Ridgway’s paratroopers participated in the first major airborne assault conducted at night by any army. As an American armored division assigned to take Palermo drove its tanks into the town square, they were met by mocking applause from troopers in the 82nd who had beaten them there by several hours.

On D-Day the following June, Ridgway jumped into Normandy with leading elements of the 82nd’s 6,000 paratroopers.

“I think the dominant feeling was one of great pride, that we were the cutting edge, the assault echelon of that unparalleled amphibious-air operation,” Ridgway recalled.

He landed alone in a pasture and drew his .45-caliber side arm when he saw a shadow--then realized it was a cow.

“I could have kissed her,” he said later.

The troops were dropped and dispersed over a wide area, but they cut German communications as they fought their way back to assembly points, took their objectives and helped secure the crucial beachhead. During 33 days of combat--”on the attack practically all the time”--the 82nd suffered more than 54% casualties.

Ridgway later commanded the 18th Airborne Corps during the desperate German offensive at the Battle of the Bulge. From his corps headquarters, he told a beleaguered general in another sector: “There hasn’t been a breakthrough here and there isn’t going to be. We are going to attack.”

While en route to the Far East to take command of airborne operations in August, 1945, Ridgway received news of the Japanese surrender. He returned from Japan the next year to find that his marriage--with its long, forced separations--was a casualty of the war. Serving in a staff job in Washington, he met Mary (Penny) Anthony, a secretary in her 20s. They married in December, 1947; their son, Matthew B. (Matty) Ridgway Jr., was born in 1949. He was killed in 1971 on a canoe trip in Canada.

After succeeding MacArthur as supreme commander in the Far East, Ridgway spent a year in Tokyo before replacing Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower as supreme commander of NATO forces in Europe.

He increased NATO’s troop strength from 12 to more than 80 divisions and returned to the United States in 1953 to become Army chief of staff. It was a turbulent and frustrating time, when redbaiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy was savaging the Army and Secretary of Defense Charles Wilson was determined to drastically cut the military budget even as the United States was offering military aid and alliances to about 40 countries.

Years later, Ridgway’s eyes would still smolder when he recalled how Eisenhower had shared a campaign platform with McCarthy after the senator had brutally attacked Gen. George C. Marshall “with scurrilous and indefensible remarks” in a three-hour Senate speech.

Recollections of what he considered Wilson’s rudeness could also get a rise out of Ridgway. Wilson--embracing the slogan, “More bang for the buck”--frequently ignored speakers at briefings, choosing instead to drum his fingers rudely on a table or stare out the window.

In one of his few successes as chief of staff, Ridgway dispatched Army experts to Indochina--tragically seared into the next generation of Americans’ consciences as Vietnam--to prepare a logistics report that persuaded Eisenhower not to send U.S. combat troops to aid the French.

Ridgway retired from the Army in 1955, but 13 years later he was part of a group advising President Lyndon B. Johnson to limit U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Greater troop strength and increased bombing could not lead to victory in Vietnam, the group argued, advising Johnson to seek a negotiated peace with North Vietnam.

Johnson heeded the group’s advice and announced in March, 1968, that he would de-escalate the war and begin negotiations. U.S. involvement in Vietnam did not end, however, because Richard Nixon won the presidency later that year with the promise of a “secret plan” to end the war. The fighting would drag on for five more years before the Nixon Administration negotiated a U.S. withdrawal.

Author David Halberstam sent Ridgway a copy of “The Best and the Brightest,” his definitive work on U.S. involvement in Vietnam, in which he had written on the flyleaf: “For General Matthew Ridgway, the one hero of this book.”

In 1986, President Ronald Reagan awarded Ridgway the Presidential Medal of Freedom, stating: “Heroes come when they are needed; great men step forward when courage seems in short supply. World War II was such a time, and there was Ridgway.”

In 1991, Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, went to Ridgway’s home to present him the Congressional Gold Medal for four decades of service to the nation.

Ridgway’s other honors included the Distinguished Service Cross, the Distinguished Service Medal, the Legion of Merit, the Silver Star and an honorary knighthood, the British Order of the Bath.

Ridgway, who retired from the Mellon Institute in 1960, wrote two books about his military experiences, “Soldier” in 1956 and “The Korean War” in 1967.

In addition to his wife, Mary, he is survived by two daughters from a previous marriage, Constance and Shirley.