After the outbreak of the Korean War, seeing that South Korea could not stand it, the United States intervened, and MacArthur, who was stationed in Japan at the time, served as the commander-in-chief of the United Nations army against North Korea.
Speaking of MacArthur, this unruly general was very senior and his prestige in the United States was also very high. During World War I, he served as brigade commander and division commander in the U.S. Expeditionary Force in Europe, and after the war, he served as the principal of the West Point Military Academy and the chief of staff of the Army. He was the commander-in-chief of the Allied Southwest Pacific Theater during World War II and the Supreme Commander of the Allied Forces in Japan after World War II.
At the time, MacArthur was a very suitable candidate.
So why was MacArthur fired?
Due to the sudden change in the situation on the peninsula, the volunteer army began to resist the United States and aid Korea. Because of MacArthur's obstinate and arrogant personality, he was in great trouble.
He never believed that China would enter the war, and as a result, hundreds of thousands of troops crossed the Yalu River without knowing it, so that the volunteer army gave him a blow. However, despite this, he still believed that the volunteer army was just a small support army, and it would not be too numerous.
However, in less than a year, the United Nations army suffered a major blow, and successive defeats made the American high-level angry.
But this was only one of the reasons for MacArthur's removal.
Another reason was that he was at odds with Truman's policies. MacArthur was very arrogant, and on the one hand he vigorously advocated the expansion of the war to China. At the same time, it was also a frequent outpouring of the Soviet Union.
This made the U.S. government very distressed, and once MacArthur's madness annoyed the Soviet Union, the results could be imagined.
At the same time, the relationship between Truman and MacArthur is also one of the reasons that have to be considered, the two are not quite right, and Truman does not look up to MacArthur who is so unruly and uninhabited.
So Truman moved the idea of replacing MacArthur, who to replace? At this moment, Ridgway made Truman's eyes light up.
Ridgway was a four-star general in the U.S. Army and graduated from the United States Military Academy at West Point, but he had long served as a staff officer and did not have much experience in leading troops, until he became a combat general and went to the battlefield of World War II at the age of 47, and became the commander of the Airborne Army.
At the end of the 1940s, he became Deputy Chief of the General Staff.
On the Peninsula, although MacArthur lost his first battle against the Volunteers, he did not take it seriously and decided to launch a general offensive to end the war before Christmas.
The result was another failure, and during the retreat, the commander of the 8th Army, Walker, was killed in a car accident. Ridgway, who was deputy chief of staff, took over urgently.
Ridgway's appearance did bring great trouble to the volunteers. As soon as he arrived in Korea, he gave the volunteer army his life, that is, the logistics supply could not keep up. To this end, he carried out a targeted counter-offensive, which is also an effective counterattack carried out by the United Nations army for so long.
It was Ridgway's performance that made Truman make up his mind and eventually removed MacArthur.
Objectively speaking, Truman's decision was correct, and Ridgway later created "magnetic tactics" and launched a "strangulation war", which brought great trouble to the volunteer army in the fifth campaign.