<p>
The United Nations world was shocked and grieved on the day before Christmas Eve 1950 when the radio and press headlines flashed the sad news: “General Walker killed at the Front in a Jeep Accident.”</p>
<p>
General MacArthur announced from his headquarters in Tokyo: “I am profoundly shocked at the death of General <em>Walton Walker</em>. As commander of the Eighth United States Army he proved himself a brilliant military leader whom I had just recommended for promotion to the rank of full general. His gallantry in action has been an inspiration to all who have served with him, and his loss will be keenly felt not only by our own country but by those allied with us in defense of freedom on the Korean peninsula …”</p>
<p>
The next day G.O. 213, Eighth Army stated in part: “… General Walker assumed command of the Eighth United States Army in South Korea on 15 July 1950. The military situation was critical. His superior knowledge, experience, personal leadership and tenacity of purpose were immediately reflected in the action of his troops. He organized a defense which brought the invading North Korean Forces against an impregnable barrier miles short of their goal. His personal courage and his unshakable faith in his troops became an inspiration to all. His skillful timing of counterattack prevented a numerically superior force from any exploitation of local successes and wrought great destruction on the enemy. Through his superior tactical ability and skillful employment of the limited troops of his command. General Walker unleashed an offensive with such power and fury that the enemy was driven back into a state of disintegration in a matter of days. The pursuit and destruction of the enemy which followed will go down in history as a monument to his military leadership ...”</p>
<p>
Messages of sympathy began pouring in by the thousands: to the Eighth Army; to General MacArthur’s headquarters; to the bereaved widow in Yokohama; and to the beloved aged mother at home in Belton, Texas. Trygve Lie, Secretary General of the United Nations, cabled: “I and all of my colleagues are deeply grieved to hear of the tragic death of General Walker. His soldierly qualities and unselfish service have won him an indelible place in the annals of the United Nations.” Similar sentiments were expressed by the heads of missions in Tokyo; by the governments of Japan and South Korea; by the Secretary of Defense and the President of the United States.</p>
<p>
Major General Leven C. Allen, USA, Chief of Staff of the Eighth Army, was expressing the sentiments of General Walker’s entire command when he wrote in a letter to Mrs. Walker: “The sorrow that has fallen over General Walker’s entire staff is overwhelming, for he was loved and revered by each and every one of us. Those who have been associated with him will never cease to mourn his death. His deeds and outstanding leadership in a most difficult campaign will live forever in history ...</p>
<p>
General Walker’s last acts were typical of him. He had just issued a cheering Christmas message to his command before setting out from his command post on a hurried trip to the front over the muddy and crowded roads north of Seoul to present well-earned unit citations to the 24th Division (first in Korea) and the British Commonwealth 27th Brigade, and a Silver Star to his own son, Captain Sam Sims Walker, 19th Infantry, for bravery in action as a front-line company commander. En route the General met his death when the jeep in which he was riding collided with an ammunition truck.</p>
<p>
As a man and as a soldier Johnnie Walker enjoyed the blessing of a very fine heritage, traceable largely perhaps to his Anglo-Saxon forebears who played such leading parts in the pioneer development of America. Johnnie was born on 3 December 1889, in Belton, Texas, the only child of Sam Sims Walker and Lydia May Harris Walker, both families having been very prominent in the history of their beloved Texas. The stories of the battles and leaders of the Civil War, which he learned at the knees of both grandfathers who served as officers in the Confederate States Army, greatly influenced little Johnnie to aspire to become a West Pointer and an officer of the United States Army. His preparation to become a cadet included grammar school and Wedemeyer Military Academy in Belton; one year at Virginia Military Academy; and one year at Braden’s Preparatory School. He entered West Point from the Texas 11th Congressional District.</p>
<p>
West Point’s yearbook (the 1912 <em>Howitzer</em>) gives this picture of Cadet Johnnie Walker, a general favorite among his classmates:</p>
<p>
“A man who has taken his fun where he found it but who, best of all, on his birthday received from the gods the gift of finding fun wherever he goes, if it is there, and if it isn’t there he gets busy and makes some. He is another one of the rank and file whose red banner bears the legend, ‘Agin the government,’ and whose slogan is ‘Down with the T.D.’ But the thing for which we like him most is his loyalty, especially to every sort of athletic team we have here. He burns his face along with the baseball fans, and he shivers himself into a sweat at football practice. No weather or physical discomfort can dampen his enthusiasm. We need that sort of men here.”</p>
<p>
Johnnie’s diminutive size placed him in the runt squad of “C” Company, then a “runt” company, and naturally barred his participation in those athletic sports that required sheer brawn rather than speed and skill. Even so he was always active in a wide variety of other extra-curricular activities such as horsemanship, marksmanship, fencing, boxing and wrestling. Being a “clean sleeve” caused easy-going Cadet Walker no more concern than the fact that scholastically he graduated only 23 files above the “goat” man of his class, for, as he would argue, his hobby as a student of military history—especially of West Point’s leaders of all time—revealed beyond question that class standing alone was no criterion of what a cadet’s future success would be in the Army, especially on the field of battle.</p>
<p>
Second Lieutenant Walker’s first assignment was the 19th Infantry, at Fort Sheridan, Illinois. He accompanied his regiment to Texas and Oklahoma, including service with Funston’s Expeditionary Force to Vera Cruz in 1914 and Pershing’s Punitive Expedition in Mexico in 1916. During World War I he commanded the 13th Machine Gun Battalion, 5th Division, A.E.F., where as a major he was cited twice for gallantry in action and awarded the Silver Star with Oak Leaf Cluster. He returned from Occupied Germany to the U.S., as a Lieutenant Colonel in 1919. After varied duties as student and instructor at both the Field Artillery and Infantry Schools, he returned to West Point as a tactical officer. While at the Academy (1923-25) two important incidents in his full life occurred—his marriage to Caroline Victoria Emerson of Philadelphia and the birth of their son. Upon graduation from the Command and General Staff School in 1926 he was assigned as Infantry Representative at the Coast Artillery School for the next four years.</p>
<p>
Then came a tour of duty with the 15th Infantry in Tientsin, China (1933-35). After two years of duty at Headquarters Third Corps Area, Baltimore, Md. he was promoted to the permanent rank of Lieutenant Colonel and ordered to the Army War College from which he graduated in 1936. His next assignment was Executive Officer on the Staff of Brigadier General George C. Marshall, Vancouver Barracks, Washington. The impression created on his new commander must have left its mark because the following year Lieutenant Colonel Walker was ordered to the War Plans Division, War Department General Staff, where he remained until the approach of World War II and his assignment as Colonel, Commanding the 36th Armored Infantry of the 3d Armored Division.</p>
<p>
This was the beginning of the career of Colonel Walker as an expert with armored forces, which he commanded so brilliantly in Europe a few years later. Henceforth his promotions and changes in assignments and stations came in rapid succession. He received his first star on 16 July 1941, and was assigned as commander of the 3d Armored Brigade. Seven months later he was promoted to Major General and commander of the 3d Armored Division, which he moved from Camp Polk, Louisiana in the summer of 1942 to the Desert Training Center in California. In August 1942 he became Commanding General of the IV Armored Corps, Camp Young, California. After seven months of maneuvers in the Desert, General Walker moved his IV Corps Headquarters to Camp Campbell, Kentucky, where he had under his command five Infantry Divisions and two Armored Divisions. A vigorous training program was resumed in preparation for the Tennessee maneuvers of nine weeks that were to be conducted in the approaching fall. In the meantime General Walker was ordered that spring to North Africa as an official observer. He arrived there in time to witness the storming of Hill 609 and Djebel-La Anz, and to follow the American action to the final stages of the Battle of Tunisia.</p>
<p>
On 9 October 1943 the IV Armored Corps was redesignated the XX Corps, which General Walker took to England in February 1944 and to France a few months later, where it became a part of General Patton’s Third Army for the duration of the war. A short time before his Corps Headquarters left England. General Walker was called suddenly to Normandy to take part, temporarily, in the operations of the XIX Corps. While there he was cited for bravery in action during the attack across the Vire River and was awarded the second Oak Leaf Cluster to his Silver Star.</p>
<p>
Walker’s success in the combined use of Armor and motorized Infantry, his repeated demonstrations of personal bravery at the front, and his ability to sense critical situations and quickly remedy them elicited the admiration and commendation of Patton—who personally awarded the Distinguished Service Cross to Walker for his conduct at Melun where, the official records show.</p>
<p>
General Walker took personal command, and, under heavy small-arms and machine-gun fire which wounded his aide and two enlisted men of his party, he reorganized and succeeded in pushing armored infantry across the river at Ponthierry and Corbeil.”</p>
<p>
Following the capture of Metz General Patton wrote in a message to General Walker: “The workmanlike manner in which your corps accomplished the capture of the heretofore impregnable city of Metz is an outstanding military accomplishment.” The people of the city hailed the Corps Commander as the “Conqueror of Metz,” and in an impressive ceremony the Military Governor awarded General Walker the French Legion of Honor, Degree of Officer.</p>
<p>
After Metz there followed during the next six months a succession of campaigns that were to test the fibre of the now famous “Ghost Corps” and its brilliant commander: CAPTURE OF SARR MOSELLE TRIANGLE; CROSSING THE RHINE; POWER DRIVE ACROSS GERMANY; DRIVE SOUTH IN GERMANY TO THE DANUBE AND INTO AUSTRIA until the end of hostilities when the American Lieutenant General Walker clasped hands with the Russian Lieutenant General Birokoff on the Enns River bridge in Austria.</p>
<p>
On April 18, 1945, three weeks before VE Day, General Patton flew to General Walker’s headquarters and pinned on him the same three stars that he (Patton) had inherited from General Eisenhower. After the cessation of hostilities in Europe General Patton wrote a most laudatory letter of commendation to General Walker in which he said in part: “... From the landing of the XX Corps in England until the termination of hostilities in Europe, you and your Corps have been outstanding for dash, drive, and audacity in pursuit and in exploitation ... Of all the Corps I have commanded, yours has always been the most eager to attack and the most reasonable and cooperative ...”</p>
<p>
At the end of World War II Lieutenant General Walker had acquired a wide array of awards and decorations, including the following: Distinguished Service Cross; Distinguished Service Medal; Silver Star with two Oak Leaf Clusters; Legion of Merit; Bronze Star; four French decorations (Legion of Honor, Officer Class, Croix de Guerre with palm and bronze star, Medal of Metz, and Medal of Verdun); Mexican Interior (World War I); Victory Medal with five stars (World War I); Army of Occupation (World War I); American Defense; American Theater; European Theater of Operations with 6 stars; Order of the War for the Fatherland (Russian); Medal of Russian Guards Army; Grand Ducal Order of the Oak Leaf of the Crown (Luxembourg); and Croix de Guerre (Luxembourg).</p>
<p>
General Walker is a Citizen of Honor of the following French cities, all of which were liberated by the XX Corps: Metz Thionville, Chartres, Verdun, St. Symporium and City of Luxembourg.</p>
<p>
In his farewell address soon after the termination of hostilities in Europe, General Walker eloquently summarized the outstanding achievements of his beloved XX (“Ghost”) Corps in these words: “Fighting across 18 major rivers and scores of smaller streams you have accomplished some of the longest sustained marches in the history of warfare. You have liberated or conquered more than 31,000 square miles of territory, including 600 cities and towns and 4,000 inhabited places. You have captured 540,000 enemy soldiers and killed or wounded at least 89,000 others. ANGERS, CHARTRES, FOUNTAINEBLOW, MELUN, MONTEREAU, CHATEAU—THIERRY, EPERNAY, REIMS, VERDUN, METZ, TRIER, SAARLAUTERN, KAISERS LAUTERN, WIESBADEN, KASSEL, WEIMAR, JENA, REGENSBURG, BRAUNAU, LINZ, and STYER were hut milestones in your zone of advance.”</p>
<p>
Following a short leave of absence General Walker was assigned to command the Eighth Service Command, with headquarters at Dallas, Texas. A year later (June 1946) he was designated to command the new Fifth Army, with headquarters in Chicago, and with residence at Fort Sheridan. This was a very busy assignment for it involved the complicated reorganization task of combining the facilities of what had been during the preceding war period the 6th and 7th Service Commands.</p>
<p>
June 1946 brought to Johnnie and Caroline Walker the realization of a foremost ambition—that of seeing their own son graduate from West Point, and with glowing colors.</p>
<p>
After two years in Chicago the Walkers were on the move again—this time to take command of the Eighth Army with headquarters in Yokohama. This duty with troops gave the heroic fighting general of European battlefield fame a challenging opportunity to prepare his widely scattered command in Japan, then on comparatively soft occupational assignments, for emergency mobilization and actual field service, should the occasion arise. General Walker had expected to retire for age in December 1951. But the old soldier’s dream of a long and happy retired life back home in the heart of his beloved Texas was not to be. June 25, 1950 came along and proved to be a fateful day, for it marks the sudden and surprising invasion of South Korea by the Communist forces of North Korea, thus bringing a United Nations Army to the relief of the South Korean weak forces.</p>
<p>
A complete story of Lieutenant General Walker’s part as the Commanding General of the Eighth U.S. Army and the 16 participating nations’ ground forces that comprised the overall United Nations’ ground armies in Korea would be too lengthy to bear repetition here. For almost four years now the world has been following developments on the Korean Peninsula, where one of the bloodiest and costliest wars of history has been fought. On 31 July 1953, four days after the signing of the Korean truce, the well-known AP reporter and columnist, Hal Boyle, who, as a war correspondent in both World War II and in the early days of the Korean War, had observed at first hand General Walker in action, devoted his entire daily column to a tribute to the little Texan who had given his life so willingly in the cause of freedom. Writing from New York he said: “LATE GENERAL WALKER WAS KEY IN SAVING KOREAN WAR. The man who saved Korea was ‘The Little Bulldog.’ He was Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker, first of the 8th Army’s four commanders in the 37-month Korean campaign. And when the military history of that frustrating operation is written it must show ‘Johnny’ Walker as a crucial figure. One wrong pass by him and the war would have been over within the first two months. We would have been shoved off the peninsula.</p>
<p>
“Most generals prefer to fight cautiously. A few generals like to gamble boldly in attack. A truly fine general is one able to fight with equal genius either on the offensive or on the defensive. ‘The Little Bulldog,’ a squat, plump, square-jawed Texan, who looked more like a small town business man than an Army Commander, proved before his death he could do both superbly well.</p>
<p>
“‘Johnny’ Walker won his fame as a leader of the 20th ‘Ghost’ Corps which spearheaded the Third Army in Europe in the Second World War. General Patton was so pleased with his bold victories that he personally pinned on him the three-star insignia of a lieutenant general which General Eisenhower had given Patton. General Walker liked to recall that time in the early days in Korea when he commanded surely one of the weakest armies ever to take the field anywhere.</p>
<p>
“SLOW RETREAT. His task was to retreat as slowly as possible while re-grouping the shattered South Korean forces and building up the American corps as fast as troops could be ferried to the front. He was unable to man a continuous battleline. He was short of everything—men, tanks, anti-tank weapons, artillery. Walker saved the day by a defensive that amounted to an offensive. He shuttled regiments and battalions and companies around the front in a continuous razzledazzle, throwing the enemy off balance by magically showing strength where they least expected it. At one time his forces were so completely committed that if guerrillas behind the line had attacked his own headquarters he wouldn’t have been able to summon another platoon to defend it.</p>
<p>
“NOT IN BOOKS. ‘You won’t find that in the books, will you?’ he asked a correspondent later. ‘They would say you were crazy to fight a war without reserves. But that’s what we are doing—because we have to.’ His famous ‘stand or die’ order when he created the Naktong River defense line seemed hopeless. But Walker rode about the front like a madman, standing up in his armored Jeep and gripping a handrail as he gave orders. His line bent, but never broke. ‘The Little Bulldog’ had to strain his line to the utmost by pulling out the 1st Marine Division, which was to land behind the enemy in the Inchon invasion on September 15. His weakened army then took its heaviest blows—and still held.</p>
<p>
“ON OFFENSIVE. The day after the Inchon landing Walker immediately switched to the offensive again and predicted the war ‘should quickly be over’ unless the enemy was reinforced. Did he foresee the entry of the Red Chinese? Certainly he was well aware of the possibility. Walker smashed fiercely through the North Korean crust before him, and in the kind of pursuit he enjoyed raced clear to the Yalu River before ambushing Chinese forced him to draw back. It is questionable whether Walker thought the later ‘win-the-war’ offensive in November was wisely conceived—but he carried out his orders. When it was smashed, he pulled back 120 miles in an orderly retreat.</p>
<p>
“PROUD OF TROOPS. ‘My Army isn’t whipped,” he said, almost wistfully. ‘I’m proud of the way it came out of the offensive. And we will fight again.’ But death prevented him from seeing his Army’s resurgence. Ironically, he died in a traffic accident, as had his idol, General Patton ... ‘The Little Bulldog’ now sleeps in Arlington Cemetery. But his true monument is the American 8th Army he welded in Korea.”</p>
<p>
For his services in Korea General Walker was awarded Oak Leaf Clusters to his Distinguished Service Cross and his Distinguished Service Medal; the Distinguished Flying Cross with one Oak Leaf Cluster; and the Air Medal with ten Oak Leaf Clusters.</p>
<p>
Every honor due a national military hero was accorded the mortal remains of General Walker on its long journey homeward by air from a field hospital in Seoul to its final resting place with the nation’s honored soldier dead in Arlington National Cemetery. Congress, by special act, promoted him posthumously to four-star rank just before the impressive military funeral exercises—which were attended by top officials from the White House, from both houses of Congress, cabinet officers, diplomats of countries of the free world, and heads of the Armed Forces of the Nation.</p>
<p>
Among the final tributes—one that would have been especially pleasing to him—was in the form of a resolution by the entire House of Representatives of the Fifty-second Legislature of Texas, reviewing General Walkers outstanding military record and expressing the sympathy of the people of Texas for the surviving members of his family.</p>
<p>
General Walker is survived by his mother, Mrs. Sam Sims Walker, Sr., of Belton, Texas; his widow, Mrs. Caroline Emerson Walker, Washington, D. C.; his son and wife, Captain and Mrs. Sam Sims Walker, Jr., 14th Infantry, Fort Davis, Panama Canal Zone, and their two sons, Walter H., Jr., and Sam Sims, II.</p>
<p>
And so, we have recorded the passing of one of our beloved Country’s greatest battle leaders. By his works on this earth he proved himself a proud son of a proud state, Texas; a devoted son, husband and parent; a loyal West Pointer; an outstanding Regular Army Officer in peace and in four of his country’s wars; and the first commander of the United Nations Ground Forces in a war of freedom against Communist aggression—a war in which he gave his all, to include his own life, and offered that of his only son in frontline battle, along with the lives of other United Nations’ sons, when the critical situation at the front was at its worst. Fervently then, we his devoted and admiring classmates, along with his Alma Mater, West Point, salute the memory of Walton Harris Walker with the traditional: “Well done! Be thou at peace!”</p>
<p>
<em>—A Classmate, W. H. H.</em></p>