Early Life and Career
Matthew Ridgway was born March 3, 1895 in Fort Monroe, Virginia to Colonel Thomas Ridgway, an artillery officer, and Ruth Ridgway. He lived in various military bases all throughout his childhood. He later remarked that his "earliest memories are of guns and Marching men, of rising to the sound of the reveille gun and lying down to sleep at night while the sweet, sad notes of 'Taps' brought the day officially to an end."
He graduated in 1912 from English High School in Boston and applied to West Point because he thought that would please his father (who was a West Point graduate).
Ridgway failed the entrance exam the first time due to his inexperience with mathematics, but after intensive self-study he succeeded the second time. At West Point he served as a manager of the football team. In 1917, he was commissioned a Second Lieutenant in the U.S. Army. The same year he married Julia Caroline Blount. They had two daughters, Constance and Shirley, and divorced in 1930.
A year after he graduated, he was assigned to West Point as an instructor in Spanish. He was disappointed that he was not assigned to combat duty in World War I, feeling that "the soldier who had had no share in this last great victory of good over evil would be ruined."
During 1924–1925 Ridgway attended the company officers' course at the United States Army Infantry School in Fort Benning, Georgia, after which he was given command of a company in the 15th Infantry in Tientsin, China. This was followed by a posting to Nicaragua, where he helped supervise free elections in 1927.
In 1930, he became an advisor to the Governor-General of the Philippines. He graduated from the Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas in 1935 and from the Army War College at Carlisle Barracks, Pennsylvania in 1937. During the 1930s he served as Assistant Chief of Staff of VI Corps, Deputy Chief of Staff of the Second United States Army, and Assistant Chief of Staff of the Fourth United States Army. General George Marshall assigned Ridgway to the War Plans Division shortly after the outbreak of World War II in Europe in September 1939. He served in the War Plans Division until January 1942, and was promoted to brigadier general that month.
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