The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by Manchester, William

  Very little. Had they interfered in the first or second months it would have been decisive. We are no longer fearful of their intervention. We no longer stand hat in hand. The Chinese have 300,000 men in Manchuria. Of these probably not more than 100,000 to 125,000 are distributed along the Yalu River. Only 50,000 to 60,000 could be gotten across the Yalu River. They have no air force. Now that we have bases for our Air Force in Korea, if the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang, there would be the greatest slaughter.

  There certainly would, though it would not be the kind of slaughter MacArthur had in mind. His intelligence was defective. Mao had assembled 850,000 soldiers in Manchuria. Already 120,000 men, the vanguard of his veteran Fourth Field Army, were south of the Yalu. They had been slipping over every night, bringing their armor and heavy guns with them and hiding before daybreak in the rugged hills of North Korea. The discovery of this momentous ruse was subsequently used to discredit MacArthur. That was unjust. He was not blameless in his autumn conduct of the war—his failure to issue winter clothing to his men against the possibility of a wider conflict is inexplicable—but his major oversights and aberrances, including his insubordination, came later. At Wake he was a loyal commander, telling his commander in chief what he believed to be the truth. In the six weeks which followed, his behavior was flawless. No blueprints for a new foreign policy issued from the Dai Ichi Building, and although technically he needed no authorization to cross the 38th Parallel in force, he waited until the U.N. General Assembly, recalling that the essential objective of his expedition was “the establishment of a unified, independent, and democratic Korea,” directed him to move north.

  He now led a splendid army built around seven U.S. divisions, the most recent of which was the magnificent old Third. By their side marched six seasoned ROK divisions and contingents from England, Australia, New Zealand, Thailand, and Turkey. Pyongyang fell on October 20. There, in the enemy capital, six years to the day after he had waded ashore at Leyte, MacArthur struck an antic pose and called out, “Any celebrities here to meet me? Where’s Kim Buck Too?”

  ***

  The general was convinced that his foes had lost heart. In this he was tragically mistaken—so wrong, in fact, that from this point forward there were two wars, one in Korea and the other in MacArthur’s mind. The real battlefield was a bleak tract of towering heights and plunging chasms, a region so dismal that until now it had been largely uninhabited. There were no reliable maps of it. Here and there faint trails in the dirt hinted at earlier visitors, but they led nowhere. Passes between the windswept precipices were unexplored, and the spines of the mountain ranges ran north to south, so that any force moving northward on a broad front would have to be split into detachments inaccessible to one another in an emergency. It would be hard to imagine terrain better suited to guerrilla warfare. Tanks were useless in it, heavy artillery had to be left behind, and its deep gorges and canyons provided superb concealment for ambushers or troops hiding from aerial observation. So adaptable was it to the enemy’s purpose that by October he had successfully tucked away in it 250,000 well-disciplined, sturdy-legged peasant riflemen who awaited only the signal to charge, sounded by their buglers and cymbal-swinging bandsmen, before throwing themselves on the flanks of the unsuspecting United Nations armies. Behind the ambushers, in the vastness of Manchuria, another 600,000 blue-uniformed Chinese soldiers stood ready to reinforce them. It was one of the greatest natural traps in the history of warfare.

  MacArthur was euphoric. To his quartermasters in Japan he sent word to prepare billets for the Eighth U.N. Army, his left wing. He informed Omar Bradley that he expected to have the U.S. 2nd Division ready for reassignment to Europe in January, and he promised the country that he would “have the boys home by Christmas.” It was all over but the mopping up, he told correspondents. On October 24 he advised the Joint Chiefs that he had drawn up his forces on a line between Pyongyang and Wonsan, a seaport forty-five miles to the east. Then he announced—actually announced—his battle plan. It was to be a giant pincer, with the Eighth Army driving north from Pyongyang while the rest of his troops, designated X Corps, moved out from Wonsan. The Eighth Army would be the western claw of the pincer, X Corps the eastern claw, and the high ground between them would be lightly held by ROK units. To the astonishment of officers who fought by the book, the general blandly notified them that he had decided to violate a basic military axiom. He had deliberately split his command between two ground commanders, giving the left wing to Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker and the right to his Dai Ichi GHQ. Intoxicated by his success at Inchon, he seemed to be increasing the difficulties already inherent in the terrain by assuring that neither hand would know what the other was doing.

  In the last week of October a dozen U.N. spearheads began this northward sweep, striking out toward the Chongchon River on the left and the Changjin Reservoir on the right. Almost at once they ran into trouble. Major General Charles A. Willoughby, MacArthur’s G2, had told them that the NKPA was completely demoralized, but a sharp North Korean counterattack isolated the 7th ROK Division and cut it up. Then, on October 26, an Eighth Army patrol picked up a Chinese soldier fully ninety miles south of where he should have been. Eyebrows went up as far back as 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue; presidential approval of MacArthur’s drive had been based on his virtual guarantee that there would be, indeed could be, no effective Chinese intervention. The U.N. general replied that there was nothing to worry about, that Peking, like Moscow, made a practice of sending idealistic “volunteers” to fight under other Communistic flags, and had in fact advertised its intention to do it in Korea.

  Four days later sixteen soldiers from no known NKPA unit were taken north of Hamhung, in northeastern Korea. Interrogated by a Nisei officer who had grown up in Honolulu’s Chinatown, they too were found to be Chinese. The following day a whole regiment of MacArthur’s presumed volunteers was reported near the Changjin and Pujon reservoirs; prisoners from it said that they had crossed the Yalu on an ammunition train two weeks earlier. On November 1 a group of Soviet MIG-15 jets challenged U.S. fighters, briefly scrimmaged with them, and then returned to the Chinese side of the Yalu. By this time Chinese foot soldiers had been identified on every divisional front. On November 2 the 1st Cavalry sent back word that while reconnoitering the north bank of the Chongchon one of its battalions had been decimated by machine gun fire and screaming soldiers in blue Mao jackets. “We don’t know whether they represent the Chinese government,” the report said, but the battle had been “a massacre, Indian-style, like the one that hit Custer at Little Big Horn.”

  Inevitably, American officers were becoming preoccupied with the yellow peril. They were fighting in forbidden country, with long and vulnerable supply lines, and they weren’t equipped for an extensive campaign. They knew little about China, but what they had heard was disturbing: its new regime regarded America as its natural enemy, and it held life cheap. The prospect of a confrontation with endless waves of charging Orientals was frightening. On November 3 the 24th Infantry actually disregarded an instruction from MacArthur. Informed that “the order of the day is full speed ahead to the Yalu River,” the 24th turned about-face and retreated fourteen miles. Before anyone in GHQ could deal with this insubordination, the situation reports for November 4 had come in. The 1st Marine Division had identified three Chinese divisions in its sector; the 1st Cavalry had found five.

  Reaction in the Dai Ichi Building was mixed. At first MacArthur told the Pentagon that while Chinese Communist intervention was “a distinct possibility,” he did not have “sufficient evidence at hand to warrant immediate acceptance.” After sleeping on it, he decided that the presence of eight hostile divisions was pretty good evidence. He advised the Joint Chiefs that his left wing had eluded “a possible trap… surreptitiously laid” and that there had not been “any possibility of a great military reverse.” Still, he was upset. Having destroyed the North Koreans, the U.N. force had found that “a new, fresh army now faces u
s, backed up by a possibility of large alien reserves and adequate supply within easy reach to the enemy but beyond the limits of our present sphere of military action.” These newcomers were operating from a “privileged sanctuary” across the Yalu. “Whether and to what extent these reserves will be moved forward to reinforce units now committed remains to be seen and is a matter of the gravest significance,” he said. Already he was “in hostile contact with Chinese military units deployed for action against the forces of the Unified Command,” and the Chinese were capable of massing in such numbers as “to threaten the ultimate destruction of my command.”

  Until this point the Joint Chiefs had interdicted bombing within five miles of the Yalu. MacArthur now asked for authority to destroy the Yalu bridges. He was still unconvinced that the Chinese intended to come in all the way, but as a lifelong student of the Asian mind, he said, he knew that “it is the pattern of the Oriental psychology to respect and follow aggressive, resolute, and dynamic leadership.” Taking out those bridges would be aggressive, resolute and dynamic, and it would also serve the purpose of discouraging replacements. Permission to bomb was granted. The Joint Chiefs were disturbed, too. They didn’t like the deployment of his forces, and they were beginning to wonder about Willoughby. Still, MacArthur was the senior soldier in the U.S. Army (“Senior,” said one junior officer, “to everyone but God”). He was also seven thousand miles away, the commander on the spot, and to overrule him would break a standing U.S. military policy going back to 1864. They were unwilling to give him a blank check, however. He was reminded that “extreme care must be taken to avoid violation of Manchurian territory and airspace.” His pilots must avoid targets inside Manchuria and, above all, the Yalu dam and power installations.

  As the teletypes in the Dai Ichi Building rattled off these instructions, the Korean front fell silent. Patrols couldn’t flush a single Chinese soldier. Apparently they had all vanished. General Willoughby was sure of it, had known it all along, and was in a mood to crow. As an old China hand he had spotted Peking’s bluff. It had been called, and now the war was over. In Korea the ground commanders weren’t so sure. The Chinese could have broken off action because they had had enough, as MacArthur and Willoughby now believed, or conversely because they were regrouping for a full-fledged attack. Altogether, they agreed, it was a mystery.

  ***

  The fact that they were mystified is itself mysterious. For over two months Chou En-lai, foreign minister of the Central People’s Government, had been trying every way he could think of to tell these Occidental intruders to go home. On August 25, when MacArthur was still boxed in at Pusan, Chou had notified the U.N. that Washington’s support of Chiang Kai-shek’s right to remain on Formosa was in itself a “criminal act” of “armed aggression,” and he had pledged himself to “liberate from the tentacles of the United States aggressors” all Oriental territories which didn’t belong to them. Asia for the Asians, Chou was saying, and while Korea wasn’t his either, his argument was no weaker than, and in many ways resembled, the Monroe Doctrine.

  Since the Americans hadn’t heard him the first time, Chou had tried again after Inchon. China, he had warned, would not “supinely tolerate their North Korean neighbors being savagely invaded by imperialists.” Then, on October 3, he had summoned Sirdar K. M. Panikkar, the Indian ambassador to Peking. Chou solemnly informed him that the Chinese People’s Republic would ally itself with North Korea and enter the war against the United Nations if U.N. troops crossed the 38th Parallel south to north. This message was transmitted to the State Department through New Delhi, Moscow, and Stockholm. It was published in all the great newspapers in the world, and just in case Washington had overlooked it, Chou repeated it over Peking’s official government radio station a week later. MacArthur and Willoughby dismissed it as “diplomatic blackmail.” They were wrong, though the administration could hardly reproach them for that. Remarking that Panikkar had in the past “played the game of the Chinese Communists fairly regularly,” Truman concluded that Chou’s message was probably “a bald attempt to blackmail the United Nations by threats of intervention in Korea.”

  In all probability, MacArthur was no more responsible for the approaching catastrophe than Eisenhower for the Battle of the Bulge—the analogy is Truman’s—but his handling of the events leading up to it was another matter. Afterward he would say of himself that “no more subordinate soldier ever wore the uniform,” yet on at least one sensitive issue he had treated Joint Chiefs’ directive with something less than respect. In their view, the deployment of Caucasian troops near Korea’s northern frontiers was needlessly provocative. On September 27 they had informed him that “as a matter of policy, no non-Korean ground forces will be used in the northeast provinces bordering the Soviet Union or in the area along the Manchurian border.” He not only ignored this order; on October 24 he told his lieutenants in the field to “use any and all ground forces at their commands, as necessary, in order to capture all of North Korea.” To the Chiefs he sent word that the Chinese despised weakness, while a show of strength “would effectively appeal to the reason in the Chinese mind.”

  MacArthur’s racial chauvinism—for that is what it was—led him into a snare of his own making. By Thanksgiving nearly three weeks had passed since the last sign of Chinese activity at the front, and he concluded that his militance had scared them off. The CIA warned him that “at a minimum” Red China would increase its presence in Korea, try to tie up U.N. forces in battles of attrition, and “maintain the semblance of a North Korean state in being.” Ignoring this, MacArthur went over to the attack for the second time that month, and again he provided the press with a preview of his strategy.

  This, he told the correspondents, would be a “general offensive” to “win the war.” He repeated his October promise to the men, directing Major General John B. Coulter to tell the troops that “They will eat Christmas dinner at home.” The drive would open early on the morning of November 24, and he would fly over from Tokyo for the occasion. It was inconceivable that this final drive might fail. In a special communiqué to the U.N. he reported that the Air Force had “completely interdicted the rear areas.” His left wing, he said, would advance against “failing resistance,” while his right wing, “gallantly supported by naval air and surface action,” continued to exploit its “commanding position.” The juncture of the two “should for all practical purposes end the war.” A reporter asked him if he knew how many Chinese soldiers were in Korea. “About thirty thousand regulars,” the general fired back, “and thirty thousand volunteers.” Losses would be “extraordinarily light.”

  In Washington the President was bemused. Earlier in the month the general had sounded an alarm in his messages that had seemed, in Truman’s opinion, to portend impending disaster. Now, apparently, the grave danger did not exist, since the same commander was announcing victory even before the first men started marching. Indeed, the troops were celebrating it in advance; the day before the offensive was Thanksgiving, and American ingenuity saw to it that every man received a hot turkey dinner with buttered squash, Waldorf salad, cranberry sauce, mince pie, and after-dinner mints.

  That was on Thursday. On Friday the attack went in, and on Sunday the Chinese struck with thirty-three divisions—300,000 men.

  At 6:15 A.M. General Bradley phoned the White House. “A terrible message has come from General MacArthur,” he told the President. “The Chinese have come in with both feet.”

  They had ruptured the entire U.N. front. The center, held by ROK divisions, simply caved in, and in those central mountain ranges the ROK II Corps disintegrated. Turks, British units, and the 1st Cavalry rushed up to replace them. They were driven back thirty miles to Tokchon, lost Tokchon, and took off for the south in two-and-a-half-ton trucks, firing back at their tormentors as they fled. The Turks chose to make a stand. They ran out of bullets, went after the enemy with scimitars, and were wiped out. The 24th Division was driven back across the Chongchon River. Altogether
the Chinese had slashed off forty miles of front. Pausing on the hilly ground between the Eighth Army on their right and X Corps on their left, they then swung east and west to envelop them. General Walker had to choose between retreat and annihilation. He sensibly withdrew. X Corps received the same order, but there the outcome was different.

  Despite appalling casualties, Walker’s command had remained intact. To be sure, every night seemed worse than the last. Heralded by the bugles and cymbals—and sometimes police whistles—masses of screaming Chinese would swoop down under flares. There was no end to them. In MacArthur’s phrase, the enemy had a “bottomless well” of manpower. Still, Walker eventually stopped running and was able to re-form down by the 38th Parallel. X Corps, on the other hand, came apart. There the key force was the 1st Marine Division. As usual, the marines had been out in front of every other U.N. unit—about forty miles ahead. They had been way up on the Chosin Reservoir when the first bugles blew, and being alert, they decided that this would be a good time to wheel around, come down behind the Chinese assaulting the Eighth Army, and pounce on their rear. But the enemy had anticipated them. The next thing MacArthur knew, the marines had been cut off and surrounded. They were forty miles away from the nearest help, at Hungnam.

  Their breakout was one of the great stories of the Korean War. “Retreat, hell!” the Marine general snapped at a war correspondent. “We’re only attacking in a different direction.” And Colonel Lewis B. “Chesty” Puller told his regiment, “The enemy is in front of us, behind us, to the left of us, and to the right of us. They won’t escape this time.” Joined by men from the 3rd and 8th divisions and the ROK Capital Division, they formed a column and hacked their way through walls of Chinese, moving ever eastward over a corkscrew trail of icy dirt for fourteen days of sub-zero cold, blizzards, and thousand-foot chasms. At one point they seemed utterly lost, confronted by an impassable gorge; then the pilots of the Combat Cargo Command arrived overhead with a huge suspension bridge dangling from their flying boxcars and parked it in the canyon. Once the column had to bury 117 marines in one frozen grave. Another time it took 2,651 casualties in four days of fighting and, lacking a hospital, had to carry every one of them. At last it reached the port of Hungnam and was evacuated.