The Generals

by Thomas E. Ricks

  Yet MacArthur imposed on the war a divided command structure that made his operations more difficult, then concocted a series of unnecessarily complex amphibious and airborne assaults that further damaged operations. He split his forces, putting part on the west side of Korea and the remainder on the eastern shore, with a mountain range between them so that they were not able to support one another. MacArthur also stayed in Tokyo, visiting Korea only occasionally, to the point that J. Lawton Collins, by then the Army chief of staff, came to believe that, despite being based in Washington, he had a “far better feel” for the Korean battlefield than MacArthur did.

  Perhaps most damaging of all, MacArthur, hardly a subscriber to the Marshall approach, assigned cronies—picked not for their competence but for their personal loyalty—to combat commands, despite their glaring lack of experience. He encouraged sycophantism among his subordinates, accepting from one of them the Distinguished Flying Cross, for flying over enemy-held territory in his passenger aircraft on his way home to Tokyo, despite having seen no enemy aircraft or even enemy troops on the ground during the flight.

  MacArthur also was increasingly at odds with Truman. In July, he visited Taiwan at a time when American policy about whether to protect the island against a Chinese attack was undecided. He took sides, in August sending to the Veterans of Foreign Wars a statement that, among other things, seemed to indicate that he supported militarily defending Taiwan against China. When questioned by the White House, he protested, disingenuously, that he had only been expressing a personal opinion—as if the U.S. commander for East Asia could separate himself from American military policy in that region. A month later, in mid-September 1950, Truman fired his defense secretary, Louis Johnson, in part because he seemed to be siding with the general against the White House. Johnson, who had been the chief fund-raiser for Truman’s presidential election campaign, was seen by many as an incompetent hack, so the dismissal had the side effect of boosting troop morale. One artillery officer, James Dill, recalled being aboard a ship heading for Korea when the news came out: “The result was a reaction among the troops such as I never saw among American troops at any other time. Cheers broke out all over the ship. Soldiers slapped each other on the back and clapped.”

  Most memorably, in mid-October Truman flew to see MacArthur on Wake Island, in the mid-Pacific. It was the only time the two men ever met, mainly because MacArthur had not journeyed back to his native land since before World War II—and actually would not go there until he was fired the following year. Before the outbreak of the Korean War, he had rebuffed requests from the Truman Administration to come back to Washington for meetings. At Wake, MacArthur, riding high on the successful landing at Inchon, seemed to see the meeting not as one between equals, but as a case of a great commander being used by a weak president as a political prop. When MacArthur greeted Truman, he shook his hand but did not salute him—an astonishing departure from American military tradition. On the contrary, MacArthur seemed to believe some sort of deference was due him.

  It was not forthcoming from Harry Truman. The president and the general sat together in the rear seat of a 1937 Chevrolet, the only automobile on the small, barren islet. Frank Boring, the Secret Service agent who was driving the car, eavesdropped on their conversation. Truman said, he recalled, “Listen, you know I’m president, and you’re the general. You’re working for me. . . . You don’t make any political decisions; I make the political decisions. You don’t make any kind of a decision at all. Otherwise, I’m going to call you back, and get you out of there. If you make one more move, I’m going to get you out of there.” It was a good, blunt formulation of the way civil-military discourse is supposed to occur in the American system. But MacArthur was well beyond the point of heeding such an admonition, especially from a president he held in contempt.

  After this private conversation, the two men moved to a small one-story building belonging to the Civil Aeronautics Board for a formal meeting that included their aides. MacArthur began the session by assuring the president and his retinue, “I believe that formal resistance will end throughout North and South Korea by Thanksgiving,” according to notes compiled by Omar Bradley, then the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He also hoped to have the Eighth Army heading back “to Japan by Christmas.”

  “What are the chances for Chinese or Soviet interference?” asked President Truman.

  MacArthur had good news on that front. The Chinese had not yet come in and probably wouldn’t, he assured those present at the meeting. But if they did, the general explained, “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.” (To be fair, the CIA had just issued an analysis that largely came to the same conclusion.) MacArthur later would bitterly deny, in one of two interviews given on his seventy-fourth birthday and released only after his death, that he had said these things. But MacArthur was not a reliable witness, given his habit of saying whatever he thought was best for his reputation at a particular moment. Most incredibly, in a 1961 interview with Forrest Pogue, one of Marshall’s biographers, he claimed that he never had been interested in running for or being president.

  At Wake Island, after nearly three hours of talking—during which other Asian issues, such as the problems of France in Vietnam, were discussed—the president concluded the meeting and suggested that they break for lunch while a communiqué was prepared. MacArthur declined the president’s invitation, saying he was anxious to get back to Tokyo. This was another violation of military tradition, which holds that an invitation from the president to an officer has the effect of an order.

  MacArthur later wrote of the meeting that his private assessment of Truman was that he “seemed to take great pride in his historical knowledge” but that “it was of a superficial character.” In particular, he said, “of the Far East he knew little”—MacArthur’s standard rebuttal to anyone who disagreed with him on Asian policy. His general conclusion from the Wake meeting was that “a curious, and sinister, change was taking place in Washington,” with Truman and those around him losing their nerve. With a different general, the Wake Island meeting might have provided the opportunity to repair a fraying civil-military discourse. But with MacArthur, it was too late, and it was evident from the meeting that the dialogue between the president and his top general in the war was breaking down.

  A few days later, MacArthur assured reporters in Tokyo that “the war is very definitely coming to an end shortly.” We now know that by this point, Peng Dehuai, who would be the top Chinese commander in the war, already had moved into Korea. In the following week, even as MacArthur was announcing that he would win the war by Christmas, some 180,000 of Peng’s troops would pour into Korea. On November 24, MacArthur announced that a new American offensive was being launched that day and that it should, “if successful, . . . for all practical purposes end the war, restore peace and unity to Korea, enable the prompt withdrawal of [the American-led] United Nations military forces, and permit the complete assumption by the Korean people and nation of full sovereignty and international equality.” That was a tall order, one that MacArthur would fail to achieve in every one of its particulars. MacArthur and his acolytes later would argue that the American offensive launched in November really had been just a sizable “reconnaissance in force,” but that claim is incompatible with the assertion about ending the war that MacArthur had issued on the day the attack began. In addition, MacArthur’s orders appeared to violate the Joint Chiefs of Staff directive, issued to him on September 27, not to send American forces to the Manchurian border area.

  This string of miscalculations and false assurances alone would have been enough to cause a president to lose confidence in MacArthur and so sack him. But, as in World War II, Douglas MacArthur was not just a general—he was a major political problem. Truman’s handling of him in the following months would resemble the new American policy of conta
ining the Soviet Union until it collapsed on its own. MacArthur’s end would come after the general issued a series of bombastic statements that undercut his support in the military and finally alienated even his subordinate commander in Korea.

  MacArthur’s rhetoric, rarely measured, veered toward the hysterical in the late fall of 1950. His statements lacked any sense that competing views might hold merit. He cast minor policy differences in the most absolute and extreme terms. Just nine days after declaring the war all but over, he was talking about facing “the final destruction” of his forces unless he was given the leeway he demanded. When he was ordered to shelve plans to bomb China, he told an aide, “For the first time in military history, a commander has been denied the use of his military power to safeguard the lives of his soldiers and safety of his army.” A few days later, informing the Joint Chiefs of Staff of his plan to take all of North Korea, he warned that “any program short of this would completely destroy the morale of my forces and the psychological consequences would be inestimable.” Furthermore, he stated, leaving any part of Korea in the hands of the Communists would be an “immoral . . . proposition” that “would be the greatest defeat of the free world in recent times.”

  On December 6, the president issued an executive order to all theater commanders to clear their public statements with their superiors. This order was clearly aimed at MacArthur.

  During this time, MacArthur’s favorite, Maj. Gen. Edward Almond, the commander of X Corps, was needlessly antagonizing O. P. Smith, commander of the 1st Marine Division, which had been placed under him, along with two Army divisions, the 7th and the 3rd. Smith was almost exactly the same age as Almond, but Almond condescendingly addressed him as “son.” In September 1950, the two had made the Inchon landing together, outflanking North Korean troops, but despite that success, they soon came to loathe each other. Theirs, wrote historian Shelby Stanton, was “the worst working relationship between American generals of the Korean war.”

  The Chinese intervention proved to be a catastrophe for American troops scattered across northwest Korea, with the 2nd Division alone suffering more than three thousand casualties, many of them incurred as retreating troops passed through a six-mile-long valley remembered as “the Gauntlet,” in which Chinese troops on either side of the road saturated their column with machine-gun fire and mortar shells. MacArthur, never one to admit to mistakes, later would insist that “the disposition of those troops, in my opinion, could not have been improved upon, had I known the Chinese were going to attack.” Lt. Gen. Matthew Ridgway privately considered that statement an “absolute falsehood. . . . It couldn’t have been a worse disposition of troops, as a matter of fact.” The Army’s official history of the campaign, written decades later, would agree with Ridgway, stating that “the Eighth Army, when hit by the Chinese, was deployed on a broad front with its right flank open and was supported by few reserves.”

  In the wake of that disaster, the division commander, Laurence Keiser, was removed from his command, but in a fashion markedly more discreet than had been used by the Army in the two world wars. He received a message from Walker’s headquarters informing him that he was suffering from pneumonia and that he needed to report to a military hospital in Tokyo. Insulted by the subterfuge, he confronted Walker’s chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Leven Allen. “I don’t have pneumonia, so cut the bunk,” he said. Keiser knew the score, having been chief of staff for John Lucas when Lucas was fired as a corps commander by Mark Clark, at Anzio in February 1944.

  Well, Allen responded, the pneumonia message was an order. Would he comply with it? Yes, Keiser said, but only because it was an order. Allen reassured him that Walker would take care of him with some kind of headquarters job. “You tell General Walker to shove his job up his ass,” Keiser responded. He would be replaced at the 2nd Division by Robert McClure, who had fought in World War I with the 26th (“Yankee”) Division, whose commander had famously been relieved by Pershing. Keiser had suffered the reputation of being an officer who commanded from his headquarters, but McClure was not much better. He privately admitted to S. L. A. Marshall, the Army historian then embedded with the division, that he was over the hill and was drinking too much in order to tranquillize himself. “I can only brace myself by hitting the bottle,” McClure said, according to Marshall. One of his first orders was to direct everyone in the division to grow a beard, which he cast as a contest. The ostensible military reason was to make it easier to identify friendly soldiers in the dark. He would be fired within a month of taking command.

  The disaster on the western side of Korea would be better remembered were it not for the even more shocking situation to the east, in the frozen mountains around the Changjin Reservoir, which the American military, using maps based on those of the former Japanese occupiers of Korea, knew as Chosin.

  CHAPTER 10

  Army generals fail at Chosin

  T he battles around Chosin Reservoir in late November and early December of 1950 would essentially provide a laboratory test for two different American approaches to warfighting and especially to leadership.

  The Marines were on the west side of the reservoir, the Army units on the east. Both reported to the same senior leadership and suffered the same winter weather, so cold that rounds for the 3.5-inch rocket launcher froze and cracked open. The Marine division chief of staff at Chosin, Col. Gregon Williams, took a four-minute radio telephone call without a glove on his hand, only to have his fingers turn blue with frostbite later that night. Discussing Chosin years later, Marine corporal Alan Herrington said, “I can still see the icicles of blood.” Indeed, one peculiarity of Chosin was that wounds remained pink and red rather than turning reddish brown, because blood froze before it could coagulate. The cold was a lethal curse but also an unexpected medical ally, because wounds froze shut; it also kept corpses from becoming a sanitation problem.

  For both the Army and the Marines, Chosin would be one of the fiercest fights in their history. “I was in the Bulge [in World War II], and it was nothing like this at Chosin Reservoir,” one survivor, Army Sgt. First Class Carrol Price, said later. “I lost all my friends.”

  As vastly larger Chinese forces attacked, both the Army and Marine units retreated almost thirteen miles. The Marine retreat would continue in a second phase, another two dozen miles, after it collected the survivors of the Army units. Though both the Army and the Marines faced the same enemy, the Army unit was wiped out, in one of the greatest disasters in American military history, while the Marine division marched out with its vehicles, weapons, and some of the Army’s survivors.

  • • •

  The battle began about three months after the Inchon landings. MacArthur and his followers were riding high. He and his favorite general, Ned Almond, recklessly pressed their subordinates to attack north toward the Yalu River, the border between Korea and China. They did this despite numerous signs that the Chinese government had inserted thousands—perhaps hundreds of thousands—of troops into northern Korea, not far from the Americans. A collision became inevitable.

  When Lt. Col. Don Faith Jr.’s 1st Battalion of the 32nd Infantry Regiment arrived on the eastern shore of the reservoir, it was the first Army element to replace the 5th Marines. That Marine unit was being moved to the west side of the reservoir to join the other Marine regiment there, because Maj. Gen. O. P. Smith, the Marine division commander, being worried by Chinese moves and by his open left flank, wanted to consolidate his forces. Lt. Col. Raymond Murray, the seasoned commanding officer of the 5th Marines, had been studying the terrain on the eastern shore. As he turned over the area to Faith, he recommended that the arriving Army unit dig in and not try to push any farther north. Gen. Smith also passed the word: “Now, look, don’t go out on a limb, take it easy up there.” The assistant commander of the 7th Division, Brig. Gen. “Hammerin’ Hank” Hodes, a veteran of the World War II fighting at Omaha Beach on D-Day, earlier had denied Faith’s request
to move north. Nonetheless, with the arrival of Col. Allan MacLean, the regimental commander to which he was attached, Faith pressed again for permission to attack north, up the east side of the reservoir. This time he got approval. In his persistence, he had set the stage for a defeat in which more than three times as many soldiers would be lost as at Lt. Col. George Custer’s Battle of the Little Bighorn.

  The Army units on the eastern side of the water were two battalions from the 7th Infantry Division—one from the 31st Infantry Regiment and one from its sister regiment, the 32nd. The 31st was commanded by Col. MacLean, who had spent World War II as a staff officer planning troop movements and who that fall had been given command of the regiment after his predecessor was relieved for a poor performance after the landing at Inchon. The 1st Battalion of the 32nd was commanded by Faith, who not only had never led a unit in sustained combat before but, incredibly, until the Korean War, actually had never been assigned to a frontline combat unit before—not at the squad, platoon, company, or battalion level—having spent all of World War II as an aide to Ridgway. Neither Faith’s battalion nor the 31st Regiment had much combat experience in Korea up to that time. Neither had fought on the defensive, and neither had faced enemy forces larger than a battalion. “The sum total of the 1/32 IN [Infantry] battle experience was the unopposed river crossing at the Han River into Seoul and a few days of combat against the scattered resistance from some of the remnants of the North Korean army in the city,” noted Maj. Paul Berquist in a study done later at the Army’s Command and General Staff College.

  Hubris rode north with Col. Faith. The first ominous sign came on the afternoon of November 27, when MacLean sent the 31st Infantry’s Intelligence and Reconnaissance Platoon to establish an outpost on the northeastern side of the reservoir near an inlet. The platoon, mounted on jeeps with machine guns, headed north and vanished, reporting back by neither radio nor runner. It was never heard from again. Faith’s intelligence officer also was picking up word from Korean civilians that Chinese troops were telling them they “were going to take back the Chosin Reservoir but everyone more or less pooh-poohed the idea,” recalled Capt. Ed Stamford, a Marine forward air controller who was attached to Faith’s Army battalion so he could coordinate support from Marine aircraft. “They couldn’t take it from us.”