The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq

by Victor Davis Hanson

  In the name of common-sense, I ask you not to appeal to a just God in such a sacrilegious manner. You who, in the midst of peace and prosperity, have plunged a nation into war—dark and cruel war—who dared and badgered us to battle, insulted our flag, seized our arsenals and forts that were left in the honorable custody of peaceful ordnance-sergeants, seized and made “prisoners of war” the very garrisons sent to protect your people against negroes and Indians, long before any overt act was committed by the (to you) hated Lincoln government, tried to force Kentucky and Missouri into rebellion, spite of themselves; falsified the vote of Louisiana, turned loose your privateers to plunder unarmed ships; expelled Union families by the thousands, burned their houses, and declared, by an act of your Congress, the confiscation of all debts due Northern men for goods had and received? . . . If we must be enemies let us be men, and fight it out as we propose to do, and not deal in such hypocritical appeals to God and humanity.70

  The stolid and straightforward George Thomas might have endlessly chased the retreating Johnston and Hood. Grant might have plowed straight for Atlanta, almost taken the city, and yet lost eighty thousand soldiers in the attempt. Each time a Southern general tried to go northward to threaten Union territory—Albert Sidney Johnston at Shiloh, Robert E. Lee at Gettysburg, John Bell Hood outside Nashville—he wrecked his army and ended up dead or retreating southward. Sherman knew how to keep his soldiers mobile, minimize losses, and take an all-important city like Atlanta, using it as a stepping-stone for greater things yet to come—and thereby winning Lincoln the election. More important, at his best he was able to translate his new philosophy of war into rhetoric that would soon galvanize the nation. Atlanta was not merely captured, but “ours and fairly won.” Savannah did not merely fall, but was presented “to the country as a Christmas present.” Georgia would not be dissected but made to “howl,” in a “war so terrible” of “synonymous ruin” for civilians. His famous postbellum pronouncement that “war is hell” was simply a variation on what he had told the nation throughout most of the Civil War. As in the case of Themistocles, individual battles were not, for Sherman, ends in themselves, nor even theater operations that served strategic purposes, but elements of far larger sociological war.71

  With Sherman stymied—or defeated—in Georgia rather than triumphant in Atlanta, Lincoln would not have been reelected. With President McClellan in the White House, there would have been enormous pressure to settle differences by permanent separation between North and South, or a return to a slave-owning Southern United States.

  Quite simply, without Uncle Billy’s men in Atlanta on September 2, 1864, the United States as we know it today might very well not exist.

  Chapter Four

  One Hundred Days in Korea

  Matthew Ridgway Takes Over—Winter 1950–51

  The Nightmare (December 1950)

  Would all of Korea now be lost?

  America’s first major military defeat seemed inevitable. As Christmas 1950 neared, the shell-shocked United States was reduced to collective despair. Once ascendant American armies in Korea were on the brink of collapse. Certain destruction loomed from hordes of invading Communist Chinese troops. The hysteria almost paralyzed Washington. Left and right blamed each other for losing Korea or even going there in the first place. Rumor had it that Secretary of State Dean Acheson might offer to quit Korea entirely if the Chinese would likewise just leave the peninsula. Harry Truman had intervened to save South Korea in July 1950 on grounds that there would be no more appeasement to aggression, as there had been with Hitler at Munich. Now that resolution was beginning to seem hollow, if not embarrassing.

  The senior ground commander of American forces in Korea was dead. The forces of the United Nations, foremost among them well over a hundred thousand American marines and Army infantrymen, were close to being annihilated by tens of thousands of fresh Chinese Communist infantry. Now, amid ice and snow, Americans were fleeing southward from North Korea as fast as possible. Gloom and panic buried even occasional good news. Few seemed to care that the U.S. Marine Corps on the east coast of Korea was in fact conducting a successful fighting retreat. Fewer still knew that the marines had killed more than fifteen thousand Chinese troops, along with another ten thousand through targeted air strikes. The entire attacking Chinese Ninth Army was rendered combat ineffective.1

  Instead, disturbing details filtered back that shaky American troops of the Eighth Army on the western side of Korea had thrown away their equipment. Chinese intelligence reports stereotyped American infantrymen as “weak, afraid to die, and [lacking] the courage to attack or defend . . . They cringe when, if on the advance, they hear firing.” Since the nineteenth century, Americans had chided the technologically backward Chinese and tried to persuade them to adopt Western religion, politics, and culture in order to evolve from poverty. Now the world seemed turned upside down: Sophisticated Chinese invaders were butchering American defenders—and with better weapons, training, and morale. General Peng Dehuai’s Communist Chinese Army was not intent on merely pushing the Americans back into South Korea. He wanted to unify the entire peninsula under Russian and Chinese patronage.2

  Throughout this bleak December, calls for the use of atomic bombs came from almost every quarter—as if the Korean conflict could be ended in the manner that Hiroshima and Nagasaki five years earlier had forced Japan to surrender. Talk spread of nationwide military mobilization and, at times, of an inevitable global nuclear war against what President Truman called “the inheritors of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane, the greatest murderers in the history of the world.” Emergency legislation quadrupled defense spending. General Douglas MacArthur was silent about his failure to anticipate a massive autumn Chinese invasion. But he became loud about the need to bomb Chinese supply bases in Manchuria—including the demand to have a theater stockpile of at least twenty-six atomic bombs. Truman told the press that he would not rule out use of a nuclear weapon.3

  In these first six months of Korean “police action,” 14,650 Americans perished, most of them during the long retreat southward from the Chinese border during November and December 1950. In a matter of weeks, well over three thousand Americans had been killed or wounded. On a single day, November 30, 799 marines and Army personnel were lost—more than all the American combat fatalities in the Afghanistan war between 2001 and 2008. In panic the Americans were fleeing Chinese “hordes.” As Matthew Ridgway later put it, “the blows fell and fell with such devastating suddenness that many units were overrun before they could quite grasp what had happened.”4

  This collapse was certainly not what the American people had bargained for, given their nation’s uninterrupted record of overseas victories and the fresh memory of overwhelming triumph just five years earlier over the Axis powers. Nor was it what the public had been told would follow from the revered General MacArthur’s recent brilliant landing at Inchon just a few weeks earlier in mid-September. Yet more than half of those Americans questioned in a November 1950 Gallup poll suddenly wanted the United States to use atomic weapons on enemy military targets to save American lives. By January 1951, about half the country would also conclude that going to war was a terrible decision.5

  Somewhere between 200,000 and 340,000 Communist Chinese troops had unexpectedly crossed into Korea from Manchuria between mid-October and December 1950—their initial invasion for days largely undetected or even ignored by United Nations forces. By the end of the year, General Peng Dehuai had almost half a million North Korean and Chinese Communist forces under his theater command. A civil war among Koreans threatened to be the first front of a new World War III that in theory could quickly escalate to intercontinental nuclear exchanges, given that the Soviets had exploded a nuclear device a little over a year earlier and were seen as the absolute leaders of a vast monolithic Communist bloc. General MacArthur’s intelligence officers had little idea that the Communist Chinese, in preparation, had transferred hundreds of thousands of their infantry forces from the
coast opposite Taiwan to the Yalu River at the border with North Korea. The autumn 1950 Chinese invasion was probably the greatest intelligence lapse in postwar American military history, with far more immediately lethal consequences than either the surprise at Pearl Harbor or the flawed estimation of Saddam Hussein’s chemical and biological weapons program.

  Following the Chinese crossing of the Yalu, much of Asia suddenly seemed to be vulnerable to a Communist takeover. The spread from Eastern to Western Europe of the armies of the Soviet Union, in tandem with the aggression of Mao’s China, loomed inevitable. If Korea could not be saved, how could a Japan, Taiwan, or even the Philippines hold out? If America, the world wondered, had freed Asia from the Japanese a mere five years earlier, how could it be that once ragtag Communists were liberating its nations from the liberators? And why were former allies now formidable enemies while former friends were lackluster allies?

  For most of December, American newspapers and radio were aghast. Once nearly victorious armies in Korea were suddenly beginning to resemble the French disintegrating before the German blitzkrieg of May 1940. All the credibility and confidence gained from World War II dissipated. Fear and uncertainty replaced them.6

  Amid this uproar back at home, Lieutenant General Matthew Ridgway, deputy chief of staff of the U.S. Army, got a late-night phone call on December 22, 1950, as he was enjoying a cocktail at the Washington home of a friend. Suddenly Ridgway was told that the ground commander of the Eighth Army, the distinguished World War II general Walton Walker, had hours earlier been crushed in a jeep accident. America’s preeminent force in Korea suddenly had no commanding general on the ground. The theater commander and architect of the advance to the Yalu, the revered Douglas MacArthur, seemed stunned and unable to arrest the flight of American troops.

  Hundreds of thousands of Chinese Communists had retaken the North Korean capital of Pyongyang on December 5—the allies had held it for only six weeks after taking the city on October 19, during the march to the Yalu. The Chinese had joined with re-formed and refitted units of North Koreans and together were nearing, or, for all Ridgway knew, perhaps already crossing, the 38th Parallel. That meant a threat to nearby Seoul, and indeed to all of South Korea. Ridgway was ordered to leave Washington immediately and to take command of what was left of collapsing American and United Nations forces as talk spread of another retreat to Pusan. Six years later, a reflective Ridgway recalled his apprehensions as he began a long multistop flight toward the battlefield: “The Army Commander was dead. The tactical situation was bad. I was in command, and on my answer to the question, ‘What do you do?’ depended something far more important than a grade in an instructor’s book. On it hinged victory or defeat.”7

  Although he was a three-star general, and apparently near the pinnacle of the Army’s Pentagon bureaucracy, Ridgway had received no official warning that he had been slated to be the next in line to assume command of the Eighth Army in Korea. His appointment was probably not initially supported by the then chief of staff of the Army, his boss, General J. Lawton (Joe) Collins. Ridgway certainly wanted out of the Washington bureaucracy. His loudly expressed views on the need to prepare for limited wars were antithetical to the cost-cutting Truman administration’s naïve trust that America’s new nuclear air power could deter all threats without the traditional expense of large conventional forces. Perhaps his appointment to save a limited war through conventional means was seen as a way of putting Ridgway’s proverbial money where his mouth was.8

  Ridgway was known as a strategic thinker, and as an experienced, if not a brilliant, World War II airborne corps commander in Europe. Few generals had seen as much combat. But Ridgway knew little about Asia in general or Korea in particular. And he had earned a growing reputation for being too outspoken for his own good. His immediate chief qualification, as deputy to General Collins, the Army chief of staff, was that from June to December 1950, Ridgway had tried, with some success, to restart the enormous Pentagon wartime machinery and get supplies and armament to a desperately outgunned and outmanned General MacArthur.

  Ridgway was outranked and overshadowed at the highest levels by four-star heroes from the recent fighting in Europe such as Generals Omar Bradley, Mark Clark, Joe Collins, and Dwight Eisenhower. At his age, the odds were that Ridgway would not again obtain another senior command in the field. More likely, he assumed that he would end his career in a billet in Europe rather than stalking around in late middle age under bombardment on the front lines in wintry Korea. Nevertheless, Ridgway in a matter of hours was on his way to Tokyo.9

  Anatomy of a Collapse (September–December 1950)

  In autumn 1950, after six months of hard fighting, Americans had swept far north of the 38th Parallel in an all-out effort to rid Korea of Communists. They felt thereby that the West would send a message to both Soviet Russia and Red China not to subvert the postwar aspirations of emerging Asian states that were supposed to be free to determine their own futures through plebiscites. The unexpected turnabout at Inchon, where tens of thousands of North Korean troops were trapped and thousands destroyed, had restored the public’s confidence in the previously unpopular and nearly disastrous “police action” of summer 1950. Americans had taken the wizard General MacArthur at his word that this new sort of limited war was both winnable and nearly over. Few remembered that the old general had long demonstrated a bad habit in the Pacific theater of prematurely declaring victory and scoffing at warnings of enemy offensives—often a prelude to disaster. They remembered only MacArthur as a savior who had regained the Philippines and seemed to have done the same thing in Korea.

  The Chinese People’s Army all September and October had been brazenly ignoring the loud American triumphalism. Instead, Chinese generals had studied the always changing dynamics of the Korean battlefield that in just the latter six months of 1950 had seen the nearly seven-hundred-mile-long peninsula almost cleared of Americans—and in turn almost swept clean of their own allied Communist North Koreans and Chinese “advisers” and “volunteers.” Yet the further northward United Nations forces had raced toward the Chinese border, the worse the weather and geography became. The north of Korea was more expansive, rugged, and mountainous than the south. Unfortunately, General MacArthur had not reconnoitered, and in fact knew far too little about, the environs of North Korea.

  The nearer the Chinese forces waiting on the border found themselves to the encroaching front, the farther American-led infantry were from their own supply depots to the south. Like Xerxes on his way to his Salamis, the more exposed the advancing Americans became, the more overconfident they seemed—given the assurances of General MacArthur that many of his now victorious forces would be “home for Christmas.” It was hard to know which was more ironic: MacArthur’s uncanny ability to turn initial defeat into sure victory after the successful landing at Inchon, or to turn Inchon’s subsequent victory into sure defeat at the Yalu. After the brilliant Inchon amphibious assault (“Operation Chromite”) and simultaneous breakout from the endangered Pusan perimeter commencing on September 15, 1950, the American-led United Nations coalition had seemed certain to reunify Korea. On MacArthur’s orders, the UN coalition crossed the 38th Parallel on October 7, eager to head northward to wipe out the fleeing North Korean aggressors. MacArthur felt that within another ninety days he could unite the entire Korean peninsula under a United Nations–sanctioned Syngman Rhee government in the south, allied closely to the United States.

  Like General Custer at the Little Big Horn, the Americans after Inchon had eagerly sought to pursue the enemy. They had little clue that they were outnumbered and soon to be overrun and cut off by hundreds of thousands of skilled, fresh Chinese Communist troops, fighting near their own homeland and energized by revolutionary anti-Western zeal. Odder still, Americans should not have been surprised. “Red China,” Matthew Ridgway later wrote, “had been threatening by radio almost daily—from the moment of the American surge after Inchon in September 1950—that it would come i
nto the war if North Korea were invaded.”10

  If unification appeared a lunatic thought in late summer 1950, when American forces were a few miles from being pushed off the peninsula far to the south at Pusan, now, little more than four months after the start of the war, it seemed almost assured as they reached the Yalu River, well over six hundred miles to the north. General MacArthur had built up an army from a skeleton force of five hundred U.S. advisers and South Korean constabularies, had saved a beachhead at Pusan, and in a matter of weeks had gone on the offensive against veteran North Korean troops. There are few comparable turnabouts in modern military history in which a battered army in the space of weeks turns on, and then nearly ruins, its numerically superior aggressor.

  Nevertheless, even with the Communists on the run in autumn 1950, reasons for disquiet were beginning to reach the White House and the Pentagon. If MacArthur persisted in his bellicose rhetoric and widely reported news conferences, the Chinese, if not the Russians as well, could intervene on news that Korea was to be united under an American-sponsored government right in their neighborhood, with American bombers based on their borders. The European allies—the British especially—feared that the humiliated Soviets might retaliate against an American crossing of the 38th Parallel by unleashing its divisions on a depleted Western Europe. Lord Salisbury in mid-November gave a sober speech warning that United Nations offensive forces so far north of the 38th Parallel violated a number of classical tactical and strategic principles, from insufficient manpower to tenuous supply lines.11

  But MacArthur was still riding high both at home and abroad. Since the Communists had wished to destroy South Korea as an autonomous state, then why could not he in turn destroy the idea of an independent North Korea? What did weather, terrain, or empty Communist threats matter after Inchon? Indeed, once the Communists visibly got the war going, MacArthur may have welcomed the notion of sending Nationalist Chinese forces back into Communist China, or using atomic weapons to devastate Communist forces and industry in the region. Even a few civilians in the State Department, such as Dean Rusk and John Allison, had long called not just for “containment” but also for “rollback” and would support MacArthur as he headed northward as rapidly as possible.12