The Joint Chiefs of Staff were worried, but not enough to rein in MacArthur’s surge to the north. At the end of September, Defense Secretary George Marshall had cabled MacArthur that he had permission to go north as the situation dictated. “A more subtle result of the Inchon triumph,” Ridgway later noted, “was the development of an almost superstitious regard for General MacArthur’s infallibility. Even his superiors began to doubt if they should question any of MacArthur’s decisions and as a result he was deprived of the advantage of forthright and informed criticism, such as every commander should have—particularly when he is trying to ‘run a war’ from 700 miles away.”13
By mid-November, as the Chinese were crossing the Yalu in increasing force, MacArthur could still send out a communiqué boasting, “If successful, [the ongoing UN offensive] should for all practical purposes end the war, restore peace and unity to Korea, enable the prompt withdrawal of the United Nations military forces, and permit the complete assumption by the Korean people and nation of full sovereignty and international equality. It is that for which we fight.” But even if MacArthur were right, it was hard to see how a poorly armed and trained South Korean military could defend the entire Korean peninsula against a million Communist troops on its borders without a near-permanent American presence in the tens of thousands.14
That the Chinese might mimic MacArthur’s Inchon gambit in reverse—by widening the war with a bold move to likewise cut off an exposed enemy far from home—was lost on his generals. As Ridgway himself later wrote of MacArthur’s inability to accept responsibility for putting his vastly outnumbered forces into a noose on the Yalu River, “It should have been clear to anyone that his own refusal to accept the mounting evidence of massive Chinese intervention was largely responsible for the reckless scattering of our forces all over the map of Korea.” That was an apt description of the radical thinning of United Nations troops as they entered the ever widening geography of North Korea near the Yalu. And the de facto lack of communications between two Marine and Army forces as they marched northward up the two coasts made the American predicament even worse.15
Now in the bleak days of midwinter, with his forces reeling “all over the map of Korea,” a shell-shocked General MacArthur warned that unless he was allowed to attack Chinese bases in Manchuria, the American cause in Korea was essentially hopeless. He went back and forth—sometimes promising complete victory, at others warning that a lack of resolve “would be the greatest defeat of the free world in recent times.” Meanwhile, the confused Joint Chiefs wondered, how might a lost war in Korea be saved by starting another war in China? They were further perplexed about whether MacArthur had been too wildly optimistic in declaring the war all but won in October, or too wildly pessimistic in all but declaring it lost in December—or both.
MacArthur did not mention to Washington, however, that he took for granted that neither the Soviets nor the Chinese would attack American air and supply bases in Japan or Taiwan. But that understanding assumed that the United States also had kept clear of Communist supply depots in Manchuria. The more an embarrassed MacArthur railed against a limited war, the more the cautious minds in Washington grasped that the Chinese and Russians were in fact also waging a limited war. And they, far more easily than America in the region, could escalate at will to other, far more vulnerable theaters.16
As the losses mounted, MacArthur began to lose his nerve. “The command,” MacArthur warned, “should be withdrawn from Korea just as rapidly as it is tactically possible to do so.” Finally, it was clear even to the blinkered Joint Chiefs that the mercurial general had gone full circle. By early January, MacArthur and others were reviewing wild contingency plans to evacuate all American forces to Okinawa, the Philippines, and Japan—a panic comparable to the Greek fright after Thermopylae, or Union hysteria after Cold Harbor.17
In fact, a self-serving narrative was developing out of MacArthur’s isolated Tokyo headquarters: The problem had not been the general’s reckless orders to his field commanders to race late in the year toward the frigid Chinese border. The disaster followed instead from the cowardly political decision in Washington restricting the scope of the war. MacArthur claimed that his problems were not that his land forces were vastly surprised and outnumbered in a neighborhood where the Communist Russians and Chinese could easily send hundreds of thousands of troops into the Korean theater. Instead, the disaster arose because he had not been allowed to widen the war into China, bomb Communist bases, and reserve the right to unleash America’s nuclear arsenal if need be. When had the United States, the general wondered, not engaged in hot pursuit across borders to punish an aggressive enemy? And were not British spies in their Washington embassy passing on sensitive American strategic planning to the Communists?18
As things got worse, a once fawning press turned on MacArthur and trumpeted predictions of American doom. And by early January, the headlines of the Chicago Tribune blared, SMASH THRU THE 8TH ARMY LINE / Chinese Rout One Division and Advance Several Miles.” The Los Angeles Times saw even less hope: REDS RACE SOUTH TO DESTROY U.S. FORCES.
Against this backdrop of the growing panic, Ridgway was taking over a seemingly hopeless command pawned off on him by his legendary superior, General MacArthur. The latter was ensconced hundreds of miles away in Tokyo fighting political battles with the Truman administration for his own legacy and reputation, hoping to preserve a possible future career in politics. If the Americans surrendered or were destroyed, Ridgway would be responsible for that defeat as supreme commander in the field—and MacArthur could use Ridgway’s failure as proof that the war effort had been shorted by Washington. Yet if Ridgway were to be successful in restoring the front, the credit would likely go to the old strategist MacArthur, who still enjoyed nominal overall command. Faced with such a lose-lose situation, Ridgway flew to Japan to meet MacArthur himself.
Everything Gone Wrong (August 1945–June 1950)
The larger problem in Korea was not just the invasion of hundreds of thousands of Chinese Communist troops. Indeed, almost everything the United States military and State Department had done in Korea had gone wrong from the moment the Second World War ended. Adding to the general chaos of the postwar occupation—and in fear of Communist radicals—the Americans had initially retained hated Japanese colonial security forces to patrol the 21 million Koreans south of the 38th Parallel. Americans also clung to a naïve estimation of Communist postwar intentions in general, and still entertained an unwarranted deprecation of the quality of Chinese and Korean troops in particular. All that resulted in several contradictory and dangerous notions—that the Communist Chinese, for example, in the late 1940s were not bent on hegemony in Korea. And even if they were, they surely could not offer a serious military challenge to the United States.19
In the exuberance of the victories over Germany and Japan, American politicians also did not appreciate fully the sacrifices of both Soviet Russia and China in defeating the Axis powers. Much less did the Anglo-Americans grasp the ensuing sense of entitlement in their respective regions of influence that such massive Russian and Chinese human losses were felt to warrant. After all, the two former allies alone lost more of their population—nearly 40 million in the aggregate—than all other combatants on both sides of World War II combined, and they would fight tenaciously to carve out regional spheres of influence as the spoils of war and compensation for their dead.
As a result, the moment North Korea invaded the south on June 25, 1950, China had already repositioned some of its best units to be nearer the Korean border. More were to come from Manchuria—on the expectation of a wider conflagration. The Soviet Union seemed to have been in charge of much of the foreign policy decisions of its Communist clients—making the North Korean government a “Russian colony,” as the June 5, 1950, issue of Time magazine had proclaimed shortly before the war. Meanwhile, Soviet and Chinese advisers and equipment poured into North Korea, confirming the American suspicion that no Communist satellite acted witho
ut Moscow’s approval.20
American thinking about Korea was at first likewise unsophisticated. In the utopian theory of postwar reconstruction, Korea fell to the oversight of the newly created United Nations. But the UN had no real power to enforce its edicts without commitments of American military power—itself on the wane given the public’s desire for a peace dividend after the sacrifices of World War II. With the end of the war, more in America had feared the return of another depression than worried about newly acquired overseas responsibilities. Under brokered postwar UN agreements, both Communist Russian and American occupying troops would depart the peninsula. The Koreans, north and south, would then be free to choose their leaders in supervised elections. Perhaps they would establish an independent—and unified—Korea for the first time since 1910.
In fact, neither Communist Russia nor China was going to allow another government allied with Americans near its borders. Russia felt that all of Korea belonged in its Communist orbit as its proper reward for entering the war against the Japanese, albeit late, on the side of the Allies. The power of the United States did not rest with fear of American boots on the ground—there were not many more than five hundred American troops when North Korea first invaded the south in June 1950. Instead, American deterrence rested solely on its already fading military reputation for helping to defeat Germany and Japan, along with its vast nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union, which had detonated its first nuclear bomb only the year before. Most observers in the Communist world, however, had studied rapid U.S. demobilization and thereby assumed that America’s foreign policy would probably soon revert to its isolationism of the 1930s. With the European colonial powers of Western Europe bankrupt and exhausted by the war, opportunity was arising everywhere in the Pacific and Asia. Few cared that America had sponsored the new United Nations, or was helping to rebuild Europe, or even that its economy was booming in supplying a war-ravaged world.
In tactical terms, on the Korea peninsula in summer 1950, America was rightfully seen as a lightweight that had virtually disbanded its Second World War conventional arsenal in Asia. Scarcely 115,000 ground troops were spread over the Pacific and Japan as the public demanded defense reductions and a redirection in federal spending to new comprehensive social entitlements. At the very moment that global security demands mounted, with the rise of the Soviet Union and the demise of the British Empire, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson slashed the Navy and tried to disband the Marines altogether. The latter scrambled to cobble together war surplus matériel, most of it obsolete, to maintain some sort of battle readiness.
The result by July 1950 in Korea was that the Eighth Army confronted a Soviet-supplied enemy with mostly outdated Sherman medium tanks and antitank weapons. Naval forces offshore were scant, especially amphibious craft. When the Communists assaulted the surrounded Americans at Pusan in July 1950, American artillery and recoilless rifle rounds bounced off their Russian-made T-34 tanks, of which the Communists had at least 150 supporting their forces. Somehow the military colossus of the Second World War in less than five years found its forces in Korea smaller, more poorly equipped, and far more demoralized than the army of an impoverished nine-million-person Communist North Korea. Unfortunately, this situation developed at precisely the time confident American diplomats were acting as if they enjoyed military parity, or even superiority, in the region.21
In this immediate postwar climate of unreality concerning America’s military readiness, President Truman again considered conventional forces almost superfluous—given the existence of a nuclear arsenal that in one fell swoop had ended the war with Japan. “The concept of ‘limited warfare,’ ” complained Matthew Ridgway later, “never entered our councils. We had faith in the United Nations. And the atomic bomb created for us a kind of psychological Maginot line that helped us rationalize our national urge to get the boys home, the armies demobilized, the swords sheathed, and the soldiers, sailors, and airmen out of uniform.”22
For most American veterans, nothing could be worse than to be recalled to military service at a time of growing American postwar prosperity after years of combat in the wars against Germany and Japan. We now think of Harry Truman as a Cold Warrior who sought to save much of Asia and Europe from Communist domination with his advocacy of containment. But his undeniable Cold War zealotry was not always so evident in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Between 1946 and 1949, Truman was eager to demobilize U.S. conventional forces, divert the defense budget to social programs, and rely on America’s nuclear arsenal to provide security. His secretary of defense, Louis Johnson, provoked a “Revolt of the Admirals” when senior naval leaders furiously objected to cuts in the carriers and naval aviation on the dubious proposition that strategic air forces alone, armed with nuclear weapons, could address far more cheaply almost any threat to American security.23
After losing nearly a half million Americans in the Second World War, the public also was naturally reluctant—a mere five years later—to go to war against former allies such as Russia and China to protect prior enemies such as Germany and Japan, which were to be covered under the new American nuclear umbrella and incorporated into regional military alliances. If the United States were to promote a new democratic postwar global order, then it fell to America to rehabilitate an unpopular Germany and Japan and restore both to the family of peaceful nations. Yet that would allow the Communist giants Russia and China the easier task of championing the victims, not the former perpetrators, of Axis aggression.
Given a weary public, some American diplomats were convinced that Japan was the only nation in the Far East that the United States could realistically protect through conventional military means. A few were even naïve enough to air that concession publicly. The usually careful secretary of state, Dean Acheson, in a speech on January 12, 1950, before the National Press Club in Washington, implied that South Korea did not reside within the American defensive sphere—perhaps an understandable caution given U.S. fear of an imminent Communist invasion of Taiwan. Not much later, the influential Senator Thomas Connally, a friend of Truman, asserted that the United States did not consider Korea vital to its strategy. Concerned parties in Asia made a note of all that. But even earlier, a 1947 Joint Chiefs of Staff study had likewise concluded that “From the standpoint of military security, the U.S. has little strategic interest in maintaining the present troops and bases in Korea.” Senator Connally in May 1950 had all but written Korea off as indefensible against the world Communist juggernaut: “Whenever she [Russia] takes a notion she can just overrun Korea like she will probably overrun Formosa when she gets ready to.”
With senior U.S. officials airing such doubts, it was logically enough concluded abroad that the United States could probably not guarantee the survival of the nascent Syngman Rhee government in South Korea. U.S. equivocation may have in part persuaded Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Kim Il-sung that America might not even intervene against a Communist invasion from the north.24
The Joint Chiefs of Staff—none of whom had even visited Korea between 1946 and July 1950—were unanimous in agreeing that most of America’s shrinking military capability should be directed at saving Western Europe. America’s most influential postwar military planners—Omar Bradley, Dwight Eisenhower, and George Marshall—had far more war experience in European than Asian theaters. They all took seriously the warnings of their Western European counterparts not to deplete American strength in far-off tangential theaters. Soviet divisions vastly outnumbered their allied counterparts on the Asian continent—and could advance under a new Soviet nuclear umbrella. The power of the Red Army in the Second World War after 1944, and its destruction of the German Wehrmacht, were still on everyone’s mind.25
In such a climate, strategic thinking in Asia had been largely left to the four-star general and hero of the Pacific theater, Douglas MacArthur—given the latter’s long association with the Pacific and his preeminent record in the victory over the Japanese. Few questioned
his proconsulship in Japan, assuming that the lack of postwar violence there was testament to MacArthur’s diplomatic genius and military acumen. But the old general had not returned to the United States in over a decade. He had little insight into the thinking of either President Truman or his own Joint Chiefs—and none at all into the ramifications of the use of nuclear weapons. The mercurial MacArthur had five times turned down invitations to receive medals and honors in Washington. President Truman, who had never met the general, guessed that MacArthur was plotting to be drafted as the Republican presidential nominee in 1952. If that were true, then the general’s accusations of Democratic appeasement of global Communism would be enhanced by his own quick victory over Asian Communists—reminding voters that he still alone preserved America’s military prowess.
As a reclusive proconsul in Japan, MacArthur stayed ensconced in imperial headquarters in Tokyo. From there, he directed the postwar reconstruction of Japan, and nominally oversaw the less important Korean occupation by remote control. He had little notion that entering Korea with outnumbered, green American forces might invite an initial disaster. Yet, on the other hand, the equally naïve Communists had no idea that the Americans would ever intervene with forces large enough to stop their assault at Pusan.
The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq Page 19
