On Desperate Ground

by Hampton Sides

  The supreme commander approached the podium. With his bare head bowed in a pious expression, he recited the Lord’s Prayer. Then, in a voice tremulous with emotion, he said, “By the grace of a merciful Providence, our forces fighting under the standard of that greatest hope and inspiration of mankind, the United Nations, have liberated this ancient capital city of Korea.” Tears coursed down his face as he turned to Syngman Rhee. “Mister President,” he said, “my officers and I will now resume our military duties and leave you and your government to the discharge of the civil responsibility.”

  Artillery thundered again, and more shards of glass dropped from the ceiling, causing one of Smith’s officers to remark, only half in jest, that it was more dangerous here than at the front.

  Rhee, the seventy-five-year-old strongman, shuffled to the dais and clasped MacArthur’s hand. The president had snow-white hair and wore a crisp gray suit. He had lived much of his life on the run or in exile and had once been horribly tortured by Japanese officers, his fingers burned and smashed. Having studied at Harvard and Princeton, he spoke perfect English, and he considered himself a close friend of MacArthur’s. “We admire you,” he began, turning his gaze to the supreme commander. “We love you as the savior of our race. How can I ever explain to you my own undying gratitude and that of the Korean people?”

  Rhee then looked out over the crowd and voiced a hope that ran deep within the South Korean people. “Let the sons of our sons look backward to this day,” he said, “and remember it as the beginning of unity, understanding, and forgiveness. May it never be remembered as a day of oppression and revenge.”

  As Rhee spoke, the audience could hear the crackle of gunfire not far away, and periodically the fetor of decaying flesh drifted in through an open window. But to Smith’s relief, the ceremony ended without incident. MacArthur went back to his motor pool and headed straightaway for the airport. A few hours later he was in Tokyo again, in his digs at the U.S. embassy. General Smith, meanwhile, returned to the business at hand: rooting out the last of the North Korean defenders and liberating Seoul—not symbolically but in fact.

  * * *

  Already, MacArthur sniffed a bigger prize. He was no longer satisfied with merely liberating the capital and restoring South Korea to her pre-war borders. The success of the Inchon-Seoul campaign had been so dramatic, the reversal of the war’s fortunes so complete, that the supreme commander was casting his ambitions farther north. He knew that his forces could easily cross the thirty-eighth parallel and destroy the last remnants of Kim’s retreating army. But why stop there? Why not seize Pyongyang? Why not drive all the way to the Yalu River, North Korea’s border with China, and unite the entire peninsula?

  What a triumph this would be, what a blow against Communism, against Stalin, against totalitarian regimes everywhere. If MacArthur could pull it off, it would be the crowning moment of his career.

  In Washington, the Joint Chiefs of Staff had begun to perceive the same glimmering possibilities. So had President Truman and his secretary of state, Dean Acheson. With the easy victory at Inchon, the mood had quickly turned from gloom to exhilaration. A sense of euphoria filled the halls of government, and few cared to puncture the mood by raising niggling doubts. Nearly everyone could see it: The fruit was ripe for the taking. The Americans had Kim on the run. MacArthur had the firepower and the momentum. The thirty-eighth parallel was an artificial border anyway, a figment of the cartographers. Making it a geopolitical boundary had been one of the “greatest tragedies of contemporary history,” MacArthur had said a few years earlier. “The barrier must and will be torn down.” Now that it was within his reach, why shouldn’t he keep going?

  So the stakes had grown, the mission had crept. If it was hubris, it was a strain of hubris in which everyone, not only MacArthur, had acquiesced. “It would have taken a superhuman effort to say no,” State Department special envoy Averell Harriman later said. “Psychologically it was almost impossible to not go ahead and complete the job.”

  By this point, MacArthur seemed virtually unstoppable anyway. After the electric success of Operation Chromite, his stock had never been higher. Few dared to question his logic or his acumen. If MacArthur had ordered his troops to walk on water, said one prominent Army general, “there might have been someone ready to give it a try.” Secretary Acheson had taken to calling him “the sorcerer of Inchon.” After the astonishing turnabout of the past few weeks, said Acheson, “there’s no stopping MacArthur now.”

  Upon his return to Tokyo, MacArthur found an urgent communication, marked FOR YOUR EYES ONLY, from George Marshall. The secretary of defense essentially had given the supreme commander carte blanche to cross the parallel and forge ahead as far and as fast as he judged necessary. In so many words, MacArthur was being issued a hall pass to go wherever he pleased. “We want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the 38th parallel,” Secretary Marshall assured him. The document had been approved by President Truman.

  By the next day, September 30, MacArthur already seemed to be relishing his new elbow room. “I regard all of North Korea open for our military operations,” he cabled Washington. A vicious air campaign began over North Korea that would hardly let up for three years—nearly every city and town, nearly every piece of infrastructure, would be destroyed. By the war’s end, millions of civilians would be killed. The stated policy, wrote Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk, was to bomb “everything that moved in North Korea, every brick standing on top of another.”

  As this wholesale devastation proceeded from the air, MacArthur formally demanded the surrender of North Korea. “The complete destruction of your armed forces and war-making potential is now inevitable,” he wrote Kim Il Sung. “I call upon you and the forces under your command, in whatever part of Korea situated, forthwith to lay down your arms.” Kim gave no reply.

  On October 1, a South Korean battalion became the first of the U.N. forces to march across the parallel. Within a few days, large numbers of American troops would follow them. As the military caravans hastened north toward Pyongyang, MacArthur continued to enjoy the full blessing of Washington. The Truman administration issued only one caveat: MacArthur must remain vigilant to any indication that Red China or the Soviet Union might enter the war. At the first sign of their involvement, MacArthur was to halt his advance.

  * * *

  Within a few days, Smith’s Marines had vanquished the last remaining North Korean defenders of Seoul. Finally, the capital had been pacified. His men drove north and east of the city and assumed a blocking position in the mountains on the road to Uijeongbu, where their mission was to intercept and destroy any of Kim’s forces that might be flooding north toward the border.

  Smith had established a temporary headquarters in a decrepit medical building on the edge of Seoul. Its rooms still had the pungent odor of carbolic acid. One of the chambers featured what appeared to be a mortuary slab—Smith had it removed because he found it “too depressing.” He and his officers began to set up housekeeping. He got his first bath in a long while, using a bucket and a canteen cup. The general, a lifelong green thumb, was pleased to find a garden out back. Its beds were tangled in weeds, but he was able to gather a fresh bouquet for the table each day.

  The plan coming from General MacArthur was that X Corps—including the First Marine Division—would be heading north in a few weeks. But they would not proceed over land. Instead they would return to Inchon, load onto ships, and cruise around the peninsula, sailing far up the coast to a place called Wonsan, a major North Korean port. There they would make yet another amphibious landing and work their way into the rugged mountains of eastern North Korea, marching in the direction of the Yalu. Meanwhile, the Eighth Army, under General Walton Walker, having broken out of its trap at Pusan, would seize the North Korean capital of Pyongyang and then march up the west side of the peninsula. This split-command master strategy see
med dazzlingly complex—with two huge forces, separated by a nearly impassable mountain range, simultaneously working their way north—but dazzling complexity was what MacArthur wanted.

  On October 11, Smith returned to Inchon and took up residence in the commander’s cabin of the Mount McKinley, where he spent his days sketching out the plans for the Wonsan landing. Unit by unit, his Marines trickled in from the countryside. Some found the time to experience the backstreets of Inchon—they tended to frequent “hole-in-the-wall drinking establishments,” wrote Joe Owen, of the Seventh Marine Regiment, where “available females” were plentiful but the whiskey was “close to lethal.”

  General Smith, at work in his floating office, didn’t like the way the larger mission in Korea seemed to have changed. He was suspicious of the ad hoc nature of the planning, the sense of drift and overreach that pervaded General Almond’s thinking. They were headed north, but no one seemed to know how far. The ultimate objective was not transparent, nor was the timetable. “As to how long we will stay in Korea, I do not know,” he later wrote his wife, Esther. “I thought we would have been out of here by now. If we had not gone much north of the 38th Parallel this would have been true.”

  He also noted how cool the nights had become. He could feel the breath of autumn, a pronounced nip in the air. Beneath his combat jacket he wore a sweater and a wool undershirt. “I hope,” he told Esther, “we do not have to operate in this country in the winter.”

  7

  GOD’S RIGHT-HAND MAN

  Wake Island, the Western Pacific

  Just before sunrise, beyond the rustling palm fronds, a plane rumbled on the horizon. The sound of its Pratt & Whitney engines grew louder, competing with the smash of the breakers that curled along the white coral beach. It was six o’clock in the morning, and the day was already sultry. This tiny Micronesian atoll, in the middle of the ocean, slightly west of the international date line, was home to an array of typhoon-battered Quonset huts built by Pan American Airways. Rusted relics from World War II lay half-submerged in the surf. Over the centuries, castaways had pitched up on these lonely shores, shipwrecked conquistadors and whalers and merchants, and, for a time in the early 1900s, the Japanese had come in search of guano and the feathers of exotic birds like the sooty tern, the masked booby, and the black-footed albatross. If, through most of its history, Wake had been uninhabited, the island boasted at least one modern virtue: It was the only piece of land for a thousand miles in any direction that could accommodate an airstrip, and so it had become the mid-oceanic refueling station of the far-flung American empire.

  On this morning—Sunday, October 15, 1950—Douglas MacArthur stood on the crushed-coral margins of the tarmac and waited for the approaching plane to land. The general wore a gold-braided Army field cap and an unbuttoned khaki shirt with five stars fixed to each side of its collar.

  MacArthur didn’t like being called away from his busy headquarters, not for one minute. “Only God or the Government of the United States can keep me from the fulfillment of my mission,” he once told a reporter. But here he stood, two thousand miles from Tokyo.

  The approaching plane, a four-propeller Douglas DC-6 that shone bright silver and blue, soared over the island’s inner lagoon. The general knew that it was the Independence, the official aircraft of Harry S. Truman. MacArthur had never met the president before. He wondered why Truman had chosen, at much expense and inconvenience, to voyage nearly seven thousand miles from Washington—a third of the earth’s circumference—to see him on this fragile reef. Truman wouldn’t fly all this way on a lark. Had he come to reprimand MacArthur? Was there a critical development afoot? Some secret plan or weapon to be unveiled?

  MacArthur didn’t know. And for a man who’d built his public persona on a mystique of omniscience, not knowing was the worst kind of torture. Truman’s people had offered no agenda beforehand, so the general could only guess what larger intrigues might be at play.

  No doubt Korea would be foremost in the discussions. Yet this was puzzling to MacArthur, too. For what was there to talk about? The war in Korea was all but over—the general was sure of it. With Kim Il Sung’s army unraveling, MacArthur would keep driving for the Yalu. The Korean Peninsula would be united under a free government that would soon hold elections. An anticipation of triumph pulsed through the high command, in Tokyo and in Washington alike.

  It occurred to MacArthur, though he preferred to dismiss it as too obvious, that political calculations might figure into the meeting’s rationale. He knew that midterm elections would be held across the United States in a few weeks. He also knew that Truman was bringing a clutch of journalists and photographers with him to Wake. The general wondered: Could this be a political stunt, a gimmick, to allow the president to bask in MacArthur’s battlefield glory?

  Election publicity was one thing, but MacArthur thought he detected a more sinister subtext as well. He feared this might be a trap. So did his aides. Major General Courtney Whitney, his closest confidant and adviser, waited beside MacArthur on the runway. As the president’s plane circled over the island and began its descent, Whitney sensed what he would later call a “sly political ambush.”

  * * *

  The Independence touched down at 6:30 and taxied to a stop. The morning sun was just then peeking out of the Pacific. President Truman rose from his cabin, radiant and alert, wearing a double-breasted navy suit and a Stetson fedora. Though he seemed in a chipper mood, he was anxious. “I’ve a whale of a job before me,” he had written a friend while en route. “Have to talk to God’s right-hand man tomorrow.”

  The bespectacled Missourian was sixty-six years old and silver-haired, but there was still a snap to his movements as he emerged from the plane. An artillery captain in World War I, Truman had launched his unlikely political career after several years running a men’s clothing store in Kansas City. He was MacArthur’s direct opposite in many respects, but especially in this one: Throughout his career, people had consistently underestimated him. Time had once belittled him as a “queer accident of democracy,” but he had a frontier toughness that many people missed. Underneath the brass of his personality, it was said, there was steel.

  MacArthur waited at the foot of the stairs. According to protocol, he was supposed to salute his commander in chief, but he only gripped Truman’s hand. “Mr. President!” he called out.

  “How are you, General?” Truman said. “I’m glad you’re here. I’ve been waiting a long time to meet you.”

  “I hope it won’t be so long next time, Mr. President.”

  The two men paused on the tarmac, posing for the photographers who were engulfing them. It was, said Truman, a “picture orgy.” Their advisers and aides clustered around. General Omar Bradley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was there. So were Dean Rusk, Averell Harriman, and Secretary of the Army Frank Pace.

  Truman and MacArthur marched arm in arm off the runway and slid into the back of a rattletrap Chevrolet sedan that was said to be the best car on the island. A Secret Service agent rode in the front seat with the driver while Truman and MacArthur fell into spirited conversation. The president cut to the subject that was foremost on his mind: What were the chances the Chinese might intervene in Korea? “I have been worried about that,” Truman said. It was more a geopolitical, diplomatic, or even psychological question than a military one—who could say what Mao would do?—but the president wanted the general’s opinion on the matter.

  MacArthur played down Truman’s concern. His own intelligence indicated that the Chinese wouldn’t dare enter the conflict—and if they did, he was sure his forces would destroy them. He did not think much of Mao’s troops. They were nothing more than a band of serfs—subsisting on rice balls and yams, relying on little burp guns and fizzly explosives that usually failed to detonate, an army held together with hemp string and bamboo.

  The two men continued the conversation at a Quonset h
ut, where Truman took a seat in a wicker chair, and MacArthur on a rattan settee. What they talked about is not precisely known. But so far, the two men seemed to be getting along well. Truman found MacArthur “stimulating and interesting.” MacArthur thought the president “radiated nothing but courtesy…I liked him from the start.”

  * * *

  A little after seven thirty, they moved down the beach to a pink cinder-block shack run by the Civil Aeronautics Administration. Secret Service agents posted themselves at the corners. Marine MPs toted carbines. Truman and MacArthur were ushered inside, and the full conference got under way. Nearly two dozen aides and staff members gathered around a long pine table. Truman sat at one end, with MacArthur on his right and Harriman on his left. Fresh pineapple was served, and a light sea breeze soughed through louvered shutters. In an anteroom, an unseen stenographer scribbled shorthand notes.

  Truman immediately set an informal tone. “This is no weather for coats,” he said. He removed his jacket, and others did the same.

  MacArthur eased into the relaxed atmosphere. “Do you mind if I smoke?” he asked, removing a corncob pipe and a pouch of tobacco.

  “No,” Truman quipped. “I suppose I’ve had more smoke blown in my face than any other man alive!”

  After the laughter subsided, Truman turned to a list of questions he’d prepared in a notebook. First, he wanted to know MacArthur’s timetable for the rest of the war.