But he was never explicitly told to accept it. “What I needed, as much as more men and supplies,” he wrote afterward, “was a clear definition of policy to meet this new situation.” When he asked for it, they responded, typically: “It is not practical to obtain significant additional forces for Korea from other members of the United Nations. . . . We believe that we should not commit our remaining available ground forces to action against Chinese Communist forces in Korea in face of the increased threat of general war. However, a successful resistance to Chinese-North Korean aggression at some position in Korea and a deflation of the military and political prestige of the Chinese Communists would be of great importance to our national interest, if they could be accomplished without incurring serious losses.” As inspiration, that was somewhat less moving than the Atlantic Charter. It gave MacArthur no concrete objectives, no guidelines, no lofty purpose except the flannelly suggestion that he tarnish Peking’s public image, provided the effort didn’t cost too much blood. Having failed to exploit his Inchon victory, American diplomats were equally helpless now that the fortunes of war had turned against him. As the gulf of misunderstanding and suspicion widened between him and them, he felt, according to one of his aides, that the “defiant rallying figure that had been Franklin Roosevelt in World War II was gone, and in his place was a group of figures of smaller stature who seemed more interested in temporizing than in fighting it through.”167
The crucial period in the continuing dialogue between Washington and Tokyo began during the 1950 year-end holidays. On the day after Christmas, Truman, Acheson, Marshall, Bradley, and Secretary of the Treasury John W. Snyder conferred in Blair House, and three days later the Pentagon, on their instructions, asked MacArthur what course of action he would recommend if the UN position became desperate. On the evening of Saturday, December 30, 1950, he replied that there was no point in waiting until their plight was hopeless. Should the United States or the United Nations choose to “recognize the state of war which has been forced upon us, ” he said, they should now authorize him to: “(1) blockade . . . the coast of China; (2) destroy through naval gunfire and air bombardment China’s industrial capacity to wage war; (3) secure appropriate reinforcements from the Nationalist garrison on Formosa to strengthen our position in Korea if we decide to continue the fight for that peninsula; and (4) release existing restrictions upon the Formosa garrison for diversionary action, possibly leading to counter-invasion against vulnerable areas of the Chinese mainland. ” These measures, he said, would “severely cripple and thereby neutralize China’s capacity to wage aggressive war” and would not only assure victory in Korea, but also “save Asia from the engulfment otherwise facing it.” The alternative to his proposals, he said, was defeat, with a “tactical plan of successively contracting defense lines south to the Pusan beachhead” as “the only possible way” in which “the evacuation could be accomplished.”168
Consternation followed the receipt of this message in Washington. Apart from the possibility that these steps might lead to world conflict, many sinologists doubted that they would work. The proposal to accept Chiang’s offer of troops was surprising, since MacArthur himself had called the Kuo-mintang force “ineffective.” World War II experience with strategic bombing indicated that it would not work without a massive slaughter of Chinese civilians, which would outrage world opinion. And a naval blockade wouldn’t disrupt Peking’s main line of supply, which was overland from Russia. Moreover, as the State Department pointed out, a blockade “off the coast of China would require negotiations with the British in view of the extent of British trade with China through Hong Kong.”169
Truman called an emergency session of the National Security Council to weigh the General’s program and phrase the answer to him. Acheson, who left a sickbed to attend it, wanted MacArthur told that he ought to confine himself to inflicting “maximum losses on the enemy”; the President felt he should be reminded that his primary task was “the safety of his troops” and “his basic mission of protecting Japan,” to which he must retreat if the price of holding a Korean bridgehead was too high. On January 9 the Joint Chiefs, with the approval of the President and the secretaries of state and defense, wired the General that while his suggestions “have been and continue to be given careful consideration,” there was “little possibility of policy change or other eventuality justifying strengthening of our effort in Korea. ” Apart from the need for approval from London, a blockade, “if undertaken, must await either stabilization of our position in Korea or our evacuation from Korea.” Bombardment of Chinese cities could be countenanced “only if the Chinese Communists attack United States forces outside of Korea.” Use of KMT units was rejected “in view of the improbability of their decisive effect . . . and their probable greater usefulness elsewhere.” Therefore he should persevere on the peninsula, avoiding “severe losses of men and materiel.” If that proved impossible—if he was overwhelmed—he should “withdraw from Korea to Japan.”170
One SCAP aide calls this a “booby-trap”—an attempt to put the responsibility for disaster on him. The General, in his own words, “shot a query right back.” Believing he had not been given a clear answer, he cited “the self-evident fact that my command as presently constituted is of insufficient strength to hold a position in Korea and simultaneously to protect Japan against external assault.” If his army continued to be locked in a seesaw stalemate, he said, he could not guarantee the safety of Nippon; he should be either reinforced or permitted to leave the peninsula. He continued: “There is no doubt but that a beachhead line can be held by our existing forces for a limited time in Korea, but this could not be accomplished without losses. Whether such losses were regarded as ‘severe’ or not would to a certain extent depend upon the connotation one gives the term. . . . The issue really boils down to the question whether or not the United States intends to evacuate Korea, and involves a decision of highest and international importance, far above the competence of a theater commander.” He did suggest that the issue should not be decided by “the initiative of enemy action, which in effect would be the determining criteria [sic] under a reasonable interpretation of your message.” Then, having stuck the knife in, he twisted it: “Under the extraordinary limitations and conditions imposed upon the command in Korea . . . its military position is untenable, but it can hold, if overriding political considerations so dictate, for any length of time up to its complete destruction. Your clarification requested.”171
This, Acheson felt, “was a posterity paper if there ever was one, with the purpose not only of clearing MacArthur of blame if things went wrong, but also of putting the maximum pressure on Washington to reverse itself and adopt his proposals for widening the war against China.” That is one reading of it, and it is understandable that the secretary of state, beset by congressional critics, saw it in that light. A less partisan interpretation would exonerate all parties, or hold all equally accountable. They were in an impossible situation, and they knew it, so all were trying to get out from under. The administration believed MacArthur was willing to risk war with Russia to save his military reputation. In the light of what we now know about Sino-Soviet relations, that threat was small, but at the time caution seemed wise. The General, on the other hand, saw his men dying for nothing. If their sacrifice was to have any meaning, the UN’s political purpose needed reexamination. MacArthur’s critics pointed out that defining it wasn’t his job, and they were right. But someone had to do it. He didn’t try until his civilian superiors, despite his goading, had failed.172
Washington’s reaction to MacArthur’s “clarification” request is a tribute to the administration’s eagerness to accommodate him. First, the Joint Chiefs issued him an order repeating previous directives—“in other words,” as Bradley later testified, telling him “to stay in Korea.” Next it was decided to send him a copy of a memorandum, a new sixteen-point fallback program which had been drawn up by the Chiefs for the consideration of Secretary of Defense Ma
rshall and other policymakers. This top-secret document, which had evolved out of staff studies begun in November, and which was to cause trouble later, set forth options—courses of action which might be pursued “if and when” the UN was forced to withdraw completely from the peninsula. Third, at the request of Acheson, Marshall, and Bradley, President Truman wrote MacArthur a long personal letter to set down “our basic national and international purposes” in Korea. The President’s tone was polite, almost deferential; he assured the General that the Korean situation was receiving his “utmost attention,” listed ten objectives to be served by resisting aggression, praised the General’s “splendid leadership” and “superb performance,” and said: “Our course of action should be such as to consolidate the great majority of the United Nations. . . . Pending the buildup of our national strength, we must act with great prudence so far as extending the area of hostilities is concerned. Steps which in themselves might be fully justified and which might lend some assistance to the campaign in Korea would not be beneficial if they thereby involved Japan or Western Europe in large-scale hostilities.” He said he wanted to strengthen the UN, America’s allies, and resistance to aggression everywhere. Acheson regarded the polished document as “an imaginatively kind and thoughtful letter for the Chief of State to write his theater commander . . . . If ever a message should have stirred the loyalty of a commander, this one should have done so.” Clark Lee, on the other hand, thought it “a classical example of buck-passing . . . ambiguous and equivocal.” In fact, it was couched in broad generalities, all of them familiar to the principals in the unfolding drama.173
Collins and Hoyt Vandenberg flew to Tokyo to deliver the order, the memorandum, and Truman’s letter, and to answer any questions the Supreme Commander might have. After reading the presidential missive, MacArthur said: “We will do our best. “ In fact, he seems to have done his best to misunderstand everything he was being told. Truman, he thought, was directing him to fight on until the foe had been vanquished, and although Collins read the Chiefs’ memorandum to him aloud—to be sure MacArthur’s staff didn’t distort it—the General chose the interpretation which suited him. Among its sixteen possible courses of action, to be weighed if the UN army was driven off the mainland, were blockade, aerial reconnaissance of the China coast, and the use of Chiang’s men. The Chiefs had “tentatively” approved laying these alternatives before the next meeting of the National Security Council, scheduled for January 17. Truman, Acheson, and Marshall hadn’t been consulted, and, as it turned out, all three were opposed to them. MacArthur came to the extraordinary conclusion that they were now U. S. policy. He exultantly told his staff that the Chiefs had “finally overcome their illusions that fighting back against China would bring on global war.” It was an incredible mistake, and characteristically he never acknowledged the error. Testifying on Capitol Hill the following spring, he said: “This was the recommendation, the study made by the Joint Chiefs of Staff which was submitted to the Secretary of Defense.” Senator Richard Russell asked: “Did you get any instructions that it was not to be put into effect?” MacArthur replied: “No, sir.” Russell: “So, if that was a recommendation of the Joint Chiefs, it encountered a veto somewhere along the line, either from the Secretary of Defense or the President of the United States?” The General: “I would assume so, sir.” On Capitol Hill it was a short hop from that to the charge, which soon was made by administration critics, that the Pentagon had endorsed a plan to win the war and Dean Acheson had torpedoed it. That was the savage way of politics in the bitter early 1950s.174
As things turned out, the controversial memorandum was never pondered by the National Security Council, because by January 17 Collins and Van-denberg had submitted their report. If MacArthur had been muddled during their stay, they had seen things clearly, and had returned to Washington greatly enlightened. Most of their five days had been spent in Korea. The General had promised them that if ejected from the peninsula he would continue to fight on a string of offshore islands—the “littoral island chain,” he called it. After touring the front, they had concluded that such an eventuality was extremely unlikely. GI morale was fine; Ridgway, in fact, considered his position impregnable. That discovery marked the beginning of the end of MacArthur’s ascendancy over the Joint Chiefs. Thereafter he ceased to be a force in strategic planning. Until then the Pentagon had believed his dire forewarnings of tragedy were his advice ignored. If he could be wrong on so crucial a point, they concluded, he was far more fallible than they had thought. Millis writes: “It seems not too much to say that with Collins’ arrival in the Far East, MacArthur’s influence was largely finished. Perhaps this was the real end of that overshadowing career. Collins is represented . . . as having been under the impression when he landed in Tokyo that evacuation was inevitable. If so, he realized by the time he reached the front in Korea that the peril had been grossly exaggerated. . . . MacArthur had provided for every contingency save one—the contingency of success.” Henceforth the Pentagon would see him as a peevish, stubborn old man, pouting in Tokyo, despising politicians while they, supported now by the Joint Chiefs, ignored his sententious forecasts of doom. The General’s prophecy of an anti-MacArthur conspiracy, it seemed, had at last become self-fulfilling.175
And yet . . .
Ridgway continued to strengthen his defenses. Plugging the Wonju gap, throwing in his reserves, exploiting his superiority in the air, and adroitly moving in troops from his flanks, he waited until the fury of the enemy’s New Year’s Eve drive had been spent, and in the last week of January he reformed for a counteroffensive. Eight days after the two Chiefs flew home from Haneda, he rolled northward on a two-corps front in a thrust which, in his words, “was never stopped until it had driven the enemy back across the Parallel. “ After Seoul had been recaptured, Truman wrote, “the tide of battle” began “to turn in our favor.” Even MacArthur conceded that “no one is going to drive us into the sea,” which prompted Acheson to note delightedly, “Mirabile dictu!” In Paris, C. L. Sulzberger wrote, it appeared that the General had been “proved wrong three times: misinterpreted his intelligence about the Chinese; split his forces unnecessarily; predicted we couldn’t hold.”176
MacArthur and Matthew B. Ridgway touring the Korean front, January 1951
MacArthur visiting the Korean front, February 1951
MacArthur in Seoul, March 1951
And yet . . .
MacArthur persuaded Ridgway to write Collins, strongly urging him to permit KMT replacements to sail from Formosa and join the Eighth Army. The proposal was brusquely rejected. In the Dai Ichi the General glumly told Sebald that unless he was permitted to strike boldly at the enemy, his dream of a single Korean nation under Rhee would be impossible. Desperately, realizing that his stock was falling in Washington, he cabled back his boldest plan yet on February 11. First he would “clear the enemy rear all across the top of North Korea by massive air attacks.” Next, “If I were still not permitted to attack the massed enemy reinforcements across the Yalu, or to destroy its bridges, I would sever Korea from Manchuria by laying a field of radioactive wastes—the by-products of atomic manufacture—across all the major lines of enemy supply.” Finally, “I would make simultaneous amphibious and airborne landings at the upper end of both coasts of North Korea, and close a gigantic trap. The Chinese would soon starve or surrender. Without food and ammunition, they would become helpless. It would be something like Inchon,” he concluded, reliving that shining hour, “but on a much larger scale.” The Joint Chiefs curtly replied that all this was out of the question. Once more, on February 13, he vainly protested that he was crippled by the “enemy’s “unprecedented military advantage of sanctuary protection for his military potential against our counterattack upon Chinese soil. “ Acheson notes laconically: “Generals Vandenberg and Collins had reported that this was not the case. Once again MacArthur was refused authority to attack Chinese territory.” Clearly the administration considered the General a discredited
commander.177
And yet, and yet . . .
And yet it was all a delusion—the belief that a solution had been found, that MacArthur had been refuted, that the UN had somehow triumphed. At the end of Ridgway’s counteroffensive the two squatting armies, glaring at one another, occupied roughly the same positions the North and South Koreans had held at the outbreak of the war. If the General’s solutions were unacceptable, so was Ridgway’s. The Eighth Army’s new field commander had averted the debacle which MacArthur had so rashly predicted, thereby offering his critics an Achilles’ heel which they could hardly have been expected to resist, but his successor at the front had won nothing but a few barren miles of shell-churned earth and the ruins of Seoul. That was no more of a victory than Pyrrhus’s at Asculum, Petain’s at Verdun, or Haig’s at Passchendaele.
Before the guns fell silent in Korea, an estimated 5,000,000 people, including 54,246 GIs, would have died, pointlessly. MacArthur had not found a way out of the impasse, but at least he had defined the problem. Wars, he argued, are waged to be won; “an indecisive stalemate” makes no sense. He was ridiculed for that, yet subsequent events were to demonstrate that he understood the fiber of his countrymen better than those who scorned him. “Americas misgivings over limited war,” Weigley writes, “proved, in the presidential election of 1952, the political undoing of the administration that had sponsored the war.”178
Rovere and Schlesinger taxed Truman with “failure to set forth convincingly to the American people why they were in the fix they were in . . . that they must learn to live with crisis.” They never did learn. Fifteen years later another generation of statesmen led the country into another war to contain Asian Communism, another conflict in which MacArthur’s advice would be spurned. Once more the people were torn, uneasy, and rebellious. Their previous protest at the polls having proved futile, they took to the streets, bringing the country to the brink of insurrection.179
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