Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  But would such an invasion take place, and if so, when? Those were the key questions that had bedeviled Kim Il Sung for almost two years. He had sensed American and South Korean weakness from the start, but when he had approached Stalin about the possibility of an attack, Stalin had hesitated. The Soviet dictator was not ready yet for an enterprise that could lead to a full-scale confrontation with the West.

  All the same, Kim’s case was immensely helped by the fall of China to Mao Zedong. As 1950 dawned, the Communist victory was complete, with Mao’s massive army available to support his North Korean neighbor. Besides, if the United States had been unwilling to intervene to save a major ally like China from a Communist takeover, how likely was it that Washington—or MacArthur in Tokyo, for that matter—would intervene to save a minor ally like South Korea?

  MacArthur had already given his answer to that question in March 1949 during an interview with The New York Times, on America’s strategic position in Cold War Asia since the fall of China. At one time the United States had seen the Pacific Ocean as a geographic barrier against potential enemies. Now, MacArthur had averred, Americans had to realize that the ocean had become “the avenue of possible enemy approach,” requiring a clear line of demarcation at which defense in Asia automatically becomes defense of the United States.

  Today “our line of defense runs through the chain of islands fringing the coast of Asia,” he told reporter G. Ward Price in that 1949 interview. “It starts from the Philippines and continues through the Ryukyu Archipelago, which includes its main bastion, Okinawa. Then it bends back through Japan and the Aleutian Islands chain to Alaska.”2

  There was no mention of Korea, and no wonder. MacArthur had no resources to defend the peninsula even if he had wanted to. There was only one small American combat team left in South Korea, after SUFIK came to a formal end. His and General Walker’s Eighth Army in Japan had now shrunk to barely 87,000 men—of which only 27,000 were in combat units. His Far Eastern Air Force had 34,000 men and 1,172 planes, with more than thirty bases scattered across the western Pacific, including Japan. But only half were fighters and bombers, and MacArthur had vetoed using Japanese funds to build longer airstrips for the new jet-powered P-80 fighters that the air force was now developing.3

  Even more important, the man who had been his architect of airpower, General George Kenney, had long ago gone back to the States. So had his successor Ennis Whitehead. The new head of the FEAF was General George Stratemeyer, an able airman and keen MacArthur admirer. But he did not have the imagination or personal clout that Kenney had brought to the job, which demanded doing more with less; and since V-E Day and V-J Day, less was now the rule in the U.S. military establishment. The U.S. Army had shrunk to just ten incomplete divisions (with two in Germany and four in Japan). The FEAF’s fighter and bomber force was the biggest anywhere outside the United States. As for the navy, its global commitments meant that only eighteen of its surviving fighting ships were available in the western Pacific—this, from a navy that had supplied MacArthur with more than 700 combatant vessels in 1945.4

  If there were any lingering doubts about whether the United States considered defending South Korea a matter of pressing interest, Assistant Secretary of State Dean Acheson had laid them to rest in a speech at the National Press Club on January 12, 1950.

  It was a speech about America’s future role in Asia as a carrier of freedom—a favorite MacArthur theme. It also repeated MacArthur’s description of America’s vital defensive perimeter in Asia down to the last detail, with no mention of Korea or even of Formosa, Chiang Kai-shek’s last remaining stronghold. Then Acheson added two more fateful sentences:

  So far as the military security of other areas in the Pacific is concerned, it must be clear that no person can guarantee these areas against military attack….Should such an attack occur…the initial reliance must be on the people attacked to resist it and then upon the commitments of the entire civilized world under the Charter of the United Nations.

  —

  In the Kremlin as well as Beijing and Pyongyang, this passage was immediately interpreted as meaning that America would not intervene unilaterally to defend areas outside that defensive perimeter, including South Korea and Formosa. As if to reinforce that interpretation, President Truman had already declared that no more military aid or assistance would be given to the Chinese Nationalists in Formosa.5

  How much of this represented an open invitation for Kim to invade South Korea can be a matter of debate. In fairness, when Acheson and Truman’s foreign policy team thought about American grand strategy, they were thinking of a general war with the Russians. This would come, they believed, with either a surprise Soviet attack on the United States or a Soviet invasion of Western Europe.6 No one contemplated a limited invasion of a small country in Asia as part of Soviet plans.

  But MacArthur and his G-2, Charles Willoughby, did. Cross-border raids and skirmishes between ROKA troops and the KPA had become almost daily occurrences. Willoughby began circulating intelligence estimates in June 1950 that an attack on South Korea was in the offing—or then again, it might not be (this was Willoughby carefully hedging his bets again). MacArthur was not overly worried; on his and William Sebald’s visits with GMAC commander General Roberts they kept getting the general’s assurances that he and the ROKA could “handle the Commies.” Sebald recalled, “I can hardly imagine a more vociferous advocate of South Korean military prowess”—or, as it happened, a more mistaken one.7

  Because this time Willoughby was right the first time. Kim Il Sung had been ready to strike the south since early spring. As Soviet records would later reveal, Kim had been hectoring Stalin since 1949 to allow him to launch a full-scale invasion of the south in order to unite the peninsula under Communist rule. That May his army got its first modern T-34/85 tanks; between October and November another eighty-seven were added to the initial sixty-four, plus eighty-six combat aircraft. Meanwhile, Soviet advisors convinced Mao to transfer two ethnic Korean divisions from his forces to the North Korean army.8

  —

  Then after Acheson’s National Press Club speech, in February and March 1950 Stalin sent a 150-man elite training mission of Red Army veterans to Pyongyang, bringing the total number of Soviet military personnel in the north to more than a thousand. At the same time, American officers and men in the south numbered less than two hundred.9

  Yet what finally tipped Stalin’s hand was Kim’s trip to Moscow on April 25, when he announced that their Chinese Communist ally, Mao Zedong, was willing to provide logistical support for an invasion. Again he reassured the Soviet dictator that the Americans would not intervene—certainly not in time to save South Korea.

  Stalin needed no more persuasion, and on May 14 Kim Il Sung went to Beijing to make final plans with Mao. A month later North Korean units were in position, and on June 15 Stalin’s ambassador was told that all was ready.10

  Ten days later the artillery sounded and the tanks rolled.

  Given the months of preparation in the Communist north, Willoughby had had a strong inkling that something was up. He had numerous reports of North Korea’s steady buildup. Based on Korean assessments on the ground, FECOM had sent Washington warnings of a possible invasion in March and April 1950. Those turned out to be false; Stalin wasn’t yet convinced, and the North Korean army wasn’t ready.11

  The final warning that Willoughby issued in June was more accurate and should have carried more weight. But Willoughby had convinced himself that the final decision to attack would be Stalin’s, not Kim’s, and that Moscow would wait until the geopolitical situation in Asia was more propitious. In addition, Willoughby refused to believe reports from South Korean military intelligence that weren’t backed up by his own agents.

  Instead, he was content to predict an imminent invasion, without assessing when it would come. By so doing, he failed to make MacArthur aware that FECOM faced a major crisis, one that would reverberate far beyond Korea to Communist China, Japan,
and Formosa—and indeed around the world.12

  Once again Willoughby had let MacArthur down, as he had many times in the past. Yet this time MacArthur’s skill in improvisation, and his confidence that he would eventually come out on top no matter what the enemy did, would be put to the supreme test—even more so than in the Philippines in December 1941. It would take every ounce of willpower and stamina that the seventy-year-old supreme commander had, to turn around what was unfolding as a major disaster on the Korean peninsula.

  —

  Fortunately, help was at hand in the person of John Foster Dulles. The Republican Party’s most senior diplomat, he was in Tokyo by sheer coincidence: Dean Acheson had sent him there as special envoy to discuss a Japanese peace treaty with MacArthur. Even more coincidentally, only two days before, he had been on a fact-finding trip in Korea. FECOM officers had taken him up to the 38th parallel, separating North and South Korea, and assured Dulles, just as they had assured MacArthur, that there were no signs of any imminent attack and that the South Korean army was more than ready to deal with it if and when it came.13 Indeed, if Dulles had stayed in Seoul another week, he would have been right in the heart of the fighting.

  Although Dulles was a Republican himself, his word carried weight in the Truman White House and with people like Acheson and Marshall. That made him the perfect ally for MacArthur to get the message across that the situation in Korea meant war, and that the United States had to act.

  In the late afternoon of June 25 Dulles and MacArthur had a long meeting. They were in complete agreement. To sit by while South Korea was overrun would set off “a disastrous chain of events leading most probably to world war,” was the way Dulles put it later to Truman. MacArthur’s dispatch called the North’s attack “serious in strength and strategic intent” and “an undisguised act of war.” The implication was that it was aimed at the United States and the West, not just South Korea, and demanded a strong response.14

  MacArthur seemed “very calm,” according to Bill Matthews, a reporter for the Arizona Daily Star who saw the general that evening. He told Matthews the attack “was an act of international banditry: inexcusable, unprovoked aggression.”

  Despite his conviction that the United States had every reason to react unilaterally, MacArthur’s dispatch to Washington also urged summoning the United Nations to take a hand; so had Dulles’s. MacArthur realized that there was immense propaganda value in having the United Nations back the use of force to expel Kim Il Sung’s forces from the south. All the same, he was convinced that only prompt action could reverse the situation and avert a major crisis, and that meant the United States.

  “I hope the American people have the guts to rise to this occasion,” he told Matthews, especially since it was coming so soon after the end of the biggest war in American history. He still believed General Roberts’s optimistic view that the South Koreans could hold their ground against Kim’s forces, at least temporarily. Even so, he had already ordered the evacuation of all American and United Nations personnel from Korea.15

  Then in the early morning of June 26 MacArthur was called to the phone again. This time it was President Syngman Rhee.

  “You have to save Korea,” he sobbed into the phone. MacArthur promised to send ten P-51 Mustang fighter-bombers, seventy-one howitzers, and anti-tank rocket launchers from FECOM’s inventory.16 Still, the decision to do more, he knew, rested with Washington. He had made his recommendation; it was up to Truman and his people to decide whether America would stand and fight, or let Korea be overrun.

  For once Washington did not let him down. When word of the North Korean attack reached President Truman in Independence, Missouri, he had flown back to Washington early the next morning. He told his secretary of state that he had been thinking about Hitler and Mussolini; this time the totalitarians would not get away with aggression. America would send in troops at once.17

  The problem was, there were no troops—or very few. In 1945 America had spent $50 billion on defense; in 1950 it spent a tenth of that amount, barely $5 billion. Its 8.25-million-man military had shrunk to fewer than 600,000, and most of those were still in Europe. The Eighth Army’s four undermanned, underequipped divisions would somehow have to stem the massive Communist tide on their own.

  Meanwhile members of the UN Security Council (minus the Soviet Union, which was boycotting the council—in retrospect a fatal mistake) passed a resolution ordering both Koreas to “cease hostilities” and North Korea to return its forces north of the 38th parallel, opening the door to U.S. intervention to enforce the resolution. With the unanimous agreement of the Joint Chiefs, Truman authorized MacArthur to provide military assistance to the ROK army; to use U.S. and naval forces to protect U.S. and UN personnel evacuating Korea, and to send a military survey team to Korea. Meanwhile, the Seventh Fleet would set out from Okinawa to protect Formosa, in case the Communists made a move there.18

  “No lack of resolve here,” George Kennan chortled—and indeed, it was more resolve than America had shown in Asia in years. Still, “I don’t want to go to war,” Truman said the next day. He certainly didn’t think the American people would stand for it without more advance persuasion by their political leaders, including Truman himself. Moreover, his mind, like almost everyone else’s in Washington, was on what the Soviets were up to in Europe—or alternately the Middle East, where Truman anticipated a similar lightning strike on Iran.19

  But the head of SCAP and FECOM was thinking in Asian, not Eurocentric terms. MacArthur hoped the crisis in Korea would spark the formation of an American-led grand anti-Communist coalition involving the Philippines, Japan, and Nationalist China. He would be bitterly disappointed when he learned that Truman had dismissed an offer from Chiang Kai-shek to send two of his infantry divisions to Korea.20 But at least on June 28, as reports came in of fierce fighting around the South Korean capital, MacArthur got permission to authorize American air strikes anywhere in Korea north of the 38th parallel.

  MacArthur was delighted. Ever since George Kenney had mobilized the Fifth Air Force into a decisive instrument of victory during the campaigns in New Guinea, MacArthur had believed that airpower could turn defeat into victory—and his new air chief, General Stratemeyer, encouraged him to think that something similar could happen in Korea, as long as he could take out airfields in North Korea and gain air superiority in the south.21

  But first MacArthur was going to fly to Seoul to see the situation for himself.

  It was a cold, rainy morning on June 29 when he set out in Bataan II under its new commander, Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Story. MacArthur lit his customary corncob pipe, which, he tells us in his memoirs, he hadn’t lit during all his time in Japan. “Haven’t seen you smoke that pipe, General, for years,” someone on the staff pointed out.

  “Don’t dare smoke it back there in Tokyo,” MacArthur growled. “They’d think I was nothing but a farmer. The Peers Club would surely blackball me.”

  But now he was back into a major shooting war, his third in a little over three decades. “Once again I was being thrust into the breach against almost insuperable odds,” he remembered. “Once again it looked like a forlorn hope.”22

  The remark sounded dramatic, but it was hardly an exaggeration. When he landed at Suwon, twenty miles south of Seoul—the capital was under fierce attack—he found a South Korean army outnumbered, outgunned, and overrun, and a South Korean government in disarray. Yet the general collapse that the Communists had anticipated (Kim had expected to be in Seoul in less than a week) hadn’t happened. The armored cars of the ROKA Cavalry Regiment were smashed to pieces by advancing T-34s but refused to retreat in the face of the superior firepower. Other ROKA units fought with suicidal determination, officers dying alongside their soldiers.

  Still, the Communist tide was unstoppable. President Rhee had been forced to move the capital from Seoul to Taegu, while the American embassy set bonfires of confidential papers as the city prepared for the end.

  On June
27 the first North Korean tanks rolled into Seoul, where some South Korean units continued to fight until the last man was killed or wounded. The North Koreans began shooting hundreds of POWs, while radical students greeted them with cheers and songs even as Communist security teams began rounding up “class enemies” trapped in the city.23

  But still South Korea did not collapse. This was something as worrying to the Soviets as it was heartening to the Americans—and MacArthur. Perhaps there was still a way to save the country, if he could figure out how to get his forces on the peninsula in time.

  Seoul fell exactly one day before MacArthur and Bataan II touched down at Suwon airport, twenty miles to the south of the capital. He climbed out onto the tarmac, along with Willoughby; Brigadier General John Church, who was head of the fifteen-man survey team MacArthur had set up to liaison with the ROK chief of staff; and Colonel R. K. “Pinky” Wright, MacArthur’s new G-3 in charge of planning. All around them were planes burning from a North Korean air raid minutes before they landed. So MacArthur ordered Story and Bataan II to fly back to Japan before there was another air raid—and told his staff to find some ground transport.

  The staff finally rounded up a convoy of seven or eight jeeps and an old Dodge sedan. MacArthur climbed into the back of the sedan and they drove off. They rolled past long columns of ROK troops and civilians fleeing the destruction in Seoul. There were “retreating, panting columns of disorganized troops,” MacArthur later wrote,” the drab color of their weaving lines interspersed here and there with the bright red crosses of ambulances filled with broken, groaning men,” and hordes of civilians, “carrying all their worldly belonging on their backs, and leading their terror-stricken but wide eyed, uncrying children” away from death at the hands of the Communists.24