MacArthur had told his nervous staff he wanted to drive to the Han River, where an ROK army unit was making a final stand at the last bridge leading out of Seoul. When they reached the bridge, it was under heavy artillery and mortar fire. They were only one mile from Seoul: “I could see the towers of smoke rising from the ruins of this fourteenth-century city,” MacArthur remembered. He insisted on climbing to the top of a small hill overlooking the Han, oblivious to the constant clump of Red mortar fire, before returning to the jeeps and heading back to Suwon.
On the way, North Korean planes began passing overhead, engaged in dogfights with American P-51s. The planes swooped so close that Wright could hear spent .50-caliber cartridges from their guns bouncing off the hoods of the cars. One jeep after another pulled off the road as everyone took cover—everyone, that is, except MacArthur. When Wright looked back, he saw the general still sitting calmly in the back of the Dodge, quietly smoking his pipe.
Wright dashed back to the car, keeping a wary eye on the planes overhead.
“General, don’t you think you should get out?” he asked.
“Aw, no,” MacArthur answered. “These things aren’t going to hit me.”25
On the plane ride back to Japan late that afternoon MacArthur began to draw up his report in his mind.
“The scene along the Han was enough to convince me that the defensive potential of South Korea had already been exhausted,” he remembered later. “Even with air and naval support, the South Koreans could not stop the enemy’s headlong rush south…All Korea would then be theirs”—that is, until the Americans stepped in.
“The South Korean forces are in confusion,” his report to Washington began. “It is essential that the enemy advance be held or its impetus will threaten the over-running of all Korea. The South Korean army is incapable of counteraction….The only assurance for holding the present line and the ability to regain later the lost ground [emphasis added] is through the introduction of United States ground combat forces into the Korean battle area.”
American air and naval support would not be enough, MacArthur said bluntly. It was time to put boots on the ground, as many as possible.26
As this first radiogram revealed, already in the midst of chaos and imminent defeat, MacArthur was thinking of how to go on the offensive to retrieve the situation.
—
MacArthur’s report arrived on Truman’s desk on June 30 and set off another storm of argument and decision making.
Truman and Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson were still not convinced that going to war was necessary, or that the Republican-dominated Congress would go along with authorizing war without using the vote as a platform for attacking Truman’s botched China policy. Johnson had overseen drastic cuts in America’s military posture as part of a return to peacetime “normal”; he was in no mood to reverse direction even now, after North Korea’s invasion.
So MacArthur’s quick series of requests for reinforcements—first for troops to raise the Eighth Army’s four divisions back to full strength; then for another four and a half combat divisions, a Marine regimental combat team and Marine aircraft group along with no fewer than fifteen battalions of heavy howitzers and self-propelled artillery and one medium tank battalion for every division—sent successive shock waves through the Pentagon and Blair House. Everyone saw at once that supplying this kind of buildup would mean returning America to wartime mobilization, as well as a draft. Truman and the Joint Chiefs turned MacArthur down. At Acheson’s urging, they also turned down the idea of asking Chiang Kai-shek for troops. The general feeling was that if Korea was indeed part of a general Communist offensive and Formosa was next, Chiang would need all his troops to defend the island.27
They could, however, authorize sending two divisions that MacArthur already had in the area, both in Japan and in Okinawa, to South Korea. These troops could help to stiffen ROK resistance along a line they were desperately fighting to hold, on the banks of the Han River. Three tank battalions in the States were released for dispatch to Korea. Washington also allowed MacArthur to compose a fourth out of light tank companies already in the theater.28
Congressional leaders assembled at Blair House went along with the plan.
“We were then fully committed,” Dean Acheson noted in his memoirs.29 With a wary eye still fixed on Europe, America was sending ground troops into Korea. Now it was up to MacArthur to make sure they weren’t too little too late.
—
The first Americans to arrive were part of a tiny combat team known as Smith Force, after its commander Lieutenant Colonel Charles B. “Brad” Smith. They were two rifle companies from the Twenty-fourth Division and a 105 mm howitzer battery.
All told, there were 540 men, although other eager volunteers joined in as the group formed up on July 1 at Kumamoto, Kyushu. By now Stratemeyer’s bombers had slowed the North Korean offensive to a crawl, and had taken out key bridges across the Han. But the Communists had somehow managed to ferry some of their T-34s across the river, and by the time Colonel Smith and his men were ready to go into action, ROK resistance along the Han had crumbled and soldiers and more refugees were streaming toward the rear.
Smith Force took up position on a hill three miles north of Osan, twenty-five miles south of the Han River. Their commander thought he could at least slow down the North Korean force headed toward him, the KPA’s elite Fourth Division. But with only a handful of howitzers, some outdated bazookas, and just six modern anti-tank HEAT rounds—plus a steady heavy rain that made air support impossible—the Americans didn’t have a chance.30 When the North Koreans plowed into their line on July 5, Smith’s men still managed to cripple four of the KPA T-34s in a desperate seven-and-a-half-hour battle before abandoning their weapons and taking to the hills.
By the time Smith rallied his men, he had lost 40 percent of his command. But their sacrifice had bought valuable time. Now other American troops were arriving, battalion by battalion, even as North Korean troops and tanks pushed through another American-held position farther south, at Pyeongtaek, the next day, sending men from the newly disembarked Thirty-fourth Infantry reeling to the rear.31
Over the course of the next week, July 5 through July 12, the same pattern repeated itself. Small groups of GIs armed with bazookas, rocket launchers, some machine guns, and a couple of field howitzers took on wave upon wave of North Korean tanks and infantry, laying down lethal, punishing fire before having to fall back, sometimes in such haste that they had to leave their weapons behind. Eventually they would arrive, spent and exhausted but still alive, at the next American line of defense, where they got new weapons and started all over again. Some observers, especially reporters, blamed the poor performance on MacArthur and the American occupation of Japan, claiming that it had made his men soft and sloppy and unprepared for combat on the barren plains and harsh mountain ridges of South Korea. The image of Americans panicking and running away in the early days of the Korean War has passed into legend.
But as historian Allan Millett has pointed out, that image is untrue and unfair. No infantry formation was going to hold the battlefield by itself without tanks and strong air and artillery support, while enemy armor was driving at its front and enemy infantry kept surging around its flanks to surround and cut off any line of retreat. So the Americans found themselves being shoved steadily down the peninsula, as casualties mounted—sometimes precipitously. The Thirty-fourth Infantry, for example, which had arrived on July 3 with 640 men, had only 175 left on July 8.32
Yet their heroic resistance against fierce odds was slowing the North Korean offensive to a crawl, and bolstering South Korean morale. Above all, it was buying time for MacArthur to pull together the combined forces he needed to bring the Communist advance to a halt.
That effort started with the air force. Even before he landed back in Tokyo on June 29, MacArthur had ordered General Stratemeyer to start bombing Communist air bases north of the 38th parallel, even though he was still authorized to
use American airpower only south of the parallel. “Take out North Korean airfield immediately,” was Stratemeyer’s terse message to his Fifth Air Force commander. “[N]o publicity. MacArthur approves.”33
Stratemeyer’s Far East Air Force started the war with 1,100 aircraft, including B-29 heavy bombers left over from the air war on Japan. That number quickly swelled over the next several months as air force planes, backed by navy and marine aircraft operating from carriers, pounded the North Korean advancing columns and supply lines, took out bridges and railroad junctions in both the north and the south, and scrubbed the skies clear of Communist aircraft. By July 10 the air force had established clear air supremacy over Korea and the North Korean air force was virtually wiped out. By then the navy together with British warships was setting up a blockade around the entire peninsula, and Australian, Canadian, New Zealand, and Dutch warships were on their way to join in.34
This was one of the novel aspects of the escalating conflict both for the United States and for MacArthur. He and his men now had allies to help out at the very start of the fight, instead of midway through (as with the British and Russians in World War Two) or at the tail end, as with MacArthur’s losing fight for Bataan. Thanks to a United Nations resolution authorizing the use of force to expel North Korea from south of the 38th parallel, soldiers and ships from a dozen nations would soon be lending aid and support.
And on July 8, MacArthur was appointed commander in chief of all of them, as Commander-in-Chief, UN Command, in addition to retaining his position as SCAP. Six days later, President Rhee gave him overall command of ROK forces as well.35
Whatever Truman’s personal misgivings about MacArthur, he didn’t hesitate to approve the Joint Chiefs’ recommendation to give him the supreme UN post. In the words of the official history of the JCS, “There was only one conceivable choice.”36 Others were not so sure. While The New York Times itself endorsed the appointment (“fate could not have chosen a man better qualified to command the unreserved confidence of the people of this country”), one of its rising columnists, James Reston, noted that MacArthur was “a sovereign power in his own right, with stubborn confidence in his own judgment.” How likely was it that the seventy-year-old, who had already authorized air attacks on North Korea without the president’s go-ahead, would display the “diplomacy and a vast concern for the opinions and sensitivities of others [that] are the political qualities essential to his new assignment”?37
To MacArthur, of course, critics like Reston were no more than chihuahuas snapping at his heels. Of course he would know how to handle a multinational coalition. He would propose a plan, and they would approve it. He also knew that, as in the Southwest Pacific, the United States would provide the overwhelming bulk of forces. American officers would head the bulk of commands; American boys would do the bulk of the dying. It was only fitting that he, as the United States Army’s most experienced and decorated officer, with half a century of active service—more than a quarter of that spent in foreign countries—plus a long record of handling desperate situations, should take overall charge.
He wrote a grateful note to President Truman that concluded:
“I can only repeat the pledge of my complete personal loyalty to you as well as an absolute devotion to your monumental struggle for peace and good will throughout the world. I hope I will not fail you.”
The 40,000 or so American troops now in Korea and their South Korean counterparts hoped so too.38
—
The first phase of MacArthur’s strategy had been to slow the North Korean advance and prevent a South Korean collapse. It had meant throwing in troops and equipment piecemeal, but “I had hoped by that arrogant display of strength to fool the enemy into a belief that I had greater resources than I did.”39
By July 19 that display of strength had come down to a desperate stand at the city of Taejon, south of the river Kum. Some half a million refugees choked the city streets as American and ROK forces prepared for a determined Communist assault. The Americans now had tanks—the first had gone into action on the 11th—and modern 3.5-inch tank-busting bazookas, but not nearly enough of them. A relentless tidal wave of T-34s swept into the city on the 20th; units from the Twenty-fourth Division mounted a hard but hopeless fight, knocking out twenty of the enemy tanks. But then resistance gave way as the Communists once again swept around the underdefended flanks. Men dropped their weapons and took to their heels; the Twenty-fourth’s commander, Major General William Dean, was taken prisoner.
“There was a spirit of hopelessness and confusion” among the survivors as they fell back to the south and east, a reporter noted, that “must have created a black and defeatist atmosphere.”40
By now MacArthur had shipped three of the Eighth Army’s divisions to Korea, including the First Cavalry Division, which had spearheaded MacArthur’s drive to retake Manila in February 1945. Now it arrived on the battlefield from Japan confident that it could do something similar in turning the battle around here. Instead, the men of the First Cav soon found themselves flying backward in full retreat, as the North Korean advance seemed unstoppable.
Yet Taejon proved to be the apogee of Communist dominance on the battlefield. The second phase of MacArthur’s strategy was about to begin: creating a stable and secure defensive line that would halt the Communists cold. Once that was done, MacArthur explained to the Joint Chiefs, he could “fully exploit our air and sea control, and, by amphibious maneuver, strike behind his mass of ground forces.” That memo had been written on July 7. Already, even as the situation on the ground had never looked bleaker, the outline of what would happen in the next two months was clear in his mind.41
The place MacArthur chose, and circumstances dictated, for that defensive line was around the port city of Pusan, on South Korea’s southeastern coast. The terrain around Pusan was ringed by high hills, highly defensible from their eastern slopes; there would be no room for any more Communist flanking movements. The port itself would be useful for resupply—it could handle up to 10,000 tons a day—and shipping in more reinforcements. At worst, it would be vital for evacuation if a final enemy assault proved too much to contain.
On August 1 MacArthur and his Eighth Army commander, General Walton Walker, ordered all American and ROK units to fall back to the Pusan perimeter, as it was now designated, an area extending eighty miles from north to south and fifty miles from east to west. Three days later, every bridge leading to the perimeter was blown up. Some 47,000 U.S. Army and Marine troops, and 45,000 South Korean troops, now began digging in as North Korean units quickly moved up to occupy the rest of the peninsula. Walton set up his Eighth Army headquarters at Pusan, as did Syngman Rhee’s government. It was now an island of resistance, in a land submerged under the Communist flood.
From MacArthur’s office in Tokyo, there must have been times when the retreat to Pusan seemed hauntingly like the retreat on Bataan. The long, losing, fighting withdrawal down a foreign peninsula against a ruthless enemy; the endless lines of refugees and weary troops; the final last-ditch perimeter from which there was no retreat. Certainly many who were there, like Marshall and Willoughby and Hugh Casey, could remember those harrowing days and the sense of inevitable hopelessness they brought.
But in fact the two situations were completely different. MacArthur now had effective control of the air and sea; and while his position at the perimeter was only going to get stronger thanks to supplies and reinforcements, his enemy’s was only going to get weaker.
MacArthur’s pleas for reinforcements were finally being met. The Joint Chiefs had agreed to bring the Eighth Army’s divisions up to full combat strength, including the Seventh Infantry Division, and were shipping two more army divisions, the First and the Second, as well as the First Marine, plus two infantry regiments. The Truman administration also finally resurrected the draft, which meant a steady supply of replacements was now guaranteed. Walker’s forces would never have enough artillery; and a shortage of support and supply tro
ops was always a problem.42 But together with military units from other UN nations, most notably Britain, MacArthur’s army was starting to look like a real fighting force.
At the same time, the war had cost the North Koreans some 58,000 casualties—far more than the Americans estimated at the time. Kim’s formidable tank force had dwindled to barely a few dozen, and his air force had all but ceased to exist. As reports from the battlefield poured into Pyongyang, Stalin’s ambassador was beginning to sense that time was running out for conquering Korea—if not for the Korean People’s Army itself.43
Still, the KPA had plenty of fight left. General Walker discovered that on August 7, when the Twenty-fourth Infantry tried a counterattack from the Masan sector, the perimeter’s southwestern anchor, and had to pull back to meet a new Communist threat from the north at Taegu. The next two weeks brought a series of confused and confusing battles, as defense of the perimeter hardened and the North Koreans increased their pressure on its outposts, but never achieved a breakthrough.
Then, after August 25, the fighting petered out and reached a stalemate. The North Koreans were too worn out, and their supply lines too thinly stretched, to try to break in; the UN forces (the Americans and ROK troops had now been joined by 2,000 men of the British Twenty-seventh Infantry Brigade, the first of the foreign contingents to join under the powder blue UN flag) were still too weak to break out. There were still not enough tanks, especially M-24 Pattons, to meet the Communist armored threat on equal terms. Machine guns, mortars, field artillery pieces, trucks, and jeeps had to be cannibalized for parts. Keeping the 180,000 men inside the perimeter fed was a constant problem. There was very little food to be foraged from nearby farms, and most of the rations were World War Two surplus. More seriously, there was a severe shortage of drinking water. Most groundwater was contaminated; soldiers who didn’t boil their canteen water or use iodine or halazone—and too few did—came down with diarrhea, or worse.44
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