Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  MacArthur was in total agreement. The road to Pyongyang, the Communist capital, was now open. According to Willoughby’s intelligence estimates, the KPA could not muster any force larger than corps strength. Moreover, President Rhee had announced that he was not paying attention to any arbitrary dividing line. South Korean troops were going to pursue the enemy across the border, regardless of what the UN said. An American officer then told the press that if the South Koreans did cross the parallel, American forces would be there to stop them—which made the State Department mad, since it implied there was a firm policy regarding what to do about the 38th parallel, when there was not.

  After much heated discussion, the Far East hands and the Joint Chiefs won out—almost. On September 26, two days before MacArthur flew to Seoul, the JCS were able to send him a directive by cable on how he was to carry out future operations in Korea.

  “Your military objective is the destruction of the North Korea armed forces,” it read. He had complete freedom to operate throughout North Korea, as long as no “major” Soviet or Chinese forces entered the country. It warned MacArthur that only South Korean units should be used in areas close to the Chinese-Soviet borders, on the assumption that they would be less likely to provoke a Communist response, and that he was not to conduct any air or sea operations in Manchuria or Soviet-occupied territory. Once the North Koreans were finally defeated, ROK units were to take the lead “in disarming remaining North Korean units and enforcing the terms of surrender”—the most important goal of all. It was only after North Korea had formally surrendered that the United States and the United Nations would decide the final fate of Korea, not before.30

  The directive concluded with a final requirement: “You will also submit your plan for future operations north of the 38th parallel to the JCS for approval.”

  MacArthur didn’t care for that last order. He was planning for a fast-moving American-led blitzkrieg that would crush North Korea’s remaining forces and clear the country of the stench of Communism. He chafed at having to get permission for winning the war beforehand. He also worried that if Washington got nervous about a possible Chinese or Russian move, it might stop him before he completed his job. After all, if he had listened to them in August, Inchon would never have happened—and they’d all be stuck back at Pusan.

  In any case, the push northward was gathering momentum. More than 350,000 UN troops were on the move against a fast-retreating enemy. There was no way they weren’t going to pursue him across the 38th parallel. And George Marshall, who was the new defense secretary, had sent him a personal message on the 28th: “We want you to feel unhampered strategically and tactically to proceed north of the 38th Parallel.” To MacArthur that sounded like carte blanche to send his forces anywhere in North Korea he wanted.

  Nonetheless, he did as told and gave the Joint Chiefs the window onto his thinking.

  “Briefly, my plan is,” he told them, “(a) Eighth Army as now constituted will cross the 38th parallel with its main effort” being the capture of Pyongyang; “(b) X Corps”—meaning the Inchon invasion force—“as now constituted will effect amphibious landing at Wonsan,” which sat on North Korea’s east coast, “making juncture with the Eighth Army.” Finally, only ROK units would proceed north of the Chungjo-Yongwon-Hungnam line, roughly two-thirds of the North Korean peninsula. He envisaged the Eighth Army’s attack getting under way October 15—certainly no later than October 30.31

  The Joint Chiefs gave their approval, and on October 5 the United Nations General Assembly passed a resolution authorizing the plan. Four days before that, the ROK Third Division was already across the 38th parallel. The war was going north, into uncharted territory in political terms, if not geographic terms. No one, not even MacArthur, could estimate where it would finally end.

  —

  There was one man, however, who did have a clear idea of where events were headed.

  He was Mao Zedong, Communist China’s newly minted ruler. Sitting in the former imperial Forbidden Palace in Beijing, he didn’t like the news that was coming up from the country to his south, and he was now determined to do something about it.

  When Kim Il Sung had approached him asking for support for his invasion of South Korea back in March, Mao was still flush with triumph from his victory over the Nationalists and was inclined to be generous. Like Stalin, he assumed that Kim would win with only token help from his Communist allies; like Stalin, he had become increasingly alarmed when the Americans intervened after Kim had said they wouldn’t. News of Inchon and the recapture of Seoul had badly shaken both Beijing and Moscow, but the two Communist dictators chose two very different responses.32

  Stalin had no desire to be drawn into a direct conflict with the Americans on the Korean peninsula. His support for Kim had never gone beyond providing equipment, military advisors, and sending the 151st Fighter Air Division with sixty-two new M-15 fighters to Manchuria. Yet to Kim’s frustration, those new MiGs and their Soviet pilots spent their time flying training missions with their Korean and Chinese counterparts, instead of venturing south to take on the Americans.33 Moreover, MacArthur’s fast-moving successes on the battlefield made Stalin even less inclined to intervene.

  By contrast, Mao was eager to take action. He had convinced himself that the American intervention in Korea was only a prelude to a much bigger American intervention in China—all evidence from the Truman administration’s abandonment of Chiang Kai-shek notwithstanding. As soon as MacArthur’s first reinforcements started arriving in Korea in July, he and chief advisor Zhou Enlai began gearing up for a full-scale war with the United States.

  Starting that July, division after division of the People’s Liberation Army began deploying in Manchuria. By early August a quarter million were in place along the Yalu River. Plans were under way to equip and supply a force of half a million. Yet when on August 4 Mao pressed his top generals to send a large expeditionary force into Korea to destroy the Americans, they still demurred.

  They would not be ready to intervene until October, they told him; American firepower, airpower, and sea power presented challenges that the PLA had never before faced. They would need almost overwhelming numbers of men and materiel before taking on the American colossus, they said.34

  Mao was unfazed. He was already telling the Chinese people to prepare for total war against the Western imperialists; he even said they never had to worry about a nuclear attack. The Americans no longer had the guts to use the bomb against civilian populations, since it would prompt the immediate condemnation of the United Nations and the rest of the capitalist world.35

  Meanwhile, the ominous Chinese buildup in Manchuria continued.

  The Americans did have some inkling of what was going on. By August 31, while MacArthur was preparing to launch CHROMITE, U.S. intelligence was saying that nine PLA armies, or thirty-seven divisions of Chinese troops, were in Manchuria. They also concluded that Mao had already sent 40,000 to 80,000 troops into North Korea. Even Willoughby in Tokyo, cautious as ever, estimated that there were at least sixteen PLA divisions ready for action in Manchuria, commanded by Mao’s intimate Lin Biao.36

  The CIA even predicted that Mao’s forces would enter the war first as Chinese volunteers of Korean origin, together with Japanese POWs volunteering to serve as mercenaries. It also knew that Chinese agents were impressing civilians of Korean ethnicity into the army. Yet no one seemed to draw the correct conclusion, including MacArthur: the Chinese were committed to war the moment the first Americans set foot in the Korean peninsula. Contrary to critics then and later, it wasn’t MacArthur’s advance across the 38th parallel into North Korea that provoked the Chinese into action—let alone his advance toward the Yalu. Those moves only trip-wired the offensive that Mao had conceived in July. His plan was to let the Americans advance up the peninsula, then strike in order to bring on a general war—and with it a Chinese victory in Korea.

  Mao’s generals had told him they would be ready by October. By coincidence
so was MacArthur. On October 1, 1950, he sent a message authorized by President Truman to Kim Il Sung, commander in chief of North Korean forces, calling on him to lay down his arms unconditionally.

  “The early and total defeat and complete destruction of your armed forces and war-making potential is now inevitable,” MacArthur said. “As the United Nations Commander-in-Chief, I call upon you and the forces under your command…forthwith to lay down your arms and cease hostilities…and I call upon you at once to liberate all United Nations prisoners of war and civilian internees under your control [while] North Korean forces, including prisoners of war in the hands of the United Nations Command, will continue to be given the care dictated by civilized custom and practice and permitted to return to their homes as soon as practicable.”37

  In MacArthur’s mind and Washington’s, they were preparing for the endgame. In Mao’s, however, the game was just beginning.

  At 5:35 A.M. on October 3, Dean Acheson was awakened by an urgent cable. Since the government in Washington had no diplomatic relations with Communist China, India’s ambassador in Beijing, K. M. Panikkar, often served as unofficial go-between for the two capitals. The cable revealed that Mao’s deputy Zhou Enlai had bluntly told Panikkar that if U.S. forces pressed north across the 38th parallel, China would have to intervene. Back in Tokyo, Ambassador William Sebald got the same message. Because it came through army channels, he knew MacArthur had gotten it as well.38

  What did MacArthur think when he read it, assuming that he did read it (we have no clear indication that he did)? Certainly the prediction was in line with his own thinking about Chinese intentions, and Willoughby and the FECOM G-2’s. They knew that Chinese forces were grouped close to the Manchurian border; there was even a solid consensus that they could enter the war at any time.39

  But would they? The general view at the State Department, and among military intelligence officials in Washington, was that the Chinese would not. When State’s delegation at the UN nervously asked around among other Asian delegations to gauge the reaction, most seemed to think the Chinese were bluffing.

  Only the Burmese seemed to think the statement was serious; and Panikkar himself believed that any Chinese intervention would be on a small scale and could be localized. Secretary Acheson was inclined to take Chou’s words as simply a warning, not to be disregarded but, on the other hand, not to be viewed as an authoritative statement of policy.40

  The overwhelming consensus was that the Chinese would enter the conflict only as part of a general Communist offensive, including in Europe—or only if MacArthur did something rash to provoke them. Even then, the CIA’s prediction that it would be Chinese volunteers who would be sent in, only encouraged the prevailing perception that if China did intervene it would be in a piecemeal fashion, which would give the Americans—and MacArthur—time to decide on a counterstrategy. MacArthur himself was confident that he could avoid a provocation by steering clear of the Yalu River boundary. And if he had known that Mao’s top military and policy advisors all thought intervening in Korea would be a mistake that would drag China into an unwinnable war, he would have been even more confident—not to say complacent.

  But if it was complacency, it was shared by every other American policymaker and analyst. The upshot was that no one in Washington or in the Dai-ichi building or at Turtle Bay in New York understood that Chou’s words were neither a warning nor a prediction, but a simple statement of fact. At the moment when American troops entered South Korea, Mao had prepared for war; at the moment when Americans crossed the border into North Korea, Chinese forces would be ready to attack. For Mao, all that remained was choosing the right moment to strike.

  —

  In retrospect, these issues would weigh heavily on the historical record, and what was about to happen on the ground. That first week in October 1950, however, the Chinese were the last thing on MacArthur’s mind. He was getting ready for the climactic stage of the Korean campaign. This would be the double envelopment of North Korea, with the Eighth Army continuing its thrust toward the North Korean capital at Pyongyang, while the X Corps under the command of William Almond—now Lieutenant General Almond—did another Inchon-type landing at Wansun on North Korea’s east coast.

  MacArthur’s decision to divide his forces in the face of the enemy, even a disintegrating one, has left military strategists and historians shaking their heads ever since. Admiral Strubel, General Walker, his own G-3 Pinky Wright—all thought it a serious mistake at the time. One distinguished military historian has even dubbed the decision “markedly maladroit generalship.”41

  Why MacArthur did it, instead of sticking to a single axis of advance up the peninsula, remains one of the mysteries of the Korean War. Speculation abounds as a result, that it was done as a favor to General Almond, by giving him independent command of X Corps in reward for his loyalty and success with Inchon. It was also no secret that Almond and Walker, both hard chargers, did not get on well. A chain of command that put X Corps under the head of the Eighth Army would have bred considerable friction; far better, MacArthur reasoned—so the theory goes—to give each a separate command on either side of the North Korean peninsula.

  But there may be a far simpler, and less devious, explanation for MacArthur’s thinking. He had been here before, eight years earlier in the first Philippine campaign. The northern end of the Korean peninsula is split down the middle by the treacherous Taebaek Range, just as the Bataan peninsula had been bisected by a tangle of jungle-covered mountains. In 1942 he had handed one half of the peninsula over to Jim Wainwright and the other, eastern side to General Turner. MacArthur’s mistake then had been not to insist that the two forces stay in constant contact over the mountain range that separated them. Now he insisted that Almond and Walker establish regular communication, even link up their forces, across the Taebaek Range.

  Besides, in 1942 MacArthur had been on the desperate defensive. Now he was on the attack against a demoralized and defeated enemy. He believed that throwing a two-fisted punch at the Communists, instead of a single line of advance, would only hasten the collapse of resistance. Capturing Wonsan would also sever Kim’s main Russian supply line from the seaport of Vladivostok. MacArthur’s memoirs provide an additional explanation (or rationalization). “It was essential to secure the eastern corridor of the peninsula,” he would write, as well as bring flank pressure to bear on the advance on Pyongyang. In any case, Inchon could barely handle 5,000 tons of supplies a day. Given his vastly expanded force, a new port of supply in the north was needed, and Wonsan was it.42

  Rationalization or not, the net result of MacArthur’s decision was to tie up Inchon harbor even more. Even as supplies and equipment were being unloaded, other troops and equipment were being reloaded for Wonsan, starting with the First Marines. Inchon became a logistical nightmare, while the Seventh Division had to head back to Pusan to embark for the voyage north. On October 11 the ROK Third Division entered Wonsan. By then Strubel’s naval forces had discovered more than 3,000 mines in the city’s harbor, all of which had to be painstakingly cleared out while the marines sailed back and forth for days—and while Walker’s men were starved for supplies and transport that were being diverted to Wonsan harbor and X Corps.

  It was a classic SNAFU—very unusual for MacArthur. Maybe he was showing his age at almost seventy-one; maybe his sense of invincibility, reinforced by Inchon, was getting the better of him. Or perhaps his hunger for seeing the Korean War end in as comprehensive and as decisive a victory as possible was propelling him to take strategic risks that a commander with shorter horizons wouldn’t have taken. Whatever the reasons, his main focus now was on the push for Pyongyang, with Walker’s four American divisions, four ROK divisions, and a brigade of British Commonwealth troops striking first toward Sariwon some twenty-five miles due south of the Communist capital, then moving on the capital itself.

  The Eighth Army offensive jumped off on October 7, but the first division across the 38th parallel, the Firs
t Cavalry, ran into unexpected heavy resistance along a string of hills between Kaesong and Kumchon. Dug in on the hills were three KPA divisions backed by fresh Soviet-made T-34 tanks and SU-76 self-propelled guns. It took three days of hard fighting before the North Koreans, pounded relentlessly by artillery and from the air, finally pulled back. But their retreat now opened the way north, and by the 14th the First Cav and First ROK divisions were marching up the highway to Pyongyang. The general in charge of the First ROK was particularly anxious to get there; Pyongyang was his hometown.43

  But MacArthur was not there to see the advance; he was not even in Tokyo. Much to his frustration, he was two thousand miles away on tiny Wake Island, impatiently waiting to meet his commander in chief.

  —

  The October 12 message from Defense Secretary Marshall asking MacArthur to meet Truman had come as an unpleasant surprise to SCAP and his entire staff. MacArthur neither liked nor trusted Truman, and he knew the feeling was mutual. The last thing he wanted to do was to be pulled thousands of miles off course just when the invasion of North Korea was reaching its most critical juncture. He also suspected that the meeting was a political stunt on Truman’s part and—despite the protestations of Truman admirers and his latest biographer—he seems largely to have been right.44

  Truman’s job approval ratings had steadily plummeted in the two years since his reelection in 1948, in large part due to the twin fiascoes of the Communist takeover of China and the Communist invasion of Korea, while MacArthur’s ratings had steadily climbed. Democrats were looking to take a beating in the November elections. Truman hoped that some of MacArthur’s exalted standing in the minds of American voters might rub off in a face-to-face meeting; photographs and newsreel shots of the two of them beaming and shaking hands might make Inchon look like a brilliant victory devised by two military geniuses, not just one.