The Chinese troops were positioned as part of Mao’s master plan: to set up a grand ambush of the Eighth Army. Mao had been waiting since early August for this moment; now it had finally arrived. His principal general, Peng, and the first Chinese “volunteer” forces had already sprung the trap on the South Korean divisions; if MacArthur had failed to advance beyond the Pyongyang-Wonsan line, Mao was ready to use the winter to train and equip his armies for a general assault in the spring. No one on the American side understood it at the time, but the widening war in Korea was a Chinese operation from the beginning. What MacArthur did, or didn’t do, didn’t matter. He was determined to fight against the American imperialist aggressors, and Kim Il Sung’s impending defeat was merely the excuse for doing it.10
MacArthur, of course, believed there was every reason to assume the Chinese entry into the war could be contained: no one in Washington at that point was prepared to suggest otherwise. His primary focus was still his plan for annihilating North Korean resistance before the Chinese could make any further aggressive moves and before the bulk of his forces reached the Yalu River. Walker’s corps commander pushed the First Cavalry Division to fill the gap on the right flank; the Twenty-first Infantry pushed its way to within twenty miles of the Yalu on the 31st—its lead commander, ironically enough, was Lieutenant Colonel Brad Smith of the original Smith Force. MacArthur was already conjuring up his plan to finish the war. The Chinese volunteers threading their way to the south only fed his certainty that it would work.11
Then on November 1 everything changed.
Chinese troops poured overnight into action against the First Cavalry Division and the Eighth Cavalry Regiment in particular, smashing through the lines and destroying tanks, artillery, trucks, and everything that stood in their way. For three days the Eighth Cav had to fight their way back through a series of Chinese roadblocks; first one and then the second battalion held out against the encircling Chinese until they were overwhelmed. The last survivors fell back to the Nammyon River on November 6; they were barely 200 out of a command of 1,000. All the rest were dead or POWs; the Eighth Cavalry gave up twelve tanks, twelve howitzers, fifty-six mortars, and ninety-two jeeps. The regiment had ceased to exist as a fighting force. Some called it the cavalry’s worst defeat since Little Bighorn.12
On the other side of the Taebaek Range, Almond’s X Corps had also made its first contact with the new enemy. The Seventh Marine Regiment fought Chinese units that had pounded to pieces a South Korean division, the Third, on November 2. The fight lasted five days until the Chinese unexpectedly broke off—as they were mysteriously breaking off everywhere and heading for the hills. Australian and British troops fought a hard, desperate hand-to-hand battle with Chinese troops at Pakchon until they too vanished from the battlefield.
Captain Al Haig accompanied Almond on a visit to meet Chinese prisoners taken in the fighting on the 30th. They were “young, well fed, and showed every sign of good training and excellent morale,” Haig remembered. He also remembered their uniforms, which would become iconic in the next climactic stage of the war: quilted goose-down uniforms and “fleece-lined hats—but no gloves or overcoats—and, instead of boots, a sort of rubber sneaker.” The Chinese soldiers had crossed the Yalu River at Manpojin two weeks before, they told interrogators, then headed southeast with their equipment loaded on horses and mules. The prisoners were happy to be out of the war; but it was clear there were many more Chinese who were poised to come in.13
American commanders, including MacArthur in Tokyo, were thoroughly confused about what was happening. Despite the devastating losses to the Eighth Cav, the line on both sides of the Taebaek Range was holding. Walker’s Eighth Army, however, was at the end of its strength. His South Korean divisions had been all but wiped out. Almond’s X Corps appeared less vulnerable because it could hug closer to its supply base at Wonsan, and had been joined by the fresh Third Infantry Division. But it was still dangling on the edge of the unknown, with no clear picture of the enemy it faced, or how many he was.
On November 3 the mystified Joint Chiefs asked MacArthur for his assessment of the situation. MacArthur gave them his best estimate, although he did not tell them it rested on very spotty intelligence (some of his field commanders still thought the Chinese they were capturing were North Koreans). Of all the possibilities, he considered a full-scale Chinese intervention the least likely. Either the Chinese were giving Kim covert help; or they were trying to buck up North Korean resistance; or they thought they could intervene in force only as long as they encountered South Korean forces.
He considered any of those three options more likely than assuming that America was now in an all-out war with Communist China. “I recommend against hasty conclusions,” he wrote. “A final appraisal should await a more complete accumulation of military facts.”14
But MacArthur himself was in no mood to wait. By November 5, he had made up his mind. It was time to strike against the Chinese who were already in Korea, this time from the air. He ordered Stratemeyer to draw up plans for a two-week bombing offensive to “destroy every means of communication and every installation, factory, city, and village” in North Korea between his troops and the border. Only Suiho Dam, the hydroelectric plants on the Yalu, and the supply center at Rocin were to be spared; and bridges were to be bombed on their North Korea side. Those were MacArthur’s only concessions to the sensitivities of the Joint Chiefs and State Department.15
Otherwise, it was total war from the air, starting with the twin bridges linking Antun and Sinuiju, which MacArthur believed were the key conduit for keeping Kim and his North Koreans supplied and still in the war—and which were now conduits for Chinese reinforcements.
When Marshall and the Joint Chiefs learned what was happening, their rage was considerable. Deputy Defense Secretary Robert Lovett consulted with Dean Acheson, and they agreed that the bombing mission had to be halted at once; it was too risky, and might endanger a UN resolution calling on China to cease all operations in Korea. From his home in Independence, Missouri, Truman assented. Even as Stratemeyer’s B-29s were warming their engines the Joint Chiefs ordered MacArthur to cease and desist, and attack no targets closer than five miles from the Chinese borders.16
Now it was MacArthur’s turn for rage. He ordered his acting chief of staff, General Hickey, to draft up a letter of resignation so MacArthur could sign it. Hickey persuaded him not to send it, saying it would demoralize the army. MacArthur had to agree, and tore the letter up. Whether the letter was a serious gesture, or just a way of letting off steam, is anyone’s guess; but he did fire off a blistering note to the Joint Chiefs, calling the Chinese intervention “one of the most offensive acts of international lawlessness of historic record” and warning of the consequences of not acting now.
“Men and materiel in large force are pouring across all bridges over the Yalu from Manchuria,” he wrote. “The movement not only jeopardizes but threatens the ultimate destruction of the forces under my command….Every hour that this is postponed will be paid for dearly in American and other United Nations blood.”17
So which was it? On the one hand MacArthur said he was unworried about Chinese intervention; on the other he was saying it threatened his army with annihilation. The Joint Chiefs asked Truman’s opinion and he, against all his own instincts, came again to MacArthur’s rescue. Since MacArthur was the commander on the ground, his call prevailed. Let the bombing begin.
Later, Omar Bradley said MacArthur’s dispatch of the 6th—so pessimistic and dire in tone from the one that had come two days earlier—should have been a warning that he needed to be stopped, even relieved. “Right then—that night—the JCS should have taken firmest control of the Korean War” away from the CINCFE in Tokyo, he complained, since MacArthur seemed to have lost any stability of judgment.18
In fact, MacArthur’s views had not changed at all from the 4th to the 6th. The explanation for the difference in tone was MacArthur’s unlimited faith in airpower. What the
Fifth Air Force had done under General Kenney, the Air Forces Far East could do under Stratemeyer: isolate the battlefield, shatter the enemy’s supply lines and ability to sustain the fight. Willoughby was telling him that the Chinese had no more than 45,000 men in North Korea—again, a pitiful underestimate—but another 350,000 were poised on the other side of the river.19 Knock out the bridges, MacArthur assumed, and they’ll have to stay there. Then he, Almond, and Walker would destroy the rest.
On the other hand, vetoing an aggressive air campaign would leave the Chinese advance unchecked. Once the Chinese had the full advantage of superior numbers, the overextended, divided UN command would be in real danger—and MacArthur would have no choice but to pull back.
But this time MacArthur was mistaken. Unleashed airpower did not change the situation on the ground. More than seventy B-29s rained death and destruction on Sinuiju; 60 percent of the city burned to the ground, but the approaches to the bridges were barely damaged. Intense antiaircraft fire from North Korean batteries manned by Russian crews kept the bombers and U.S. fighters from coming in close enough to do much damage to most of the other bridges; and the Joint Chiefs’ rules of engagement made it impossible to take out the bridge at Namsan, because a final bombing run had to come from the forbidden Manchurian zone.
In the end, only half of the Yalu bridges were damaged, while Russian-piloted MiG 15s brought down two B-29s and damaged three more.20
In fairness, Stratemeyer had told MacArthur it couldn’t be done, anyway—not under Washington’s rules of engagement. MacArthur later claimed that one bomber pilot who had lost an arm during one of the raids and was near death asked him, with blood pouring from his mouth, “General, which side are Washington and the United Nations on?”21
But there was another, more urgent issue puzzling MacArthur, Willoughby, and G-2 analysts. Where did all the Chinese go?
In more specific terms, what had happened to the Chinese troops inside the border? After the intense battles from October 31 to November 2, they had simply vanished. No one, not Willoughby, not the British or American military intelligence, and certainly not the CIA, could provide any helpful information as to where they had gone.
A logical assumption, and a convenient one, was that they had headed back to China. Their presumed pullback meant that the United Nations forces had prevailed, and now controlled the battlefield. No wonder MacArthur felt that the day was his, and that the United Nations forces, after a brief crisis, had regained the advantage.
What no one knew, least of all MacArthur, was that Mao had pulled them back on purpose. What he dubbed his First Offensive against the American imperialists and their Korean stooges was over; it had been a disastrous slaughter of his soldiers, but he personally rated it a success. Now he was gearing up for a Second Offensive, with more than half a million Chinese descending upon the unsuspected American and UN forces.22
When it came, MacArthur and his generals would be fighting not just an enemy that outnumbered them two to one, but the forces of nature itself.
In the first two weeks of November, a series of storms roared across both North and South Korea, opening the way for an icy Siberian front to descend on the peninsula. On November 15–16 temperatures dropped below zero. In the words of one historian, by November 20 “Korea became a frigid land of blowing snow, plunging temperatures, cutting winds, blinding dust, thickening clouds, heavy ground fog, and ‘white outs.’ ” Even worse, Stratemeyer’s air force intelligence had disturbing news. The frigid temperatures meant that the Yalu would freeze so thick that troops, trucks, and even armored vehicles would be able to get across. Further bombing on the Yalu bridges was now useless; Communist China could reinforce its army in North Korea at will.23
The fog of winter as well as war had fallen over the battlefield, obscuring everything. Yet from his office in Tokyo, MacArthur refused to be daunted.
“There were but three possible courses of action,” he later wrote. “I could go forward, remain immobile, or withdraw.” He decided to go forward. If he did, “there was a chance that China might not intervene and the war would be over.” If he stayed put and waited out the weather, the Chinese might use the opportunity to descend on him in overwhelming numbers and destroy his army. If he withdrew, “it would be in contradiction to my orders and would destroy any opportunity to bring the Korean war to a successful end.”24
Blessed with the inestimable gift of hindsight, later historians and commentators almost unanimously condemn MacArthur’s decision to advance to the Yalu as a disastrous one. Some have even compared MacArthur to a character in a Greek tragedy, overcome by hubris and possibly even declining mental and physical health. They have portrayed MacArthur’s progress from the victory at Inchon to the push to the Yalu as a final death ride—in General Lawton Collins’s words, “like a Greek hero [marching] to an unkind and inexorable fate.”25
It is important, however, to remember that MacArthur had good reason to believe that the tools of victory were still in his grasp. Despite the appearance of the Russian and Chinese MiG 15s, he enjoyed overwhelming air superiority. He also had complete control of the seas on either side of the Korean peninsula, with ample port facilities for resupply. Even more, he had a battle-tested army on the march against a devastated North Korean enemy and a primitively equipped Chinese foe in worrisome but still (he believed) manageable numbers.
In his mind the only things that stood in the way of final triumph were the doubters in Washington and the naysayers at the United Nations, especially the British, who were pushing a plan to establish a demilitarized zone along the border between Manchuria and North Korea (a plan that we now know neither Mao nor Stalin would ever have accepted). There was no reason for a confident MacArthur not to assume that one final decisive push would get his men to the Yalu and make the Chinese think twice before trying to cross.
Furthermore, his assurances to the Joint Chiefs that Stalin had no inclination to intervene, either in Korea or in Europe, would also prove correct. We also know from secret Soviet archives that the Soviet dictator believed the war in Korea now belonged to two persons and two only, Kim Il Sung and Mao. It was theirs to win or lose. He was not about to commit Soviet troops to save the Korean peninsula, or his Asiastic allies, from the Americans, let alone provoke a second front in Europe.
MacArthur’s confidence also sprang from the one other insuperable advantage that he enjoyed over all his critics. He had a plan; no one else did. And so, after long, intense debate and with deep foreboding, the Joint Chiefs, Defense Secretary Marshall, State’s Dean Acheson, and with Averell Harriman representing the president, signed on to his plans for a large new offensive to begin on November 24. Assuming that the Chinese entered the war in force, their instructions read, “you should continue the action as long as, in your judgment, action by forces now under your control offers a reasonable chance of success.” Then, “on the assumption that your coming attack will be successful,” the president and his team would want to make sure certain steps were taken for the unification of the Korean peninsula and disengagement of remaining Chinese forces by diplomatic means.
Other than that, the war was his to win.26
MacArthur took up the offer with enthusiasm. On November 21 the first unit of Almond’s X Corps reached the southern bank of the Yalu. One eyewitness could see on the other bank “Chinese sentries walking their rounds and other soldiers coming and going” with “their breath vaporized in the frigid air.”27 Yet the Chinese on China’s soil never fired at the Americans. It seemed to prove MacArthur’s point: once the United Nations controlled all of North Korea, the Chinese would back down.
More important, arriving at the Yalu meant that Almond’s forces had completed the preliminaries for MacArthur’s November 24 offensive, a “massive compressive envelopment,” as he called it, that would catch the Chinese and remaining North Koreans in its jaws. The Eighth Army, some 240,000 strong (although half were the often unreliable ROK army) would thrust northward, w
hile the X Corps’ 102,000 Americans, Koreans, and British, would push to the northwest to close the trap, with a series of massive bombing raids that would seal off the enemy from his supply lines.
Although he and Walker had drawn up a fallback plan for withdrawal in case the Chinese did in fact intervene in large numbers, MacArthur was supremely confident of success. Unfortunately, so was the Chinese general opposing him, Peng Dehuai. At almost the same time MacArthur was driving his armies forward, General Peng would be hurling 388,000 Chinese soldiers straight into the heart of Walker’s army.28
On the morning of November 24, MacArthur’s plane landed on the frozen tundra outside what was General Walker’s headquarters on the Chongchon River.
He and Walker agreed that the supply situation for the Eighth Army was still unsatisfactory, but there was no time to waste. They had already put off the offensive once, when it was set for November 15. Now the time had come to strike, before any more Chinese troops filtered across the Yalu.29
MacArthur toured the lines for five hours, with the press following eagerly behind. He met with General Milbourne, ironically nicknamed “Shrimp” on account of his enormous height, commander of the Twenty-fourth Infantry Division, in a large tent together with some other officers. Milbourne began showing him on a map how much ground they had covered in the past week, despite the Chinese resistance and the atrocious weather.
MacArthur was impressed. He said, “If we can keep this up, we will have some of these people home by Christmas.”
Outside the tent, reporters’ ears perked up; pencils scratched the phrase down on notepads. In newspapers across the country MacArthur’s coming offensive was redubbed the “Home by Christmas Drive.”30
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