For MacArthur, the operative word was “some.” He told the officers that if the Red Chinese didn’t intervene further, General Bradley had already slated two divisions to head back to the States by that date. But the words “home by Christmas” would haunt him in less than twenty-four hours.31
Meanwhile, “I decided to reconnoiter” the Yalu River line and “try to see what was going on.” He particularly wanted to see the Chinese airstrips that were supposed to be on the opposite bank. Since he couldn’t do it on foot, he decided he’d do it by airplane, on Story’s Lockheed Constellation with its name emblazoned its nose: SCAP.
His staff looked at one another. “Everyone was appalled,” Pinky Wright later remembered. They knew the big, lumbering Constellation would instantly draw all kinds of fire from the ground—and probably send Chinese jets scrambling to shoot them down.
But MacArthur shook his head.
“I don’t care. I don’t want to get right over this airstrip. I just want to get close enough so that I can see it.”
Once they were in air and headed for the river, MacArthur explained his real mission: to do an aerial tour of the entire Yalu, from the mouth at Antung clear across to Hyesanjin in the east and the Siberian border. Even if the Chinese troops remained invisible, he felt it would still give him a sense of the terrain over which his men would be fighting the next several days.
Since American fighters could follow for only fifteen minutes before their fuel began to run out and they had to head back to base, MacArthur, SCAP, and his staff flew at 5,000 feet for the next four hours without any protection or fighter escort. His staff all assumed these were their last hours on earth. MacArthur was too absorbed in staring out the window to notice.
“All that spread before our eyes was an endless expanse of utterly barren countryside, jagged hills, yawning crevices, and the black waters of the Yalu locked in the silent death grip of ice and snow,” he later wrote dramatically. Those lines of jagged hills would be a problem; troops advancing up one set of ravines would barely notice what was happening in the valleys on either side. It was a perfect setting for ambushes and sudden counterattacks, as the Americans were about to find out.32
At last MacArthur told a relieved Colonel Story to turn around and head back to Tokyo. When they came back to earth, General Stratemeyer was waiting with a reward for his chief’s daring flight: a Distinguished Flying Cross. Pinned to it was an honorary pair of pilots’ wings. Stratemeyer, at least, had not lost faith in the CINCFE; the men in Washington were still uncertain. What happened in the next day or two would determine whether they had made the right choice in backing MacArthur, or the wrong one.
From GHQ in Tokyo came a press release from MacArthur himself:
The United Nations massive compression envelopment in North Korea against the new Red armies operating there is now approaching its decisive effort….If successful this should for all practical purposes end the war, restore peace and unity to Korea, enable the prompt withdrawal of United Nations military forces, and permit the complete assumption by the Korean people and nation of full sovereignty and international equality. It is that for which we fight.33
In fact, MacArthur was now fighting for a much larger goal than the unification of Korea. He had never accepted the argument that his move toward the border would trigger a Chinese reaction, although posterity (wrongly) would claim otherwise. From the beginning, he stressed to the Washington men that Mao’s entire approach to the war had been proactive, not reactive. In an extraordinary personal memorandum sent to Secretary Marshall on November 8, MacArthur revealed his thinking in response to the question of what he thought the Chinese were up to.
“Their activities in Korea throughout have been offensive, never defensive,” he wrote, starting with the Communist invasion of North Korea. What was on display in Korea, he said, was a Chinese nationalism “of increasingly dominant aggressive tendencies” that was spawned fifty years before during the Boxer Rebellion, and “has been brought to its greatest fruition under the present regime.”
The result has been the creation “of a new and dominant power in Asia which for its own purposes is allied with the Soviet Union, but which in its own concepts and methods has become aggressively imperialistic with a lust for expansion and increased power.”
He added, China’s “interests are at present parallel to those of the Soviet Union.” But to MacArthur, “the aggression shown in Korea as well as Indo-China and Tibet” suggested that Peking was following its own line of expansionist conquest—and not the Soviet line. On the one hand, it showed the Chinese were not automatically Soviet satellites, doing Stalin’s bidding. On the other hand, MacArthur concluded, “When they reach the fructification of their military potential, I dread to think what may happen.”34
George Marshall was an intelligent, insightful man but no egghead. He was slightly puzzled by the entire historical-cultural disquisition, and wrote back that MacArthur might have misunderstood his question. But MacArthur’s remarks revealed a prescient insight into what was actually taking place in Asia, and what might happen in the future. While the conventional wisdom in Washington held that Mao was only Stalin’s stooge, MacArthur was anticipating the possibility of a future Sino-Soviet split—even the future direction of Chinese foreign policy sixty years later.
What was at stake was far more than victory in Korea, in MacArthur’s mind. It was putting the brakes on an incipient Chinese conquest of East Asia before it was too late.
—
It was in the dim morning light on November 24 that Walker’s I and IX Corps—four American divisions and a British brigade—began their advance toward the Yalu, with the ROK II Corps on their right. Farther east, Almond’s Third Infantry Division and First Marine Division, which had reached the Yalu at Hyesanjin on the 21st, wearily resumed their march to join up with the Eighth Army. Although they had faced little opposition over the past two weeks, the marines were cold, tired, and footsore. They were suffering acutely from frostbite; temperatures on the eastern side of the Taebaek Range were on average thirty degrees lower than where Walker was advancing, and during the day hovered around twenty degrees below zero.35
Although they were advancing slowly—too slowly to make Walker happy—the men of X Corps weren’t meeting much opposition now either, as the marines reached the south end of the large body of water known as the Chosin Reservoir and turned northwest. Nor were Walker’s men, who covered twelve miles that first day of the offensive and into the next.
Everything was going according to plan, and not just MacArthur’s plan.
When he returned to Tokyo on November 24 there had been a message waiting for him from the Joint Chiefs. It expressed concern about “a general conflict” if his advance to the Yalu brought on a major clash with the Chinese. But it still urged “there should be no change in your mission” and that MacArthur make plans for “the establishment of a unified Korea” as well as “reducing the risk” of a bigger conflict with the Chinese.36
Then suddenly MacArthur’s strategy lay in ruins, almost overnight.
—
The black, frozen night of November 25 was shattered by a massive barrage of mortar, artillery, and rocket fire. Then tens of thousands of soldiers from the Chinese Thirty-eighth and Forty-second Armies surged over the ROK II Corps in a human tsunami, while others swept around the South Korean flanks. Only one ROK regiment, the Seventh Division’s Third, managed to evade the Chinese encircling pocket by marching west to join up with the American Second Division.
Then it was the Second Division’s turn, along with a brigade of Turkish infantry. They made a heroic sacrifice over the next day and night with appalling losses, but managed to slow the Chinese advance long enough for Walker to stanch his bleeding right flank. By daylight on the 27th, four Chinese armies—180,000 men—were now hammering the Eighth Army back, while two more armies struck south along the Taedong River, trying to cut off the United Nations force’s access to the road back to Py
ongyang.37
That night it was X Corps that took a mauling from the Chinese.
Almost 120,000 of them swept down on the First Marine Division and the Twenty-seventh Infantry Division as they moved west of the Chosin Reservoir. It was the same tactic the Chinese were using in their assaults on the Eighth Army. Once darkness fell, there would be a “frightening uproar of noise. Bugles, whistles…cymbals…drums…the crowing of cocks…shouting, laughing, chattering.” When the noise stopped, the attack would begin, a human battering ram of one massed infantry regiment following another on a narrow front, heedless of casualties as the Americans poured on everything they had: rifle fire, machine-gun fire, artillery firing nearly at point-blank range.38
Then slowly, inevitably, the Americans would give ground, gathering up their casualties, and fall back to the next line of hills as the Chinese would regroup and begin the attack again. Farther to the west, Walker’s troops had managed to evade the expanding Chinese pocket, but they were falling back to the southeast bank of the Chongchon River, along the Anju-Kachon-Kunuri Road at a rate that more resembled a rout than a fighting retreat. The Eighth Army was in serious trouble, and it was up to MacArthur and his commanders to figure out how to save it.39
MacArthur’s reaction to the events since the 25th had been slow, largely because his commanders, Almond and Walker, were slow to catch on to the size and extent of the Chinese offensive. This in turn happened because of the confusion and the cold, and as with most battles being fought at night, it was difficult to understand where their own troops were, let alone the Chinese. But by the morning of November 28 all three men realized this was indeed “an entirely new war,” as MacArthur put it. A 300,000-strong enemy was battering steadily at their front and their flanks, and they faced a looming disaster unless they reacted swiftly.
But what to do? On the 28th MacArthur summoned Almond and Walker to Tokyo for a quick war conference—an unusual move for him, and a sign that he was deeply worried about what was happening. They gathered late that night: MacArthur, Walker, Almond, Stratemeyer representing the Air Force, and Admirals Joy and Arleigh Burke sitting in for the navy. MacArthur’s staff was there—Hickey, Wright, Willoughby, and Whitney—but for once they didn’t have a preconceived plan. Neither did MacArthur. Everything short of a total withdrawal from Korea was on the table.
When they finally adjourned at 1:30 the next morning, they knew what to do. There was no alternative to dropping back; it was just a matter of deciding how far. In the end, they agreed that the Eighth Army would leave the Chongchon Valley and retire to a line just north of Pyongyang; MacArthur told Walker he could even abandon Pyongyang if he had to.40
On the other side of the peninsula, the navy would pick up the X Corps at Hungnam on North Korea’s east coast and carry them back to Wonsan while keeping supplies flowing to both Walker’s and Almond’s men. The air force would continue its bombing runs up the Yalu and try to slow the Chinese advance, but the threat of meeting Stalin’s MiGs diminished the airmen’s confidence that they could stop it. MacArthur’s faith that airpower could be decisive in the Korean conflict had been wrong. This was an infantry slugging match from start to finish. He might have drawn more lessons from his experiences with the Rainbow Division in World War One than from what he and Kenney had achieved in the battles for the Solomons and New Guinea.
As the meeting broke up and Almond and Walker flew back to Korea, MacArthur was left alone with his thoughts. He doesn’t reveal them in his account of those days in his memoirs. But later he would fix the blame for the debacle they had just suffered squarely on Washington and the Joint Chiefs, for failing to allow him to destroy the Yalu bridges. In his memoirs he would even darkly hint that someone had leaked his plans to the Chinese in advance, and they had known that “they could swarm down across the Yalu without having to worry about bombers hitting their Manchurian supply lines.”41
The truth was that the Yalu bridges were the least of his problems. The people who had really let him down were the ever-erratic Willoughby, the CIA, and the army’s own G-2 units for not detecting the arrival of Chinese “volunteers” in Korea, and their massive numbers, sooner. He had been led to believe he was playing a minor-league ball club, as it were, when he was actually in the World Series.
Now it was up to him to do something to save the two halves of his army. Fortunately, the marines fighting along the banks of the Chosin Reservoir bought him the time to save the X Corps half. The Fifth and Seventh Marines started a cautious, phased pullback from Yudam-ni to the perimeter around Hagaru-ri. There was no panicky, desperate flight as sometimes happened during the Eighth Army’s withdrawal; or even in some of Almond’s army units. But there was plenty of fighting. The marines pushed their way through no fewer than thirty-seven Chinese roadblocks and firesacks in subzero temperatures, with gunners from artillery batteries and even marine typists and truck drivers filling the rifle platoon ranks when their numbers got too thin. During the day they got air support from their Corsair fighter-bombers; at night they cut down the waves of attacking Chinese with artillery, tank, and massed infantry fire.42
Men stayed alive by eating Tootsie Rolls when their food ran out; they also used Tootsie Rolls to plug bullet holes in truck radiators. Others used their own urine to keep their weapons’ bolts working. Any body part exposed to the air immediately froze, which medics learned meant that men with severe gunshot wounds could be kept from bleeding to death by letting the wound freeze until it could be treated at an aid station.
By the time the last marines made it to Hagaru-ri, they were a shadow of their former selves. Company B, First Battalion, Seventh Marines started the fight with seven officers and 215 marines; they finished it with one officer and 26 marines.
But when General Smith watched one of the last battered battalions form up to march and heard them sing “The Marines’ Hymn” in lusty, cracked voices, he knew his men’s fight back from Chosin Reservoir had written one of the epics of the Korean War—and an immortal chapter in the history of the Marine Corps.43
On the other side of the Taebaek Range, the army’s Second Division was not so lucky when on the retreat back to Pyongyang they entered a long mountain pass between Kunu-ri and Sunchon—what would later be remembered among the survivors as “the Gauntlet.” For forty-eight hours they had to fight their way through Chinese roadblocks, ambushes, and a withering crossfire from the hills on either side. Wrecked vehicles filled with dead GIs often clogged the road, while the men behind were sitting targets for Chinese riflemen and machine gunners. Close air support and infantry-tank counterattacks couldn’t break the Chinese grip on the Gauntlet. Only one combat team from the Second Division managed to break out intact. By December 1, the division had lost 5,000 men, abandoned all its engineering and most of its artillery and radios, as well as hundreds of jeeps and vehicles.
The marines’ calvary at Chosin had inspired Almond’s command with hope; the Second Division’s inspired General Walker to abandon the strategy he and MacArthur had agreed to. He gave up on the idea of holding on to the Pyongyang-Wonsan line—or any other line north of the 38th parallel. He would pull his forces back into South Korea. As he explained to MacArthur, he had suffered some 10,000 casualties; he had lost massive amounts of artillery. He had no choice but to pull back to a line he could protect with the artillery he had left.
So on December 2 he closed his headquarters in Pyongyang, and by December 6 the Eighth Army had cleared the city while engineers prepared to blow the bridges connecting the road from Pyongyang to Seoul—bridges that the Eighth Army had crossed in triumph less than six weeks before.
The speed of the Eighth Army’s withdrawal caught the Chinese by surprise.
It was not until December 20–21 that their advance battalions caught up with Walker’s new front line just north of Seoul.44
That precipitous retreat should have left X Corps totally exposed at Hungnam, but they were no longer there. On November 30 MacArthur had already ordered
their departure from North Korea; he was going to need them in the south. Almond, even with his thinned and bedraggled forces, managed to set up a twenty- or thirty-mile perimeter at Hungnam, protected on each side by massed artillery. When the Chinese tried to break through, their losses were even greater than they had been in the fighting for Chosin Reservoir. Almond’s aide, Captain Alexander Haig, believed X Corps could have held out indefinitely.45 But on December 12 the navy began loading up its transports with sick, frozen, and battle-weary marines and soldiers—some 105,000 men plus 91,000 Korean refugees, 17,000 vehicles, and more than 90,000 tons of stores and munitions.
It was Inchon in reverse. By Christmas Eve they were disembarking at southern Korean ports, to get ready for the next stage of the battle.46
The evacuation of Hungnam had been a brilliant logistical success. But as Winston Churchill said about Dunkirk, wars are not won by evacuations—nor is public opinion. News of the Chinese offensive, and the retreat from North Korea, hit American newspapers with express-train impact. Suddenly all of MacArthur’s assurances about “coming home by Christmas,” and of the Communist advance in Asia not only halted, but broken, vanished in a steady outpouring of bad news from the front.
Except for MacArthur’s stalwart supporters like the Hearst and McCormick newspapers, the media in America and Western Europe painted a picture of defeat comparable only to Napoleon’s retreat from Russia. Men and vehicles frozen in the snow; panicked Western troops fleeing the irresistible Oriental tide; a reckless power-mad general whose thirst for glory had led his forces to irrevocable disaster: these were the images of the situation in Korea that were conjured up in the American public’s mind by papers like the New York Herald Tribune, The New York Times, and the Washington Post.
The mood in Washington was, if anything, even gloomier. Among State Department officials, there was an element of Schadenfreude at seeing Douglas MacArthur finally getting his comeuppance. But everyone in the president’s new National Security Council understood that this was a disaster of the first order.
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