Disaster in Korea
Page 62
The Joint Chiefs of Staff in Washington at this time were:
Gen. Omar Bradley, chairman
Adm. Forrest Sherman (Navy)
Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg (Air Force)
Gen. J. Lawton Collins (Army)
The Joint Chiefs operated under the general jurisdiction of General George C. Marshall, secretary of defense, who reported directly to the president of the United States, Harry S Truman. On matters transcending the purely military and reaching into foreign policy, the president would normally consult the secretary of state, Dean G. Acheson. The above men were the top policymakers in the United States government at this time, reviewing and acting on General MacArthur's requests and recommendations in the crisis period in Korea in December 1950."1
On 6 December, the secretary of defense issued a directive to all military commanders, warning them to avoid statements of public policy concerning the conduct of foreign affairs that had not been cleared in Washington. This order was to have serious consequences in the future for MacArthur, but it did not mention him directly. Later, however, in response to a question from Senator Russell, chairman of the Senate Military Affairs Committee, General Marshall stated that General MacArthur's statements in early December, at the time of Eighth Army's defeat along the Chongchon and the failure of his 24 November offensive, criticizing the restrictions placed on him and his command in responding to the Chinese offensive, were the reasons for issuing the directive. It was in fact directed at General MacArthur and was intended as a direct warning to cease making such comments. In response to another question by Senator Russell, General Marshall said that MacArthur, subsequent to 6 December, had violated this directive.77
On 7 December General MacArthur sent a radio message to General Walker in Korea stating that "current planning provides for a withdrawal in successive positions, if necessary, to the Pusan area. 8th Army will hold the Seoul area for maximum time possible short of entailing such envelopment as would prevent its withdrawal to the south." This same message informed General Walker that the X Corps was being evacuated from northeast Korea and would join Eighth Army as soon as practicable, and at that time would pass to control of Eighth Army." All of General Walker's decisions concerning Eighth Army after 7 December must be considered in the light of this instruction from General MacArthur.
At this time, after the Joint Chiefs had refused to allow the Far East Command to bomb the Yalu River bridges and after his conversations with General Collins on 6 December, which made it certain he would receive no reinforcements from the United States, General MacArthur subsequently said he decided to resign from his post as commander, Far East. He wrote a dispatch on 7 or 8 December to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tendering his resignation. According to his later statement, "I at once asked for immediate relief from assignment to duty in the Far East. In my bitterness I told my able Chief of Staff, General Doyle Hickey." MacArthur then continues, "By some means the enemy commanders must have known of this decision to protect his lines of communication into North Korea, or he never would have dared to cross those bridges in force." General Hickey protested to MacArthur that he should not take the action he proposed in the crisis then existing. General MacArthur added, "I tore up my dispatch."79
Soviet Penetration of American War Policy
While this work is a combat history of the Korean War and not a political history of the UN alliance that fought it, it seems essential to mention briefly a charge that General MacArthur made in late 1950 and early 1951 (and repeated later) that the Soviet Union and the Chinese government were well informed of American and UN policy concerning limits imposed on him for the conduct of the war. If true, this charge meant that the Chinese knew in advance of the UN forces' actions at the end of 1950 that there would be no reprisal against them on the mainland of Asia and that they had a sanctuary across the Yalu River in Manchuria. Therefore, there would be little risk to them in sending their troops across the border into Korea to fight UN forces in November and December. The Soviets and the Chinese could know all this only if their agents, working in either the United States or England, had penetrated the highest levels of policy-making offices of the two governments. If the Soviets and the Chinese did in fact know in advance that UN and United States policy would be to engage in no military action against China beyond the confines of Korea, this knowledge would obviously affect the course of their actions and of the war.
General MacArthur believed that the Chinese Communists and the Soviets did know these policies in advance. And he believed this information had reached the Soviets and the Chinese through espionage agents operating within the British Embassy in Washington and within the British government in London, and indirectly through the United States Department of State.
It is a matter of record, in public documents and in UN actions, that the British government was hostile to General MacArthur's proposals in November and December 1950 to take military action against Chinese bases in Manchuria and against the Chinese mainland after the massive Chinese intervention in Korea. We have already mentioned the trip Prime Minister Clement Atlee of Great Britain made hurriedly to the United States on 4 December 1950 and his subsequent conversations with President Truman, Secretary of State Dean Acheson, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. His trip was almost wholly to make sure the United States government would not accede to General MacArthur's recommendations and would not use the atomic bomb, which President Truman had suggested might be used against CCF forces in Korea. Atlee and his government feared that any of these actions, if taken, might involve Great Britain, as an ally of the United States, in a war with the Soviet Union.
General MacArthur raised the question, Were British subjects working within the British Embassy in Washington as Soviet agents at this time? And if they were, would they have access to State Department and American war-policy decisions on Korea? The answer on both counts has to be yes. Not only were British subjects working as Soviet agents in positions of high authority in the British Embassy in Washington, but their network encompassed the British Foreign Office and British Intelligence in London. Specifically, the agents Kim Philby, Donald MacLean, and Guy Burgess were traitors to their country, and their espionage actions directly affected the United States in the Korean War.
In the early summer of 1950, Philby was transferred from Istanbul to Washington as Secret Service liaison officer in the British Embassy to work with the American CIA and the FBI. Burgess was transferred from London to the British Embassy in Washington as second secretary in October 1950. He imposed himself on Philby, whom he could blackmail, and lived in his home for 18 months. At the same time, MacLean was back in London and assigned to the American desk in the Foreign Office. The three men could hardly have been placed in better positions to serve their Soviet masters. All three were bitterly hostile to General MacArthur for his efforts to expand the war so as to win it, as MacArthur thought. They were all afraid he might dominate American policy in Korea. MacLean in London "provided for the Moscow Centre microfilmed copies of every vital document that passed through his hands," according to a foremost student of the espionage ring."
There is no certain knowledge, publicly known, as to just what the British espionage agents in 1950 and 1951 may have transmitted to the Soviet Union about UN and American war policy concerning China in the Korean War. And there is no certain knowledge, publicly known, as to how much of this information the Soviet Union may have passed on to China. If American intelligence has any knowledge on these points, it is still locked in secrecy. Possibly it is all still held in the secret files of the Soviet Union, and perhaps part of it in those of China.
All of this is not to imply that Soviet and Chinese intelligence gained by any source, including that which may have been transmitted by Philby, MacLean, and Burgess, about the limitations Great Britain, the United States, and the United Nations imposed on MacArthur, caused the loss of North Korea to Chinese intervention and nearly the entire war. It may very well have been one of several factors in t
he dismal outcome. But it was not the most important. It was open knowledge that Great Britain would exert itself to contain the war and hold a checkrein on General MacArthur's plans for extending the war beyond the Yalu. In a coalition war, such as was the Korean War, it is a commonplace of history that allies Teak to, or are penetrated by, an active enemy intelligence apparatus to learn coalition secrets. So what is new in the case of Korea? When China intervened on a massive scale in late 1950, even though it had intelligence that it would have an inviolate sanctuary north of the Yalu, it nevertheless had to accept the risk that this might not be so. Any cautious commander must know that he cannot count with certainty on anything in war working out as he has planned it.
The mistakes that General MacArthur himself made after the Inchon landing and the capture of Seoul, and the subsequent linking up of Eighth Army from the south with the X Corps in the Seoul area, constituted the origins that led to disaster in Korea. MacArthur tied up the port of Inchon for weeks in outloading the X Corps for ferrying it to northeast Korea, preventing the bringing in of supplies for Eighth Army to continue the attack north. Instead of attaching the X Corps to Eighth Army for unified command to operate from the Seoul area and in western Korea, MacArthur kept it as a separate command under his own control. Rather than the long, inefficient movement of X Corps by water all the way around Korea to the Wonsan area of northeast Korea, he could have marched the corps overland from Seoul to Wonsan in a week, and while doing so have taken possession of the key Iron Triangle area and its communications. Subsequently, after Eighth Army captured Pyongyang, he could have used the X Corps from the Wonsan area in conjunction with Eighth Army in the Pyongyang area to establish control of the waist of Korea and established there a defense line with an ocean port at either end for ready supply and logistic support of the UN troops.
When General MacArthur decided to go to the Korean border, scatter his X Corps troops in far-flung positions that were not mutually supporting, and leave numerous North Korean guerrilla units behind his front, both in the east and in the west, he created a precarious military situation. A wise general would have established a secure line across the waist of Korea before he ventured farther. If the 38th Parallel was crossed because it did not offer a good defensive line (one of the reasons given for crossing it), then the advance should have stopped at the waist of Korea if such a line was being sought. Even if the Chinese had not intervened in Korea initially in late October and subsequently in far greater strength in November and December, it seems certain that the ROK Army and the Republic of Korea could not have established and maintained civil government throughout all of Korea up to the border. This would have been especially unlikely in northeast Korea along a 500-mile border from Manpojin to the Sea of Japan. General MacArthur can be accused of violating one of Clausewitz's dictums that military ventures should not be undertaken beyond what political policies and capabilities could support after military victory had been won.
General MacArthur's own decisions after Inchon and the capture of Seoul, rather than the effect of successful Soviet espionage in the United States and England, were the main causes of the Korean disaster. His decisions and policies were militarily unrealistic and unsound in the circumstances and conditions that prevailed in Korea and its border territories and in the fight of the conventional military resources available to the United States and the UN.
As conditions worsened in Korea in the first half of December, ranking officers in the Department of the Army, including Generals Collins and Ridgway, urged that President Truman declare a state of national emergency. On the evening of 15 December the president in a radio address to the nation said that the United States was in "great danger" and that a state of national emergency existed. The next day he issued a formal proclamation to that effect." That same day the People's Republic of China rejected the UN plan for a cease-fire in Korea.
Two days before Christmas 1950, on a Saturday, Lt. Gen. Walton H. Walker, Eighth Army commander, left his headquarters in Seoul about 10:30 A.M. for Uijongbu, about 20 miles north on the MSR. He rode as usual in his special jeep, driven by his longtime driver, Master Sergeant Belton, and with his bodyguard. A second jeep with his armed escort followed close behind the first jeep. General Walker was scheduled to present the Republic of Korea Presidential Citation to the US 24th Infantry Division and to the British 27th Brigade for roles they played in the defense of the Naktong River line perimeter during the preceding summer. The ceremony was to be held at the IX Corps headquarters at Uijongbu.
Approximately two to three miles south of Uijongbu at a few minutes before 11 A.M., General Walker was killed in an accident involving the lead jeep in which he was riding. The ceremonial presentations were not held that day for the paraded British 27th Brigade, which waited in vain for the arrival of General Walker. Maj. Gen. Frank Milburn, US I Corps commander, did make the presentations the next day as acting commanding general of Eighth Army.
The official United States Army records present a mystifying silence on details of the accident that caused Walker's death. All one finds is the terse statement that he was killed about 11 o'clock in a traffic accident while on his way to present the citations at Uijongbu. The most commonly heard hearsay elaboration of this cryptic announcement was that a truck driven by a ROK soldier pulled out of the southbound traffic lane in front of Walker's jeep and collided with it.'
Gen. John Coulter described the setting for the accident. He was awaiting General Walker at his IX Corps CP, only two to three miles from the scene of the accident, when word came to him of Walker's death. He went at once to the scene. General Walker, he said, had been traveling north rather fast. In the southbound lane of the road a British 27th Brigade truck had stopped because of some mechanical trouble. A ROK 6th Division vehicle going south came up behind the stopped British vehicle and started to pull around it. At that moment General Walker's jeep came over a rise just ahead, running fast. The two vehicles narrowly missed averting a collision, but the left-hand three inches of the ROK vehicle bumper grazed Walker's jeep, causing it to swerve and skid over the side of the road and turn over down an embankment. The road at this point crossed a bund, or raised fill, over low paddy ground. General Walker was pinned under the jeep and had a broken neck, according to General Coulter.'
The men in the second jeep, following General Walker, had a close-up view of the accident. They lifted the jeep off the dead general and carried the other injured men to the roadside. They also witnessed the arrival of two generals and other men from IX Corps. A bit of background is necessary in understanding what had become a normal practice of travel in the general's jeep and was a factor in the accident.
Before the outbreak of the Korean War, General Walker in Japan had four special jeeps, two of them painted white, the other two Army olive drab (OD). All of them were modified in certain respects. When Walker came to Korea in mid-July 1950 to take command of the troops there, he brought the two ODcolored jeeps with him. Jeep No. 1 had a .30-caliber machine gun on a pedestal mount between and behind the driver and General Walker, who always rode in the front right-hand seat. Two escort guards, one of them behind the .30-caliber machine gun, rode in the backseat. Lt. Col. Joseph Tyner, the general's aide, usually rode in the lead jeep with the general. The jeeps were not armored, although it is believed the general's jeep had a piece of armor plate on the floor to protect him against a possible road-mine explosion. The jeeps had flashing red lights and sirens mounted on each front fender, and a steel handrail welded to either side crossed in front of the windshield. The general often stood up and held on to the bar. The jeeps also had rear overhang compartments welded to the frame and body. In Japan they had been used to carry luggage for the general and his staff. In Korea they were used to carry machine-gun ammunition. The ammunition weight in the rear tended to shift the jeep's center of gravity toward the rear wheels. At high speed the jeeps would ride front wheels high, making steering uncertain and treacherous. In Korea the dirt roads were o
ften deep in dust, increasing the danger in driving these jeeps at high speed.
The second jeep, called by the escort guards the machine-gun jeep, had a .50-caliber machine gun on a pedestal mount but otherwise was similar to the first jeep. The driver of Walker's jeep was nearly always Master Sergeant Belton. The other members of his party, except his aide, Lieutenant Colonel Tyner, were all members of the 502nd Reconnaissance Platoon. Their sole duty was to protect the general and to do escort duty for him and guard duty at his CP and residence or van, in which he normally slept. The original Jeep No. 2 had been destroyed in an accident in August at the Naktong River front. At the time of the accident on 23 December it had been replaced by a normal jeep from the 502nd Reconnaissance Platoon Scout Section, mounting a .50-caliber machine gun. The accident in early August caused serious injury to Colonel Dabney, Eighth Army G-3, and Sergeant Davidson, who were riding in it. That jeep in trying to follow Belton was caught in a cloud of dust; the driver could not see the road and crashed head-on into a self-propelled gun.
Everyone in the 502nd Reconnaissance Platoon talked about Belton's fast driving, often at 50 to 60 miles an hour in traffic and dust on the bumpy dirt roads. A common jest in the platoon was "Shoot Belton and save the general." But Belton's driving must have satisfied Walker, because he would have no other. Walker was often impatient with slow travel caused by road traffic congestion, and those who rode escort with him said that sometimes he would pull out his .45 automatic pistol and fire it into the road to clear a path. His jeep usually traveled with sirens blaring and red lights flashing.'
On the morning of 23 December, Jeep No. I carried the following persons: driver Master Sergeant Belton, General Walker in the right front scat, Lieutenant Colonel Tyner in the back scat, and Cpl. Francis S. Reenan in the back scat. Jeep No. 2 carried driver Sgt. Eugene Donlin, Sgt. Emerson A. Sullivan, and Corporal Long. There may have been another person in the jeep, but this is not certain. Cpl. Randle Hurst was not in Jeep No. 2 on this trip. He had the eight to noon guard duty outside General Walker's office in Seoul that morning. Learning the details of the accident from his friends in the general's escort later in the day, Hurst later wrote that the two vehicles approached Uijongbu