Now, in these “weeks of slaughter and heartbreak,” all that was to change dramatically and with immense, far-reaching consequences.
Truman himself had changed. Members of the White House staff spoke of the “aching pain” of the President’s disappointment, since the Communist invasion of South Korea crushed his dream of peace. He was working eighteen hours a day and the strain showed. Margaret would write of her father’s anguish as American troops were hurled back. Korea was “constantly” on his mind.
At the same time, Truman was undergoing extensive dental treatment. In three weeks beginning July 8, he had two bridges, four single crowns, and a filling replaced, in a series of twelve sessions at Walter Reed Hospital. And through all this, according to the records, he had anesthesia only once, for one of the crowns. Why he subjected himself to such an ordeal just then is puzzling, unless it was to safeguard his health overall, in anticipation of the stress of the war only growing worse.
Solemn, “war-conscious” crowds, as they were described, gathered outside Blair House every time word spread that he was meeting with his military advisers. Many Americans, perhaps most, had first thought of the Korean conflict as truly a “police action,” a mere brushfire affair that would be quickly extinguished once American forces arrived. Now letters and telegrams poured into Washington, to the White House and Congress, decrying the way things were being handled. “It would seem General Vaughan is running the Korean situation,” said one. “Are we being sabotaged by the State Department?” asked another. Those addressed to Truman were at one point running twenty to one against the war:
I wonder how well you have been sleeping these last nights? Mothers and fathers all over our beloved land are spending sleepless nights worrying again over their boys being sent to fight wars on foreign soil—wars that are no concern of ours….
WE DEMAND THAT YOU STOP MURDERING AMERICAN BOYS AND KOREAN PEOPLE….
In heaven’s name, what are you doing? The blood hasn’t dried from World war 2…. We have nothing to do with Korea. These people are capable of settling their own affairs….
LET THEM HAVE THE ATOM BOMB NOW….
I am the mother of a soldier in Korea. I am an American, I mean a good American. I love this country and all it stands for…. I am writing to you, because I want my son home, he is my only child, and very young. Please, Mr. President, I implore you….
YOU DID IT ONCE BEFORE STOP DROP ONE OVER THE KREMLIN AND GET IT OVER WITH.
In the Senate, Taft called for Dean Acheson to resign. Owen Brewster wanted to let MacArthur use the atomic bomb “at his discretion.” Newspapers carried photographs contrasting the cheerful, confident President of spring with die grave, lined President of summer. “The grin in which his face was formerly permanently wreathed has disappeared,” wrote the Alsop brothers. “So, at last, has the euphoric presidential conviction that ‘everything’s going to be all right.’ ”
To the Alsops and others who had long deplored the decline of American military power, it was a case now of “we told you so.” The influence of Louis Johnson at the Pentagon had been “little less than catastrophic”—“damn near treasonous,” Joseph Alsop would later say privately. Truman had been naive at best. With the Korean crisis, however, Truman had undergone a “complete change.”
The great historic shift began at a meeting of the Cabinet on Friday, July 14. Again, as at the fateful Blair House sessions, it was Acheson who took the initiative, urging an immediate expansion of all military services and huge increases in military spending. Truman agreed. And from this point forward there was to be no turning back, not in his lifetime or in that of any of those around the table.
On Wednesday, July 19, first in a special message to Congress, then in an address to the nation, Truman said the attack on Korea demanded that the United States send more men, equipment, and supplies. Beyond that, the realities of the “world situation” required still greater American military strength. He called for an emergency appropriation of $10 billion—the final sum submitted would be $11.6 billion, or nearly as much as the entire $13 billion military budget originally planned for the fiscal year—and announced he was both stepping up the draft and calling up certain National Guard units.
“Korea is a small country thousands of miles away, but what is happening there is important to every American,” he told the nation, standing stone-faced in the heat of the television lights, a tangle of wires and cables at his feet. By their “act of raw aggression…I repeat, it was raw aggression,” the North Koreans had violated the U.N. Charter, and though American forces were making the “principal effort” to save the Republic of South Korea, they were fighting under a U.N. command and a U.N. flag, and this was a “landmark in mankind’s long search for a rule of law among nations.”
As a call to arms it was not especially inspirational. Nor did he once use the word “war” to describe what was happening in Korea. But then neither was there any question about his sincerity, nor was he the least evasive about what would be asked of the country. The “job” was long and difficult. It meant increased taxes, rationing if necessary, “stern days ahead.”
Possibly in time the strident warnings and enjoinders of NSC-68 would have effected such a turn in policy. But Korea made all that academic now. Truman’s commitment to military power was theoretical no longer. In another televised address at summer’s end, he would announce plans to double the armed forces to nearly 3 million men, saying such costs and obligations were to be part of the nation’s burden for a long time to come.
Congress appropriated the money—$48.2 billion for military spending in fiscal 1950–51, then $60 billion for fiscal 1951–52.
Was he considering use of the atomic bomb in Korea, Truman was asked at a press conference the last week of July. No, he said. Did he plan to get out of Washington any time soon? No. He would stay on the job.
That Truman was extremely vexed with his Secretary of Defense, Louis Johnson, and less than fond or admiring of his Far Eastern Commander, Douglas MacArthur, was well known to his staff and a cause of gathering concern at the Pentagon. “He would have saved himself a lot of grief had he relieved both men at the onset of the war,” was the subsequent view of General Bradley. Johnson had begun to show “an inordinate egotistical desire to run the whole government,” Truman later recorded. “He offended every member of the cabinet…he never missed an opportunity to say mean things about my personal staff.” His Secretary of Defense, Truman speculated, was suffering from a “pathological condition.”
When Truman learned from Averell Harriman that Johnson had been praising Senator Taft—over the phone, and in Harriman’s presence—for Taft’s attacks on Acheson (and then promised Harriman to do all he could to make Harriman Secretary of State, once Acheson was out of the way), Johnson was, in effect, finished. From Eben Ayers’ diary, it is known that the President confided Harriman’s story to Charlie Ross on July 3. The next morning, July 4, Truman drove to Leesburg, Virginia, with Margaret for what was ostensibly a holiday visit with General Marshall, who, since recovering his health, had become head of the American Red Cross. “A most interesting morning,” was all that Truman noted in his own diary.
Yet to fire Johnson then, with things going so badly in Korea, to shame the man who had been most conspicuous in carrying out Truman’s own policies at the Pentagon, would not have been a move of the kind Truman admired. So weeks passed and Louis Johnson remained.
As for MacArthur, Truman’s private view seems to have been no different from what it had been in 1945, at the peak of MacArthur’s renown, when, in his journal, Truman had described the general as “Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat,” a “play actor and bunco man.” The President, noted Eben Ayers, expressed “little regard or respect” for MacArthur, called him a “supreme egotist” who thought himself “something of a god.” But working with people that one did not necessarily like or admire was part of life—particularly the politician’s life—and if removing Louis Johnson would have b
een difficult under the circumstances, firing the five-star Far Eastern Commander would have been very nearly unthinkable. John Foster Dulles told Truman confidentially that MacArthur should be dispensed with as soon as possible. Dulles, the most prominent Republican spokesman on foreign policy and a special adviser to the State Department, had returned from a series of meetings with MacArthur in Tokyo convinced that the seventy-year-old general was well past his prime and a potential liability. In a private conference in the Oval Office, Dulles advised Truman to bring MacArthur home and retire him before he caused trouble. But that, replied Truman, his blue-gray eyes large behind his glasses, was easier said than done. He reminded Dulles of the reaction there would be in the country, so great was MacArthur’s “heroic standing.”
In later years it would be stressed by some writers that Truman had little regard for generals, even viewed them with contempt, considering them limited in outlook and ability. He himself, in retirement, would say most generals were “dumb,” “like horses with blinders on,” and would Fault their West Point education (the education he had so wanted as a youth but was denied). His bias, however, was not against generals overall, but such figures as MacArthur who seemed to feel they were above everyone else. Truman hated caste systems of any kind, disliked stuffed shirts of all varieties, and his experiences in France in 1918 had left him with an abiding dislike of the military caste system and its West Point stuffed shirts in particular.
However, his latter-day remarks notwithstanding, Truman’s regard for such generals as Bradley and Ridgway (both West Pointers) could not have been much greater. He had long considered Bradley a model officer and very quickly that summer he had come to rely on Bradley as an adviser more than anyone in his administration except Acheson. Ridgway, too, greatly impressed Truman and would in time more than justify Truman’s confidence in him. Then there were Eisenhower and Marshall—Eisenhower, the man Truman had been willing to step aside for, to make him President, and Marshall, “the great one,” whom Truman revered above all men.
Nor, importantly, did Truman at this stage express any doubt concerning MacArthur’s ability. If anything, he seems to have been banking on it.
By the first week in August, American and ROK forces, dug in behind the Naktong River, had set up the final defense line to be known as the Pusan Perimeter, a thinly held front forming an arc of 130 miles around the port of Pusan. On the map it looked like a bare toehold on the peninsula. On the ground the fighting went on as savagely as before. The monsoons had ended. Now the troops cursed the heat and dust so thick that supply trucks kept their headlights on at midday. But the retreat was over. Besides, the headlong advance of the North Koreans had cost them heavily—their casualties had been worse even than the Americans imagined. Their supply lines were now greatly overextended. U.N. forces controlled the sea and air, while at Pusan, the buildup of American tanks, artillery, and fresh troops was moving rapidly. At his briefing for the President on Saturday, August 12, in his customary, dry, cautious way, Bradley, for the first time, described the situation as “fluid but improving.”
Averell Harriman, meanwhile, had returned from a hurried mission to Tokyo, bringing the details of a daring new MacArthur plan.
Harriman had been dispatched to tell the general of Truman’s determination to see that he had everything he needed, but also to impress upon him Truman’s urgent desire to avoid any move that might provoke a third world war. This was Truman’s uppermost concern and there must be no misunderstanding. In particular, MacArthur was to “stay clear” of Chiang Kai-shek—a sore point since MacArthur had made a highly publicized flying visit to Formosa on July 31 to confer with Chiang, after which he had been photographed kissing Madame Chiang’s hand. Chiang, Truman had instructed Harriman to tell MacArthur, must not become the catalyst for a war with the Chinese Communists.
Harriman, as Truman appreciated, had known MacArthur on a first-name basis since MacArthur was Superintendent at West Point in 1920.
Accompanied by Ridgway and General Lauris Norstad of the Air Force, Harriman had left for Tokyo on August 4, and on the morning of their return to Washington, August 9, Harriman went directly from the airport to Blair House, taking no time to shave or shower or have breakfast. As he would later explain, Harriman had scheduled his return so he could see the President at about 7:00 A.M., the best time to “catch him alone.”
MacArthur had no reservations about the decision to fight in Korea, “absolutely none,” Harriman reported. MacArthur was certain neither the Chinese Communists nor the Russians would intervene in Korea. Concerning Chiang Kai-shek, MacArthur had assured Harriman that of course, as a soldier, he would do as the President ordered, though something about MacArthur’s tone as he said this had left Harriman wondering.
Of greater urgency and importance was what Harriman had to report of a plan to win the war with one bold stroke. For weeks there had been talk at the Pentagon of a MacArthur strategy to outflank the enemy, to hit from behind, by amphibious landing. The details were vague and the Joint Chiefs remained highly skeptical. But in Tokyo, Harriman, Ridgway, and Norstad had been given a grand unveiling, a brilliant, two-and-a-half-hour exposition delivered by MacArthur “with all his dramatic eloquence,” as Ridgway wrote. The three men were completely won over, “enthralled,” said Harriman, and ready to go home and argue for the plan. It could mean “our salvation,” Harriman told Truman.
The idea was to make a surprise amphibious landing on the western shore of Korea at the port of Inchon, 200 miles northwest of Pusan. The problem was that Inchon had tremendous tides—tides of 30 feet or more—and no beaches on which to land, only sea walls. Thus an assault would have to strike directly into the city itself, and only a full tide would carry the landing craft clear to the sea wall. In two hours after high tide, the landing craft would be stuck in the mud.
To Bradley it was the riskiest military proposal he had ever heard. But as MacArthur stressed, the Japanese had landed successfully at Inchon in 1904 and the very “impracticabilities” would help ensure the all-important element of surprise. As Wolfe had astonished and defeated Montcalm at Quebec in 1759, by scaling the impossible cliffs by the Plains of Abraham, so, MacArthur said, he would astonish and defeat the North Koreans by landing at the impossible port of Inchon. But there was little time. The attack had to come before the onset of the Korean winter exacted more casualties than the battlefield. The tides at Inchon would be right on September 15.
“I made clear to the President the difficulties of the plan,” Harriman later said, “including the very heavy tide which would make landing any reinforcements impossible until the next high tide.”
Truman told him to see Johnson and Bradley “as fast as you can.” Though Truman had made no commitment one way or the other, Harriman left the house convinced that Truman approved the plan.
At the Pusan Perimeter desperate fighting raged on, American casualties mounting—6,886 by August 25, by mid-September double that number. Soldiers who had fought in Europe were calling Korea a tougher war than any they had known. In a long, searing dispatch in Time and Life, correspondent John Osborne described it as “an ugly war,” “sorrowful,” “sickening,” “an especially terrible war.” No one who saw it firsthand would ever speak of it as a “police action.” The savagery of the North Koreans was appalling, but that of some South Korean police was hardly less. Americans described seeing enemy troops within plain sight changing from the green uniforms of the North Korean Army to the common white trousers and blouses of the Korean peasants. The awful uncertainty of who was friend and who was foe had already forced American troops to their own appalling acts and attitudes.
This means not the usual, inevitable savagery of combat in the field but savagery in detail—the blotting out of villages where the enemy may be hiding; the shooting and shelling of refugees who may include North Koreans in the anonymous white clothing of the Korean countryside, or who may be screening an enemy march upon our positions….
The
buildup of men and arms pouring into Pusan was phenomenal. Still, warned Osborne, “We may be pushed out of Korea.”
By early August, General Bradley could tell the President that American strength at Pusan was up to 50,000, which with another 45,000 ROKs and small contingents of U.N. allies, made a total U.N. ground force of nearly 100,000. Still the prospect of diverting additional American forces for MacArthur’s Inchon scheme pleased the Joint Chiefs not at all. Bradley continued to view it as “the wildest kind” of plan.
But on August 10, after a series of intense White House meetings, the Joint Chiefs and National Security Council approved the strategy in principle. As further sessions followed in Tokyo and in Washington, Bradley, Admiral Sherman, and General Collins expressed “the gravest misgivings,” as Bradley reported to Truman at a briefing Saturday, August 26, the same day the Associated Press broke a statement from MacArthur to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, in which he strongly defended Chiang Kai-shek and the importance of Chiang’s control of Formosa: “Nothing could be more fallacious than the threadbare argument by those who advocate appeasement and defeatism in the Pacific that if we defend Formosa we alienate continental Asia.” It was exactly the sort of dabbling in policy that MacArthur had assured Harriman he would, as a good soldier, refrain from.
Truman was livid, “his lips white and compressed.” Dispensing with the usual greetings at his morning meeting with Acheson, Harriman, Johnson, and the Joint Chiefs, he read the whole of MacArthur’s statement aloud. Acheson, outraged, called it rank insubordination. To Bradley the message was “the height of arrogance.” Harriman was the most upset of all. Truman would later say he considered but rejected the idea of relieving MacArthur of field command then and there and replacing him with Bradley. “It would have been difficult to avoid the appearance of demotion, and I had no desire to hurt General MacArthur personally.”
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