The Glory and the Dream: A Narrative History of America, 1932-1972

by William Manchester

  Seoul fell Wednesday, and the ROK defenders retreated to the Han River. In Long Island’s Stockholm Restaurant that noon, three unlikely diplomats—Trygve Lie, Jacob Malik, and Ernest Gross—met to keep a long-standing luncheon date. Naturally they talked about the war; there was nothing else to talk about. Malik held that Sunday’s Security Council resolution was “illegal” because no Russian delegate had been present and Red China had not been admitted. While Gross waited tensely, Lie met his responsibilities as a scrupulous Secretary General. Forget about Sunday, he advised Malik; come to this afternoon’s Council meeting and hear the new American resolution. “Won’t you join us?” he asked. “The interests of your country would seem to me to call for your presence.” But the Russian shook his head. He said vehemently, “No, I will not go there.” Outside, Gross mopped his brow. He said to Lie, “Think what would have happened if he had accepted your invitation.” What would have happened would have been a Soviet veto of the new U.S. move and then, in all probability, American intervention in Korea unsupported by the U.N.—in short, an earlier Vietnam.

  ***

  Tuesday evening Americans with TV sets watched their first U.N. session, oddly interspersed between commercials and the performances of two children’s puppets named Foodini and Pinhead. Malik’s seat remained vacant, and the strong U.S. resolution carried. For the first time in history, an international organization had decided to resist aggression with force. That was how editorial writers put it the following morning, for Truman’s decision to provide the ROK troops with naval support and air cover was enormously popular. When it was announced on the Hill, Congress rose in a standing ovation. The White House press received it with broad smiles. As titular head of the Republican party, Governor Dewey enthusiastically supported U.S. intervention. Even the Chicago Tribune congratulated the President, noting that approval of his stand was unanimous.

  It wasn’t quite. One man stood against the tide. All day Tuesday, while the Senate debated the new course of foreign policy, Robert Taft had sat apart, his head resting in his hand, thoughtful and silent. Now on Wednesday he took the floor. He charged that the administration had “invited” the NKPA attack by declaring that Korea lay beyond the American defensive perimeter. No wonder the North Koreans felt they could strike south with impunity, he said; “If the United States was not prepared to use its troops and give military assistance to Nationalist China against Chinese Communists, why should it use its troops to defend Nationalist Korea against Korean Communists?” Make no mistake, Taft said; he approved using U.S. might to throw the invaders back across the 38th Parallel, and if the administration had brought the issue before the Senate, he would have voted for it. But it hadn’t. Instead it had “usurped the power of Congress,” creating dangerous precedents for the future. The Constitution extended the right to declare war to Congress alone, and the President’s action “unquestionably has brought about a de facto war.” Taft concluded: “So far as I can see, and so far I have studied the matter, I would say there is no authority to use Armed Forces in support of the United Nations in the absence of some previous action by Congress dealing with the subject.”

  He sat down. The right-wing Republican senators gave him token applause, and, when the moment arose, expressed other views. On the question of whether the President “arrogates to himself the power to declare war,” said William Knowland of California, “I believe that in the very important steps the President of the United States has taken to uphold… the United Nations and the free peoples of the world, he should have the overwhelming support of all Americans regardless of their party affiliation.” The rest of the Taft bloc broke into loud, sustained applause. What with the prospect of a ROK stand on the Han, a Chiang Kai-shek offer of 33,000 Kuomintang veterans to fight the North Korean aggressors, and news that all British warships in the Pacific had been placed under the command of the U.S. Navy, the country was in no mood to weigh fine points of constitutional law. Yet Harry Truman agreed with Taft. He wanted a congressional resolution of support. Acheson argued against it. In his opinion Taft’s speech, though “basically honest,” was “bitterly partisan and ungracious.” He insisted that the President “should not ask for a resolution of approval, but rest on his constitutional authority as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces.”

  Among historical ironies, few are sharper than this: Dean Acheson, excoriated during his years of power as a tool of international Communism, was so implacable in his hostility toward it that he believed the President could commit America’s armed might to an anti-Communist conflict without consulting anyone, acting on the strength of his position as commander in chief. Acheson never changed his mind. During the missile crisis of 1962, he wanted President Kennedy to invade Cuba. In his last years he became one of the most zealous of Vietnam hawks, wearing a red, white, and blue armband and lecturing Washington high school students on the need to stand up to the Reds. By then, of course, presidential authority to intervene in foreign wars had become much greater—largely because of precedents established, at Acheson’s urging, in June 1950.

  Between communiqués from Washington, Lake Success, Tokyo, and Seoul, the public was thoroughly muddled, and in a presidential press conference Thursday afternoon, the first since the outbreak of hostilities, Truman was urged to clarify matters:

  Q. Mr. President, everyone is asking in this country, are we or are we not at war?

  A. We are not at war.

  Q. Mr. President, could you elaborate on that statement, “We are not at war,” and could we use that in quotes?

  A. Yes, I will allow you to use that in quotes. The Republic of Korea was set up with United Nations help. It was unlawfully attacked by a bunch of bandits who are neighbors, in North Korea. The United Nations held a meeting and asked the members to go to the relief of the Korean Republic, and the members of the United Nations are going to the relief of the Korean Republic to suppress a bandit raid on the Republic of Korea. That is all there is to it.

  Q. Would it be correct to call it a police action under the United Nations?

  A. Yes, that is exactly what it amounts to.

  It amounted to more than one hundred thousand American casualties over the next three years, and the Republicans, who after their initial enthusiasm found less and less to like in the war, never let Harry Truman forget that he had once thought of it as a “police action.” Homely phrases work only if the policies they epitomize work; had lend-lease failed, FDR’s comparison of it with “a length of garden hose” would be less charitably remembered. The difference, unappreciated in June 1950, was that Roosevelt’s goal had been total victory. The purpose in Korea was not unconditional surrender; it was a cease-fire, an end to aggression, a negative aim.

  Thursday morning’s communiqué from Tokyo reported that of South Korea’s 65,000 defenders, nearly half had been killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. Plainly this mounting sacrifice could not go on much longer. Equally obvious, tactical support from U.S. naval and air units would not be enough to turn the war around. Hourly, now, the momentum of events was tugging Truman toward a stronger commitment. From the Dai Ichi Building in Tokyo came news that MacArthur had flown into Korea for a firsthand look at the struggle. Disregarding his Air Force weathermen, who had grounded all other aircraft at Haneda Airfield, the seventy-year-old general had boarded his old C-54, the Bataan, and told his pilot, “We go.” Upon landing—Syngman Rhee met him at the airstrip—MacArthur said, “Let’s go to the front and look at the troops. The only way to judge a war is to see the troops in action.” He then drove northward under shellfire and reached the Han just in time to see the last, hopeless attempt to hold the bridges. For twenty minutes the general stood on a little mound just off the road watching the demoralized retreat, the screaming refugees, and the continual bombardment from the north. As a member of his staff noted, he had “encountered all the dreadful backwash of a defeated and dispersed Army.” Back at his Japanese headquarters, he cabled the Pentagon: “The only assurance fo
r holding the present line and the ability to regain later the lost ground is through the introduction of United States ground combat forces into the Korean battle area.”

  There it was. They had known all week that it was coming, and now it came chattering from a Pentagon telecom machine at 3 A.M. Friday, while most of the capital lay asleep. General J. Lawton Collins, in MacArthur’s old role as the Army’s chief of staff, answered that before taking such a momentous step the President would doubtless want to consult his advisers. Couldn’t the war wait a few hours? Absolutely not, MacArthur replied. Every minute was crucial now. If the Republic of Korea was to be saved, America troops must be sent into the breach at once.

  General Collins phoned Secretary of the Army Frank C. Pace Jr., and Pace called Blair House. It was just before 5 A.M. in Washington, but Truman was already up and shaved. Taking the call at his bedside table, he hesitated briefly and then authorized the commitment of one regiment to combat. He would assemble the members of his war cabinet at once, he said, to propose an expansion of this expeditionary force. Their approval was unanimous. Orders were cut that morning, and at 1:22 P.M. that June 30, the seventh day of the crisis, the calling up of reserve units was under way. The United States was at war all the way—with warships, warplanes, tanks, artillery, and ground troops—and Congress hadn’t even been asked for an opinion.

  ***

  Six weeks of agony followed. Americans assumed that the moment the U.S. 24th and 25th divisions left Japan and arrived in Korea, the fighting would take on a new cast. If the North Koreans didn’t panic and flee, it was thought, they would at least lose their momentum. In fact, the U.S. divisions began crumbling as quickly as their new ROK allies. Out of condition and outnumbered by as much as twenty to one, the first detachments to arrive were for the most part green troops; fewer than 20 percent of them had seen action in World War II. Their only antitank weapons were ten-year-old bazookas, hopelessly ineffective against the mighty Soviet T-34s. Isolated and cut off from one another, in the first weeks many surrendered, including the major general commanding the 24th, before learning that the North Koreans took few prisoners. More often the NKPA tied the hands of captives behind their backs and bayoneted them. U.S. infantrymen then became afflicted by “bugout fever”—a yearning to return to their soft billets in Japan. MacArthur did what he could, skillfully maneuvering U.S. and ROK battalions so as to delay the enemy as much as possible while building a defensive perimeter around the Pusan bridgehead, but defeatism crept into the high command.

  Osan, Yongdok, Hadong, Chindong’mi, the Nakton Bulge—the strange names appeared in headlines as a succession of front-page maps depicted the Pusan perimeter, smaller each morning. Ferocious NKPA attacks threw the 24th Division out of Taejon on July 20 and then began hammering the 25th at Taegu, the main U.S. supply base and communications hub. In the tough phrase of the hour, war correspondents wrote that MacArthur might “run out of real estate,” and be driven into the sea. Then, on August 6, the long retreat ended. Infantrymen of the 27th Regiment and their ROK allies dug in their heels and stopped the Red tide at the walls of Taegu. Late in August the North Koreans staged one last massive attack in an attempt to capture Pusan, but by now the defenders had tanks and heavy artillery. The lines held on a 120-mile arc from the Sea of Japan on the east to the Korea Strait on the south. There, as summer waned, the line of opposing trenches grew stronger every week. It was a stalemate, and commentators wondered how it could become anything else. The mood of the men on the line was fatalistic. Their favorite expression was, “That’s the way the ball bounces,” and they sang:

  The Dhow, the Gizee, and Rhee

  What do they want from me?

  But Douglas MacArthur was too gifted a strategist to be bottled up by an unimaginative siege, and the military force now arriving from an aroused America was too great to be contained within so narrow an enclave. At home selected National Guard units were being called up. Recruiting drives had been intensified and draft quotas increased to put 600,000 men in uniform as soon as possible. To be sure, the replacements were often neither enthusiastic nor cheerful. No one called them gung ho; Kilroy wasn’t there; and a Corporal Stephen Zeg of Chicago doubtless spoke for thousands of others in Pusan when he told a reporter, “I’ll fight for my country, but I’ll be damned if I see why I’m fighting to save this hellhole.” Yet there were few organized protests against the war and fewer demonstrations in the States. The new infantrymen were the younger brothers of the men who had fought in World War II. Patriotism was still strong, and that early rout of American infantry by North Koreans had stung the country’s pride.

  Each day the stockpiles of men and steel behind the Pusan front grew larger. The 1st Cavalry Division arrived from Japan and the 2nd Infantry from home; then came 2,000 Tommies from the 27th British Brigade in Hong Kong and French, Turkish, Australian, Dutch, and Philippine troops—the van of supporting units from fifteen other U.N. members.

  While the North Koreans worried about their long supply lines, their heavy casualties, and the inferior quality of teen-age replacements who were being drafted in the north at bayonet point, MacArthur was preparing the most brilliant stroke of his career. Against all advice, he proposed to divide his force, holding part of it here and staging an intricate amphibious attack with the other part, landing at the port of Inchon, twenty-four miles west of Seoul and one hundred and fifty miles from the present NKPA rear.

  Two days before D-day, ten warships swept the harbor of mines and bombarded shore batteries. At 6:30 A.M. on September 15, the appointed day, as the first pink streaks of dawn broke in the east, the commanding admiral broke out the traditional amphibious signal “Land the landing force”—whereupon waves of small boats darted for the shore bearing the 1st Marine Division, which had sailed secretly from San Francisco two weeks earlier. It took the marines exactly forty minutes to seize Wolmi Island, the key to Inchon’s defense. Racing down a thousand-foot causeway, they then headed for Seoul while MacArthur announced to the world: “The Navy and Marines have never shone more brightly.” By October 1 the North Korean army was all but destroyed. Half its men were in prisoner of war pens; the rest were divided into small detachments that moved furtively at night, trying to reach home. U.N. troops held everything in the peninsula south of the 38th Parallel. MacArthur appealed to the NKPA to lay down its arms, and at Lake Success a resolution backed by eight nations asked the U.N. General Assembly to “take all appropriate measures to ensure a stable situation in the whole of Korea”—thus approving a crossing into North Korea. But the Joint Chiefs were again urging caution upon MacArthur, and ominous rumbles were heard in Peking. U.S. intelligence reported that Chinese divisions were massing in Manchuria, just across the Yalu River from North Korea. President Truman decided that it was time he and General MacArthur had a little talk.

  It was long overdue. As early as June, John Foster Dulles, the chief Republican foreign affairs adviser, had called on Truman to recommend that the general be “hauled back to the United States.” Dulles had just returned from Tokyo. At the outbreak of the war, he said indignantly, MacArthur’s headquarters had been caught unprepared. No one in the Dai Ichi Building would rouse the general—“they were afraid to disturb him”—so Dulles had to do it himself.

  Late in July the general’s dabbling in affairs which were none of his concern had prompted a second glance from the White House. At a time when diplomatic maneuvering in the U.N. required that Chiang Kai-shek be kept under wraps, MacArthur had flown to Formosa to call on the generalissimo and tell reporters that the U.S. ships patrolling Formosa Strait were “leashing” Chiang and should be withdrawn. The President, disturbed, had dispatched Averell Harriman to the Dai Ichi Building for a consultation with MacArthur. Harriman had returned gloomy. He felt that the general hadn’t understood him, that he seemed to have “a strange idea that we should back anybody who will fight communism.”

  The next Truman knew, AP, UP, and INS were carrying the text of a special me
ssage MacArthur had sent to the annual convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars. In it the general had proposed nothing less than a new foreign policy in the Pacific, with American arms holding a defensive line from Vladivostok to Singapore. Obviously this would commit the United States to an alliance with Chiang. The general thought that a sound idea. Those who believed such a move might provoke the Chinese Communists were appeasers, he said, guilty of offering a “fallacious and threadbare argument,” while what was needed was “aggressive, resolute and dynamic leadership.” The President, furious, demanded that the statement be withdrawn. MacArthur obeyed, but that accomplished nothing; it was already in the papers. Now, with the threat of a wider war, the White House arranged a face-to-face conference between the President and his most colorful general on lonely Wake Island.

  They met on October 15 in an ugly cinder block outpost of the Civil Aeronautics Authority. In the crucial session, both men assumed that they were alone, but a zealous diplomat—Philip Jessup—had stationed a secretary with a shorthand pad in the shadow of the door, which was ajar. Though MacArthur later challenged the accuracy of her stenographic transcript, there is no other reason to doubt it. If it is correct, MacArthur apologized handsomely for his message to the VFW. He also predicted that the war would be over by Thanksgiving. Then the Japanese peace treaty could be signed with or without Soviet cooperation, he said, and Korea could be reconstructed for as little as a half-billion dollars. Truman asked about the chance of either Russian or Chinese intervention in the war. The general replied that it was: