American Caesar

by William Manchester

  Monday morning—Sunday evening in Washington—MacArthur’s first Korean orders came in over his telecon, a form of communication comprising two typewriters and two screens; messages punched out on the Pentagon keyboard appeared on MacArthur’s tube. Operation of all U.S. forces in Asia was now officially vested in him. His new title, added to SCAP, was Commander in Chief, Far East (CINCFE). He was instructed to “support the Republic of Korea” with warships around, and warplanes over, South Korea. He could expect broader powers as Austin applied greater pressure on UN allies. Already America had one foot on the battlefield. By now reports from Taejon had eclipsed any hope that the invaders could be swiftly driven back, and both he and Dulles were gloomy when he drove the envoy to Haneda for his flight home. MacArthur, as pessimistic as he had been ebullient before, now spoke darkly of writing off the entire Korean peninsula. He had just radioed Truman: “South Korean units unable to resist determined North Korean offensive. Contributory factor exclusive enemy possession of tanks and fighter planes. South Korean casualties as an index to fighting have not shown adequate resistance capabilities or the will to fight and our estimate is that a complete collapse is imminent.” In his reply the President again cautioned him to send no fliers or vessels north of the Parallel.10

  MacArthur heartily approved of the administration’s decision to intervene—though it was an even greater surprise to him, he said, than the invasion—but he had many reservations, and some of his assumptions would have alarmed the Blair House planners. He believed that they understood “little about the Pacific and practically nothing about Korea,” that they were certain to blunder because errors were “inescapable when the diplomat attempts to exercise military judgment.” The President’s war cabinet was determined to confine the war, but the new CINCFE believed in the Thomist doctrine of just wars—believed that if the battlefield was the last resort of governments, then the struggle must be waged until one side had been vanquished. And while he scorned the military opinions of civilians, he didn’t think that soldiers should shirk civil decisions; he had pointedly suggested to Dulles that he was quite “prepared to deal with policy questions. ” This was more than presumption. He had made such decisions in Australia, the Philippines, and Japan. Few world leaders, let alone generals, were more experienced in governing nations. It is understandable that Washington should want only his military talents in this fresh crisis, but it was unreasonable to expect him, of all men, to leash himself.11

  The issue was further complicated by his stature among Americans. The GOP might not want him as a presidential nominee, but he remained one of the most popular military leaders in the country’s history. Delighted by his new appointment, Republicans regarded it as a sign that the administration might be veering away from its Europe-first policies. The General, they thought, didn’t share the liberal conviction that Asian unrest arose from poverty and the rejection of Western colonialism. They were wrong there, but right in assuming that he didn’t believe that Peking might be detached from Moscow if the United States courted Mao by abandoning Formosa—that he would not, in their words, “sell out” Chiang to “appease” the mainland Chinese. Above all, both U.S. political parties recognized SCAP as a powerful Pacific force whose views about the Far East carried great weight with his countrymen. This was to have grave consequences in the conduct of the Korean War. Reluctant to offend him, and thereby risk accusations of playing politics while men were dying, virtually all of Truman’s advisers, including the Joint Chiefs, including even the President himself, would prove timid and ambiguous in many key directives to him. That was inexcusable. By now they should have learned that if he were free to construe unclear orders, he would choose constructions which suited him, not them. Sebald, the foreign-service officer closest to him, observes: “With his sense of history, experience, seniority, reputation, and temperament, he did not easily compromise when his judgment or his decisions were questioned. . . . He was never reluctant to interpret his authority or to make decisions and act quickly—arguing the matter later.”12

  In any political contest with him, the President would suffer from certain peculiar handicaps. One was his own fault. In his determination to achieve what he called an “economy budget,” he had rashly slashed the Pentagon budget to 13.2 billion dollars, cutting, as Cabell Phillips of the New York Times put it, “bone and sinew along with the fat. “ Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson became the goat for this. After events in Korea had exposed the Pentagon’s vitiation, Truman fired Johnson and appointed George Marshall in his place—no improvement in MacArthur’s eyes, though more acceptable to the country. But the President, despite the “Buck Stops Here” sign on his desk, was the real culprit. And he hardly improved matters by attempting to intimidate antagonists by brandishing military might which no longer existed. In those first turbulent days of the Korean crisis he impetuously announced that the United States would not only defend Rhee’s and Chiang’s regimes; it would, he said, also support the Philippine campaign against the Huks and the French drive against Ho Chi Minh in Vietnam. This was NSC-68 with a vengeance. It was also ludicrous. He lacked the muscle to back it up, and foreign leaders knew it. As MacArthur noted, five years before Korea the U.S. had been “militarily more powerful than any nation on earth,” but now it would be hard put to push the fledgling In Min Gun back across the 38th Parallel. American power, SCAP said, had been “frittered away in a bankruptcy of positive and courageous leadership toward any long-range objective.”13

  The General believed he was a more eloquent advocate of traditional American idealism than the President. He may have been right. NATO, the Marshall Plan, the Berlin airlift—the shining monuments of Truman’s foreign policy—were relatively sophisticated concepts. His constituents approved, but for the most part they were unstirred. They believed that democracy, the “American Way,” was the sole answer to the world’s problems. The more democratic a European nation, the more they admired it. But Europeans were prosperous. The real test, as they saw it, lay in Asia. In some mysterious way they had regarded the triumphant end of World War II as a victory for American ideals. The successful reformation of Japan and the new Philippine republic were cited as evidence of it. That was one reason the cataclysm in China had shaken them.

  MacArthur believed that the postwar struggle lay between Christian democracy and “imperialistic Communism.’ Most of the United States agreed—as Walter Lippmann pointed out, it is hard for Americans to feel secure in an environment not governed by Christian concepts—though there was a subtle difference between the General’s view and theirs. As the popularity of McCarthyism attested, they were more offended by Marxist zealots, particularly American Marxists, than by Sino-Soviet hunger for power. MacArthur, with his nineteenth-century credo, believed that the greater enemy was Muscovite adventurism. He would have been just as antagonistic toward them had a czar ruled in Moscow and mandarins in Peking. As he had repeatedly demonstrated in Tokyo, he was capable of adopting radical solutions as long as they weren’t called radical. He had always paid lip service to conservative shibboleths. In practice, he had ignored them. It was Truman, after all, who wanted to fight the Huks and Ho Chi Minh’s Viet Minh. It was MacArthur who had understood the motivation of both.14

  It is a massive irony that this Victorian liberal should have become the first commander of a United Nations army. Thanks to Warren Austin—and to the Russian walkout from the Security Council—UN prestige was now committed to the South Korean cause, and thirteen countries had promised troops if the United States committed its own ground forces. In his first press conference since the rupture of the Parallel, Truman had agreed with a reporter who had asked: “Would it be correct to call it a police action under the United Nations?” The phrase was unpopular in the United States; few Americans thought it an acceptable substitute for war, or felt allegiance to the world body. Many who did had doubts about the choice of a commander. James Reston wrote in the New York Times that “General Douglas MacArthur, at 70,” w
as being “asked to be not only a great soldier but a great statesman; not only to direct the battle, but to satisfy the Pentagon, the State Department, and the United Nations in the process.” Reston noted that unlike Eisenhower, with his “genius for international teamwork,” MacArthur “is a sovereign power in his own right, with stubborn confidence in his own judgment. Diplomacy and a vast concern for the opinions and sensitivities of others are the political qualities essential to this new assignment, and these are precisely the qualities General MacArthur has been accused of lacking in the past.”15

  In a little rite atop the Dai Ichi roof on July 14, J. Lawton Collins, then the army Chief of Staff, presented the Supreme Commander with the blue-and-white UN colors. Sonorously SCAP responded, “I accept this flag with the deepest emotion. . . .” The rest of his speech was forgettable. As a turn-of-the-century officer, bound by the oath he had taken on the plain at West Point in 1899, he could not transfer his loyalty from the Stars and Stripes to this bunting from Lake Success. It should be noted that this did not, however, prevent him from trying to exploit his dual allegiance. In the White House view, CINCFE’s chain of command ran from the army Chief of Staff through the Joint Chiefs to the President, who acted as agent for the United Nations. The General disagreed. As Sebald notes: “I recall several instances in which MacArthur’s status as a public official became a prime topic. In the light of subsequent events, there was more than academic significance to the question whether the General was acting purely as an American official in his positions as SCAP and United Nations commander or whether he was an international officer. In the prevailing Washington view, MacArthur was an American official, and subject to all the requirements of such a position. . . . The General had different ideas. . . . He expressed the opinion that SCAP was an international officer. He could be called to account, MacArthur said, only in consequence of an agreed Allied position. When I repeated the Washington attitude on this point, the General called it incorrect.”16

  Later this would cause problems, but apart from his attempts to manipulate his twin titles, CINCFE never mentioned the rooftop ceremony again. He even omits it from his memoirs. Possibly he thought it somewhat incongruous. In a way it was. The situation in Korea was Orwellian. A former ally of the United States, the Soviet Union, was championing a captive state, North Korea, in a conflict in which the South Korean foe was being supported by the United Nations, to which the Russians belonged, while the Soviets, meanwhile, were demanding the right to participate in treaty negotiations with a former enemy of the Americans and the Russians—Japan—which would bring peace between Japan, which was becoming the base for anti-Pyongyang forces, and the United States, now the Soviets’ archenemy. To crown it all, the grand alliance fighting the puny North Koreans seemed to face imminent defeat.

  Truman had begun the first week of the war by instructing MacArthur to supply the ROKs from his quartermaster’s stores. Then he had directed him to assist Rhee’s troops with air and sea support along the 38th Parallel. It wasn’t working. On the fifth day Brigadier John Church, sent to the front by MacArthur, reported that the situation appeared to be hopeless. The President approved warplane missions north of the Parallel, on the condition that bombardiers confine themselves to military targets. But flight times from Japanese airdromes were too great to make the missions effective. Therefore the White House authorized the transfer of a contingent of U.S. troops—men of the 507th Antiaircraft Artillery Battalion—to Korea. They were told to hold Suwon airfield while other American soldiers and sailors secured fields and docks in the vicinity of Pusan, on the southeast tip of the Korean peninsula. A deadly sequence was forming. Once aircraft are committed, they must have airstrips. Airstrips need ground crews, and these crews have to be protected by U.S. infantry. The same pattern would emerge later in Vietnam.17

  On Wednesday, the fourth day of the war, MacArthur decided that it was time he visited the front. At dusk he summoned four American correspondents to his Dai Ichi office. He told them he didn’t know whether U.S. air, naval, and logistical support would be enough to save the ROKs: “In past wars there has been only one way for me to learn such things. There is only one way now. I have decided to go to Korea and see for myself.” The Bataan would fly him there tomorrow, June 29. The plane was unarmed. He didn’t know where they would land; Kimpo field, the airstrip closest to Seoul, had been captured, and Suwon, twenty miles south of the capital, was considered unsafe. His staff wanted him to settle for Pusan, the port closest to Japan, but he rejected that; it was too far—two hundred miles—from the fighting. The reporters were invited to accompany him to Suwon, but he wanted them to know he couldn’t guarantee fighter cover. “If you’re not at the airport,” he said, “I’ll know you have other commitments.” All four replied that they would be there. He smiled. “I have no doubt of your courage,” he said. “I just wanted to give your judgment a chance to work.”18

  Thursday morning dawned windy, foggy, and rainy. A fine spray, whipped up by the parked Bataan’s propellers, hung in the air for a moment and then lashed back across the concrete runway. “The old man should be here any minute,” a lieutenant shouted to the newsmen, but the first general to appear was, not the commander in chief, but George E. Stratemeyer, Kenney’s successor as MacArthur’s air chief. According to Tony Story, the Bataan’s pilot, Stratemeyer told him they were grounded; ceiling was zero. Then MacArthur strode up with his jaunty, swinging gait, carrying field glasses and wearing faded, almost white suntans, a leather windbreaker, his crushed cap, and, despite the poor visibility, sunglasses. He promptly overruled Stratemeyer. The airman protested strenuously. The General said: “But you’d go yourself, wouldn’t you?” Stratemeyer answered: “Yes, but I don’t count. You’re a different matter.” The commander in chief turned to Story. He said: “We go.”19

  Airborne, he lit up his outsize corncob pipe. “I don’t smoke this back there in Tokyo,” he told one of the newspapermen; “they’d think I was a farmer.” The reporter noted that his fingers were quavering, but guessed it was from age, not fear; he was, after all, in his seventy-first year. Rising, he thrust his hands in his hip pockets and began pacing the aisle. “He’s always this way,” a staff officer told a newsman. “He’ll walk half the way there before we set down.” Stratemeyer had produced some cover, four Mustangs which hovered overhead like alert terriers, bunched together, wing tip to wing tip. They were needed; as the Bataan entered its glide pattern over Suwon, a Yak closed fast and dove toward it. An aide shouted “Mayday!” Everyone but MacArthur ducked. He darted to a window and saw a Mustang peeling off to intercept the North Korean fighter. “We’ve got him cold,” the General said eagerly, but Story took swift evasive action, depriving him of his ringside seat.20

  They made a rough landing on the pocked airstrip. Rhee, disheveled and distraught, greeted the General, and John Muccio led them to a nearby schoolhouse, temporary headquarters for the American advisers in the country. Brigadier Church stood by a wall map and explained the deteriorating situation. He had scarcely returned the pointer to its rack when MacArthur slapped his knee, rose, and said: “Let’s go up to the front and have a look.” In a black Dodge, trailed by a procession of jeeps, they drove north toward the Han River, the Han being to Seoul what the Potomac is to Washington.21

  In Plain Speaking Merle Miller quotes Acheson as saying, “General MacArthur flew over the battlefields’ that day. Actually SCAP spent eight hazardous hours touring the ROK lines. Eighteen In Min Gun divisions were smashing southward, and he and his entourage were surrounded by chaos. According to Russell Brines, one of the four correspondents who were there, they “drove through the swirling, defeated South Korean army and masses of bewildered, pathetic civilian refugees for a firsthand look at the battlefront. . . . Throughout the journey, the convoy constantly risked enemy air action, against which there was no adequate protection. . . . The crump of mortars was loud and clear, and the North Koreans could have seriously endangered the party with gunfire from
only moderately heavy artillery.”22

  Like Napoleon at Ratisbon, MacArthur “stood,” Willoughby writes, “on a little mound just off the road, clogged with retreating, panting columns of troops interspersed with ambulances filled with the groaning, broken men, the sky resonant with shrieking missiles of death and everywhere the stench and misery and utter desolation of a stricken battlefield.” Another aide recalls that the General’s “sharp profile” was “silhouetted against the black smoke clouds of Seoul as his eyes swept the terrain about him, his hands in his rear trouser pockets, and his long-stemmed pipe jutting upward as he swung his gaze over the pitiful evidence of the disaster.” SCAP himself later wrote: “Seoul was already in enemy hands. Only a mile away, I could see the towers of smoke rising from the ruins of this fourteenth-century city . . . . It was a tragic scene.”23

  Mangled corpses littered the south bank of the Han. The Americans had just missed a ghastly spectacle. Cabell Phillips wrote that “with the thunder of Communist guns roaring in the northern reaches of the city, a milling, screaming mass of humanity choked the river bridges, seeking a way to freedom. The destruction of these bridges had been ordained by the ROK high command as a last-ditch deterrent to the invaders. At 2:15 . . . the bridges were engulfed in simultaneous dynamite blasts, sending hundreds of refugees still struggling across them to a fiery death. Most of the ROK troops in Seoul, with their equipment and transport, were trapped on the north bank.” Now only one lone railroad bridge still spanned the Han. Enemy tanks and trucks could cross it at any instant. MacArthur studied it briefly through his field glasses. “Take it out,” he said, issuing an order for which he had, at that moment, no authority. Then, backing and filling in the narrow dirt road, the motorcade headed back toward Story and the waiting Bataan. Muccio phoned Sebald in Tokyo: “The Big Boy had a lot of guts and was magnificent.” No one knew then how magnificent; much later the General would reveal that during his twenty minutes on that little knoll he had conceived a great amphibious landing, tentatively coded “Bluehearts,” behind the North Koreans.24