American Caesar

by William Manchester

  Returning from this, the first of what would be seventeen flights to Korean battlefields, he remained seated on the Bataan, puffing his corncob, spectacles perched on his nose, scrawling his appraisal of South Korean chances on a yellow scratch pad with a soft pencil. Clearly, he wrote, the ROKs couldn’t defend their own country. In Japan he had only his four U.S. infantry divisions, all one-third below strength, and the lone regiment. He knew that an American battleground commitment now would mean “entry into action ‘as is.’ No time out for recruiting rallies or to build up and get ready.” It would be “move in—and shoot.” This would “put the bulk of the burden on the G.I.” In an aside to an aide he said that he knew his occupation troops were “unprepared to fight a war on such short notice,” that soft duty had “taken its toll.” Characteristically, he assumed no responsibility for this, blaming “frills and fancies” inspired in the Pentagon which “militated against producing good soldiers.” He had told Major Bowers that “a soldier’s first duty is to keep fit,” but he had let his men grow flabby. Somebody else had blundered. MacArthur didn’t make mistakes. Other men did, undermining him, making his tasks harder.25

  Nevertheless, in his role as a fighting general he was the absolute professional, and he gave Washington his impersonal opinion: “The only assurance for holding the present line and the ability to regain later the lost ground is through the introduction of United States combat forces into the Korean battle area. To continue to utilize the forces of our air and navy without an effective ground element cannot be decisive. If authorized, it is my intention to immediately move a United States regimental combat team to the reinforcement of the vital area discussed and to provide for a possible build-up to two-division strength from the troops in Japan for an early counteroffensive. Unless provision is made for the full utilization of the Army-Navy-Air team in this shattered area, our mission will at best be needlessly costly in life, money, and prestige. At worst, it might even be doomed to failure.”26

  He realized that this recommendation was political, not military. Strategically, he still believed that Korea lay well outside America’s defensive perimeter in the Pacific, but he was convinced that, given the men and the guns, he could save Rhee’s regime. Unfortunately, there was a catch here, the seed of a grievous misunderstanding. Truman, Acheson, and the Joint Chiefs were pursuing a negative goal: the ejection of the invaders. The war they foresaw would resemble the wars of Frederick the Great in that it would be a struggle for limited objectives. But MacArthur assumed that his purpose was to defeat the enemy. Years afterward he wrote: “The American tradition had always been that once our troops are committed to battle, the full power and means of the nation would be mobilized and dedicated to fight for victory—not for stalemate or compromise. And I set out to chart the strategic course which would make that victory possible. Not by the wildest stretch of imagination did I dream that this tradition might be broken.”27

  It was 5:00 P.M. in Tokyo—3:00 A.M. in Washington—when the General reached his Dai Ichi office. Immediately he teleconned his report to the Pentagon, where the duty officer roused Chief of Staff Collins, who was sleeping on a cot upstairs in an anteroom to the Joint Chiefs’ quarters. Collins replied that this issue was too momentous for the Chiefs; it would have to be laid before Truman later in the morning. MacArthur objected. Time was the enemy’s ally. The North Koreans would soon be racing toward Pusan. He wanted an immediate answer. Reluctantly Collins called Secretary of the Army Frank Pace at 4:30. Pace telephoned the White House at 5:00 A.M. and was surprised to learn that the President, always an early riser, had shaved, dressed, and breakfasted, and was seated at his oval office desk, ready to make decisions.28

  Ever since Roosevelt had goaded the Japanese into attacking Pearl Harbor, the war-making powers of Congress had been atrophying. Truman believed in what John W. Spanier approvingly called “his right to send American troops anywhere in the world to protect American interests,” and journalists of all persuasions supported him; Richard H. Rovere later wrote in the New Yorker that the “President of the United States has the right to take whatever action he deems necessary in any area he judges to be related to the defense of this country, regardless of whether it is related to the defense of Formosa or anything else.” So the chief executive felt no obligation to consult senators and congressmen. He did, however, tell Pace that he wanted to call a few advisers. The previous evening Chiang Kai-shek, in a shrewd political move, had responded to the UN resolution to “render such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack” by volunteering to send thirty-three thousand of his “best equipped” KMT troops. Truman writes in his memoirs that he “told Acheson that my first reaction was to accept this offer because I wanted . . . to see as many members of the United Nations as possible take part in the Korean action.” Acheson, already awake, studying Muccio’s report, was appalled by the President’s proposal. In Present at the Creation he explains: “I argued against on the ground that these troops would be more useful defending Formosa than Korea.” In addition, he predicted that KMT reinforcements of the ROKs would bring Mao into the peninsula. The President wasn’t so sure—“I was,” he writes, “still inclined to accept the Chinese offer”—but the Joint Chiefs, polled by phone, told him they regarded Chiang’s men as untried, ill-trained, and ill-equipped.* Therefore Truman, agreeing to grant SCAP full authority to use the ground forces under his command, gave the go-ahead to Pace, who gave it to Collins, who gave it to MacArthur. Later in the morning the White House announced that the President had “authorized the United States Air Force to conduct military missions on specific military targets in Northern Korea” and had “ordered a naval blockade of the entire Korean coast.” Then, tersely: “General MacArthur has been authorized to use certain ground units.” In less than twenty-four hours the first battalions of American infantry were being flown from northern Honshu to Pusan.29

  Later the General would bitterly protest the enemy’s “privileged sanctuary” in Manchuria, but he ignored his own sanctuary in the Japanese islands. It is a tribute to his successful five-year proconsulship that he could strip Dai Nippon of every U.S. combat unit in the islands without jeopardizing his bases there. Ichiro Ohno, Tokyo’s vice-minister of foreign affairs, told Sebald that “ninety-nine percent of all Japanese support the Korean operation, despite the widespread antiwar sentiment throughout the country.” They did more than endorse it; Japan became an important supplier for UN forces on the peninsula. Airfields built by Nipponese became invaluable to MacArthur’s Far East Command, Japanese vessels carried UN troops across the Korea Strait, Japanese minesweepers swept both coasts of the peninsula, and Nipponese stevedores volunteered to cross the strait and unload cargo in such front-line ports as Wonsan, Hungnam, and Inchon. This naturally infuriated the Russians. Major General A. P. Kislenko, then the Soviet member of the Allied Council in Tokyo, drew up a long bill of particulars documenting Nipponese cooperation in the UN effort, but, Sebald recalls, “Although he evidently expected to create an adverse reaction in Japan strong enough to raise demands for strict noninvolvement, he received no support whatsoever from the Japanese press or public.”30

  Had they found Kislenko’s arguments persuasive, had they chosen to remain aloof, MacArthur would have been driven from the peninsula. It was a close shave as it was. The enemy “crossed the Han,” MacArthur recalled, “and South Korean resistance became increasingly unsuccessful.” The first GIs from Japan were little help. Americans had assumed that the fighting would take on a new aspect once those two U.S. divisions—the 24th and 25th—arrived in Korea. If the North Koreans didn’t panic and flee, it was thought, they would at least lose their momentum. In fact, the U.S. units began crumbling as fast as those of their new ROK allies. MacArthur’s hopes that two U.S. divisions could check the enemy had been dashed. 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 o
f them had seen action in World War II. Their only antitank weapons were obsolete bazookas, hopelessly ineffective against the mighty Soviet T-34S. Isolated and cut off from one another, many, including the commander of the 24th, surrendered in the first days before learning that the In Min Gun took few prisoners. More often the PA tied the hands of captives behind their backs and bayoneted them. GIs then became afflicted with “bugout fever”—a yearning to return to their comfortable billets in Japan. Defeatism crept into the high command. Correspondents wrote grimly of an imminent “American Dunkirk.”

  MacArthur sent the Joint Chiefs a request for five more divisions and was outraged when they demurred, explaining that they were buttressing U.S. forces in NATO against the possibility of Russian moves there. At least in the early 1940s, he fumed, there had been a war in Europe. Now troops were being sent to a continent where, he believed, Soviet commanders were adopting a defensive stance, while the Pacific basin, around which most of the human race lived, was being shortchanged. It was “the old faulty issue of ‘priorities,’ “ he wrote, “under which the Far East was again at the bottom of the list.” The quarrel was familiar, but this time it was invested with long-range significance which both he and the Chiefs missed. If Washington was determined to increase and strengthen U.S. commitments to NATO despite the growing demands of the Korean War, the Korean effort must be finite, a prospect which the General, either then or later, could not accept. The short-range implications were also somber, but here MacArthur found an imaginative solution. He introduced what he called a “buddy” system, under which each GI was assigned a ROK to fight beside him. This immediately increased his Eighth Army by thirty thousand men. Then he set about doing what he did best, outwitting a powerful foe by skillful disposition of his own forces.31

  His most perceptive critics give him high marks here. Spanier writes that although self-assurance and self-confidence “were responsible for some of MacArthur’s more reprehensible qualities . . . they were also the virtues which heartened and benefited the free world in the dark days of July and August 1950.” Rovere and Schlesinger conclude that “he did what he had to do superbly.” The General himself summed up his plan in four words: “Trade space for time”—time to land more men from Japan; time to bring in heavy weapons, tanks, and supplies. His tactics were both brilliant and unorthodox. As he testified on Capitol Hill the following spring, he hoped by an

  arrogant display of strength to fool the enemy into the belief that I had a much greater resource at my disposal than I did. I managed to throw in a part of two battalions of infantry, who put up a magnificent resistance before they were destroyed—a resistance which resulted, perhaps, in one of the most vital successes that we had. The enemy undoubtedly could not understand that we would make an effort with such small forces. Instead of rushing rapidly forward to Pusan, which he could have reached within a week, without the slightest difficulty, he stopped to deploy his artillery. . . . We gained ten days by that process. . . . By that time we had landed . . . the First Cavalry Division on the east coast, and they moved over and formed a line of battle. . . . From that time on I never had the slightest doubt about our ability to hold a beachhead. And on July 19, in the first communique that I recall I issued, I predicted that we would not be driven into the sea.32

  The Pentagon wasn’t so sure; neither was the American public. Osan, Yongdok, Danong, Chinong’mi, the Naktong Bulge—the strange names appeared in U.S. headlines as a succession of front-page maps depicted the Pusan perimeter, smaller each day. Ferocious PA attacks nearly chewed the 24th Division to bits and threw the survivors out of Taejon in July; then In Min Gun columns began hammering the 25th at Taegu, the main U.S. supply base and communications hub. “Gloomy and doubtful as was the situation at this time,” MacArthur said, “the news reports painted it much worse than it actually was.” Certainly those dispatches were dark. Correspondents were wondering whether, in the tough phrase of the time, the General might “run out of real estate.” But Walton “Johnnie” Walker, CINCFE’s troop commander, sounded equally desperate. “There must be no further yielding under pressure of the enemy,” he said, rallying his men. “From now on let every man stand or die.”33

  Then, as July melted into August, the long retreat ended. Infantrymen of the 27th Regiment and their ROK buddies dug in their heels and stopped the Red tide at the walls of Taegu. MacArthur had been vindicated. The New York Times observed editorially that welcome as the news from the battlefront was, the chief “cause for satisfaction and assurance surely to be found is the fact that it is Douglas MacArthur who directs this effort in the field. Fate could not have chosen a man better qualified to command the unreserved confidence of the people of this country. Here is a superb strategist and an inspired leader; a man of infinite patience and quiet stability under adverse pressure; a man equally capable of bold and decisive action . . . . In every home in the United States today there must be a sure conviction that if any man can carry out successfully the task which Truman and the Security Council of the United Nations have given him . . . that man is the good soldier in Tokyo who has long since proved to the hilt his ability to serve his country well.”

  MacArthur reported that he believed that “the enemy’s plan and great opportunity depended on the speed with which he could overrun South Korea, once he had breached the Han and with overwhelming numbers and with superior weapons shattered South Korean resistance. This chance he has now lost through the extraordinary speed with which the Eighth Army has been deployed from Japan to stem his rush.” Late in August nine North Korean infantry divisions and one armored division staged a massive attack in an attempt to overpower the defenders, but by now the General had U.S. tanks and heavy artillery ashore, and the In Min Gun, weakened by casualties, its supply lines mercilessly savaged by Stratemeyer’s bombers, was losing some of its vim. MacArthur’s troops held on a 145-mile arc where, as summer waned, the lines of opposing trenches steadily grew stronger.34

  Within that arc, which was small enough to be quickly crossed by jeep, the stockpiles of UN men and steel around Pusan grew larger every week. The 1st Cavalry Division arrived from Japan and the 2nd Infantry from home; then came two thousand Tommies from Hong Kong, the first of forty thousand Commonwealth soldiers, followed by Frenchmen, Turks, Dutchmen, and Filipinos—the van of supporting units from thirteen other UN members. A Times correspondent cabled home: “The outskirts of Pusan to a depth of fifteen miles have become a vast arsenal and supply depot. Forty-five ton Pershing tanks with their 90-mm guns are arriving in quantity. So are the big 155-mm howitzers. There is plenty of oil, fuel, and motor transport. There are supplies for a winter campaign—tents, heaters, sleeping bags, and cold weather clothing.” 35

  It was a draw, and newspapermen wondered how it could become anything else. The mood of the GIs was fatalistic. They sang: “The Dhow, the Gizee, and Rhee / What do they want from me?”

  Douglas MacArthur was too gifted a strategist to be bottled up indefinitely in a narrow enclave, however. Operation Bluehearts, originally scheduled for July 22, had been canceled because every available soldier had been needed in the southeastern tip of Korea that month, but soon he would have plenty of men. The United States, led by its President, was thoroughly aroused. 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 quickly as possible. To be sure, many of the replacements were neither enthusiastic nor cheerful. No one called them gung ho; a Corporal Stephen Zeg of Chicago doubtless spoke for thousands of others in the perimeter when he told a reporter: “I’ll fight for my country, but I’ll be damned if I can see why I’m fighting to save this hellhole.” Yet there were few organized protests against the war at home and fewer demonstrations. The new infantrymen were the younger brothers of the men who had fought in World War II. Patriotism was still strong, and the early rout of GIs by the In Min Gun had stung the country’s pride.36

  Heavy fighting continued alon
g the hot, dusty, four-thousand-square-mile beachhead fanning out around the port of Pusan—the first two weeks of September were particularly bloody—but the General, with complete mastery of sea and air, assured Washington that he now had “a secure base.” Losses were no longer greater than arriving replacements. His infantry outnumbered the foe, ninety-two thousand to seventy thousand, and each day he had more materiel. As early as late July, convinced that “the period of piecemeal entry into action” was over, that “the fight for time against space’ was won, he had felt confident enough to entrust the safety of the battlefield to Walker while he flew to Formosa for a conference with Chiang Kai-shek.37

  MacArthur had agreed with Washington’s decision to decline Chiang’s offer of three KMT divisions. Stilwell had warned him that the Chinese Nationalist army was “led largely by mere jobholders and sustained only by its numbers, American support, and a cadre of leaders committed to a dogged defense of [the] old China.” If the General needed raw manpower, he had plenty of eager South Korean volunteers. The prospect of transporting thirty-three thousand men from Formosa was a logistical nightmare, the commander in chief concluded, so he advised the Pentagon that “the Chinese Nationalist contingent would be an albatross around our neck.” At the same time, he couldn’t ignore the generalissimo—the “Gimo,” as he was known to old China hands. Truman had charged him with the defense of Chiang’s island (“You are to repel any attack upon Formosa and the Pescadores”) and MacArthur felt it “necessary,” in his words, “to visit the island in order to determine its military capabilities for defense.” Moreover, Washington wanted him to go. In its response to the KMT aide-memoire of June 29, the U.S. had advised Taipei that no final decision could be reached on the offer of the three divisions until the General could spare the time to consult with KMT authorities. In the last ten days of July the Joint Chiefs had repeatedly reminded MacArthur of their anxiety over the Formosa situation, and two of the Chiefs, Collins and Hoyt Vandenberg, had flown to Tokyo to explain the President’s concern over possible Nationalist raids on the mainland. The General was given the unenviable job of explaining to Chiang, as tactfully as possible, that the Seventh Fleet would intercept any such raiders and send them home.38