American Caesar
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Not only could these problems not be resolved in two groggy hours on Wake; their very existence was unsuspected by either party. Pushing the pineapple plates away, they all rose and stretched. Vernice Anderson entered. (“Where did this lovely lady come from?” a startled MacArthur asked chivalrously. No one enlightened him.) The General entered a technical discussion with Bradley, Muccio conferred with the civilian advisers from Washington, and the President took a constitutional. By now MacArthur was looking at his watch. The presidential party had planned on a leisurely luncheon, but if the SCAP delayed its departure until afternoon, its return to Japan would have been thrown into the night hours. Disappointed, Truman settled for a little ceremony, pinning MacArthur’s fifth Distinguished Service Medal on his shirt and saying that the General had “so inspired his command by his vision, his judgment, his indomitable will and his unshakeable faith, that it has set a shining example of gallantry and tenacity in defense and of audacity in attack matched by but few operations in military history.” These words would be remembered when, asked if he repented of firing the General six months later, Truman replied: “The only thing I repent is that I didn’t do it two years sooner.”108
Truman decorating MacArthur with another Distinguished Service Medal on Wake.
Truman and MacArthur in car on Wake
The two then issued a bland, uninformative communique, typed by the helpful Miss Anderson. Truman told reporters, “I’ve never had a more satisfactory conference since I’ve been President.” MacArthur backed away from the press, saying, “All comments will have to come from the publicity man of the President.” Ross bridled. That wasn’t his title. Gunther observed that it was unlikely the Supreme Commander had “meant this as a slight; it is merely an example of his somewhat old-style way of expressing things.” Yet clearly he was uncomfortable in all this. Anthony Leviero wrote in the next day’s New York Times that Truman seemed “highly pleased with the results, like an insurance salesman who has signed up an important prospect, while the latter appeared dubious over the extent of the coverage.” The General’s mood wasn’t improved when the President, after wishing him “Happy landings,” rode off with his entourage, leaving MacArthur without transportation. Story unsuccessfully tried to hail a passing jeep. Finally he flagged down a Civil Aeronautics pickup truck, and he and the Supreme Commander bumped off in it.109
Back in Tokyo, having flown four thousand miles in thirty-three hours, MacArthur plunged into plans for delivering the coup de grace in Korea. He told Sebald that the meeting had gone as well as could be expected and made no comment when Muccio said he and the President had conducted themselves “magnificently.” There the matter would have rested had there been no sequel. But sequels were inevitable; the public wanted to know what had happened. In the San Francisco Opera House two days after the conference, Truman said he had “felt that there was pressing need to make it perfectly clear—by my talk with General MacArthur—that there is complete unity in the aims and conduct of our foreign policy.” He told reporters: “General MacArthur and I have talked fully about Formosa. There is no need to cover that subject again. The General and I are in complete agreement.” In the Dai Ichi a SCAP spokesman said: “There has been absolutely no change on General MacArthur’s part in any views he has held as to the strategic value of Formosa.” Three weeks later Stewart Alsop reported from the White House that on Wake MacArthur had assured the President there was no possibility of Chinese intervention in Korea. The editor of the Freeman wired the General, asking him to confirm or deny this. MacArthur replied: “The statement from Stewart Alsop quoted in your message of the 13th is entirely without foundation in fact. MacArthur, Tokyo, Japan.”110
The possibilities for mischief raised by Wake were endless. There had been no record of the MacArthur-Truman exchange in the Quonset hut. Miss Anderson’s shorthand notes on the second session are suspect. Each of the two men had heard what he wanted to hear. The President needed the General’s support on the Formosa question, so he would claim that it had been pledged on the island. MacArthur did much the same thing; when the Joint Chiefs radioed him that he was exceeding his instructions, he would answer that those instructions had been changed in his conversation with Truman. Acheson had been right. The meeting had been a dreadful idea. Many men would pay for it with their lives.111
Eventually paranoiacs exhaust their credibility. MacArthur had long since lost his. The Joint Chiefs were undismayed, therefore, when, in the autumn of 1950, he began claiming that his “strategic movements” were being betrayed to the Communists. “That there was some leak in intelligence,” he later wrote, “was evident to everyone. Walker continually complained to me that his operations were known to the enemy in advance through sources in Washington. “ But the General had sounded the alarm so often in the past that the Pentagon ignored him. Cabell Phillips of the New York Times doubtless spoke for both the press corps and the administration when he called SCAP’s claim “farfetched.”112
This time, however, his suspicions may have been justified. That fall the first secretary of the British embassy to the United States was H.A.R. “Kim” Philby. The second secretary was Guy Burgess. And the head of England’s American Department in London was Donald Maclean. Because the Commonwealth brigade was fighting in Korea, copies of all messages between the Pentagon and the Dai Ichi were passed along to the Attlee government through the embassy on Massachusetts Avenue and the American Department in Whitehall. Philby and Burgess sat on the top-secret Inter-Allied Board, and Philby acted as liaison officer between the CIA and the U.K. Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). It is a shocking fact that all three men were Communist agents. On May 25, 1951, Burgess and Maclean, warned by Philby that MI5, Foreign Office (FO) Security, and Scotland Yard were closing in on them, would defect to the Soviet Union. Philby himself would hold on for nearly twelve more years, finally slipping into Russia via Beirut on January 27, 1963.113
Of this roguish triumvirate the New Yorker’s Rebecca West has written: “Every secret they learned during their official lives was certainly transmitted to the Soviet Union.” Secretary of the Army Wilbur M. Brucker examined Defense Department files and reported on February 17, 1956—before Philby’s defection—that “Burgess and Maclean had secrets of priceless value to the Communist conspiracy.” James M. Gavin, an officer untainted by McCarthyism, recalls that during his service in the last critical months of 1950, the enemy repeatedly displayed an uncanny knowledge of UN troop deployment. He says: “I have no doubt whatever that the Chinese moved confidently and skillfully into North Korea, and, in fact, I believe that they were able to do this because they were well-informed not only of the moves Walker would make but of the limitations on what he might do. At the time, it was difficult to account for this,” he continues, but he is “quite sure now that all of MacArthur’s plans flowed into the hands of the Communists through the British Foreign Office.” In his Reminiscences MacArthur observes that after the war “an official leaflet by General Lin Piao published in China read: ‘I would never have made the attack and risked my men and military reputation if I had not been assured that Washington would restrain General MacArthur from taking adequate retaliatory measures against my lines of supply and communication.’ ” Vice Admiral A. E. Jarrell notes of this pamphlet that the Chinese general revealed that he had learned of this decision through disclosures “by British diplomats Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean.” Assuming that MacArthur and Jarrell had acquired an accurate translation of such a leaflet—neither this writer nor Asian scholars at Harvard and Brown have been able to trace the original—it is of course possible that Lin was merely attempting to plant seeds of fresh discord between the United States and the United Kingdom, but in the light of what is known about the Philby conspirators and the pattern of events on the Korean peninsula that autumn, it seems fair to suggest that the Chinese general may have been confirming what was already suspected. Certainly it would go far toward explaining the war’s course after the Wake meeting.*
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The key date is November 1, 1950, seventeen days after Wake. On that Wednesday Maclean was appointed chief of Whitehall’s American desk. As an FO department head, his name went to the top of all distribution lists for classified material reaching London from Washington. With Philby and Burgess already in position, monitoring CIA and Defense Department developments, the three-man apparatus would have been able to tell the enemy, not only what the UN commander was going to do, but, as Gavin notes, what he could not do. For example, a CIA memorandum approved by Truman shortly after the President’s return to Washington recommended MacArthur make no moves against Chinese units which were entering North Korea to take up positions around the Sui-Ho electric plant and other installations along the Yalu. Philby and Burgess would have known of this vital decision a few hours after it was made, and a copy of the document itself would have been in Maclean’s possession the following morning. The text could have been in Moscow within a week at the outside, and it might then have been sent straight to Peking and thence to Lin Piao’s headquarters. On that assumption, it is hardly surprising that Lin anticipated MacArthur’s moves and was ready to foil them. Not until the UN rout reached disastrous proportions, and the General was improvising so fast that Washington and the Philby agents couldn’t keep up with him, was he able to match the foe blow by blow.115
Philby and Burgess were already relaying embassy bumf to the Russians, but Maclean, under a psychiatrist’s care, had not yet taken over the American desk in London when the General, back from his talks with the President, mapped out the moves which, he believed, would swiftly lead to the UN occupation of North Korea. During his brief Sunday absence Russian flak shot down an American F-80 which had been patrolling the Yalu, and on Monday a Chinese regiment was spotted crossing the river and marching toward the Chosen and Fusen dams. Brushing aside these reports, MacArthur ordered a general UN advance. He planned a great double envelopment to pin the In Min Gun remnants against the banks of the Yalu, with an X Corps pincer sweeping up from Wonsan in a series of complex amphibious maneuvers on the right, an Eighth Army pincer attacking from the vicinity of Pyongyang on the left, and ROKs holding the center.116
The ROKs were the weak link. They were understrength and unable to maintain contact with the two wings because of the mountainous spine that divides North Korea vertically—precipices and canyons crossed by sketchy dirt trails that lead nowhere. Nevertheless the General was supremely confident. On Friday Pyongyang fell to the hard-charging Eighth Army while an airborne regiment was dropped thirty miles to the north, cutting off the fleeing North Koreans’ escape route. The UN commander watched from a plane overhead, accompanied by his favorite war correspondents—“Of course I’m partial,” he said to the newsmen not invited; “that’s my privilege”—and when he landed in Kim II Sung’s lost capital he struck a pose and called out, “Any celebrities here to greet me? Where’s Kim Buck Too?”117
The war, he told the reporters, was virtually over, though he confided to Walker that he was worried about his overextended supply lines. Walker shared his concern, but PA resistance was so feeble that MacArthur sent a dozen widely scattered spearheads probing toward the Chongchon River in the northwest and the Changjin hydroelectric complex in the northeast. He advised the Pentagon that he needed no more reinforcements; ships en route to Pusan could be diverted to Japan or Hawaii, and other transports could prepare to carry the 2nd Division to Europe. It was at this point that he began to get careless. Aware that winter would be upon him in less than a month, freezing the Yalu and turning it into a highway for Chinese infantrymen, he decided to lift the restriction on non-ROK troops venturing beyond the peninsula “neck”—the point just north of Pyongyang where it narrows to less than a hundred miles—and into the northeastern provinces bordering China and the Soviet Union. On Tuesday, October 24, four days after the seizure of Pyongyang, he ordered X Corps and the Eighth Army to “drive forward with all speed and full utilization of their forces.”118
This looked very much like a flouting of his September 27 orders from the Joint Chiefs. Acheson later wrote: “If General Marshall and the Chiefs had proposed withdrawal to the Pyongyang-Wonsan line and a continuous defensive position under united command across it—and if the President had backed them, as he undoubtedly would have—disaster probably would have been averted. But it would have meant a fight with MacArthur.” The Pentagon was unwilling to risk that fight. Intimidated by the victor of Inchon, the Chiefs timidly radioed him that while they realized that CINCFE “undoubtedly had sound reason” for his move, they would like an explanation, “since the action contemplated” was a “matter of concern” to them. MacArthur replied that he was taking “all precautions,” that the September 27 order was not a “final directive” because Marshall had amended it two days later by telling him that he wanted SCAP to “feel unhampered tactically and strategically” in proceeding “north of the 38th Parallel,” and that “military necessity” compelled him to disregard it anyhow because the ROKs lacked “strength and leadership.” If the Chiefs had further questions, he referred them to the White House. The entire subject, he said, had been “covered” in his “conference with the President at Wake Island.”119
That was news to Harry Truman. On Thursday he weakly told a press conference that it was his “understanding” that only South Koreans would approach the Yalu. Informed of this, the General contradicted him through the press, saying, “The mission of the United Nations forces is to clear Korea.” The Pentagon advised the President to ignore this challenge from SCAP because of a firmly established U.S. military tradition—established by Lincoln with Grant in 1864—that once a field commander had been assigned a mission “there must be no interference with his method of carrying it out.” That, and MacArthur’s tremendous military prestige, persuaded Truman to hold his tongue. He did more than hold it; he endorsed SCAP’s strategy in a statement declaring that he would not allow North Koreans to take refuge in a “privileged sanctuary” across the Yalu. Later MacArthur would use that phrase in a different context, but the President said it first.120
Acheson, deeply disturbed, was doing everything he could to assure Peking, through the United Nations and through statements of his own. A UN Interim Committee promised that it would “fully support” the Manchurian border, a six-power resolution introduced into the Security Council pledged full protection of “Chinese and Korean interests in the frontier zone,” and the State Department declared that Americans had no “ulterior design in Manchuria.” Finally, Truman declared: “We have never at any time entertained any intention to carry hostilities into China; so far as the United States is concerned, I wish to state unequivocally that because of our deep devotion to the cause of world peace, and our long-standing friendship for the people of China, we will take every honorable step to prevent any extension of hostilities in the Far East.” It was too late, wrote James Reston in the next day’s Times: “Some well-informed persons here believe such a statement, if made when the United Nations troops took the North Korean capital, might have prevented . . . intervention, particularly if the United States had also offered to allow a United Nations peace commission to take over a buffer zone on the Korean side of the Chinese frontier.” Instead, Peking had heard other, more ominous voices—Rhee saying, “The war cannot stop at the Yalu River,” and Senator William F. Knowland of California asking, “Why not a neutral zone ten miles north of the Yalu River?” Statements at odds with these were a “mixture of honeymooned words and threats,” said Peking, meant to “soften up public opinion for an advance right up to the Chinese frontier and eventually across it.”121
Only Chinese “volunteers” were crossing into Korea, a spokesman for Mao insisted, arguing that they were following such honorable precedents as Lafayette’s volunteers in the American Revolution and the American and British volunteer brigades which fought in the Spanish civil war during the 1930s. MacArthur at first believed that the newcomers “will prove to be Manchurian-bred Koreans. ”
One thing was certain: there were a lot of them. As early as October 26 Hanson Baldwin reported in the Times that there were about 250,000 Chinese soldiers near the Korean frontier and 200,000 actually in Korea. Baldwin reported that “it is considered natural for the Chinese Communists to strengthen their frontier, for Mao may believe that Manchuria is next on the timetable.” What neither Baldwin nor anyone else on the UN side realized was that this massive force was stealthily encircling UN forward units as they moved north. The very presence of the Chinese there was largely unknown. Even after they had been detected MacArthur seemed not to be alert to the danger. One wonders why. At Inchon he had told Howard Handelman of U.S. News and World Report that “I believe that an American ground invasion of China would be the worst tragedy of all. No people has ever conquered China. It is too big.” Perhaps he distinguished between the Korean peninsula and mainland Asia, or perhaps he believed a CIA assessment, which concluded that Chinese troops would stay on the defensive, protecting the power plants along the Yalu.122
In the last days of October a South Korean force nearing the Yalu was almost wiped out by Chinese troops which seemed to come from nowhere. Next the ROK 1st Division was reported to be “heavily engaged with a fiercely resisting enemy,” about forty miles south of the frontier. Elements of Mao’s 40th Corps were identified; then X Corps began picking up Chinese prisoners as far south as Hamhung, on the right. MacArthur noted this on October 29, but described the situation as “not alarming.” Three days later a marine battalion in X Corps, a ROK division, and a unit of the 1st Cavalry Division along the Chongchon River, on the left, found themselves in fierce fights with Chinese riflemen and machine gunners who, after inflicting severe casualties on the UN forces, abruptly broke off action and faded into the hills. MacArthur acknowledged that “temporarily,” at least, he faced a fresh foe. Elements of five of Mao’s divisions from the 38th and 40th route armies—the units which had been guarding the coast against KMT raids from Formosa, freed now by the intervention of the Seventh Fleet—were mounting a scattered offensive. GIs and Chinese were “now in contact.” In fact, the New York Times reported, “Chinese Communist hordes, attacking on horse and foot to the sound of bugle calls, cut up Americans and South Koreans at Unsan today in an Indian-style massacre,” and pilots reconnoiter-ing the Manchurian border saw “considerable movement” north of it.123