by H. W. Brands
14
MARGUERITE HIGGINS WASN’T yet thirty when the Korean War began, but she was already a veteran war reporter. Born in Hong Kong, where her father worked in international trade, she had covered the final campaigns of World War II in Europe for the New York Herald Tribune, which sent her to Germany for the postwar Nuremberg trials. She observed the Berlin airlift, about which she quizzed Lucius Clay. The Herald Tribune subsequently dispatched her to Japan to report on the MacArthur occupation.
Maggie Higgins was blond and attractive and determined not to let those attributes keep her from getting the stories she sought. She was in Tokyo watching MacArthur when the fighting in Korea began. “The Red invasion of South Korea on Sunday, June 25, 1950, exploded in Tokyo like a delayed-action bomb,” she wrote. “The first reports of the dawn attack were nonchalantly received by the duty officer at the Dai Ichi building. He didn’t even bother to wake General MacArthur and tell him. But within a few hours the swift advance warned us of the power of the attackers. South Korea, the last non-Communist outpost in North Asia, was crumbling. America had to decide at once whether to lend fighting support to its South Korean protégé or cede it outright to the Reds.”
The decision hadn’t been made when Higgins reached the front lines of the fighting. She and three other reporters hitched a ride on an American transport plane sent to evacuate American civilians from Seoul, and they arrived amid the chaos of the South Korean retreat. “There were hundreds of Korean women with babies bound papoose-style to their backs and huge bundles on their heads,” she recounted. “There were scores of trucks, elaborately camouflaged with branches. South Korean soldiers in jeeps and on horses were streaming in both directions.” She spoke to an American colonel attached to the Korean Military Advisory Group, or KMAG, about why the South Koreans weren’t making a better show of things. “The South Koreans have a pathological fear of tanks,” the colonel said. “That is part of the reason for all this retreating. They could handle them if they would only use the weapons we have given them properly.” Higgins later had reason to doubt the colonel’s explanation, but for the moment it seemed to explain what she saw.
The same American officer blamed the South Koreans for botching the retreat. Higgins was riding in a U.S. Army jeep with an American lieutenant toward a bridge over the Han River—“the only escape route,” she wrote. “As we raced through the rainy darkness a sheet of orange flame tore the sky. ‘Good God, there goes the bridge,’ said the lieutenant.” Their escape route blocked, the lieutenant and Higgins turned back toward the city, where the colonel regathered the three score members of his staff. “The South Koreans blew up that bridge without even bothering to give us warning, and they blew it much too soon,” he said. “Most of the town is still in their hands. They blew that bridge with truckloads of their own troops on the main span. They’ve killed hundreds of their own men.”
Higgins eventually found an alternate route across the Han River, where she encountered MacArthur, on his first visit to the battle zone. She needed to get back to Japan so she could file her story for the Herald Tribune, and the general offered her a lift on the Bataan. The plane had just taken off when MacArthur’s aide, Courtney Whitney, told her the general would like to see her in his cabin. She gladly accepted the offer and found herself charmed. “In personal conversation General MacArthur is a man of graciousness and great lucidity,” she recorded later. “So far as I am concerned, he is without the poseur traits of which I have heard him accused. It has always seemed to me most unfortunate that the general held himself so aloof from most of the newspapermen in Tokyo. I am convinced that if he would spare the time, even once a month, to see correspondents, he would dissolve most of the hostility felt toward his command and toward him personally.”
Higgins was impressed by MacArthur’s decisiveness and confidence. In a voice that exuded self-assurance, he told her, “It is certain that the South Koreans badly need an injection of ordered American strength. The South Koreans are in good physical condition and could be rallied with example and leadership. Give me two American divisions and I can hold Korea.” The general wasn’t sure Washington shared his confidence. “The moment I reach Tokyo, I shall send President Truman my recommendation for the immediate dispatch of American divisions to Korea,” he said. “But I have no idea whether he will accept my recommendation.”
While MacArthur made his recommendation to Washington, Higgins sent her story to New York. She caught the next plane back to Korea to gather more material. This time she rode on an American transport hauling supplies to Suwon, to which the South Korean army had retreated. “As our heavy, unarmed ammunition ship rumbled off the runway the crew was in a fine state of nerves,” she recorded. “For the past two days Yak fighters”—Communist warplanes—“had been spurting bullets at the Suwon strip. The day before a transport had been shot down going into the same field.” The transport pilot was a veteran of the Pacific war and took his new job matter-of-factly. “In a few minutes we reach hot weather,” he said as they approached the war zone. “Put on your chutes and grab a helmet.” Then he glanced back at the cargo he was carrying: 155-millimeter artillery shells. “Though I don’t know what in Christ good a chute will do if we do get hit.”
They dodged the incoming fire and landed heavily. The pilot had to brake hard to stop short of wrecked planes piled at the end of the runway. Higgins climbed out and immediately faced a familiar challenge. “I was greeted by a dour army colonel,” she wrote. “He was the nervous, officious type that the Army seems to have a talent for producing. ‘You’ll have to go back, young lady,’ the colonel said. ‘You can’t stay here. There may be trouble.’ Somewhat wearily, I brought out my stock answer to this solicitude. ‘I wouldn’t be here if there were no trouble. Trouble is news, and the gathering of news is my job.’ ”
While the colonel was beginning to reiterate his prohibition, Higgins spied a jeep approaching, driven by the lieutenant she had met before. “Hey, Lieutenant!” she shouted. “How about a ride back to headquarters?” The lieutenant, unaware of the colonel’s comments and pleased to chauffeur a pretty woman, nodded assent. “As the jeep swept by I jumped aboard and we were off before the colonel could do anything but sputter,” Higgins recalled.
American officers flown in from Japan had reinforced the existing advisory group, but their numbers and influence were too small to stem the ROK retreat. “The moment the jeep rattled into the pine-dotted Suwon headquarters I sensed another crisis,” Higgins recounted. “It was 6 P.M. In the main wooden building little knots of officers were talking in low voices. Major Greenwood of KMAG spotted me as I got out of the jeep, walked over with elaborate casualness, and said, ‘Don’t go far away from headquarters. It looks bad again.’ ” His advice was prescient, as Higgins soon discovered. “The events of that evening provided the most appalling example of panic that I have ever seen.”
The panic began when the temporary headquarters received reports that North Korean tank units had somehow crossed the Han River and were rapidly approaching Suwon. Higgins and two other reporters were eavesdropping outside a conference room where American officers were consulting their South Korean counterparts. “Suddenly the doors of the conference room scraped open. We heard the thump of running feet and a piercing voice, addressed to the officers within the room: ‘Head for the airfield!’ ”
Higgins pushed her way into the conference room to find out what was going on. She was abruptly told she wasn’t allowed in the room. But she blocked an American colonel who was trying to get out. She demanded to know why the warning said to go to the airfield. “Why, if there is something wrong, don’t we all take the road south to Taejon?”
“We’re surrounded,” the colonel said. “We’re surrounded.” He pushed past her, evidently intending to reach the airfield as soon as possible.
“The panic of the next few minutes jumbled events and emotions so wildly that I can remember only episodic flashes,” Higgins recalled. “I remembe
r a furious sergeant stalking out of the Signal Corps room and saying to Keyes”—Keyes Beech of the Chicago Daily News—“ ‘Those sons of bitches are trying to save their own hides. There are planes coming, but the brass won’t talk. They’re afraid there won’t be room for everybody.’ ” The sergeant’s suspicions spread rapidly. “The rumor that the officers were trying to escape without the rest swirled around the camp like a dust storm. From then on every mess sergeant, jeep driver, code clerk, and correspondent had just one idea—to get hold of every and any vehicle around. Any South Korean who owned four wheels and was unlucky enough to be near headquarters that night was on foot from that second forward. That was the fastest convoy ever formed, and probably the most disheveled.”
The convoy headed out. “The first jeeps started bouncing toward the airfield without orders or direction,” Higgins wrote later. “They were filled with infuriated GIs determined not to be left behind by the brass. Correspondents and photographers, hitching rides as best they could, joined the race.” Major Walter Greenwood began to organize a perimeter defense. “Mines were laid, machine guns entrenched, small-arms ammunition distributed. It began to look to me like a fair start toward a Korean Corregidor.”
No one knew when or if the rescue planes would arrive. But it was hard to imagine there would be enough to ferry everyone to safety. The anger among the enlisted men grew.
Suddenly the defense of the airfield seemed to lose its urgency. The officers’ attention was drawn elsewhere. They began piling back into their jeeps and driving away. Gradually Higgins and the others learned that an escape route had been discovered—a road not interdicted by the North Koreans. “So we were not surrounded after all,” Higgins muttered to Keyes Beech. “This is a fine way to find out.”
This new exodus, commenced in the dark, was even more chaotic than what had preceded it. “About 11 P.M. we decided to follow the crowd of Americans unhappily bumping southward on the rutted dirt road,” Higgins wrote. “Then the torrential Korean rains started. Korean nights are cool even in the summer, and with this pitiless downpour the temperature was like a foggy winter’s day in San Francisco. None of the men were wearing more than shirts and slacks, and I was still in my blouse and skirt. There had been no time to buy or scrounge a khaki shirt and pants. The rain pounded down without letup during the seven miserable hours in our completely open jeep. The blankets we put over us soon were soaked through, and we just sat helplessly, as drenched as if we had gone swimming with our clothes on.”
At dawn Higgins’s part of the column reached Taejon, where they learned that American relief troops were on their way from Japan. MacArthur’s recommendation had been accepted. An American general Higgins buttonholed said, “Two companies of American troops were airlifted into southern Korea this morning.”
Reflecting on what she had seen, she asked the general, “Don’t you think it’s too late?”
“Certainly not,” he said. “It will be different when the Americans get here. We’ll have people we can rely on. To tell you the truth, we’ve been having a pretty rough time with the South Koreans. We can’t put backbone into them. What are you going to do with troops who won’t stay where they’re put? We have no way of knowing whether the South Korean reports are accurate or just wild rumor. It will be better when we have our own organization. It may take one or two divisions.”
Speaking with hindsight, Higgins later reflected on this conversation. “None of us, military or civilian, had the remotest idea of what we were really up against: a total of thirteen to fifteen enemy divisions. This meant approximately one hundred and fifty thousand well-armed, hard fighting Reds, equipped with the only heavy tanks in that part of the world.”
Realization would come presently. For the moment, Higgins’s interlocutor exuded confidence. She asked the general, “How long will it be before we can mount an offensive?”
“Oh, two weeks or so—maybe a month.”
“But suppose the Russkies intervene?” Keyes Beech inquired.
“We’ll hurl them back too.”
15
THE PANIC IN Korea caused even Truman’s harshest critics to hold their political fire at home. The senators and representatives who met with the president in the Cabinet Room returned to the Capitol, where none expressed more than modest reservations about Truman’s handling of the emergency. Kenneth Wherry declined to tell reporters he had hectored Truman about consulting Congress; rather he praised the president for having drawn a firm line against communist aggression—although he couldn’t resist adding, “At long last.” Robert Taft had been sharply critical of Truman for circumventing Congress. “We are now actually engaged in a de facto war with the North Korean Communists,” the Ohio Republican had complained two days earlier. “It is a complete usurpation by the President of authority to use the armed forces of this country.” But he supported the principle of bold action and on this day declared, “When you are in, you’ve got to go all out.” Harry Byrd of Virginia was a Democrat but more conservative than many Republicans. Yet Byrd backed Truman without reservation. “The President will have my full and unqualified support in all measures that are necessary to drive the North Koreans out of South Korea,” he said. “This is a time for unity, as we must win.” William Knowland of California would come to be called the “Senator from Formosa” for his admiration for Chiang Kai-shek, but at present he was willing to focus on Korea and accept Truman’s formulation of the American role in that country. “There is no necessity of a declaration of war,” Knowland said. “This is more of a police action.” Congressman Charles Eaton of New Jersey came from the White House meeting to make a statement that perhaps surprised some members of the flock of this former minister. “We’ve got a rattlesnake by the tail,” Eaton said, “and the sooner we pound its damn head in, the better.”
For the moment the president appeared to have neutralized even Joseph McCarthy. Amid the concern over Korea, the Senate closed its investigation into McCarthy’s allegations of communists in government. McCarthy blasted the move as part of a “whitewash” and swore to carry on. “My own investigation will continue,” he said. “I have now got five investigators working round the clock.” But many in the capital sighed relief. “There is in Washington tonight a spirit of far greater cooperation than at any time in the last few years,” veteran reporter James Reston observed. “Moreover, the somber spectacle of American planes engaged against a Communist aggressor 7,000 miles away from home, long before the United States is ready for a major war, has finally overwhelmed the spirit of McCarthyism that has pervaded this city for months.”
—
YET FOR ALL the nods in Truman’s direction, Douglas MacArthur was the man of the hour. “As the American people watch eagerly for news from Korea,” the New York Times editorialized, “one constantly recurring cause of satisfaction and assurance is surely to be found in 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. His long years of experience in the Orient, his thorough grasp of the fundamentals of organization and supply, the immense prestige which he enjoys not only in this country but throughout the whole Pacific world, all these are assets of immeasurable value.”
MacArthur needed every talent attributed to him. The North Koreans captured Seoul and drove far into South Korea as the South Koreans continued to flee before them. The American troops thrown into the battle weren’t much help at first. Maggie Higgins described the disadvantages the inexperienced and ill-equipped GIs labored under during the early weeks of the war. “When orders to attack first went out to the fifty-odd youngsters in our bazooka team,” she said of a unit assigned to keep a column of North Korean armor from passing down a road, “they gazed at the tanks as if they were watching a
newsreel. It took prodding from their officers to make them realize that this was it—that it was up to them to attack. Slowly, small groups of them left their foxholes, creeping low through the wheat field toward the tanks. The first swoosh from a bazooka flared out when they were nearly five hundred yards away from the tanks. But the aim was good and it looked like a direct hit.” Yet it didn’t please the lieutenant commanding the unit. “Damn!” he said. “Those kids are scared. They’ve got to get close to the tanks to do any damage.”