by H. W. Brands
MacArthur fired back at Washington. He reiterated that the great battle for Asia had already been joined. “It is quite clear now that the entire military resource of the Chinese Nation, with logistic support from the Soviet, is committed to a maximum effort against the United Nations Command,” he told the joint chiefs, for Truman’s benefit as well. This was a challenge but also an opportunity. “In implementation of this commitment a major concentration of Chinese force in the Korean-Manchurian area will increasingly leave China vulnerable in areas whence troops to support Korean operations have been drawn.” MacArthur proposed a full range of escalatory measures against China. The most important were “(1) Blockade the coast of China; (2) Destroy through naval gun fire and air bombardment China’s industrial capacity to wage war; (3) Secure reinforcements from the Nationalist garrison on Formosa to strengthen our position in Korea if we decide to continue the fight for that peninsula; and (4) Release existing restrictions upon the Formosan garrison for diversionary action (possibly leading to counter-invasion) against vulnerable areas of the Chinese Mainland.”
MacArthur understood that he was calling for everything short of an invasion of China by American ground forces. But he thought the danger and the opportunity necessitated such bold action. “I believe that by the foregoing measures we could severely cripple and largely neutralize China’s capability to wage aggressive war and thus save Asia from the engulfment otherwise facing it.” He considered the risk manageable, indeed unavoidable. “I am fully conscious of the fact that this course of action has been rejected in past for fear of provoking China to a major war effort, but we must now realistically recognize that China’s commitment thereto has already been fully unequivocally made and that nothing we can do would further aggravate the situation as far as China is concerned.”
If the authorities in Washington rejected his advice, if they continued to constrain him, the outcome could be most dire and would include results the administration said it was trying to prevent. “If we are forced to evacuate Korea without taking military measures against China proper as suggested in your message, it would have the most adverse effect upon the peoples of Asia, not excepting the Japanese,” MacArthur said. The American position in the island chain off Asia’s coast would be placed in jeopardy. “Evacuation of our forces from Korea under any circumstances would at once release the bulk of the Chinese forces now absorbed by that campaign for action elsewhere.” Korea once again would become a dagger pointed at the heart of Japan.
MacArthur acknowledged that if his hands continued to be tied, he might have to evacuate. The plan the chiefs had suggested, of retreat toward a beachhead at Pusan, “would seem to be sound.” But he was in no hurry. “In the execution of this plan it would not be necessary for you to make an anticipatory decision for evacuation until such time as we may be forced to that beachhead line.”
42
HE ALARMED US with his closing sentence,” Omar Bradley recalled of MacArthur’s response, referring to the general’s rebuff of any “anticipatory decision” about evacuating. “That could indicate he was not going to commence evacuation until the Red Chinese were knocking on the gates of Pusan, which could be disastrous.”
The chiefs were pondering how to answer MacArthur’s latest when the disaster appeared to draw closer. Matthew Ridgway had spent his first days with the Eighth Army gathering information. Commandeering a worn B-17, he undertook a personal reconnaissance of the front lines. “On my orders we flew a roundabout route, covering some sixty miles of rugged mountain country,” he recalled. “Peering down from three thousand feet, I traced on a map the ridge lines where later on a reorganized Eighth Army could stand and fight. The sight of this terrain was of little comfort to a soldier commanding a mechanized army. The granite peaks rose to six thousand feet, the ridges were knife-edged, the slopes steep, and the narrow valleys twisted and turned like snakes. The roads were trails, and the lower hills were covered with scrub oaks and stunted pines, fine cover for a single soldier who knew how to conceal himself. It was guerrilla country, an ideal battleground for the walking Chinese rifleman, but a miserable place for our road-bound troops who moved on wheels.”
Ridgway received no greater encouragement when he reviewed the troops. “I must say, in all frankness, that the spirit of the Eighth Army as I found it on my arrival there gave me deep concern. There was a definite air of nervousness, of gloomy foreboding, or uncertainty, a spirit of apprehension as to what the future held. There was much ‘looking over the shoulder,’ as the soldiers say.” Ridgway saw an army that had been badly shaken by its recent rough handling. “It was clear to me that our troops had lost confidence. I could sense it the moment I came into a command post. I could read it in their eyes, in their walk. I could read it in the faces of their leaders, from sergeants right on up to the top. They were unresponsive, reluctant to talk. I had to drag information out of them. There was a complete absence of that alertness, that aggressiveness, that you find in troops whose spirit is high.”
The dismal spirit showed in the troops’ performance. “They were not patrolling as they should. Their knowledge of the enemy’s location and his strength was pitifully inadequate.” Ridgway believed in fighting by feel. “The first rule in war is to make contact with your enemy at the earliest possible moment. Once you get that physical contact, you never lose it. You hang on to it with a bulldog grip.” The Eighth Army had lost the grip. “Here the enemy was leaning right up against us, but we did not know his strength, and we did not have his location pinpointed on a map. All Intelligence could show me was a big red goose egg in front of us, with ‘174,000’ scrawled in the middle of it.”
Ridgway embarked on rebuilding morale. He ordered regular patrols along the entire front line; this revealed that the Chinese were preparing another attack, which commenced on the last day of 1950. The ROK forces staggered under the blow, soon abandoning their positions. Ridgway drove toward the front lines, only to encounter the South Koreans racing the other way. “A few miles north of Seoul I ran head-long into that fleeing army,” he recounted. “I’d never had such an experience before, and I pray to God I never witness such a spectacle again. They were coming down the road in trucks, the men standing, packed so close together in those carriers another small boy could not have found space among them. They had abandoned their heavy artillery, their machine guns—all their crew-served weapons. Only a few had kept their rifles. Their only thought was to get away, to put miles between them and the fearful enemy that was at their heels.”
Ridgway tried to rally them. “I jumped from the jeep and stood in the middle of the road, waving them to a halt. I might as well have tried to stop the flow of the Han. I spoke no Korean, and had no interpreter with me. I could find no officer who spoke English. The only solution was to let them run—and to set up road blocks far enough back where they could be stopped, channeled into bivouac areas, calmed down, refitted, and turned to face the enemy again.”
Ridgway turned to Syngman Rhee for help. “I asked him if he would go up to the front with me, find these troops, talk to them and try to put some heart back in them.” Rhee agreed. “We flew in bitter cold, in little unheated planes, the battered old canvas-covered Cubs of World War II. The temperature aloft was close to zero, and I nearly froze, though I was bundled in my heavy GI winter gear. President Rhee flew in his native dress, in a long white cotton kimono and low shoes, without even a scarf at the neck. His wrinkled, brown old face seemed to shrivel with the cold, but he never uttered a word of complaint.” They met the soldiers where the roadblocks had stopped them. The soldiers had been fed, and the worst of the panic had been stilled. Rhee approached them. “The brave old President addressed them with fiery eloquence,” Ridgway said. “I could not understand what he said, but the effect of his words was obvious.” After he finished with the soldiers, Rhee turned to Ridgway. He placed his hand on the American general’s arm. “Do not be discouraged,” he said. “They will fight again.”
; But not in the same place. Ridgway’s aerial reconnaissance had shown him a much better line south of the Han. To retreat there meant yielding Seoul once more to the enemy, but Ridgway saw no alternative. Crossing the river was a daunting challenge. The river was mostly frozen, but shifting floes threatened to wreck the floating bridges American engineers threw across the channel. Ridgway was reminded of paintings of George Washington leading his Revolutionary War troops across the Delaware, but in the present case the army attempting the crossing was vastly larger.
Yet the army was only a small part of the southbound movement. Ridgway informed Rhee that the army was retreating south; word rapidly spread among the civilian population of Seoul. Fearing for their lives, as many as a million men, women and children tried to beat the army across the bridges. Ridgway let them use the bridges until his own columns arrived but then closed the spans to all but military traffic. Yet the refugee surge didn’t stop, as Ridgway observed. “Off to the right and left of the bridges was being enacted one of the great human tragedies of our time. In a zero wind that seared the face like a blow torch, hundreds of thousands of Koreans were running, stumbling, falling as they fled across the ice. Women with tiny babies in their arms, men bearing their old, sick, crippled fathers and mothers on their backs, others bent under great bundles of household gear flowed down the northern bank and across the ice toward the frozen plain on the southern shore. Some pushed little two-wheeled carts piled high with goods and little children. Others prodded burdened oxen. Now and then an ox would go down, all four legs asprawl, and the river of humanity would break and flow around him, for in this terrible flight no man stopped to help his neighbor.”
Ridgway was one of the last Americans to cross the river. He packed the few personal items he had brought from home, including a photograph of his wife and young son. While gathering his clothing, he noticed that the bottom half of his flannel pajamas had worn through, prospectively baring his posterior to the world. Ridgway’s orderly wanted to use it as a shoe rag, but Ridgway had a better idea. “We tacked it up on my office wall—the faded, torn, and worn-out seat flapping derisively in the breeze. Above it, in large block letters, we left this message:
TO THE COMMANDING GENERAL
CHINESE COMMUNIST FORCES—
WITH THE COMPLIMENTS OF
THE COMMANDING GENERAL
EIGHTH ARMY.
43
THE RETREAT FROM the Han saved the Eighth Army. Ridgway directed his troops to the defensive line he had sketched out from the air, and there they turned to face the enemy. But the Chinese didn’t attack. The winter was hard on them too, and with each mile they marched south they stretched their supply lines further. They paused to regroup, giving Ridgway time to revive the spirits of his men. He sent them on increasingly aggressive patrols, allowing them to bloody the enemy, be bloodied themselves and rediscover their self-confidence. By mid-January the immediate crisis had passed.
But the larger issue of the war’s direction remained. The differences between Truman and MacArthur were as sharp as ever. The president wanted to contain the war, the general to expand it. Of late, with the military situation in Korea highly uncertain, Truman had hesitated to push MacArthur too hard. A political explosion between the president and his theater commander would scarcely help matters. Ridgway’s success in stemming the retreat, however, gave Truman confidence to assert his authority. The Eighth Army was holding, at least for now, and MacArthur needed to be dealt with.
At Truman’s direction the joint chiefs let MacArthur know he wasn’t going to get the wider war he wanted. “The following must be accepted,” they wrote. “(1) There is little possibility of policy change or other external eventuality justifying strengthening of our effort in Korea. (2) Blockade of China Coast, if undertaken, must await either stabilization of our position in Korea or our evacuation from Korea.” Lest MacArthur get his hopes up, the chiefs added a crucial condition: that a blockade receive British and UN concurrence. “(3) Naval and Air attacks on objectives in Communist China probably can be authorized only if the Chinese Communists attack United States forces outside of Korea.” Beyond this, the administration continued to rule out the use of Chinese Nationalist forces.
MacArthur was given more specific orders than before. “You are directed as follows: (1) Defend in successive positions as required by JCS 99935”—the message of December 29 emphasizing the survival of the Eighth Army—“inflicting maximum damage to hostile forces in Korea, subject to primary consideration of the safety of your troops and your basic mission of protecting Japan. (2) Should it become evident in your judgment that evacuation is essential to avoid severe losses of men and materials you will at that time withdraw from Korea to Japan.”
—
“ALL ONE COULD do was smile sadly at such arguments,” Courtney Whitney recalled. “It was evidently more important to protect British profits in Hong Kong than to save American—and British—lives in Korea by means of a blockade.” Whitney, as usual reflecting MacArthur, called the chiefs’ deference to MacArthur on the timing of evacuation a “booby trap”—a “much more obvious attempt to put the onus for evacuation on his shoulders.”
MacArthur refused to enter the trap. “Request clarification,” he shot back, before launching into a scathing critique of the decisions that had placed him and his command in its current position. “My command as presently constituted is of insufficient strength to hold a position in Korea and simultaneously protect Japan against external assault.” Washington had to choose between the two. He could hold on in Korea for a time, but not without losses that would jeopardize Japan. The original mission in Korea had been accomplished, he said. “This command was committed to the Korean campaign to fight the North Korean invasion Army, which in due course was effectively destroyed.” The mission had not included fighting China. The administration needed to define a new mission. Until it did, his soldiers were bearing the weight of Washington’s indecision. “The troops are tired from a long and difficult campaign,” MacArthur said. “Their morale will become a serious threat to their battle efficiency unless the political basis upon which they are asked to trade life for time is clearly delineated.”
MacArthur complained once more of the restraints imposed on his command and said they made a grim outcome inevitable. “The limitations and conditions—viz., no reinforcements, continued restrictions upon Chinese Nationalist military action, no measures permissible against China’s continental military potential and the concentration of China’s military force in the Korean-Manchurian sector—eventually will render the military position of the command in Korea untenable.” He demanded a straight answer from the president. “Is it the present objective of United States political policy to maintain a military position in Korea—indefinitely, for a limited time, or to minimize losses by evacuation as soon as it can be accomplished?” The decision was the president’s, and likewise the moral burden. “Under the extraordinary limitations and conditions imposed upon the command in Korea, its military position is untenable, but it can hold for any length of time up to its complete destruction, if overriding political considerations so dictate.”
—
DEAN ACHESON READ MacArthur’s letter with astonishment at its brazenness. “Here was a posterity paper if there ever was one, with the purpose not only of clearing MacArthur of blame if things went wrong but also of putting the maximum pressure on Washington to reverse itself and adopt his proposals for widening the war against China,” Acheson wrote. With this letter MacArthur had definitively crossed the line. “Nothing further was needed to convince me that the General was incurably recalcitrant and basically disloyal to the purposes of his Commander in Chief.”
Omar Bradley thought MacArthur was blaming his men for his own shortcomings. The joint chiefs chairman recalled a comment he had made in congressional hearings after an admiral had complained about low morale in the navy: “Senior officers decrying the low morale of their forces evidently do not realize that t
he esprit of the men is but a mirror of their confidence in their leadership.” George Marshall drew a similar conclusion: “When a general complains of the morale of his troops, the time has come to look into his own.”
Truman bridled at the letter and MacArthur’s stunt in sending it. “I was deeply disturbed,” he wrote in his memoirs. “The Far Eastern commander was, in effect, reporting that the course of action decided upon by the National Security Council and by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and approved by me was not feasible. He was saying that we would be driven off the peninsula or, at the very least, suffer terrible losses.” Truman again was tempted to find another general but concluded that the time wasn’t yet ripe.
The president convened the NSC once more. Marshall read aloud MacArthur’s message, then commented that the Pentagon wanted to gauge for itself the morale of the troops in Korea. He recommended sending Generals Collins and Vandenberg to Korea and Japan. Truman approved the mission. Discussion turned to the question MacArthur had posed: whether American forces should evacuate Korea. Truman was strongly opposed unless the South Korean forces could be evacuated as well. The note taker at the meeting paraphrased the president: “He was unwilling to abandon the South Koreans to be murdered.”
Marshall, Bradley and Acheson urged the president to write to MacArthur directly. The general might argue with the joint chiefs, they explained, but he couldn’t argue with the president.