The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  He had used American air and sea power to strike where the Japanese least expected it, isolating and stranding their forward people and strongest positions, rather than contesting them, and he intended to do exactly that again in Korea. As early as July 4, he was already thinking of landing behind In Min Gun lines. He had little sense of how poorly trained, equipped, and led the first wave of American troops he had dispatched to Korea were. In no way were they ready for a complex amphibious operation. At first, the operation was to be called Operation Bluehearts, and it was to take place on July 22. But that was a hopeless schedule. So Operation Bluehearts was junked, but the idea of an amphibious landing was not. On July 10, when Lieutenant General Lem Shepherd, the Marine commander in the Pacific, visited Tokyo, MacArthur had wistfully said that he wished he had a Marine division on hand, and if he did, he’d land them behind North Korean lines. His hand went to the map of Korea. “I’d land them here…at Inchon.” At that point Shepherd had suggested that MacArthur ask for a Marine division—it would, after all, serve both their interests. MacArthur needed troops, and the Marines badly needed roles and missions. The pressure to cut back the defense budgets had made the Marines’ institutional future shaky, and they seemed momentarily to be without adequate political sponsorship. Both the Army and the Air Force appeared eager to usurp the Marines’ traditional roles. MacArthur was all too aware of the vulnerability of the Marines: he had been sure Shepherd would jump at his suggestion, and he had. The Marines could, Shepherd promised MacArthur, have a division ready for him by September 1.

  The more MacArthur thought about an amphibious landing, the more he fixed on Inchon. One hundred and fifty miles northwest of Pusan, it was on the west coast, well behind the North Korean lines. It was the principal port for Seoul, some twenty miles away, depending on how direct the route was, and even closer to Kimpo, the country’s main airfield. Inchon was also potentially a disaster looking for a place to happen. Any amphibious landing was fraught with danger, but Inchon seemed like it might be far worse than any other site. “We drew up a list of every natural and geographic handicap—and Inchon had all of them,” said Lieutenant Commander Arlie Capps, one of the staff members on the team of Admiral James Doyle, the Navy’s top amphibious planner. Almost everyone agreed that Inchon had the look of a place created by some evil genius who hated the Navy. It had no beaches, only seawalls and piers. The small Wolmi-do (Moon Tip) Island, presumed to be well garrisoned, sat smack in the middle of the harbor, effectively guarding the port and splitting the landing zone in two. The currents inside were notoriously fast and tricky—and none of these factors was the worst of Inchon’s perils; the real danger was the tides. Other than the Bay of Fundy, these might be the highest in the world, reaching peaks of thirty-two feet. At low tide, as Robert Heinl wrote in his thoughtful account of the campaign, Victory at High Tide, anyone trying to land would have to walk across at least a thousand yards, and at other points up to forty-five hundred yards, of a mud flat, with the gooey consistency of “solidifying chocolate fudge.” It was not so much a beach as it was a potential killing field. If someone had thought to mine the harbor, and some harbors in Korea had already been mined with the help of the Soviets, it would be an unmitigated disaster. “If ever there was an ideal place for mines, it was Inchon,” said Admiral Arthur Struble, the senior Navy officer in the Pacific. Worse yet, the window of opportunity during which the operation could take place was unbelievably narrow. There were only two days in the near future when the tides would be high enough to permit landing craft access to Inchon’s seawalls and piers: September 15, when the tides would be 31.2 feet high, and October 11, when the height of the tides would again reach 30 feet. There was an additional problem—the morning high tide on September 15 came at 6:59, just forty-five minutes after sunrise; the second high tide was at 7:19 P.M., thirty-seven minutes after sunset. Neither was ideal for something as complicated as an amphibious landing. The October date held no attraction: MacArthur was in no mood to wait an additional month with his troops penned up in the Pusan Perimeter, while giving the Communists more time to mine Inchon. The morning of September 15, it would have to be. For MacArthur, it was all or nothing.

  Almost everyone else was appalled, most especially the Navy people assigned to plan and execute the landing. Back in Washington the Joint Chiefs were wary, and MacArthur was very much aware of that. Technically they were his superiors, but he saw them as small-bore bureaucrats, men who had gained their power by accommodating themselves to politicians whom he despised. He knew that if he wanted success at Inchon, he had two battles on his hands and the first was with them. He had always expected the Joint Chiefs to oppose the landing. Some of this was his paranoia, but some was reality. He disliked and disrespected Omar Bradley, the chairman, whom he looked on as a pal of Eisenhower (a demerit there), a protégé of Marshall’s (another demerit), and a man who had fought, in his view, without great skill or daring in Europe (a third demerit) with far greater forces than MacArthur had ever been given in the Pacific (a fourth demerit) and had now become close to Truman (the ultimate demerit).

  If their relationship was terrible, then most of the enmity, as usual, was on MacArthur’s side. Each man had collected a good deal of baggage over the years. MacArthur was sure Bradley hated him because he had vetoed a major command for Bradley during the planning for the invasion of Japan. There was no evidence of that, but there was a good deal of evidence that Bradley, like other senior figures in the postwar national security world, was uncomfortable with so senior a figure being effectively outside his reach. MacArthur believed (with good reason) that in 1949 Bradley had been a co-conspirator in a plot sponsored by Dean Acheson to limit his power in Japan by splitting his job. MacArthur got wind of it and was furious. Later, Admiral James Doyle, who did most of the planning for the Inchon landing, mentioned to MacArthur Bradley’s lack of warmth when the two had met in Tokyo. “Bradley is a farmer,” MacArthur told Doyle.

  The Chiefs were wary, in no small part because of the risk itself, so dangerous an undertaking involving so large a share of America’s available troops. (MacArthur himself spoke of Inchon being a five thousand to one shot.) But some of their wariness stemmed from intra-service rivalries. For a variety of reasons, some noble, some less so, almost everyone was against the plan. Among the exceptions were Averell Harriman and Matt Ridgway, and in time Truman himself, who gave his trust in the end to the man in the field. Inchon’s lead planner, Admiral Doyle, had significant doubts of his own; and like many other men he had to deal with Ned Almond, who became MacArthur’s lead man on Inchon, and Doyle quickly came to dislike him for his peremptory, bullying style and his tendency to isolate MacArthur from things he needed to hear. If they were going ahead, Doyle believed, then MacArthur must know all the terrible risks involved, and he told Almond this. “The General is not interested in the details,” Almond replied, but an irritated Doyle was not to be brushed aside. “He must be made aware of the details,” the admiral insisted. In time he won his case, and made sure that MacArthur knew those details, for in the details were the dangers.

  It was as if Almond had tried to separate Doyle from doing his job, because MacArthur was always the great MacArthur, a man above mundane details. Those lesser details—whether or not a plan would work—could be dealt with by lesser commanders who were lesser men. That grandeur was implicit in the way MacArthur dealt with everything and everyone. Now he prepared for one of the great performances of his life—convincing the Navy and other doubters to go along with Inchon. A great performance was needed before the representatives of the Navy and the Joint Chiefs, and a great performance he would give.

  He was still the most theatrical of men. In World War I he had worn riding breeches, a turtleneck sweater, and a four-foot scarf—“the fighting dude,” his men called him. He did not merely seek the limelight, he had an addiction to it. He was aware of camera positioning, always making sure that his famous jaw jutted at just the right angle for photographs. I
ndeed, as he grew older, not only did his staff censor all news photos, ensuring that nothing insufficiently heroic went out, but they tried to impose certain ground rules for camera angles. Not only was he to be shot, if at all possible, from the right side, but one Stars and Stripes photographer had been under orders to shoot the general while kneeling himself, in order to make him look more majestic. He always wore his battered old campaign hat. It was his trademark, and no photographer was ever to be allowed to show that he was partially bald, and working on what would be known eventually as a major comb-over. He needed to wear glasses in his office but did not like to be seen wearing them, and so they too were not to be photographed. That everything was a performance had always been true. “I had never met so vivid, so captivating, so magnetic a man,” William Allen White, the famed editor from Emporia, Kansas, wrote after meeting him during World War I; MacArthur, he added, “was all that Barrymore and John Drew could hope to be.” Bob Eichelberger, his senior Army commander in World War II, dealing with the censorship of wartime, had coded his letters for his wife. In them, MacArthur was always Sarah—as in Sarah Bernhardt, the great actress of that era. “Do you know General MacArthur?” Dwight Eisenhower was once asked by a woman. “Not only have I met him, ma’am,” Eisenhower answered, “I studied dramatics under him for five years in Washington and four in the Philippines.”

  Mystique—indeed a certain mystery and distance from mortals—was power, MacArthur believed, and he worked carefully on it. No outsider was to have too much access to him; certainly not until he was ready to perform. What he wanted to project to the larger public was the most calculated of self-portraits. Each word describing him was, if at all possible, to be carefully chosen. When, during World War II, a profile of him was written that described him as being aloof, he tried to have the censors change the word to austere. No intimacy with subordinates was permitted. He was to be above other generals. Dwight Eisenhower, on becoming his top aide in the Philippines in the 1930s, was startled to discover that MacArthur would sometimes refer to himself in the third person, saying things like: “So MacArthur went over to the senator…” In these years, he saw himself—and portrayed himself—as the man who embodied the nation’s living history, history’s man. It was an honor to be received by him, and if you came, it was to admire him as an icon, a living monument. There were daily rituals and they were to be observed; for example, at lunches in Tokyo held regularly for visiting VIPs, Mrs. MacArthur would greet guests who had, of course, arrived ahead of MacArthur, and then as he finally entered she would say quite reverentially, “Why, here comes the general now.” He would then greet her, in the words of one witness, “as if he hadn’t seen her for years.”

  This then was the brilliant, highly original, temperamental commander who dominated the most important of briefings on Inchon on August 23, almost two months after the first North Korean strike. It took place at MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo. Joe Collins, the Army chief of staff, Forrest Sherman, the chief of naval operations, and Lieutenant General Idwal Edward, the Air Force operations deputy, flew out from Washington. Hoyt Vandenberg, the Air Force chief of staff, did not attend. It was believed by some sensitive to divisions in the services that he did not want to legitimize an operation that essentially belonged to the Navy and the Marines. The Marines, whose job it would be to lead the landing if Inchon were approved, were not invited to the meeting, their own questions and doubts never to be raised, which became something of a sore point. During the meeting Admiral Doyle and his men briefed the assembled brass in painstaking detail for almost an hour and a half. Nine different members of Doyle’s staff got up and spoke about every technical and military aspect of the landing. Then Doyle himself got up. “General,” he said, “I have not been asked, and I have not volunteered my opinion about this landing. If I were asked, however, the best I can say is that Inchon is not impossible.” With that he sat down.

  Joe Collins again suggested that they consider Kunsan or Posung-Myon, south of Inchon, both of them less risky landing sites. His cautiousness did not surprise MacArthur—it was what he expected. Then MacArthur spoke. He had prepared for this moment over and over in his mind. He knew the reservations of every man in the room, and his principal target was Sherman, the Navy chief, who had as yet not signaled what he felt. Without Sherman’s approval, without the cooperation of the Navy, there would be no Inchon. Joe Collins might have strong reservations, but the Army brass in Washington would not lightly overrule an Army commander in the field. MacArthur was at his best that day; he took a room full of senior officers who were essentially against him and made them believers. As he started, he later wrote, he heard the voice of his father saying, “Doug, councils of war breed timidity and defeatism.” He was not, he said, interested in a safer landing farther south. There was no great benefit in that. “The amphibious landing is the most powerful tool we have. To employ it properly, we must strike hard and deep!” The difficulties presented by Inchon were very real but not insurmountable. He was sure they could do it. All of the arguments he had heard against making the landing, he said, were in reality arguments for its success. There was a very real chance that the enemy would be completely unprepared. “The enemy commander will reason that no one would be so brash as to make such an attempt.” MacArthur said he himself would be like James Wolfe at Quebec in 1759. Because the banks of the St. Lawrence River to the south of Quebec were so steep, the Marquis de Montcalm, defending the city, had placed almost all his troops on the city’s north side. Wolfe and a small force had, however, come up from the south, scaled the heights, and caught Montcalm’s troops completely by surprise. It was a great victory, one that virtually ended the Anglo-French colonial wars in North America. “Like Montcalm, the North Koreans would regard an Inchon landing as impossible. Like Wolfe, I could take them by surprise.”

  He had great faith in the Navy, he said, instantly wiping the slate clean from what been a historic, indeed marathon, clash of wills throughout the Pacific campaign. If anything, he insisted, “I might have more faith in the Navy than the Navy has in itself.” The Navy—and this was said as if Sherman were the only man in the room—“has never let me down in the past and it will not let me down this time.” Kunsan, he commented, knowing that it was the favored landing place of both Joe Collins and Johnnie Walker, “would be an attempted envelopment that would not envelop.” It might bring a relatively easy linkup with the Eighth Army—but it would only place more troops in a larger Pusan Perimeter, where he believed they were singularly vulnerable. “Who will take responsibility for such a tragedy? Certainly I will not.” He would, he swore, take complete responsibility for the Inchon operation if it failed. (“I wouldn’t have taken that promise too seriously,” Bill McCaffrey, one of Almond’s staff members, later noted. “After all he had said the Chinese would not come in, and when they did, and it turned out he was very wrong, and we were hit terribly hard, he accepted no responsibility at all, and he blamed everyone except himself.”) If he was wrong about the landing, MacArthur told his audience, he would be there on the spot commanding. “If we find that we can’t make it, we will withdraw.” At that point Doyle dissented: “No, General, we don’t know how to do that,” he said. “Once we start ashore, we’ll keep going.”

  Then he put his sights directly on Sherman and spoke of his affection for the Navy. Long ago, in the darkest moments of another war, he said, the Navy had come to Corregidor and carried him out to safety so he could continue to direct Allied forces against the Japanese. Then, step by step, the Navy had carried him to victory during the Pacific War. “Now in the sunset of my career, is the Navy telling me that it will not take me to Inchon and that it is going to let me down?” In the back row of a room so filled with brass was a young Army officer named Fred Ladd, an aide to Ned Almond. He smiled to himself when MacArthur made the last pitch—he’s got them now, Ladd thought. No senior military man will be able to resist such a great personal challenge. Admiral Sherman then spoke for the first
time. “General, the Navy will take you in.” MacArthur had won. “Spoken like a true Farragut,” he replied, knowing he had moved his man. (As he said that, Admiral Doyle, furious with the way his serious objections were being pushed aside, said to himself, “Spoken like a John Wayne.”) Then, theatrical as ever, MacArthur lowered his voice, making them strain to catch his words: “I can almost hear the ticking of the second hand of destiny. We must act now or we will die…. Inchon will succeed. And it will save a hundred thousand lives.” He had carried the day, and he knew it. “Thank you,” Sherman said. “A great voice in a great cause.”

  “If MacArthur had gone on the stage, you would never have heard of John Barrymore,” Admiral Doyle later said. Sherman was aboard, although the next day, slightly removed from the power of MacArthur’s presentation and his one-on-one challenge, he felt his doubts renewed. “I wish I had that man’s optimism,” he told one friend. Collins was still uneasy too, but uneasy or not, the Chiefs were aboard, and five days later they wired their approval to MacArthur. (Why, Mike Lynch later asked Walker, had MacArthur triumphed over the doubts of the Joint Chiefs? “MacArthur has everyone thinking of Korea as an island, and Seoul the final objective. Once it’s taken the war would be over,” Walker answered prophetically.) Nonetheless, on August 28, the Joint Chiefs back in Washington were still nervous—so much of their limited resources to be invested into a plan that had so many things that could go wrong—and they sent one last message to MacArthur, suggesting Kunsan. The general dealt with the message in classic MacArthurian style. He never acknowledged that he had received it or that it existed. He just went right ahead, although in ever greater secrecy, making sure that the exact plans for Inchon did not reach Washington until the operation was already under way. He did this very deliberately, holding back on telling Washington what he was doing until it would be too late to stop him. What he did was, in the words of Clay Blair, “an astonishing course of deceit and deception.” He waited and waited, and then on September 8 he sent several immense volumes that contained his final plans back to Washington in the care of a young staff officer, Lieutenant Colonel Lynn Smith, telling Smith not to get there too quickly. Smith followed orders: The JCS expected a senior officer but instead got a light colonel at virtually the last minute. Smith was immediately ushered into a room with the Joint Chiefs and began his briefing. “This is D-day isn’t it, Colonel?” Joe Collins asked. Smith said it was. Collins asked when the assault would begin. “The landing at Wolmi-do will begin in six hours and twenty minutes—17:30 your time,” he answered. “Thank you,” said Joe Collins, “you’d best get on with your briefing.” In the long run, what MacArthur did at that moment damaged him with the Chiefs. He was not playing games with civilian authorities, which (within certain limits) was permissible, but with his peers, men with four stars, who felt that they were as responsible as he for the lives of the young men in his command and the success of the operation. That, within the culture of the military, was unforgivable. Eight months later, when Truman fired MacArthur, it was, as Joseph Goulden pointed out, one of the principal reasons that the president had the Chiefs’ unanimous support. It was their way of paying MacArthur back for blindsiding them on the Inchon planning.