The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War

by David Halberstam

  THAT AMERICA’S WAR aims were not clearly defined, and that there were significant differences in the attitudes in Washington and Tokyo, had been obvious from the very start. As early as July 13, when Joe Collins and Hoyt Vandenberg visited him in Tokyo, MacArthur had spoken quite openly about how his first mission was to destroy the North Korean forces, but that he then intended “to compose and unite Korea.” “It might be necessary to occupy all of Korea,” he added, “although this was speculative at the time.” Now that was his goal: the fact that the men from Washington had wanted to bask in his glory convinced MacArthur that he was more powerful than ever, which in turn made him more difficult than ever to restrain.

  Of the American military miscalculations of the twentieth century, Douglas MacArthur’s decision to send his troops all the way to the Yalu stands alone. (Vietnam was a political miscalculation and the chief architects of it were civilians.) All sorts of red flags were there for him, flags that he chose not to see. So it was that his troops, their command split, their communications often dangerously weak, the weather worsening by the day, pushed north, while the Chinese watched and patiently waited for them on the high hills, already preparing to block the narrow arteries of retreat or escape. The same general who had argued for Inchon because of the vulnerability of the North Korean supply lines now allowed his own supply lines to grow dangerously long in territory over which he had no control. The same general who had wanted to land at Inchon because it might end the war quickly and spare his troops from fighting in the cruel Korean winter was now ready to send them farther north just as the Manchurian winter arrived. “One of the things I found hardest to understand—and to forgive as a commander,” Matt Ridgway said nearly forty years later, “was how completely oblivious the Tokyo command was to the conditions under which our men would have to fight.”

  OF THE MANY professional sins of which Douglas MacArthur was guilty in that moment, including hubris and vanity, none was greater than his complete underestimation of his enemy. The China he thought he knew—despite all his time in Asia, he had spent almost no time there—was part of a nineteenth-century world. As Bruce Cumings, a historian of the Korean War, noted, Asians in MacArthur’s mind were “obedient, dutiful, childlike, and quick to follow resolute leadership.” In the late 1940s, that was certainly true of Japan, because the Japanese, having disastrously lost the war, were looking for lessons from the victors. But much of the rest of the region was caught up in nascent revolution. What had happened in the Chinese civil war as much as anything else reflected those changes, something MacArthur never chose to understand. Part of that was his very nature, and what had become the nature of his mystique. He did not ask questions; that would imply there was something he did not know. Instead he was oracular, the man that others came to hear. Major General Dave Barr, the head of the last American military advisory mission in China, a witness to the rise of Mao and very knowledgeable about the tactics of the Chinese Communists, was a division commander in Korea when the Chinese entered the war. He knew more than most American officers about why the Communists had won in China, but MacArthur was not about to let him brief other regimental and division commanders.

  The China that existed in MacArthur’s mind was one that had not been touched by revolution. He seemed not to care how and why Mao had come to power and seemed to have little interest in the forces that the revolution had unleashed. He showed astonishingly little curiosity about who his enemy was and why they had been so successful in the past. Despite all the information available before the Chinese struck, despite all they got from captured prisoners, Charles Willoughby’s intelligence shop knew so little about the enemy command that in late December, a month after the big Chinese attack, MacArthur still thought that Lin Biao, not Peng Dehuai, was the Chinese commander. MacArthur seemed to believe that the Communists’ victory in the civil war had little larger meaning. As a military force the Communists were “grossly overrated,” he had told congressional representatives in September 1949, a month before Mao proclaimed his government. The way to beat them, he had said at the time, was to hit them “where they are weakest, namely in the air and on the sea.” All you had to do, he added, was place “500 fighter planes, under the command of some old war horse similar to General Chennault.” He had used his airpower skillfully in his campaign in the Pacific against the Japanese, as a kind of long-distance artillery, and he seemed to believe that he would be able to use it much the same way against the Chinese. That belief in the supremacy of American airpower above all else would prove a military miscalculation that would soon haunt, if not MacArthur himself, certainly the men who fought underneath him. It was as if he believed the Chinese would march right up to American lines in daylight in traditional battle formation, daring the Americans to wipe them out from the air. He had been blinded by his success with airpower in World War II, Joe Collins later wrote, but that had been against fixed, immobile Japanese targets, not against the Chinese as they would appear in this war. There was, regrettably, Collins believed, almost no firsthand sense of the battlefield at his headquarters.

  MacArthur had his own mantra about the forces at play. He prided himself on his understanding of what he called Oriental psychology, or in a phrase he used again and again, “the mind of the Oriental.” He knew, he would say, that the Asiatic respected powerful men who were strong and unshakable in their vision. One of the great myths of the Korean War, said Mike Lynch, who, after Johnnie Walker was gone, became Matt Ridgway’s pilot and watched many of the key players from very close up, “was Douglas MacArthur’s claimed knowledge of the Oriental mind. We may have known the rich businessman in Manila, and the cowardly and corrupt Chinese leaders in Chiang Kai-shek’s Army, and the condescending Japanese in Tokyo. But we knew nothing about the battle hardened North Koreans, or the dedicated Chinese who had whipped Chiang. It was a classic failure to apply the most basic tenet for military commanders: know your enemy.”

  MacArthur did not in fact know that much about Asia. He had not been on the Asian mainland since 1905; he paid little attention to events he did not like. To the degree that he knew any Asian country well, it was the Philippines, a nation as different from most other Asian countries as New York is from Texas. There, he had been in fact something of a national hero and was exceptionally well connected with the upper class, and quite well rewarded for his role. In fact he and some of the key members of his staff had received immense payments in early 1942 from the Philippine leader Manuel Quezon, to guarantee their role as influential friends of Manila in the future. Even before he departed the islands for Australia, in one of the most puzzling financial arrangements of the war, Quezon had transferred $640,000 in U.S. dollars to MacArthur and a few staff members. “Seldom, if ever, have American military officers received such evidence of high esteem,” Carol Morris Petillo, who wrote of the deal, dryly noted. Of that sum, $500,000 went to MacArthur himself (probably the equivalent of $10 million in contemporary dollars, tax free); Richard Sutherland, his much despised chief of staff, got $75,000; Sutherland’s deputy Richard Marshall, $45,000; and Sid Huff, another MacArthur aide, $20,000. The War Department knew of it, which meant George Marshall and surely Roosevelt were aware of the transaction, but no one tried to stop it. Not long after that Quezon made a comparable offer to Eisenhower, by then an important officer in Washington, supposedly for his service in the islands from 1935 to 1939. Eisenhower wisely and graciously turned Quezon down and entered a memo for his official file explaining what had happened.

  Like many a general before him, MacArthur believed one war would be much the same as the next—even if it was against an entirely different enemy—so he failed to grasp the differences between the two great Asian armies he had fought in two very different wars. In World War II, the Japanese had fielded a traditional army, fighting a conventional war, vulnerable not because of the limits of their individual soldiers’ abilities, but because of the limitations of their country’s industrial base. As a military force they
were indeed vulnerable to traditional power, most particularly airpower. The Chinese, by contrast, were the least industrialized of major nations, understood their vulnerabilities all too well, and adjusted their tactics accordingly. Much of the way they fought reflected the primitive status of their industrial economy. Their ability to shift vast forces without detection—moving some of their divisions up to fifteen miles at night without a single cigarette being smoked, then burrowing into handmade caves during the day—caught MacArthur and his immediate staff completely by surprise.

  So as his troops continued their push toward the Yalu, the Chinese were carefully preparing what was, in effect, the largest ambush in the era of modern warfare. What the Chinese now wanted was for MacArthur to move ever farther north, extending his supply lines even more precariously. When Lei Yingfu had given Mao his briefing on MacArthur’s likely assault on Inchon back in late August, the Chinese leader peppered him with questions not just about the general’s tactics in the past but about his personality as well. He was, Lei answered, “famous for his arrogance and his stubbornness.” That intrigued Mao. “Fine! Fine!” he said. “The more arrogant and more stubborn he is the better.” “An arrogant enemy,” he added, “is easy to defeat.”

  Now it was MacArthur’s staff, so much an extension of his ego, that played a critical role, making sure that whatever he had wanted to happen was happening, and that anything that cast doubt on his preconceptions was minimized. Clark Lee, a wire service reporter, and Richard Henschel, a combat photographer who had covered MacArthur together throughout World War II, once wrote that the staff was a reflection of the worst in him because it amplified his worst qualities without any of his redeeming ones. “Some of them,” they wrote, “acted like men who had personally lifted him down from the cross after he had been crucified by Marshall-Admiral King-Harry Hopkins [the top Washington people of the moment] and they had determined that nothing again should ever hurt him.” It had always been this way. There had been a time years earlier when MacArthur was making a point with General Marshall. “My staff—” he had begun, when Marshall interrupted him. “You don’t have a staff, General. You have a court.” To Joseph Alsop, a nominally sympathetic columnist, the manner of MacArthur’s staff in the Tokyo years seemed like nothing so much as what Alsop had read of the court of Louis XIV. The Dai Ichi Building, he wrote, “was proof of the basic rule of armies at war: the farther one gets from the front, the more laggards, toadies and fools one encounters.” No one had more toadies and sycophants than MacArthur, and their tone with him “was almost wholly simpering and reverential, and I have always held the view that this sycophancy was what tripped him up in the end.”

  By the fall of 1950, their universe was a small but volatile one. If he smiled, they smiled; if he frowned, they frowned. If things worked out well, it was because he was a great man; if not, it was because of sworn enemies in Washington. He had by then “surrounded himself,” the historian William Stueck wrote in a particularly apt phrase, with men “who would not disturb the dreamworld of self worship in which he chose to live.” Never would the weakness of his staff come back to haunt him as in Korea, and rarely would the failure so revolve around one man—his chief of intelligence, or G-2, Charles Willoughby. There was no area of MacArthur’s headquarters where the drop-off between the talents required for the job and the prejudices and bombast of the incumbent was as noticeable as with Willoughby, or Sir Charles, or Lord Willoughby, or Baron von Willoughby—or Bonnie Prince Charles, as he was sometimes known by officers not in the Bataan Gang. Dave Barrett, leader of the Dixie Mission, considered him a major distortionist. “The Prince of Pilsn,” he called him in private. Willoughby was a name, said Carleton West, a young intelligence officer who had come out of the OSS, that should have been pronounced with a V—Villoughby—so Prussian, authoritarian, and arrogant was he. “Roger,” Willoughby once asked Dr. Roger Egeberg, one of the senior staff members, “do you think I have too much of a Prussian accent?” But you could tell, Egeberg added, that he was very proud of it. “My lovable fascist,” MacArthur called him on occasion.

  Willoughby was not just MacArthur’s principal personal intelligence man; when it came to the war in Korea, he was the only intelligence man who mattered. Most commanders wanted as many good sources of information as possible; MacArthur was focused on limiting and controlling the sources of intelligence. His desire was to have no dissenting or even alternative voices on his watch. It was always important to him that his intelligence reports blend seamlessly with what he had intended to do in the first place. What that meant was that the intelligence Willoughby was turning over to MacArthur was deliberately prefabricated. Highly professional intelligence estimates, which reflected a growing Chinese presence, might have prevented him from making what he wanted most: the final drive to the Yalu. Only after Willoughby’s great and catastrophic failure on the whereabouts and intentions of China’s armies would the CIA finally be allowed into the region.

  Willoughby was a Prussian-born man of the far right, “all ideology and almost never any facts,” in the words of Frank Wisner, the head of the CIA’s Directorate of Plans. He did not always seem completely assimilated: America should, he told Robert Sherrod, who was working for Time magazine during World War II, be fighting a different enemy. “This Washington policy makes no sense,” he said. “We should give England to the Germans. Our war is over here [in Asia].” His great hero—other than MacArthur—was the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco, a true fascist who had been supported by the Nazis in his drive to power in the 1930s and who then tilted to the Germans during World War II. Even as he was operating as MacArthur’s G-2, he was busy working on a biography of Franco. John Gunther had been surprised by the way, during a dinner in the midst of World War II, Willoughby, who had been bitterly caustic about the American military and political leadership in Europe and Washington, suddenly raised his glass to toast “the second greatest military commander in the world, Francisco Franco,” a man who was hardly an ally, or for that matter a friend of the United States. Frank Gibney, who covered Willoughby as a young reporter for Time, noted that he was “always talking about the two great generals, and your great job at any given moment was to figure out which great general he was talking about, MacArthur or Franco. He’d be saying he had just gotten another marvelous shipment of wine in from The General, so you had to figure out that that was probably Franco, on the assumption that Spain made a good deal more wine than the people at the Dai Ichi.”

  In no other American headquarters could Willoughby have reached so important a post, and the higher he rose, the more Prussian he became. On occasion, he even wore a monocle, although, as one fellow officer put it, he was more like Erich von Stroheim, the movie director, than Gerd von Rundstedt, the head of the World War II German General Staff. There was something pathetic about Willoughby’s manner, Gibney thought, his self-conscious attempt to seem more aristocratic than he was. “He’d be out there at the Tokyo Club, ready to play tennis accompanied by his claque, the colonels from his shop, on some very hot day. He would look over and see you, and say, ‘Gibney, good show, good seeing you out there playing today, Gibney—well, they say that only mad dogs and Englishmen go out in the noon day sun, but here I am too.’ And the awful thing was that the claque of colonels would all laugh as if he had said something funny, and you suddenly feared for the intelligence coming into the Tokyo command and headed towards Washington.”

  There was some debate about his origins. His claims that he was descended from an aristocratic German father and an American mother were generally believed to be false, and most people believed he was a self-invented nobleman. Certainly, he did little to clear up any mysteries about his past. In Who’s Who in America and in the biography he gave to the Army, Willoughby said he was born in Heidelberg, Germany, on March 8, 1892, and was the son of Freiherr (Baron) T. von Tscheppe-Weidenbach and Emma von Tscheppe-Weidenbach (née Emma Willoughby of Baltimore). But the Heidelberg registry for that dat
e records only the birth of Adolf August Weidenbach, sired by August Weidenbach, a rope maker, and Emma Langhauser, a German. According to Frank Kluckhohn of The Reporter magazine, a search of German documents showed no grant from anyone in power of the right to have the “von” in Willoughby’s name. One of Willoughby’s friends from his early days confirmed that both of his parents were German and that the name Willoughby was a rough translation of Weidenbach, which means “willow brook” in German. Kluckhohn questioned Willoughby about this and thereupon was told that he had actually been an orphan, had never known his father, and was sticking with the Who’s Who version. Apparently he came to America as an eighteen-year-old in 1910 and entered the Army as Adolf Charles Weidenbach. In three years he made sergeant, left the Army, went to Gettysburg College, did some graduate studies at the University of Kansas, and then taught languages at girls’ schools in the Midwest. In 1916, he reentered the Army, served on the Mexican border, and eventually went to France but did not see combat. After the war, he served for a time as military attaché in Venezuela, Colombia, and Ecuador, where Ned Almond first ran across him and, according to Bill McCaffrey, came to hate him. Eventually he became a self-styled military historian and intelligence officer. Somehow in the mid-1930s he connected with MacArthur while he was teaching at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, a place where the Army sent its most promising mid-career officers for extra training, and in 1940 he joined MacArthur in the Philippines, soon becoming the intelligence expert on his staff. From then on, one of his chief jobs was as amplifier of the MacArthur myth, and he worked all through World War II as well as in the Tokyo and Korean years on a monumental study of MacArthur’s military career, said to be three thousand pages long, although the book he finally published was of normal length.