Yet already by August 7 MacArthur was sensing that the moment was coming to reverse the tide of war, and he was making plans accordingly. Those plans should have made him the hero of the hour. Instead, just a week earlier—less than a month after his warm letter to President Truman, and Truman’s equally warm response—he had set off a firestorm with Washington, which prefigured a coming reversal in his relationship with the White House.
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It had to do with his decision on July 31 to visit the island of Formosa and meet with Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek.
In MacArthur’s mind, his motives were innocent enough. Since the perimeter of his new command included Formosa as well as the Pescadore Islands, “I felt it necessary, at the end of July, to visit the island in order to determine its military capabilities.” The Joint Chiefs were worried about his decision too. They sent him what Omar Bradley said “amounted to a war warning” showing intel that Red China might be planning an invasion of Formosa, and that Chiang Kai-shek, who had declared himself the legitimate ruler of China in March, was in the crosshairs.45
The Joint Chiefs therefore authorized MacArthur to conduct overflights on the mainland coast opposite Taiwan, and to send a survey team to see what Chiang might need to repel an attack. They even recommended that Chiang be authorized to launch preemptive air strikes if an invasion fleet sailed (Acheson, worried about a major incident, stopped that idea cold).46
There was certainly nothing untoward in MacArthur’s deciding to head the survey team himself, especially when the Joint Chiefs, after suggesting that he might hold off going on his own, nonetheless said he was “free to go” if he chose. So MacArthur did, on July 31, flying over with Stratemeyer and fourteen other senior officers.
They spent two days talking with Chiang in Taipei and touring Nationalist military installations. “It was a great pleasure for me to meet my old comrade-in-arms of the last war,” MacArthur later wrote of Chiang. Like many Americans, he felt that the Nationalist leader had been unfairly abandoned by the Truman administration, thus letting the mainland fall into the hands of the Communists. He was also still angry that Truman had rejected Chiang’s offer of two divisions for the fight in Korea—two divisions that MacArthur and Walker would have immediately put to use. Still, the meetings were warm and cordial. “Arrangements were completed for effective coordination between the American forces under my command and those of the Chinese nationalists,” MacArthur later wrote. Before returning to Tokyo, MacArthur also decided that three squadrons of F-80 jet fighters should be sent to Taiwan to help bolster Chiang’s defenses.47
The result was panic and consternation in Washington, followed by anger and rage. When Secretary Acheson learned of MacArthur’s plans for sending jets to Taiwan, he was told (wrongly) that the general had already given the order—thus making a major foreign policy decision that belonged with the president, not with MacArthur.
The Truman administration’s position had always been that while the United States would act to protect Formosa if the Communist Chinese attacked, Formosa and the United States were not formal allies. MacArthur’s action implied that they were. To say that Acheson and Truman were furious would be a pathetic understatement (the Joint Chiefs were less than pleased, as well, at MacArthur’s overstepping their instructions). The president’s acerbic comments on MacArthur’s presumption “evoked the admiration and envy of us all,” Acheson later wrote.48
The Joint Chief fired off a stern warning to MacArthur letting him know that such a decision involved “political” issues and required approval from the government’s “highest levels”—which by implication did not include MacArthur. Still another, even sterner message came from Defense Secretary Johnson: “No one other than the President as Commander-in-Chief has the authority to order or authorize preventive action against concentrations on the ‘Chinese’ mainland…The most vital national interest requires that no action of ours precipitate general war or give excuse to others to do so.”
By now, MacArthur was too old and too experienced to be dismayed by this kind of thing. He waved off Johnson’s objections (the idea that he intended to start a war with China was in his mind beyond absurd) and sent along a soothing note saying he understood his limitations as theater commander; and he told Truman’s special assistant Averell Harriman when he came to Tokyo that while he disagreed with Truman’s China and Formosa policy, “I’m a good soldier and know how to obey orders.”49
But MacArthur was not finished. On August 7 he sent his report on his Formosa visit to the Joint Chiefs, urging a reappraisal of U.S.–Nationalist China military ties. He argued that “there is real potential in the Armed Forces on Formosa,” but said they needed additional equipment and training, especially in joint operations like seaborne landings and air interdiction. He also urged setting up a Far East Command communications center in Taipei; setting up more American overflights and naval patrols in the Taiwan Straits separating Formosa from the mainland; and taking steps for “immediate coordination in the defense of Formosa” between American and Chinese senior air and naval commanders.50
The recommendations were hardly radical. Some were proposals that the Joint Chiefs themselves had made; except for the joint coordination planning, most were unobjectionable from a larger policy and security standpoint. But coming after the uproar over MacArthur’s visit with Chiang, the report seemed to be a direct challenge to Truman’s stated policy—even insubordination in the face of written warnings to stay away from the Formosa issue. That was compounded on August 17 when, at the invitation of the Veterans of Foreign Wars, MacArthur sent a statement for their national convention that warned “Formosa in the hands of…a hostile power could be compared to an unsinkable aircraft carrier and submarine tender ideally located to accomplish offensive strategy” against U.S. forces in Okinawa and the Philippines, and concluded, “Nothing could be more fallacious than the threadbare argument by those who advocate appeasement and defeatism in the Pacific that if we defend Formosa we alienate continental Asia….They do not grant that it is in the pattern of Oriental psychology to respect and follow aggressive, resolute and dynamic leadership [and] to turn on a leadership characterized by timidity or vacillation.”51
The reaction at Blair House and the State Department was pyrotechnic. “All of us were outraged at the effrontery and damaging effect at home and abroad of MacArthur’s message,” Acheson later wrote. They were particularly furious about the last sentence implying that the administration was being timid and vacillating on China and Formosa. Yet the fact was that millions of Americans, including many in the VFW, firmly believed Truman and Acheson had been timid and vacillating—and that the events in Korea were the result of it.
Even so, it was above even MacArthur’s pay grade to put that out publicly, so Truman ordered Secretary Johnson to order MacArthur to withdraw the message.52
Now it was MacArthur’s turn to be outraged. “My message was most carefully prepared to fully support the President’s policy position,” he wrote back to Secretary Johnson. “My remarks were calculated only to support his declaration [on June 27] and I am unable to see wherein they might be interpreted otherwise”—although hardly anyone who read his VFW statement reached the same conclusion.53
But MacArthur’s attention was moving on to other, more pressing matters. Things were building to a head in the Pusan perimeter; MacArthur now had a plan to break the deadlock—and destroy North Korea’s army in one blow.
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He had already hinted at his strategy in a meeting with Truman’s special envoy Averell Harriman and the Joint Chiefs’ two personal representatives, General Matthew Ridgway and the air force’s General Lauris Norstad, in Tokyo on August 6. Pacing back and forth in front of the map of Korea, he stressed his need for two more American divisions and whatever other forces the United Nations countries could provide. The war in Korea had reached a critical stage, he kept saying. The KPA was at the breaking point; “Their leadership has been vigorous…th
eir tactics have been skillful,” but he was sure they had used up their last reserves. With additional forces he could win a decisive victory before any Chinese or Russian troops could intervene to save the North Koreans—something he thought unlikely in any event.
MacArthur told them that winning the war would not only safeguard Japan, and cement the U.S. relationship with its fledgling democratic government. It would be a convincing global triumph for a U.S.-led coalition to “save the world from Communist domination and so would be recorded in history.” Harriman and Ridgway were impressed; in their conversations with Walker at Taegu they found him less sanguine about victory. But at this point even Walker may have had no inkling of what MacArthur was thinking of doing to reverse the course of the war, or the risks he was willing to run in order to do it.54
The idea of a surprise amphibious landing deep in the rear of North Korea’s advancing armies to cut off their supplies and line of retreat probably occurred to MacArthur after his visit to Korea on June 29. We know that on July 2 he ordered his new chief of staff, Lieutenant General Edward Almond, his G-3 Pinky Wright, and the staff of Wright’s Joint Strategic Plans and Operations Group to draw up plans for an amphibious landing involving the First Cavalry and a Marine regimental combat team he had just requested. MacArthur wanted the operation ready in just twenty days, for July 22, but the plan was canceled when the First Cavalry and marines had to be sent in to shore up the crumbling American position south of the Han instead.55
In any case, MacArthur told his joint planning staff, known by the unlovely acronym JSPOG, to keep working on a later and larger amphibious operation, which got the code name CHROMITE. (“Pinky, let’s think of a couple of end runs around each coast,” was the way he put it to Wright.)56 We also know that by July 10 MacArthur had a good idea of where he wanted the landing to take place. The head of Fleet Marine Force, Pacific, General Lemuel Shepherd, was in Tokyo for a visit and found MacArthur pacing back and forth in front of a map of the Far East.
“I wish I had the entire 1st Marine Division under my command again,” MacArthur said. “I have a job for them to do.”
“What’s that?” Shepherd wanted to know.
MacArthur stopped and struck the map with his pipe. He was pointing to a port city 150 miles northwest of Pusan and 30 miles east of Seoul.
“I’d land ’em here,” MacArthur said, his face grim, “at Inchon.” It was also the city he told Wright would be his first choice for a landing.57
Inchon was a large seaport, capable of handling considerable amounts of United Nations shipping once the landing had been achieved. It was also tantalizingly close to the Communist-controlled South Korean capital and Kimpo airfield, as well as the KPA’s supply lines from the north. Grabbing Inchon would put the cork in the bottle, to use MacArthur’s favorite metaphor, trapping the North Koreans even as they imagined they had the Americans trapped at Pusan.
Then with MacArthur pushing down from Inchon, and Walker pushing out from Pusan, they could destroy the North Korean forces in detail.
On July 27, he let the Joint Chiefs in on the CHROMITE plan, although he did not release many details. He even had a date for D-Day: September 15. Reaction at the Pentagon was mixed, to say the least. MacArthur’s experience with amphibious landings in New Guinea and the Philippines made him optimistic about the success of the plan; Omar Bradley’s experience at Omaha Beach, and General Lawton Collins’s knowledge of what happened at Anzio, where an American army had nearly been destroyed, made them correspondingly pessimistic. At one point in 1949 Bradley had even told the House Armed Services Committee that large-scale amphibious operations would never happen again.58
Now here was MacArthur proposing just such an operation—and outside a port where, as navy analysts at the Pentagon had discovered, there was an abnormally deep tide of thirty-three feet, which meant there would be only a very brief period twice a day when assault craft could get close to shore. There were other geographic drawbacks as well. Rivers in the Inchon area emptied into low, flat basins where at low tide landing craft could get stranded and become helpless targets for defenders on the shore. Navy planners also didn’t care for Inchon’s port facilities, which were old and not suited for a bridgehead port. There was also an island, Wolmi-do, dominating the approaches to Inchon harbor the way Corregidor dominated the Manila approaches. Taking Wolmi-do would require its own operation, thus eliminating any hope of surprise.
“We drew up a list of nearly every natural and geographic handicap” that an amphibious assault might face, one naval staff officer later remembered, “and Inchon had ’em all.”59
The Joint Chiefs began trying to dissuade MacArthur from pursuing CHROMITE. If he didn’t want to give up the amphibious landing altogether, then at least choose a different spot for it, they urged him, preferably one closer to Pusan for the final linkup with Walker. MacArthur, however, was adamant. It would be Inchon or nowhere. His only worry was making sure he had all the troops he needed for a breakout south from Inchon to connect with Walker and then push east to retake Seoul. Above all, he had to have the full First Marine Division, he told them, not just one or two combat teams. He made his most eloquent plea for more troops to Averell Harriman when he visited on August 6, and they sat down for a private man-to-man meeting.
“I cannot believe that a great nation such as the United States cannot give me these paltry reinforcements,” he told Harriman. “Tell the president that if he gives them to me, I will, on the rising tide of the fifteenth of September, land at Inchon and between the hammer of this landing and the anvil of the Eighth Army, I will crush and destroy the army of North Korea.”60
Harriman had known MacArthur for almost thirty years—they had played polo against each other when MacArthur was West Point superintendent—but he had never seen or heard him as passionate as this. He wrote back to Truman, urging him to give MacArthur what he wanted. And on August 10, the Joint Chiefs informed MacArthur that he would have the First Marine Division, all three regiments.61
MacArthur now had the forces he needed: the marines to make the breakout from Inchon and retake Seoul, and the Seventh Infantry Division under Major General David Barr to make the linkup with Walker and the Eighth Army. There were still the numbers of ships and transports to be worked out, and air cover: but Almond, Wright, and the staff of JSPOG did a brilliant job of bringing together senior naval and air force officers to flesh out the final plan.62
There were just two centers of resistance to overcome, and neither one involved the North Koreans. The first was from the two commanders in charge of the operation itself, Marine General O. P. Smith, who would lead the First Marine Division, and Rear Admiral James Doyle, who would command the amphibious phase of CHROMITE. After arriving in Tokyo on the morning of August 22, Smith conferred with Doyle and both agreed that the entire plan should be scrapped. They didn’t like the choice of Inchon any more than the Pentagon did; they decided the whole operation should be put off a week and staged at Posung-Myon, twenty miles south of Inchon, instead.63 That afternoon Smith had a meeting scheduled with MacArthur. Whatever his respect and admiration for the man, it was time to tell him the bad news and get him to change his mind.
When he entered MacArthur’s office at the Dai-ichi building, he was surprised, as most visitors were, by its starkness. The bare furnishings and lack of formal display seemed to contradict the media image of MacArthur as a man with a towering ego and a flair for the dramatic. Even more surprising was the man himself. For a man over seventy, he was still ramrod straight and tall, with an almost youthful glow to his skin.
“My God, how does he do it?” another amazed visitor, Assistant Secretary of War John McCloy, commented during a visit at the end of 1945. “He’s in better health than when I saw him before the war.” Reporter John Gunther happened to have lunch with MacArthur just before the North Korean invasion and noted that the general’s appearance “was that of a man of fifty, not seventy, moreover a man of fifty in the very best p
hysical condition and at the top of his form.” Another regular MacArthur follower said, “I never saw him look so fit and well, so alert and youthful and full of color and mental vigor.”64
MacArthur was going to need that vigor in the next twenty-four hours. First he had to deal with General Smith’s resistance to CHROMITE. After greeting Smith warmly, he sat down and listened carefully to Smith’s objections, one by one. Then he waved his hand as if he hadn’t heard them. The Inchon landing will be decisive, he told the general. The war will be over in a month.
It was a stunned marine who left MacArthur’s office. “It was more than confidence,” he said later of MacArthur’s attitude. “[I]t was supreme and almost mystical faith that he could not fail.”65 Even though Smith did not quite share that faith, he would break the news to Doyle that CHROMITE was going ahead.
That is, unless the visitors arriving the next day were to stop MacArthur.
They carried far more weight than Smith or Doyle—and far more prestige, including back in Washington. If MacArthur couldn’t persuade them that the landing in Inchon would succeed, it would never take place.
The fate of CHROMITE, and the entire course of the war, hung on what happened in the next twenty-four hours.
CHAPTER 30
INCHON AND BEYOND
The history of the world for the next thousand years will be written in the Pacific.
—DOUGLAS MACARTHUR, DECEMBER 1944
On the morning of August 23, three uniformed men stepped off their plane at Tokyo Airport, looking tense and somber. They were General Lawton Collins, Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Forrest Sherman, and Lieutenant General Idwal Edwards, chief deputy to the head of the U.S. Air Force, Hoyt Vandenberg.
Douglas MacArthur Page 85