Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  Still, MacArthur was hardly in a position to refuse a request from his commander in chief. The one question was where to meet. Truman originally proposed Honolulu, but Wake was closer to Tokyo and involved less of a flight for the UN’s commander in chief in the middle of a war, so it was there that the two men agreed to meet for the first time, on October 15.

  MacArthur’s plane touched down on Wake about twelve hours before the president’s. He had spent most of the flight pacing up and down, cursing his fate at being dragged away from the war just so Truman could get some extra votes in November. His staff wanted him there twelve hours early so he could get some rest before the big summit meeting. MacArthur, however, was too mad to sleep.

  He had only one resolution in his mind. If this was a meeting solely for the politics and the photo op, he was going to beat Truman at his own game.45

  At 6:30 the next morning, the 15th, a large plane could be seen approaching the island. MacArthur was sitting in a jeep near the edge of the tarmac. Protocol demanded that the most senior military officer be present at the foot of the ramp whenever a president steps off a plane or ship or train. MacArthur, however, refused to move even as the president’s plane circled and then landed.

  As the plane came to a stop, the ground crew wheeled a ramp up to the door. The plane was just opening when MacArthur ordered his driver to drive. The result was that President Truman was starting down the ramp when MacArthur’s jeep stopped and the general jumped out. MacArthur then timed it perfectly, so that he and the president both reached the bottom step at the same time—thus fulfilling protocol while putting himself on an equal footing, almost literally, with his commander in chief.46

  He also did it by not saluting but instead offering to shake hands—which Truman, after a moment’s confusion, did. The cameras caught the beaming smiles and the happy clasp, but now it was MacArthur, not Truman, who again had the upper hand.

  “How are you, General?” Truman said. “I’m glad you are here. I have been a long time meeting you.”

  “I hope it won’t be so long next time,” MacArthur graciously replied. In fact, they would never meet again.47

  A small Chevy sedan took them over to a building where they could have a private chat. Meanwhile, MacArthur’s team and the twenty-four members of Truman’s entourage boarded a bus to take them to the site of the main conference.

  The makeup of that entourage also confirmed MacArthur’s suspicions about the motives for the meeting. Neither Marshall nor Dean Acheson was there; if it had been a serious strategy session they would have been. “I wanted no part of it,” Acheson simply wrote later, “and saw no good coming from it.”48 Instead, there were Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Omar Bradley and Secretary of the Army Frank Pace. Dean Rusk and Philip Jessup led the delegation from the State Department. Averell Harriman was also there, having arrived early like MacArthur. Tucked under his arm was a five-pound box of chocolates for Jean.

  “What’s this meeting about?” MacArthur had asked his old friend. Harriman told him it was to see how to win a political victory in Korea, now that MacArthur had won a military one. MacArthur, Harriman remembered, seemed relieved at the answer. He took Harriman’s arm and confessed he had taken “an awfully big risk” at Inchon. Harriman reminded him that Truman had taken an equal risk in backing MacArthur.49

  Truman and MacArthur sat alone for forty minutes in one of the most celebrated face-to-face meetings of the twentieth century—and one of the least satisfying. Neither man’s account of what was said is trustworthy (Truman’s account of the Wake visit is more disingenuous, and sprinkled with what can only be described as falsifications of known facts), especially their mutual assurances later that they took a liking to each other. The story that MacArthur apologized for getting into politics in 1948—“they made a chump out of me,” he said regarding his GOP supporters—is probably true, as is the story that Truman told him not to worry about it. Beyond that and some discussion of the future of the Philippine government, neither man would venture close to the sensitive issues at hand without witnesses—which came when they were driven over to the building with the other conferees.

  The public meeting was, if anything, less satisfactory than the private one.

  Five small folding tables had been pushed together to create one long oblong, around which the participants sat. Dean Rusk in particular was shocked at the superficiality of the questions Truman put to MacArthur—and at the rudeness with which MacArthur answered them. MacArthur did little to hide his conviction that the meeting was a sham, while Truman, incensed at the general’s rudeness and wanting to end the meeting as soon as possible, fired off one question after another without bothering to listen to the answers.

  Some were significant. When Truman asked about the impending peace treaty with Japan, MacArthur answered, “[A]ll occupations are failures,” and urged that the treaty—and the American mission—end soon. Omar Bradley worried that the bulking up of MacArthur’s army in Korea had depleted America’s reserves, especially if there was a Soviet move in Europe. MacArthur promised to release a division, the Second, which was one of his best, in January.

  Everyone in the room assumed that the war was rapidly drawing to a close, and several questions about rebuilding South Korea, about dealing with prisoners of war, and punishing North Korean war criminals, reflected that.

  Then Truman raised the question that got the most significant answer of all.

  “What are the chances of Chinese or Soviet interference?”

  “Very little,” MacArthur replied, puffing on his pipe (he had forgotten to ask the president for permission to smoke until the very last moment). “Had they interfered in the first or second months it would have been decisive. We are no longer fearful of their intervention.” Only 50,000 or 60,000 Chinese could get across the Yalu River, he said; China also had no air force. “If the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang there would be the greatest slaughter.” Even with Russian-provided air support (and “I believe Russian air would bomb the Chinese as often as they would bomb us”), a Chinese intervention would be a failure, where it wasn’t unlikely in the first place.

  Truman nodded and moved on. It was an important moment; in retrospect, even a milestone in American policy in Asia. Yet no one spoke up with a follow-up question; just as importantly, no one in the room spoke up in MacArthur’s support, even though his views were broadly the same as the consensus of the intelligence community, the Pentagon, and the State Department—a fact that critics of MacArthur’s performance on Wake conveniently forget. Dean Rusk was the only one who was worried that the meeting was running too fast over this and other crucial issues. He quietly slipped a note to Truman, urging him to slow down the questions. “Hell, no!” Truman scribbled back. “I want to get out of here before we get into trouble!”50

  Instead it was MacArthur who would get into trouble for his overconfident prediction. Even though every knowledgeable person in the room agreed with his opinion that the Chinese wouldn’t intervene and if they did, they’d lose, he was the only one who stated it out loud. In less than eight weeks, those words would come back to haunt him—so much so that conspiracy-minded biographers Courtney Whitney and William Manchester have accused Truman of deliberately asking the question in order to trick MacArthur into making a gaffe. They would even accuse Truman of posting a secret unseen stenographer behind a half-closed door to record his answer. In fact, there was a stenographer, one of Jessup’s staff members named Vernice Anderson, but the claim that she was a secret plant is untrue.

  The truth is very different—and as usual in these cases—more banal. MacArthur’s complacency about a Chinese intervention sprang from the same intelligence reports the others had seen. It also sprang from the same belief that the Chinese were weaker, and Mao Zedong more dependent on Stalin’s control, than reality warranted. Events would prove them all wrong, but a combination of myth weaving, historical revisionism, and furious buck passing by others, including Truman, woul
d come to fix the blame on MacArthur alone.

  In any case, the ninety-minute meeting was over. Truman asked MacArthur to join them for lunch. The general demurred, saying he had to return to Tokyo at once—another slap in the face of his commander in chief. After the president presented him with his fourth Distinguished Service Medal, MacArthur was on board Bataan II and safely in the air.

  He breathed a deep sigh of relief. From his perspective, the Wake meeting had gone well. No one had challenged his capacity to wage the rest of the war as he saw fit; after Inchon, no one dared. He had also warned the president that his views on Chinese intervention were speculative (a warning that Omar Bradley’s final report on the meeting left out) and that understanding what they would do necessarily fell to State and the intelligence community, not to his military staff. As far as he was concerned, all of North Korea was still his battleground and he could range as far and as wide as he pleased.51

  He could also be gratified that he had managed to make Truman look second-rate and foolish without revealing his underlying contempt for the man—or hurting America’s image abroad. MacArthur didn’t much care for the new, more cautious stance in Washington, the current president included. “The defiant, rallying figure that had been Franklin Roosevelt was gone,” he wrote later. This president “seemed to be swayed by the some of the more selfish politicians in the United Nations,” especially Europeans worried that an American victory in North Korea might provoke the Soviets into striking west across the Iron Curtain. “[Truman] seemed to be in the anomalous position of openly expressing fears of over-calculated risks that he had fearlessly taken only a few months before”—and MacArthur didn’t like the change.52

  The truth was the Truman team was nervous, and MacArthur’s confidence made them more nervous. George Marshall could remember MacArthur’s unqualified reassurances about defending the Philippines, and how that turned out. So could General Pace and Omar Bradley. In a strange sense, it was a group who knew one another almost too well, but with no resultant sense of trust.53 Each expected, and was waiting for, the other to make a misstep, and all were focused on how they could correct the error when it came.

  But it was already too late to go back and reassess the strategy that had gotten them this far with such unexpected success. As MacArthur’s plane touched down back in Tokyo, the endgame in Korea was already under way.

  They were now left with only one unknown. How far they could go before the rest of the Communist world realized what a threat American victory in Korea really would be.

  CHAPTER 31

  REVERSAL OF FORTUNE

  Invincibility is in oneself, vulnerability is in the opponent.

  —SUN TZU, THE ART OF WAR

  On October 19 Pyongyang fell.

  The First Cavalry and First ROK took the town with little fighting, as Kim Il Sung and his government fled northward to Anjun. The next day MacArthur, Pinky Wright, Whitney, and Stratemeyer took off to witness the first airdrop of the war by the 187th Airborne Regimental Combat Team, in a bid to seal the gap between Sukchon and Sunchon, some thirty miles north of Pyongyang. Most North Korean troops had already escaped farther north; the paratroopers captured fewer of the enemy than MacArthur had hoped. But from the air this was not apparent, so MacArthur was jubilantly telling reporters, “It looks like we closed the trap….This very definitely is coming to an end.” Later that day, MacArthur took a drive through a deserted Pyongyang, where portraits of Stalin and Kim Il Sung still hung in the streets and on the walls of government offices.1

  The value to capturing Pyongyang was for MacArthur as much symbolic as strategic. “Aggressive Communism had been decisively defeated at a time and place of its own choosing,” he wrote later. “The prestige of the United Nations, and especially the United States, was again high in all Asia.”2

  But MacArthur’s forces had paid a steep price for the victory. MacArthur reviewed F Company of the Fifth Cavalry Regiment, the first Americans to enter the Communist capital. He asked how many had been with F Company when it first entered combat ninety-six days before. Five men raised their hands. They were the only ones left of the 200 men who had first come to Korea as F Company.

  The rest were all replacements; even more sobering, of the five original survivors, only two were still unwounded.3

  Walker made Kim Il Sung’s own office his headquarters; Stratemeyer pinned a Distinguished Flying Cross on MacArthur for his “outstanding heroism and extraordinary achievement” in participating in the air jump (though of course MacArthur hadn’t jumped with the others but had stayed in his plane), as well as his other low-level flights across Korea under “precarious” conditions. Then the commander in chief Far East (CINCFE) returned to Tokyo, where he penned a triumphant note to the Joint Chiefs the next day. He was preparing for the departure of the Eighth Army from Korea, he said, which “would start before Thanksgiving and be completed before Christmas.”

  Indeed, it really did seem as if all of North Korea was now in United Nations hands. Kim and his henchmen had to flee the advancing ROK and American forces again, evacuating Sinuiju near Anju for a spot deeper in the mountains. On the 26th, the Sixth ROK Division sped ahead of the rest of Walker’s army until one of its platoons reached the banks of the Yalu River near Chosan and could look across into China. That same day the marines of X Corps began landing at Wonsan. They didn’t anticipate doing much fighting. MacArthur had already informed them that two of First Marine’s regiments would soon be headed home, and the third for Japan.4

  Yet the imminent end of hostilities only made the men sitting back in Washington more anxious. Their worries were still centered on the risks of triggering a wider war, either with China or the Soviet Union. News that one hundred new Soviet-built fighters had been spotted by an American reconnaissance flight near Antung, Manchuria, made them particularly jumpy; so did a CIA report that Chinese volunteers might be sent into action to defend the Suiho hydroelectric plant near Sinuiju if MacArthur made a move in that direction.5

  MacArthur reassured the Joint Chiefs that he had no plans to attack the Suiho plant; he added he wouldn’t hesitate to destroy it if he found out it was being used for military purposes like manufacturing munitions. Indeed, his plans for wrapping up this war involved more military operations, not fewer, especially from the air.

  His principal objective was bombing the massive North Korea supply center at Rocin, which was used to unload supply trains coming in from the Soviet Union. The Joint Chiefs, however, said no; it was too close to the Chinese border. They also nixed any plans to bomb hydroelectric dams along the Yalu—again, too close to the China border.6

  MacArthur could only throw up his hands in frustration at what he saw as Washington’s timidity. But that timidity was fast turning into anger when the Truman team learned that MacArthur had moved the northernmost line for UN action even farther north along a new Sonchon-Songjin axis on October 19, and then on October 24 abolished any demarcation line altogether—all without their permission or prior consultation. Instead, MacArthur was ordering his forces “to drive forward with all speed and full utilization of their forces,” even to the Yalu if necessary, in order to “secure all of North Korea.”

  “Your action is a matter of some concern here,” the Joint Chiefs wrote archly. They pointed out that MacArthur’s directive was clearly contradictory of their directive on September 27 setting the non-ROK unit boundary. “While the JCS realize you undoubtedly had sound reasons for issuing these instructions, they would like to be informed of them.”

  With a perfectly straight face, MacArthur wired back, “There is no conflict that I can see.” The JCS themselves had said at the time that the September 27 directive was provisional and might need modification. Then he played his trump card, the message “dated 30 September from the Secretary of Defense [George Marshall] which stated: ‘We want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the 38th Parallel.’ ”7

  Certainly Marshall never mean
t his personal cable to MacArthur to be a blank check for any and all operations north of the parallel, but MacArthur now felt free to use it as such. The Joint Chiefs were stung into silence—for now. But their patience with what seemed to be MacArthur’s high-handedness bordering on insubordination was wearing thin. A sentiment was growing, at both the Pentagon and the State Department, that someone needed to rein him in before something disastrous happened. But in the shadow of Inchon and now the collapse of North Korea, no one was willing to.

  Besides, everyone had a more urgent issue to worry about. The very day that MacArthur’s reply reached Washington, the Chinese entered the war.

  —

  They entered first in the sector around Onjong, forty miles north of Anjung.

  The Sixth ROK Division suddenly found itself engaged with an enemy in unknown uniforms carrying old Japanese rifles and using bugle calls and drums to launch troops into battle. They were the 120th Division of the Chinese Fortieth Army, and in a matter of hours they overran two battalions—and inside of two days virtually annihilated the Sixth ROK. Two more South Korean divisions ran head-on into the Chinese onslaught and rapidly collapsed, leaving the Eighth Army’s entire right flank wide open.8

  General Walker immediately alerted MacArthur of the South Korean rout and the Chinese presence; suddenly Korea had become, as MacArthur put it somewhat later, “an entirely new war.”

  Still, MacArthur wasn’t too worried. He and Willoughby were still operating within the consensus of American intelligence, both military and the CIA, that the Chinese entry into the war was provisional, possibly just a symbolic gesture to keep United Nations forces from getting too close to the Yalu and China’s hydroelectric grid along the river.9 Willoughby’s sources said that no more than 16,000 Chinese troops might be in North Korea (the actual number was closer to 200,000). That confident estimate was Willoughby’s biggest blunder in his career—with the most fateful consequences for his beloved commander in chief.