Douglas MacArthur

by Arthur Herman

  On December 3 meetings at the Pentagon deepened the gloom. The Joint Chiefs announced that they might have to consider the complete evacuation of Korea.47 Truman was alarmed enough to send Army Chief of Staff General Lawton Collins directly to Tokyo to take stock of the situation—and of MacArthur’s state of mind. There were stories circulating of MacArthur being in a blue funk and on the verge of a breakdown, and alternately, stories of his towering rage and his lambasting the administration for not letting him bomb the Yalu bridges. There was even an interview in U.S. News & World Report in which he was quoted as saying that his advance to the Yalu had actually saved the situation in Korea by exposing the Chinese presence before it became overwhelming, and that the restrictions Washington put on his command had been “an enormous handicap, without precedent in history.”48

  Truman and Acheson were understandably furious about the U.S. News & World Report interview. But then Truman was no stranger to the habit of shooting off his mouth in front of reporters, even in the midst of this crisis. On November 30 he had even suggested to them that atomic bombs might be used to stop the Chinese attacks. That revelation set off alarm bells in the capital of every country that had troops in Korea; British prime minister Clement Attlee bustled over to Washington from London to make sure the remarks weren’t meant for real. If MacArthur’s staff was learning to cringe every time a reporter came near him during this crisis, so was Truman’s.

  General Lawton Collins arrived in Tokyo on December 4, 1950, and then toured the battlefront in Korea. He visited Walker and Almond while the Eighth Army was retreating from Pyongyang, and while the Marines and X Corps were still trying to break out for Hungnam—not exactly propitious days for the UN forces or their commander. But in Tokyo Lawton found that MacArthur, far from being reduced to a cowering wreck by the disasters in Korea, or “defeatist” as some historians have claimed,49 was planning a comeback.

  He told Collins he estimated that he faced half a million Chinese (the real number was closer to 300,000) and 100,000 North Koreans, backed by Soviet advisors—with hundreds of thousands of other Chinese poised to move across the China–North Korea border. He grimly showed him a map of South Korea with nine different withdrawal lines in case they were forced all the way back to Pusan.

  All the same, MacArthur believed the situation could still be saved—but he would need three things. The first was a naval blockade of Red China; the second was a free hand to strike targets in Manchuria; the third was reinforcements from Nationalist China. If those couldn’t be guaranteed, he told Collins, then it would be time to evacuate Korea altogether.

  Collins was shocked. His tour hadn’t suggested to him that the UN command’s position was anywhere near as bad, or that Seoul would have to be evacuated as MacArthur suggested (though MacArthur would turn out to be right). But he declined to argue the point with the CINCFE. When he returned to Washington, he told his Joint Chiefs colleagues that if the United States and the United Nations weren’t prepared to make “an all-out effort in Korea,” then MacArthur should be authorized to do what he needed to do to prevent the complete destruction of his forces, including an evacuation of the peninsula.50

  To their credit, Truman and his advisors vetoed any talk of evacuation. “We all agreed…we could not in good conscience abandon the South Koreans to their Chinese–North Korean enemies”—although MacArthur, to his credit, had suggested no such thing. He had seen evacuation not as abandonment but as a regrouping in order to renew the fight at a later date. Still, it’s not difficult to see looming behind MacArthur’s ultimatum (if that’s what it was) a darker inner fear: that if the Chinese overran UN forces in Korea, he would be blamed again for abandoning a command to their doom and doing nothing to save them.

  Besides, Truman’s people had another, even more disastrous plan that they had to block. This was a proposal from the British, backed by other nervous UN countries, to negotiate an immediate cease-fire. Marshall, for one, rejected the idea out of hand. He felt strongly that the Chinese and Soviets would only use a cease-fire to rearm Mao’s forces and the North Koreans; Acheson and others believed that any price Red China demanded in return for agreeing to a cease-fire would be far too high.

  A long series of meetings with Attlee and his advisors between December 4 and 11 finally laid the British proposal to rest.51

  Despite the disastrous retreat, the Chinese offensive, and the deteriorating relationship between MacArthur and Washington, the way was actually open for a fresh start in fighting the Korean War. MacArthur would have agreed with one deputy chief of staff for the army who remarked during the December 3 meeting, “We owe it to the men in the field to stop talking and act.”52

  Improbably enough, in less than three weeks he and MacArthur would be partners in command. His name was Matthew Bunker Ridgway.

  —

  On December 23 General Walton Walker decided he was going to take a driving tour of his command as they were organizing for the defense of the sector north of Seoul. He had just won a major bureaucratic victory: MacArthur had agreed that X Corps, led by MacArthur’s former chief of staff, would now be subordinate to Walker’s command of the Eighth Army.

  Maybe the news made Walker more reckless than usual on the Korean roads. Lawton Collins had warned MacArthur that Walker was too inclined to run risks that might cost him his life.53 In this case it wasn’t enemy fire but a ROK army truck. Walker’s jeep collided with it on the road between Seoul and Uijongbu, and Walker was killed instantly.

  The news couldn’t have come at a worse time—or a better one, depending on one’s perspective. Walker was not MacArthur’s favorite general. He felt his leadership of the Eighth Army since Pusan had been halting, even hesitant; he worried that Walker’s slow advance toward the Yalu before November 25 might have weakened the United Nations position, even tempted the Chinese to strike sooner and harder than they did (no one would have disagreed more than Walker himself).

  Nonetheless, Walker was gone. Who would take his place? General Almond, MacArthur’s protégé, would have done anything for the job. But instead MacArthur wired to Washington with one name on his list: Matthew Ridgway.

  Ridgway’s life and career had been much like MacArthur’s. Born in 1895 at Fort Monroe, Virginia, he was the son of an artillery officer. Like MacArthur, his earliest memories were of bugles blowing reveille and sounding taps after dark. Like MacArthur, he attended West Point to please his father, although he missed seeing combat in World War One. He made up for that in World War Two, organizing and then personally leading the Eighty-second Airborne on airdrops in Sicily, Normandy, and in Operation Market Garden in Holland.

  Just as importantly for his new position, Ridgway had been athletic instructor at West Point when MacArthur was superintendent. A bond of friendship and trust developed that culminated twenty-eight years later when Walton Walker’s jeep met destiny in the shape of a South Korean truck, and MacArthur finally found the commander he needed to turn the war in Korea around.

  Thanks to the briefings at the Pentagon over the last several weeks, Ridgway was primed and ready. He boarded a plane for Korea on Christmas Eve, and thirty-seven hours later was in MacArthur’s presence in Tokyo.

  “My meeting with MacArthur [and Hickey] began at nine thirty” that evening, he later wrote. “I had known MacArthur since my days as a West Point instructor but, like everyone who had ever dealt with him, I was again deeply impressed by the force of his personality.” As MacArthur outlined their situation on the Korean peninsula, Ridgway realized that although MacArthur had the actor’s gift for invoking the dramatic, “so lucid and so penetrating were his explanations and his analysis that it was his mind rather than his manner or his bodily presence that dominated his listeners.”54

  Yet despite the theatrics, Ridgway understood MacArthur’s main point, and his assignment.

  “Hold as far as possible in the most advanced possible positions in which you can maintain yourself,” CINCFE said. MacArthur thought it esse
ntial to hold on to Seoul for psychological as well as strategic reasons, but not if it became another Stalingrad, “a citadel position.”

  MacArthur wanted to restore a war of movement; then, he felt, the Chinese would be too slow to respond—and American airpower would have a second chance at winning the day. He warned Ridgway that the Chinese “were a dangerous foe,” but that if the United Nations could regain the initiative, it would fill what he called “the mission vacuum.” The diplomats would have to yield to the military men and their success; as during World War Two, victory in the field would dictate its own terms.

  Ridgway sat on the long brown couch and digested all this.

  “Form your own opinions,” MacArthur finally said. “Use your own judgment. I will support you. You have my complete confidence.”

  Ridgway hesitated. He was used to having his own way in commanding troops; he was no sycophant. He respected MacArthur, but he was not afraid of him as some others, including Generals Almond and Stratemeyer, head of the air force, were inclined to be.

  His last question was: “If I find the situation to my liking, would you have any objections to my attacking?”

  MacArthur gave a broad grin and said, “The Eighth Army is yours, Matt. Do what you think is best.”

  It was, Ridgway realized, the best order he had ever received.55

  CHAPTER 32

  ENDGAME

  You are only remembered and become famous because of your mistakes.

  —DOUGLAS MACARTHUR

  Ridgway would emerge as the most admired figure of the Korean War—for many because he was not Douglas MacArthur. He would also be seen as the man who turned the war around almost overnight. The usual story is of how MacArthur’s missteps and then defeatist attitude created an Eighth Army devoured by self-doubt and “bug-out fever”: “the staring eyes of soldiers who had become accustomed to defeat,” was how one reporter described it.1 Then instantly and miraculously—the story goes—this broken army was turned into a magnificent fighting force thanks to the intrepid former leader of the 101st Airborne. Certainly no one contributed more to the legend than Ridgway himself in his memoirs.2

  Yet the truth is that General Lawton Collins had been right. The Eighth Army’s position was never as dire and desperate as critics, including sometimes MacArthur, were inclined to believe. Its losses had been painful—more than 7,700 killed, wounded, or taken prisoner. Most of those, however, had been in the Second Division, and as MacArthur himself later pointed out, taking Iwo Jima had cost twice as many men, while Okinawa had cost five times as many.3 It was also true that combat casualties weren’t the army’s only problem. Fourteen thousand soldiers and marines were laid low by frostbite.

  All the same, combined American, UN, and ROK forces still had 443,000 men on the South Korean peninsula. They probably could have held the Pyongyang-Chungchon line if MacArthur had ordered them to. It was Walker, not MacArthur, who had sent his forces reeling back over the 38th parallel—and Walker, not MacArthur, who abandoned North Korea to the Communists.4

  Indeed, if anyone had “bug-out fever” it was the United Nations. On December 14, its General Assembly decided that it “viewed with grave concern the situation in the Far East,” and passed a resolution asking the assembly president, Iran’s Nasrollah Entezam, to appoint a commission for determining the basis of a cease-fire in Korea. Beijing turned the proposal down flat.5 But the next phase of the war would take place against a backdrop of American allies, not American GIs, steadily losing heart in the struggle and desperately pushing for a cease-fire rather than victory.

  Moreover, if it had been a brutal winter so far for the Americans and their fellow UN troops, it had been far worse for the Chinese. They had suffered more than 72,000 casualties. They were badly equipped for winter fighting, with shoes instead of boots and down jackets instead of overcoats. They had been issued no gloves, and most had been issued only enough rations to last them five or six days. By December most had been fighting in Korea for a month.

  Theirs was a war of frostbite, starvation, and disease, as well as sudden death from American bombs and artillery. MacArthur’s men got firsthand glimpses into what the Chinese were suffering. One Seventh Marine platoon at Chosin reported discovering a Chinese position with fifty soldiers sitting bolt upright but too frozen to move, let alone shoot back. The Chinese were still alive but had to be lifted out one by one as the marines loaded them onto stretchers and carried them away—after prying their rifles loose from fingers frozen like claws around the triggers and barrels.6

  And while UN forces were in constant resupply, especially heavy artillery, thanks to their control of the sea, the Chinese had seen barely a trickle of fresh weapons and ammunition, almost all of which had come by primitive horse and mule train. Plus the Americans had a new player over the battlefield, the F-86 Sabre. It would steadily reassert American air superiority, and eventually clear the skies of Communist opposition.

  So contrary to the standard myth, the Eighth Army was indeed an army poised to resume the offensive. It just needed a commander ready to do it, and MacArthur had found the one who could.

  Ridgway shook up the command the moment his plane touched down in Korea. A tour of corps, division, regiment, and even battalion headquarters revealed a deepening pessimism among his senior command. After listening to their defensive plans, he wanted to know their offensive plans. None had any. Ridgway would gruffly tell them to start drawing up some, and then he would move on to the next command post.

  When he saw maps posted showing the terrain behind frontline positions, as preparation for withdrawal, he would rip them down.7 This army was going forward, he was telling his officers; stop planning where we’re going to retreat and start thinking about where we’re advancing next.

  But even Ridgway couldn’t hold back the tide when the Chinese launched their third, and biggest, offensive of the war.

  —

  As darkness fell on the last day of 1950, six Chinese divisions crashed through ROK army positions on the far bank of the Imjin River. The two divisions facing them had been considered first-rate; now they folded like a wet blanket. Men and officers streamed for the rear. Ridgway himself was nearly run over when he tried to stop a panic-stricken ROK army convoy.8

  Ridgway ordered his Twenty-fourth and Twenty-fifth Divisions, along with the Turkish and British brigades, to try to build a new defensive line north of Seoul but the Chinese were too fast for him. Three more South Korean divisions melted away as the Communist onslaught continued; soon the entire line from Chunchon northeast of Seoul to the sea was poised to give way.

  A sober reality was staring the Eighth Army’s new commander in the face. He would have to abandon Seoul.

  Ridgway sensed that this could trigger a humanitarian, as well as a military, disaster. Some 600,000 Koreans had returned to their homes in and around Seoul after the capital had been captured the previous September. Now they joined the panicked flood southward, jamming the roads and threatening to jam the all-important bridges across the Han, which Ridgway needed to move troops and supplies away from the surging Chinese. ROK military police and American military engineers had to keep herding the streaming thousands down to the banks of the Han, which was fortunately frozen over, so they could cross on foot, slipping and sliding on the ice. Thousands of others, however, died of exposure in the subzero cold, leaving a dismal trail of frozen men, women, and children sprawled along the roads as the Eighth Army began its pullback.

  Ridgway was unhappy with the withdrawal. Many units ignored his orders to stay in fighting contact with the Chinese as they fell back; others displayed the “bug-out fever” that reporters had talked about and he had discounted. Army engineers were all too eager to blow up Kimpo airfield, including 9,000 tons of engineering supplies, and the bridges across the Han—again!—before taking to their heels themselves.9

  Still, the Eighth Army managed the retreat without it becoming a rout. By January 4 they had abandoned Seoul to the triumpha
nt advancing Chinese, and on January 7 they established a new line roughly seventy miles south of the 38th parallel, running from Pyongtaek in the west to Samchok in the east.10

  As far as Ridgway was concerned, this was as far as the retreat would go. He alerted the Joint Chiefs that as soon as the line stabilized and the Chinese attacks were checkmated, he would be going on the counterattack.11

  Now for the first time, the men back in Washington thought they had found someone who grasped the situation in Korea better than the aging patriarch in Tokyo. They were still pondering MacArthur’s reply to their December 29 directive ordering him to stand fast, in which he reiterated the three choices the United Nations faced: massive reinforcement, evacuation, or annihilation. President Truman even sent him a personal message on January 13 to buck him up, explaining why withdrawal or relying on Chinese Nationalist reinforcements was unacceptable. It ended: “The entire nation is grateful for your splendid leadership in the difficult struggle in Korea, and for the superb performance of your forces under most difficult circumstances.”12

  MacArthur’s reply was terse: “We shall do our best.” To his GHQ staff he said simply, “There will be no evacuation.”13

  Yet what Truman and his people saw as their stand-fast determination to stay in Korea, MacArthur read as a catastrophic “loss of the will to win,” since they had rejected his overall strategic plan. The Joint Chiefs’ directive of December 29 had told him, “We believe that Korea is not the place to fight a major war.” MacArthur believed they were already fighting that war, and he was determined to win it.

  The men in Washington, on the other hand, saw MacArthur’s all-or-nothing plan as alarmist, even “defeatist” (interestingly, the same word MacArthur was using about them). They also saw his recent boasts that his advance to the Yalu had actually been a success because it had forced the Chinese to launch their attack before they were fully ready—“we had reached up, sprung the Red trap, and escaped it,” was how he put it in his Reminiscences—as self-justifying braggadocio. All the same, at least one top-level commander in Korea thought MacArthur’s diagnosis was correct. “If the Chinese had waited for us to deploy along the Yalu and then attacked,” he would write later, “they would have destroyed us with ease. MacArthur was correct in saying he had to feel out the enemy, and that by forcing their hand he averted a great disaster.”14