In any case, now there was the commander on the ground, Matthew Ridgway, saying he could hold the Chinese back and retake the initiative without any additional reinforcements or blockade of Red China. As the bonds of trust between Washington and the CINCFE steadily frayed, both sides would turn to Ridgway as the man to save their credibility: the man who could win the war (MacArthur’s main objective) without widening it (Washington’s).
All that both sides needed was proof that Ridgway was right. And starting on January 7, 1951, that proof came at the village of Wonju.
Wonju sat at the crossroads of the main road leading east from Seoul and Route 29, the north-south highway running all the way to Pusan. In their New Year’s Eve push, Wonju had fallen to the Communists—except the Communist units were North Koreans, not Chinese. Mao’s divisions fighting the marines at Chosin had taken such a mauling that Soviet and North Korean planners had moved newly reconstituted North Korean divisions into the line instead. The capture of Wonju was part of their next envelopment strategy. Five KPA divisions would overwhelm Wonju; another five would swing southeast, forcing the Eighth Army into yet another fighting withdrawal. But they ran afoul of General Almond and the Second Infantry Division instead.
On January 8 Almond ordered the men of the Second to retake Wonju; after intense fighting it was still in North Korean hands, but the Americans took up position on a hill dubbed Hill 242 overlooking the village and, with the help of the French and Dutch battalions, and with ROK divisions protecting their flanks, they held on through the storm.
For the next five days the North Koreans hurled one division after another to take Hill 242 but failed to dislodge the UN position as artillery and air support pounded their attacks to pieces. Almond moved up the U.S. Seventh Infantry Division to hold the critical towns overlooking Route 29, while the ROK commander rallied his divisions to hold their ground, which they did. It was, as one historian notes, Almond’s finest hour; at one point the battle raged forty miles from Wonju to Andong on the Naktong River. It was also the finest hour of the ROKA, as they proved at last that they could dig in and fight without fleeing to the rear under Communist attack.15
By January 13—the same day Truman sent his message to MacArthur explaining why evacuation was impossible—Wonju was in ruins, reduced to rubble by American artillery. Almond’s counterinsurgency force, the Special Activities Group or SAG, was still rooting out North Korean troops who had tried to slip behind the UN lines to raise havoc as insurgency guerrillas. The last were killed or captured on the 15th. But the battle for Wonju had been fought, and won, by the X Corps. Two American divisions, backed by three ROK divisions, had fought ten North Korean divisions to a draw. From that point on, the initiative in Korea belonged to Matt Ridgway.16
He was now infusing the Eighth Army and United Nations forces with a new spirit of drive and enthusiasm for battle. MacArthur’s staff usually found him not at army headquarters, but at some regimental or battalion command post, exhorting anyone who would listen that they were there for a purpose, and that purpose was killing Chinese. He once asked a startled lieutenant colonel what tanks were for.
“To kill Chinese,” the man blurted after a moment’s thought.
“That’s right,” Ridgway shot back, as he strode outside.17
They called him Iron Tits because he wore two grenades on his chest, attached to his utility harness. He hated reporters and the media, and told his staff that every story going out from Korea was subject to censure—a very un-MacArthur-like attitude. He also had a quick and savage temper—again un-MacArthur-like. Ridgway didn’t hesitate to drive his jeep over anyone’s tail if it gave him the freedom to do what he wanted.
The one person he never crossed, however, was MacArthur. MacArthur himself was delighted with Ridgway, the man he “held in highest esteem,” he later told a congressional committee, “as a cultured gentleman and one of the most magnificent characters I have ever been acquainted with.”18 And as Ridgway began slowly to turn the tables on the Communists, MacArthur was determined to be part of the action, and identified with the turnaround.
On January 12 he flew over to Korea—the first of eight trips he would make in the next three months. It was a revived MacArthur, exuding confidence and optimism. “There has been a lot of loose talk about the Chinese driving us into the sea,” he told reporters. “No one is going to drive us into the sea. This command intends to maintain a military position in Korea just as long as Washington decides we should do so.”19
Then, MacArthur wrote later, “I ordered Ridgway to start north again.” In his copy of MacArthur’s Reminiscences, Ridgway wryly wrote in the margin, “There was never any such order.”20 But it didn’t matter. Although new defensive positions were being prepared near Taegu and Pusan, there was nowhere to go but forward; MacArthur and the UN forces couldn’t leave Seoul to the Communists even if they had wanted to. Moreover, Ridgway was of the same mind as MacArthur: this had become a war about defeating Communism in Asia. America, not just the United Nations, had to win it. MacArthur later said, “There is no substitute for victory” in Korea. Ridgway wholeheartedly agreed.
And so on January 15, even as the entire peninsula lay blanketed under Arctic-like conditions, Ridgway ordered his I Corps forward in Operation Wolfhound. Their orders were to find and destroy any Chinese formations they encountered; and as the I Corps inched along the road to Suwon, they found plenty. Most dropped back under the Wolfhound attacks and more than a thousand air sorties. The Chinese took up new positions south of the river Han and waited for an opportunity to envelop the advancing Americans. But the way was now open for the first decisive UN offensive since the fighting along the Yalu two months before.21
“The Eighth Army has plenty of fight left,” Ridgway wrote to MacArthur, “and if attacked will severely punish the enemy. [But] this command, I am convinced, will do far more,” and he intended to prove it in Operation Thunderbolt.22
This was what Ridgway dubbed his division-size reconnaissance in force, a massive probing operation that started on January 25 and ran along the entire length of the peninsula. Each American division was backed by a ROK division as part of Ridgway’s plan to stiffen the South Koreans’ spine by showing them more fighting, not less—but with coordinated U.S. support. Thunderbolt worked. By January 28, UN forces had punched through Chinese resistance at Osan, and reoccupied Suwon. The Chinese commander’s hopes of enveloping the Eighth Army’s flank died, as Ridgway insisted on keeping an unbroken line of advance across the peninsula.23 Instead, the Chinese were steadily falling back under the relentless onslaught of air and artillery attacks, naval gunfire from offshore, and Ridgway’s terse orders to his troops: they were to kill Chinese, nothing else. “Keep throwing scrap iron at them.”
And so they did, surrounding Chinese troops by night, and then pulverizing their positions by day—while strafing planes slaughtered those who tried to break and run from the lethal pockets the UN forces made. MacArthur made another visit to the Eighth Army, shaking hands and getting briefings from all his commanders. When he returned to Tokyo, Ridgway wrote him a note: “We are all deeply grateful that you gave us of your time this Sunday. All were inspired by your visit.”24
On the last two days of January, Chinese People’s Volunteer Army (CPVA) resistance stiffened; Ridgway’s advance shrank to a few hundred yards a day. Then very suddenly on February 9, the Chinese pulled back to the far bank of the Han River, letting UN forces come right to the river’s edge. The next day I Corps took back Inchon and Kimpo airfield without firing a shot.25 On the 9th another operation, dubbed Punch, left more than 4,200 Chinese dead on the battlefield as the Han River now became the boundary between UN and Communist forces.
A jubilant Ridgway wrote to MacArthur on February 3, reporting that his forces had inflicted maximum casualties on the Chinese while sustaining minimum casualties themselves, and stating his intentions to close the line along the Han, although he felt that retaking Seoul was not yet feasible. Ma
cArthur wrote back saying he was in complete accord with Ridgway’s plan, but Ridgway shouldn’t feel he should stop at the Han. “If you reach the river without serious resistance,” Ridgway should keep going until he found some.
MacArthur was as anxious as Ridgway to keep the momentum going; and while retaking Seoul had less military value than diplomatic and symbolic importance, retaking Kimpo and Inchon were vital (which Ridgway did on the 9th). “Your performance of the last two weeks in concept and execution has been splendid,” MacArthur wrote at the end, “and worthy of the highest traditions of a great captain.”26
That great captain was about to undergo his most intensive test. What he and MacArthur did not know was that the Chinese had dropped back to resupply and prepare for Mao Zedong’s fourth and greatest offensive.
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The attack began at night on February 11 and fell first on three hapless ROK divisions sitting just north of Hoengsong. The Chinese broke through, and poured into Ridgway’s rear, setting up roadblocks and ambushes as Ridgway and his men struggled to recover. There were several days of confused fighting, with the UN abandoning Hoengsong and falling back toward Wonju.
The night of the 13th proved the turning point. The Chinese Thirteenth Army Group threw themselves on Almond’s Second Infantry Division and the French Battalion, who had been in the thick of the fighting at the first Battle of Wonju and now proved their skill and bravery once again in what became known as the Battle of Chipyong-ni. Almond’s men were cut off; Ridgway told Almond to stand fast. He would resupply the Second Infantry by air, he said, while blasting the surrounding sector with bombs and artillery fire.
It was a risky order, one that depended on American airpower to win the day—and American airpower came through. For three murderous days one wave of Chinese attackers after another crashed against the UN troops, who held firm as ceaseless napalm strikes rained down on the Chinese, decimating their formations. By the 16th it was all over. The French and Americans held the grim, smoldering battlefield. Farther east, similar Chinese attacks failed to dislodge the rest of X Corps.27
The UN line stabilized and Ridgway moved forward with a combination of what he called “good footwork with firepower.” His troops would beat back one Chinese counterattack after another as the artillery and air strikes pounded Chinese positions, until his soldiers were ready to move in. Then, once the Chinese broke and scattered, massed tanks would move in to complete the kill.
This lethal process, which Ridgway and his men came to call “the meat grinder,” repeated itself over and over, until by the 18th Ridgway’s forces were in line with the entire south bank of the Han River. Meanwhile, the First Marine Division and ROK security forces had reduced the Chinese and North Korean guerrillas operating behind his lines—some of whom had escaped during the first Battle of Wonju—to manageable proportions. When Ridgway ordered another cautious probe forward, his men found only abandoned foxholes and weapons. The fact was, the Chinese army in Korea was all but beaten; its supplies had run out, its ranks had shrunk by a third, not just from U.S. firepower but by typhus, frostbite, and trench foot as well.28
Now Ridgway and MacArthur could at last take the offensive, and drive the Communists back across the 38th parallel in three rapid strokes.
First came Operation Killer on February 21, as seven UN divisions pushed forward to destroy as many CPVA as possible. The first big thaw of the year had started, providing a major relief to men who had suffered three and a half months of subzero temperatures but also a major hamper to mobility, as streams overflowed their banks and became unfordable while Korea’s roads turned to mud.
Still, Chinese resistance proved lighter than anyone expected. Sometimes troops found just a line of empty trenches with a long, shallow grave dug behind them and lined with corpses killed days before. Stratemeyer’s planes dropped thousands of leaflets on the retreating CPVA with a message in Chinese for every officer: “Count your men”—a message aimed at destroying the morale of the Chinese command as well as that of their soldiers.29
By the 28th Ridgway had retaken Hoengsong, and every Chinese unit south of the Han had either pulled back or been destroyed. By one count, the Chinese may have suffered almost half a million casualties in just six weeks of fighting.
Then, after a one-week pause to rearm and refit, Ridgway launched Operation Ripper on March 7.
It was intended to outflank Seoul and split the Chinese off from North Korean formations farther east. It commenced with a head-on assault across the Han preceded by the heaviest artillery bombardment of the war. The Chinese on the north bank held on for three bloody days; it was estimated they lost 21,000 men in the first twenty-four hours of fighting. But by the 10th the U.S. Twenty-fifth Infantry Division was across the river, and elsewhere the Chinese were falling back, sometimes standing and fighting in suicidal defiance of the inevitable, sometimes simply turning and running—and running.
By the 13th troops from I Corps crossed the Han River on the western flank, and were in the outskirts of Seoul. Two days later they moved into the city’s deserted streets as Seoul changed hands for the fourth—and final—time. The rest of the Eighth Army was completing its move across the Han River. Farther east a successful ROK attack drove the North Koreans northward toward the 38th parallel, while in the center IX and X Corps had to blast the enemy out of a series of deep bunkers before reaching the line that Ridgway had established as the foremost limit of the Operation Ripper advance. It was dubbed Line Idaho, and extended from Seoul to just north of Kangnung in the east, and in the center to just south of the 38th parallel.
The tide of war was now running fully in the UN’s favor. Meanwhile, Communist forces had completed their pullback to just north of the parallel, into a complex of forts, tunnels, and shelters dug out of the rock by tens of thousands of North Korean peasants and reinforced with concrete.
What to do next? MacArthur, for one, had no doubts. It was time to cross the 38th parallel again and finish the Communists off, this time for good.
The men in Washington, however, had other ideas.
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“While General Ridgway was fighting the enemy, General MacArthur was fighting the Pentagon.”30
That at least was Dean Acheson’s assessment of the situation in late February and March 1951, as the disagreements over why and how the war in Korea was to be fought reached their final climax.
Since late December the consensus at the Pentagon, State, and Blair House was that if by some miracle MacArthur could survive the Chinese onslaught and turn the fighting around yet again, the best goal the United States and the United Nations could hope for would be to reestablish the 38th parallel as an international boundary with South Korea as a free independent country. All thought of freeing the entire peninsula from Communist rule, outlined in NSC 81/2, was now out.31 And as Ridgway’s success on the battlefield encouraged the belief that the worst was now over, the Truman administration began making arrangements for adopting the British plan and instituting a cease-fire once the Communists were driven back across the parallel and a twenty-mile demilitarized zone was established on either side of the border.
It was a strategy that Truman had ordered his national security team to start on as early as December 11; it came together with Truman, Acheson, and Marshall all acceding on December 26, and was the basis of the directive sent to MacArthur on December 29, and the president’s message to the CINCFE on January 13.32
It was a sensible, realistic strategy; one that most later observers have suggested was the best option left to the United States in the spring of 1951. It also reflected a consensus, including the Joint Chiefs, of what should not happen. Nothing should be done that might provoke a Soviet reaction in Europe or encourage a wider Chinese intervention. Under no circumstances were sites in Manchuria to be bombed; under no circumstances were United Nations forces to cross the 38th parallel again in sizable force.
Yet these last two points were essential to MacArthur’s own alte
rnative strategy—not just to achieve a satisfactory stalemate but to win the war, including, if possible, the total destruction of Communist China.
Instead of the plan presented to him by the Joint Chiefs, which he considered too timid by half, he conceived a four-point plan in mid- to late February, while his forces were still slightly south of Seoul. It would take advantage of what he reckoned was China’s overextended and overstretched position in Korea, with its supply lines vulnerable to air and naval attack, and the unwillingness of the Soviet Union to be dragged into a general war, even if it meant sacrificing its Chinese client.
The first step would be to use twenty to thirty atomic bombs to take out Chinese air installations and supply bases in Manchuria. The second would be to lay a radioactive belt of nuclear-contaminated material across the northern neck of the peninsula, thus severing North Korea from Red China.
The third was to put half a million Nationalist Chinese troops from Formosa plus two marine divisions into Korea with simultaneous amphibious landings on both the east and the west coasts of North Korea, who would then join up and cut off the million or so Chinese that MacArthur’s intelligence people estimated were still on the peninsula.
The fourth and final stage would be moving a reinforced Eighth Army (MacArthur had asked for four National Guard divisions) northward across the 38th parallel to finally crush the CPVA and its remaining North Korean allies.
Douglas MacArthur Page 93