MacArthur estimated that it would take ten days to force the complete surrender of Chinese forces in Korea, with as few casualties for the UN as possible. It might even trigger the fall of Mao himself.
It’s not clear that MacArthur ever submitted his plan to the Joint Chiefs; most of its details did not emerge until years later, and in MacArthur’s own memoirs. Certainly they would have rejected it out of hand; it might even have led some in the Pentagon to question his sanity (among Dean Acheson and his State Department colleagues, there were no remaining doubts). The reaction of MacArthur’s biographers to The Plan, as it’s sometimes called, has been correspondingly harsh. Clayton James called it “grandiose” and utterly “fantastic.”33
But other analysts, including British military historian Edgar O’Ballance, have suggested that MacArthur’s plan was not so ill-conceived. It certainly was not unprecedented. President Truman himself had first raised the specter of using nuclear bombs to halt the Chinese advance; so had the Joint Chiefs in December, although they had concluded that the mountainous terrain of North Korea would nullify the impact. They had even asked MacArthur’s advice on potential Soviet targets for nuclear attack if Stalin decided to enter the war.34
Likewise, MacArthur’s idea of using twenty to thirty bombs seems a strategic extravagance until one realizes the enormous advantage that the United States enjoyed in its atomic arsenal in 1951 vis-à-vis the only other nuclear power in the world, the Soviet Union. The Strategic Air Command’s ability to deliver nuclear weapons anywhere in the world, including the far northern portion of North Korea, would have made the plan feasible, even at the cost of exhausting America’s existing nuclear arsenal—albeit (MacArthur would have argued) as the price for achieving final victory.
The idea of using radiological warfare to defeat an enemy was also nothing new. In early June 1950 then Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson had released a study on how to create a deadly radioactive belt, using atomic pile waste, to deny an enemy areas on the battlefield—a study that MacArthur had read.35
Instead, it is the idea of Nationalist Chinese troops toppling the mainland’s Communist regime that has drawn the most scorn from readers of MacArthur’s plan. It’s led to many detractors then and later to see his concept of “unleashing Chiang Kai-shek” as unbridled fantasy. But in the circumstances of early 1951, it was not so far-fetched as hindsight suggests.
The truth was, Mao’s forces were overextended; his best armies and military equipment were in Korea, not guarding the mainland—and they were being systematically destroyed. As Edgar O’Ballance has pointed out, “The Red Chinese regime was still unsteady, bewildered, and more than slightly surprised at its victory over the Nationalists”—which had as much to do with the cutoff of American support for the Nationalists as it did with Communist battlefield skill. In addition, “the Chinese Red Army had been diluted by huge infusions of turn-coat Nationalist soldiers” whom a Chiang-led invasion might have persuaded to turn coats again, while there were still sufficient Nationalist guerrillas fighting in the interior to tie up more than a million of Mao’s forces.36
An American-supported Nationalist invasion, with or without nuclear weapons, would have certainly wreaked havoc on Mao’s regime. If it didn’t actually topple the Red leader, it would have led to a serious resumption of the civil war—possibly even the partition of China. All of this would have crippled Chinese resistance against advancing UN forces, and North Korean resistance along with it. Only Stalin’s entry into the conflict could have saved the Communist cause; and almost every analyst now agrees that he was not prepared to start World War Three. Indeed, the prospect of a long, drawn-out war between China and the United States might have served his strategic purposes very well.37
All that being said, no one in the Truman administration, not even MacArthur’s supporters in Congress, was prepared to endorse such a plan on such a scale. Truman and his advisors were keenly interested in winding down the war; MacArthur’s plan would substantially widen it, although with the laudable goal of victory rather than stalemate and cease-fire.
And here the differences among MacArthur, Acheson, and Truman grew into a yawning chasm. For all his faulty calls and overconfidence alternating with overpessimism, MacArthur still believed that decisive victory was possible—indeed, sending American troops into battle to fight and die without that possibility seemed unfair, even obscene. To those who argued that he would then draw Red China fully into the war, as he wrote later, “How could Red China have been more at war against us?…How can one reasonably say it is not war when approximately 150,000 Americans [sic] and many times that of our ally, South Korea, were killed or maimed” by Red Chinese forces?38, *
Nor was MacArthur alone in believing that engaging Red China head-on in a wider war was the route to victory. We know now that in early March he requested the Joint Chiefs activate contingency plans in case more Chinese forces, and even Soviet forces, crossed the Yalu; and that the Joint Chiefs sent at least nine unassembled atomic bombs to Guam—just in case.39 The move suggests they at least understood MacArthur’s strategic concerns, and his willingness to take extreme measures to prevent a Communist takeover of the Korean peninsula.
But MacArthur also saw other geopolitical forces at work in the Korean conflict, forces that would ricochet around the Pacific Rim. To give up the goal of victory would encourage would-be Communist regimes in other parts of Asia, while dealing a “catastrophic blow to the hopes of the free world,” he wrote. That included other Asian governments such as Indonesia, Malaysia, and India, which would have drawn closer to the United States after a forthright display of power and resolve—but which, as Korea eventually ground to a stalemate, chose to withdraw into neutrality or even tacit acceptance of Chinese hegemony, instead.
Nothing that happened in the next decade—the Communist insurgency in Malaya, Mao’s armed clash with India and his invasion of Tibet, America’s growing involvement in the fighting in Indochina—would have come as a surprise to MacArthur. His former G-3, Pinky Wright, later agreed. As he told Clayton James in a personal interview long after the war, The Plan might have triggered a full-scale confrontation with China, and even the Soviet Union. But it was a confrontation that the United States would have decisively won.
“If this had happened,” Wright said in 1970, “we wouldn’t be in Vietnam.”
It’s difficult to see how that judgment was wrong, then or later.40
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From the perspective of Washington, however, the risks of such a confrontation were too great. That was why it still forbade MacArthur to conduct any air operations along the Yalu even though the Yalu remained the Chinese force’s chief line of support; and why it rejected using Nationalist troops out of hand. It was also why, as the Chinese pulled back in March and MacArthur saw the prospect of pushing across the 38th parallel as a way to open the next decisive stage of the war, the Truman people had already decided that Korea was, in Omar Bradley’s famous formulation, “the wrong war at the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong enemy.” They had also decided that MacArthur was the wrong commander, at least for the next phase of the war they had in mind.
The decision to remove MacArthur as CINCFE was a long time coming—Omar Bradley later said he thought he should have been removed as early as the previous October. In fact, no one was less surprised than MacArthur. Pinky Wright later said he knew for some time he would be relieved.41 Certainly when a theater commander realizes that what he thinks about the conduct of the war no longer matters to the commander in chief, it is time to go.
In addition, the statements that MacArthur began issuing to the media were increasingly critical of Truman’s policy. Those statements would later serve as the justification for his removal. Yet it might be better to read them not as the hubristic outbursts of a power-crazed tragic hero but as the last gestures of a man who sensed his time was up.
The first was his interview with Hugh Baillie of U.S. News & World Report, compl
aining of “the limitations which prevent unlimited pursuit of Chinese large forces and unlimited attack on their bases” as being “without precedent in history,” and castigating the “somewhat selfish though most[ly] short-sighted viewpoint” of Western European leaders who were reluctant to take on Red China. MacArthur did not name, but clearly implied, that France and Great Britain were those selfish and shortsighted allies.
Truman was furious. “I should have relieved General MacArthur there and then,” he wrote later, but Truman didn’t want to swap out commanders in the midst of the Chinese offensive. He contented himself instead with firing off a directive on December 6 stating that all U.S. government personnel, civilian or military, clear “all but routine statements with their departments” and “refrain from direct communication on military or foreign policy with newspapers, magazines, or other publicity media.”42 The directive was duly noted by MacArthur, who naturally assumed it did not apply to him.
The second incident came on March 7, when MacArthur gave a press conference at Suwon airfield and predicted that the “savage slaughter” would continue and the Eighth Army would face a stalemate if it did not get reinforcements, or if he did not get more leeway in striking at the enemy. “Vital decisions have yet to be made,” he warned, “decisions far beyond the scope of the authority vested in me” on how to end “Red China’s undeclared war in Korea.” But he left no doubt as to what he thought those decisions should be, that is, all-out war. The Truman team were upset at what they saw, rightly, as direct criticism of the rules of engagement the president had imposed, and also a blatant violation of the earlier December directive. But again they chose to take no action.43
The third provocation came a little more than two weeks later, on March 24. Ridgway was mopping up isolated Chinese and KPA units trapped below Line Kansas, and preparing to shift his focus eastward, where IX and X Corps would launch Operation Dauntless. This northward advance would give the Eighth Army control of the Chorwon-Kumhwa-Hwachon area south of Pyongyang and well above the 38th parallel, at the base of Communist defensive positions known as the Iron Triangle. On the 22nd MacArthur instructed Ridgway, “Do not cross the 38th parallel. I expect new directive from Washington shortly.”44 In the meantime, MacArthur decided to issue a call to the Communist Chinese to admit they were defeated and to either negotiate a peace or face a widening war.
“The enemy,” he stated, “must by now be painfully aware that a decision of the United Nations to depart from its tolerant effort to contain the war to the area of Korea, through an expansion of our military operations to his coastal areas and interior bases, would doom Red China to the risk of imminent collapse.” China could give up now or give up later, was the implied message; “I stand ready at any time to confer in the field with the Commander-in-Chief of the enemy forces” on how to realize “the political objectives of the United Nations in Korea, to which no nation may take just exception, might be accomplished without further bloodshed.”
In his memoirs, MacArthur described the bulletin as “routine.” When it hit Washington, however, Dean Acheson described it as “a major act of sabotage of a Government operation.”45 He, Dean Rusk, and others had been engaged in a delicate diplomatic balancing act of polling the other participating UN countries on the idea of announcing that the UN command was prepared to accept a cease-fire as the first step to a broader settlement. On the 21st a draft under Truman’s signature had gone out for final approval. The Joint Chiefs had even given MacArthur a warning of what was up, that the hope was to propose a halt to the fighting before troops crossed the 38th parallel.46
Now MacArthur’s statement seemed to doom the proposal in advance. The consensus was that taunting Communist China this way would kill any chance that Beijing would listen to Truman’s offer. Acheson remembered that Robert Lovett, the new defense secretary, who replaced Marshall on March 1, was “angrier than I had ever seen him” (MacArthur later claimed he had prepared his assessment of China’s military situation before he had read the Joint Chiefs’ March 20 communiqué).47
“MacArthur must be removed,” Lovett said firmly, “and removed at once.” Acheson read the statement and agreed. It seemed to him “insubordination of the grossest kind to his Commander-in-Chief.” The next morning, March 24 (MacArthur’s statement had reached them the previous evening), Truman summoned everyone to the White House. In the presence of Acheson, Lovett, and the other key principals, Truman dictated a message to MacArthur:
The President has directed that your attention be called to his order as transmitted 6 December, 1950 [stating that CINCFE was to make no statements of policy to the press without prior approval]. In view of the information given you 20 March 1951 any further statements by you must be coordinated as prescribed in the order of 6 December.
The President has also directed that in the event Communist military leaders request an armistice in the field, you immediately report that fact to the JCS for instructions.48
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Given the size of the provocation in the minds of Truman and his team, this seems a remarkably weak response. Certainly MacArthur was unimpressed. Since he believed his statement had been “a routine communiqué,” the December 6 directive clearly didn’t apply anyway.
Besides, he scoffed later, the claim “that I had disrupted some magic formula for peace” was “utter nonsense.” “No such plan was even in draft form,” and MacArthur in 1951 had guessed what we in fact now know was true. Far from being tempted by a cease-fire offer, Mao was getting ready for yet another, fifth offensive. In fact, MacArthur had warned Ridgway to mount “strong patrol action” to stay in constant contact with an enemy who, intelligence suggested, was gathering his forces for a major attack.49
The weather over Korea was starting to thaw as April began. Southern winds were driving the clouds lower as the snow turned into soft rains. On April 3 MacArthur paid another visit to Ridgway and the troops—his fifteenth since the war had begun and, although no one knew it, his last. He flew to Kangnung and traveled by jeep along the coastal road to Yangyang, where he watched the ROK Capital Division take up its new position fifteen miles north of the 38th parallel. Across the parallel Ridgway’s troops were surging forward in strength, readying for an attack on the formidable Iron Triangle. Back in Tokyo, MacArthur told the press, “Our strategy remains unchanged and is based on maneuver and not positional warfare.” As far as he was concerned, the 38th parallel “has never had any military significance.” His job and Ridgway’s was to fight the enemy wherever he was.50
In fact, it would be Ridgway’s fight alone. MacArthur’s fate was about to be sealed—not by his enemies in Washington, of whom he had taken full account, but disastrously and unexpectedly, by one of his closest supporters.
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On April 5 Joseph Martin, Republican congressman from Missouri, strode to the podium of the House. The Republicans had scored a massive victory at the polls in November—mostly due to disgust with the way the war in Korea was proceeding—and Martin was the new Speaker of the House, the first Republican to hold that post in almost two decades. Martin and his Republican colleagues were determined to hold the Truman administration accountable for its major failures in Asia, including the loss of China and the ongoing bloodshed in Korea, and Martin had in his pocket what he thought was the means to do it.
At the podium he pulled it out and began reading. It was a letter Martin had received from the general he revered, Douglas MacArthur, on March 20, in response to a letter Martin had sent. That missive had contained a speech Martin had made about America’s mishandled policy toward Formosa, and urged the United States to help Chiang Kai-shek open “a second Asiatic front” with Red China.
“I would deem it a great help if I could have your views on this point,” Martin had written, “either on a confidential basis or otherwise.”
MacArthur probably should not have written back. He should have realized that in a leak-obsessed Washington anything he sent to the Speaker of the
House, confidential or otherwise, would eventually make its way into the nation’s headlines—especially if it could be read as harshly critical of the current administration.
But he couldn’t help himself. The national melodrama that had become Truman versus MacArthur since their meeting on Wake Island was about to take a major turn as MacArthur sat down and wrote to Martin, in part:
It is strangely difficult for some to realize that here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest…that if we lose this war to Communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable; win it and Europe most probably would avoid war and yet preserve freedom. As you pointed out, we must win. There is no substitute for victory.
As Martin finished reading the general’s letter and left the House chamber, he did not realize that he had destroyed MacArthur’s career. Neither did MacArthur. When he got wind from one of his staff that one of his letters had set off a firestorm in Washington, MacArthur later testified, “I had to go back into the files. I didn’t even recall what the circumstance was.”51
In one sense, MacArthur had no reason to be alarmed. There was nothing he had said in the letter about his views on China and Formosa that he hadn’t told the administration before; certainly nothing about his views on the larger stakes in Korea, including in his communiqué with then Secretary Marshall.
Still, only someone who had not set foot in Washington in more than fifteen years could have been so obtuse as not to realize that such a letter, if made public, would be widely taken as an attack on the administration and the president. Making it worse was the release the same day of an interview in the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph quoting MacArthur as saying he “found himself in a war without a definite objective” and that “the situation would be ludicrous if men’s lives were not involved,” while the conservative magazine The Freeman ran an article saying that MacArthur had told them the reason South Korea’s army had not grown to larger numbers had to do with “basic political decisions beyond my authority,” and putting the blame squarely on the Truman administration.52
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