The Cold War (17 page)

As Truman had anticipated, the tumult began to subside. For seven weeks in the late spring of 1951, the Senate Foreign Relations and Armed Services committees held joint hearings to investigate MacArthur's dismissal. Though the hearings were closed, authorized transcripts of each day's sessions, edited for military security reasons, were released hourly to the press.

MacArthur, the first witness, testified for three days, arguing that his way in Korea was the way to victory and an end to the slaughter. He had seen as much blood and disaster as any man alive, he told the senators, but never such devastation as during his last time in Korea. “After I looked at that wreckage and those thousands of women and children and everything, I vomited. Now are you going to let that go on … ?” The politicians in Washington had introduced a “new concept into military operations—the concept of appeasement,” its purpose only “to go on indefinitely … indecisively, fighting with no mission….”

But he also began to sound self-absorbed and oddly uninterested in global issues. He would admit to no mistakes, no errors of judgment. Failure to anticipate the size of the Chinese invasion, for example, had been the fault of the CIA. Any operation he commanded was crucial; other considerations were always of less importance. Certain that his strategy of war on China would not bring in the Soviets, he belittled the danger of a larger conflict. But what if he happened to be wrong? he was asked. What if another world war resulted? That, said MacArthur, was not his responsibility. “My responsibilities were in the Pacific, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff and various agencies of the Government
are working night and day for an over-all solution to the global problem. Now I am not familiar with their studies. I haven't gone into it….” To many, it seemed he had made the president's case.

The great turning point came with the testimony of Marshall, Bradley, and the Joint Chiefs, who refuted absolutely MacArthur's claim that they agreed with his strategy. Truman, from the start of the crisis, had known he needed the full support of his military advisers before declaring his decision about MacArthur. Now it was that full support, through nineteen days of testimony, that not only gave weight and validity to the decision but discredited MacArthur in a way nothing else could have.

Never, said the Joint Chiefs, had they subscribed to MacArthur's plan for victory, however greatly they admired him. The dismissal of MacArthur, said all of them—Marshall, Bradley, the Joint Chiefs—was more than warranted; it was a necessity. Given the circumstances, given the seriousness of MacArthur's opposition to the policy of the president, his challenge to presidential authority, there had been no other course. The fidelity of the military high command to the principle of civilian control of the military was total and unequivocal.

Such unanimity of opinion on the part of the country's foremost and most respected military leaders seemed to leave Republican senators stunned. As James Reston wrote in
The New York Times,
“MacArthur, who had started as the prosecutor, had now become the defendant.”

The hearings ground on and grew increasingly dull. The MacArthur hysteria was over; interest waned. When, in June, MacArthur set off on a speaking tour through Texas, insisting he had no presidential ambitions, he began to sound more and more shrill and vindictive, less and less like a hero. He attacked Truman, appeasement, high taxes, and “insidious forces working from within.” His crowds grew steadily smaller. Nationwide, the polls showed a sharp decline in his popular appeal. The old soldier was truly beginning to fade away.

Truman would regard the decision to fire MacArthur as among the most important he made as president. He did not, however, agree with those who said it had shown what great courage he had. (Harriman, among others, would later speak of it as one of the most courageous steps ever taken by any president.) “Courage didn't have anything to do with it,” Truman would say emphatically. “General MacArthur was insubordinate and I fired him. That's all there was to it.”

But if the firing of MacArthur had taken a heavy toll politically, if Truman as
president had been less than a master of persuasion, he had accomplished a very great deal and demonstrated extraordinary patience and strength of character in how he rode out the storm. His policy in Korea—his determined effort to keep the conflict in bounds—had not been scuttled, however great the aura of the hero-general, or his powers as a spellbinder. The principle of civilian control over the military, challenged as never before in the nation's history, had survived, and stronger than ever. The president had made his point and, with the backing of his generals, he had made it stick.

THOMAS FLEMING

One has to go back almost to 1914 and the Battle of the Marne to find military fortunes that seesawed as breathlessly as those first months of the Korean War. First there was the surprise North Korean attack and the drive that penned in a battered and demoralized U.N. force and the remnants of the South Korean army in the Pusan Perimeter, that small southeastern corner of the Korean peninsula. Then came another surprise, this time an American one, the September 15 landing at Inchon, the port of Seoul, the final masterstroke of Douglas MacArthur's career, and the melting away of the North Korean army, followed by the advance to Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. A few U.N. units got as far as the Yalu River, which separated North Korea from China. The war—which Truman (in a phrase that would come back to haunt him) termed a “police action”—seemed as good as over. MacArthur predicted that the bulk of his troops would be “home in time for Christmas.” That was at the end of October 1950, just four months after the fighting had begun. Suddenly, the U.N. faced a new enemy, this time Chinese “volunteers.” (The Chinese Communists chose the designation in hopes of avoiding a more widespread war with the U.S.)

The story of how MacArthur misread the signs has been told many times. The immediate cause of the Chinese intervention seemed to be his decision to advance above the 38th Parallel and strike for the Yalu. (The British were antsy, afraid that the Chinese would use the attack into North Korea as a pretext to seize Hong Kong.) But apparently, Mao had taken Truman's sending of the Seventh Fleet to patrol the Straits of Taiwan as an act of war, even though its actual purpose was to prevent the broadening of hostilities. Washington, too, misread the signals. It failed to
recognize the depth of Chinese resentment caused by the forestalled invasion. Mao reluctantly canceled preparations for the Taiwan invasion in August but had already begun a build-up of forces in northeast China. As his generals advised him, “One should always open an umbrella before it starts to rain.” Meanwhile, Stalin, dismayed by the failure of his North Korean gamble, appealed to the Chinese for help. He also promised further military aid to the North Koreans, especially air support.

In the last days of October, the Chinese attacked, badly roughing up the American and ROK vanguard. After a few days, they abruptly withdrew, disappearing into the barren, hilly landscape. It was a warning that MacArthur failed to heed. Though some of his generals urged withdrawing to safer positions, he elected to resume his advance. On November 24, the Americans observed Thanksgiving. No effort was spared to make sure the men of the Eighth Army were served turkey dinners with all the trimmings.

The next day the Chinese attacked. It was a type of warfare that Americans had never experienced and for which they were unprepared. They were in effect facing a huge guerrilla army whose very primitiveness was its greatest strength. No wireless radio activity, movement of tanks, air reconnaissance, or sudden appearance of supply depots had warned of the Chinese approach. They lacked almost all the technological basics of modern war making. They did not advance along roads but swooped down from the hills, usually at night, announcing their coming with drums, bugles, and flutes that unsettled and paralyzed defenders. The mortar, the machine gun, and the grenade were their principal weapons, infiltration their favored tactic. Failure to anticipate, failure to adapt, failure to learn: This, the historian Eliot A. Cohen tells us, is the surest recipe for military misfortune, and the Eighth mastered the combination. In November and December 1950 it suffered one of the notable defeats in the history of American wars.

Seoul fell again; the Chinese pushed the U.N. forces back a hundred miles, and the commander of the Eighth Army died in a jeep accident. The prospect of an American Dunkirk loomed. (The mid-December evacuation of the X Corps from Hungnam, accomplished without panic or loss, was just that.) There was, to be sure, the epic withdrawal of the 1st Marine Division from the frozen Chosin Reservoir, which amounted, Martin Russ has written, to “a series of tactical victories within the overall
context of a strategic defeat.” In Washington and Tokyo desperation mounted. Should we drop atomic bombs on China? Unleash Chiang to invade the mainland? Blockade China? Would the Soviets choose this moment to invade Europe, using the atomic bombs that they now had? The end of 1950 had to be one of the most dangerous moments in the Cold War.

This was the situation that the new Eighth Army commander, Lieutenant General Matthew B. Ridgway, faced when he arrived in Korea the day after Christmas. Ridgway's revival of that army, Thomas Fleming writes here, became “the stuff of legends, a paradigm of American generalship.” It was a leadership feat that has to be as notable as the disaster that preceded it.

THOMAS FLEMING is the author of more than forty books, including
The New Dealers' War: FDR and the War Within World War II; Duel: Alexander Hamilton, Aaron Burr, and the Future of America; Liberty!: The American Revolution; The Illusion of Victory: America in World War I;
and
Washington's Secret War: The Hidden History of Valley Forge.

I
F YOU ASKED A GROUP
of average Americans to name the greatest general of the twentieth century, most would nominate Dwight Eisenhower, the master politician who organized the Allied invasion of Europe, or Douglas MacArthur, a leader in both world wars, or George C. Marshall, the architect of victory in World War II. John J. Pershing and George S. Patton would also get a fair number of votes. But if you ask professional soldiers that question, a surprising number of them will reply: “Ridgway.”

When they pass this judgment, they are not thinking of the general who excelled as a division commander and an army corps commander in World War II. Many other men distinguished themselves in those roles. The soldiers are remembering the general who rallied a beaten Eighth Army from the brink of defeat in Korea in 1951.

The son of a West Pointer who retired as a colonel of the artillery, Matthew Bunker Ridgway graduated from the U.S. Military Academy in 1917. Even there, although his scholastic record was mediocre, he was thinking about how to become a general. One trait he decided to cultivate was an ability to remember names. By his first-class year, he was able to identify the entire 750-man student body.

To his dismay, instead of being sent into combat in France, Ridgway was ordered to teach Spanish at West Point, an assignment that he was certain meant the death knell of his military career. (As it turned out, it was probably the first of many examples of Ridgway luck; like Eisenhower and Omar Bradley, he escaped the trench mentality that the World War I experience inflicted on too many officers.) Typically, he mastered the language, becoming one of a handful of officers who were fluent in the second tongue of the Western Hemisphere.
He stayed at West Point for six years, in the course of which he became acquainted with its controversial young superintendent, Brigadier General Douglas MacArthur, who was trying in vain to stop the academy from still preparing for the War of 1812.

In the 1920s and 1930s, Ridgway's skills as a writer and linguist brought him more staff assignments than he professed to want—troop leadership was the experience that counted on the promotion ladder. But Ridgway's passion for excellence and commitment to the army attracted the attention of a number of people, notably that of a rising star in the generation ahead of him, George Marshall. Ridgway served under Marshall in the 15th Infantry in China in the mid-1930s and was on his general staff in Washington when Pearl Harbor plunged the nation into World War II.

As the army expanded geometrically in the next year, Ridgway acquired two stars and the command of the 82nd Division. When Marshall decided to turn it into an airborne outfit, Ridgway strapped on a parachute and jumped out of a plane for the first time in his life. Returning to his division, he cheerfully reported that there was nothing to the transition to paratrooper. He quieted a lot of apprehension in the division, although he privately admitted to a few friends that “nothing” was like jumping off the top of a moving freight train onto a hard roadbed.

Dropped into Sicily during the night of July 9, 1943, Ridgway's paratroopers survived a series of snafus. Navy gunners shot down twenty of their planes as they came over the Mediterranean from North Africa. In the darkness, their confused pilots scattered them all over the island. Nevertheless, they rescued the invasion by preventing the crack Hermann Göring panzer division from attacking the fragile beachhead and throwing the first invaders of Hitler's Fortress Europe into the sea.

In this campaign, Ridgway displayed many traits that became hallmarks of his generalship. He scorned a rear-area command post. Battalion and even company commanders never knew when they would find Ridgway at their elbow, urging them forward, demanding to know why they were doing this and not that. His close calls with small- and large-caliber enemy fire swiftly acquired legendary proportions. Even Patton, who was not shy about moving forward, ordered Ridgway to stop trying to be the 82nd Division's point man. Ridgway pretty much ignored the order, calling it “a compliment.”

From Patton, Ridgway acquired another command habit: the practice of stopping to tell lower ranks—military policemen, engineers building bridges—they
were doing a good job. He noted the remarkable way this could energize an entire battalion, even a regiment. At the same time, Ridgway displayed a ruthless readiness to relieve any officer who did not meet his extremely high standards of battlefield performance. Celerity and aggressiveness were what he wanted. If an enemy force appeared on a unit's front, he wanted an immediate deployment for flank attacks. He did not tolerate commanders who sat down and thought things over for an hour or two.