The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (47 page)

Inchon represented a great gamble: the enemy would have to be completely asleep for it to work, because the entrance to the port was so narrow. But great generals, MacArthur believed, take great gambles. Just before his own D-day he summoned some of the Tokyo reporters assigned to the war and invited them to come along on the assault, traveling aboard the
Mount McKinley,
his headquarters ship. (Their dateline of course would then have his imprint on it, “From MacArthur’s headquarters…”) Just before the ship left Sasebo harbor for Inchon, there was another briefing, done jointly with Admiral Doyle. MacArthur was in an expansive mood. He intended to cut the North Korean supply lines. Nine times out of ten in the history of war, he said, an army was defeated because its supply lines were cut. One reporter asked whether he feared a Chinese intervention. The idea did not seem to bother him at all, and his answer was much like the one he would give Harry Truman at Wake Island a month later: he was aware of the vast difference in demographics, he said; if “we commit 150 million Americans, they could still put in four Asiatics for every American.” He therefore would not challenge them in an area of their strength. But he nonetheless had a plan for the use of airpower to neutralize them, to play to our strengths and away from theirs and to nullify their massive numbers. “If the Chinese do intervene, our air [force] will turn the Yalu River into the bloodiest stream in all history.” Whether he or those around him who had done his planning understood how the Chinese fought and how their strategy at least partially limited the effectiveness of airpower was another thing. When the Chinese finally attacked, they caught MacArthur by surprise; his airpower was of little immediate effectiveness, and there was almost no Chinese blood in the Yalu, which they had long ago crossed, undetected.

A
T INCHON, MACARTHUR
was lucky, in no small part because Kim Il Sung was not the most nimble of adversaries. For whatever reason, Kim had refused to pick up on the possibility of an amphibious landing taking place behind his lines. The Chinese, on the other hand, were very much aware of a massive American buildup in Japan in the weeks before Inchon. Because Japan in the late 1940s and early 1950s was a sieve for espionage, because security at Japanese ports was marginal, and because many Japanese dockworkers were dedicated Communists, the Chinese knew that much of the equipment being brought in was the kind to be used for an amphibious landing. By early August, Mao Zedong was very concerned about what he was hearing about the North Korean offensive. The quick victory promised by Kim in the South had not materialized. The Americans, Mao knew, were stiffening their resistance in Pusan in late August and early September, but they were also keeping what appeared to be two divisions of their best troops in Japan. Amphibious landings were being practiced. Clearly something was up. Mao had spent much of his lifetime fighting adversaries who had not only superior forces but superior weaponry, and so military intelligence had always been critical to his success—the Chinese had learned to avoid their enemies where they were strongest, strike only where they were weakest, and once in battle they always had to be ready to break off contact in order to fight another day. Mao took what was happening—and what he sensed was about to happen—with the utmost seriousness.

So in early August, well before the landing itself, he assigned Lei Yingfu, one of the ablest men on his general staff, and Zhou Enlai’s military secretary, to figure out what the Americans were up to and where they might strike next. It was the purest of military intelligence missions. Certain things were clear to the Chinese military intelligence people. In addition to some of the American units there practicing amphibious landings, Japan’s harbors were swarming with American and allied ships of all sizes from all over the world. In addition, the American commander, MacArthur, had waged his Pacific campaign using
amphibious landings again and again. Lei studied all the available intelligence and decided the Americans were preparing a major trap for the North Koreans, that they were going to land by surprise far behind the In Min Gun’s lines. He believed they not only intended to break out from the Pusan Perimeter, but with the amphibious landing they hoped to capture much of the North Korean Army at the same time. Lei studied his maps, tried to think like an American, and decided that the amphibious assault would come at one of six ports, and that MacArthur, given the aggressive nature of his personality, would most likely choose Inchon. On August 23, a week before the final Communist push along the Naktong began (and the day by chance of MacArthur’s dramatic appeal to the Chiefs in the Dai Ichi war room), Lei took the results of his study to Zhou Enlai, who was greatly impressed and immediately passed them on to Mao. Summoned by Mao, Lei gave a formidable briefing and offered a three-page memo on MacArthur and his tactics, his mind-set, and his personality quirks. Mao then told Zhou Enlai to pass the estimates on to Kim Il Sung. Some of Kim’s Russian advisers were making similar suggestions, but none of this seemed to move Kim. This was hardly surprising. After all, he had risen to power not by battlefield brilliance, but by managing to survive in a cruel political era, and then by being essentially ideologically obedient. Kim held power largely through the largesse of the Red Army. He had not learned anywhere near as many lessons on his way to power as Mao or Ho.

Mao was sure, based on his predictions, that China’s role in the war was about to change. By mid-August he believed that the North Koreans had reached the essential high-water mark of their success in the South. On August 19 and 23 he met with Pavel Yudin, a senior Soviet adviser. At these meetings he told Yudin that if the United States continued to send more troops to Korea, the In Min Gun would not be able to hold and would need direct assistance from China. In August and in early September, Mao met with Lee Sang Cho, a North Korean representative in China. In these meetings, he indulged himself slightly—a little chance to pay the Koreans back for the condescending way they had treated him at the start of the war—by going over some of the North Korean military mistakes: their failure, in essence, to seek more of his advice. They had not prepared enough in the way of reserve forces, even as they were striking on so broad a front. They had put too much effort into conquering territory rather than destroying their enemies. Then he mentioned the current vulnerability of places like Kimpo Airfield and suggested that the North Koreans consider retreating and strengthening their defenses at places that were especially vulnerable. He even pointed to the map and specifically mentioned Inchon as the most likely target. But Kim, surprisingly to the Chinese, made no moves, not even to mine Inchon harbor.

The Chinese understood what was happening at the front; the North Korean leadership did not. One of the problems in a totalitarian system like that of North Korea was that bad news tended
not
to filter back with much accuracy from the front to higher commands. That could be true of democratic societies as well, but it was all the more true of deeply hierarchical ones like North Korea. Instead the news was sanitized step by step as it moved upward. Thus, on September 4, when Mao’s emissary, Zhai Junwu, told Kim that the war was locked in a stalemate in the Pusan area, the Korean leader did not believe him. His great offensive was just starting, he told the Chinese representative, and would soon break the deadlock. When Zhai mentioned the possibility of a United Nations strike behind North Korean lines, Kim answered, “We estimate that presently a U.S. counterattack is not possible; they do not possess sufficient troop support and therefore a landing to our rear ports would be difficult.” Stunned by his response, Zhai returned to Beijing on September 10, five days before the Inchon landing, and then went back to Pyongyang again. He brought with him Zhou’s pleas that Kim make a strategic withdrawal. “I have never considered retreat,” Kim replied. Zhou was annoyed by the response, and on September 18, three days after the Inchon landing had taken place virtually unopposed, he met a senior Soviet representative to suggest once again that the North Koreans pull back, regroup their units farther north, and play on Western fears that the Chinese or the Russians would enter the war.

THE LANDING ITSELF
—thirteen thousand men hit the seawalls and piers—and then the race for Seoul that followed, went not merely as MacArthur had planned, but as he had dreamed. The conditions proved better than expected, the initial resistance comparatively light; Doyle’s planning had been skillful and detailed, and the gods of battle favored them in one additional fateful way: they provided a careless enemy commander in Kim. The port of Inchon stuck out slightly into the bay like a truncated thumb. About ten miles east of it was Kimpo Airfield, and another five or six miles east of that, depending on the route taken, was Seoul itself. Two Marine regiments, the First and Seventh, were to take Inchon, followed by Kimpo, and then move east across the Han River and take Seoul itself. Soon there was to be a linkup with Walker’s Eighth Army, which would by then have presumably broken out of its positions on the Naktong and be driving north with ever greater speed.

Initially, Marine losses were relatively light: no one killed in the assault on Wolmi-do Island, which opened up the harbor, and only twenty Americans dead at the end of the first day. Gradually, though, as the UN forces moved toward Seoul, the North Korean resistance stiffened. As that happened, tensions between Almond, the Tenth Corps commander, and O. P. Smith, the commander
of the First Marine Division, which was part of his corps, grew more bitter. Almond began demanding immediate results, which Smith, trying to complete the increasingly deadly mission without unnecessarily sacrificing the lives of his men, thought unrealistic. Smith (and most of the other senior Marines) came to believe that Almond was an unrealistic commander, a man who listened only to the voice of the man above him and was careless with his orders, insensitive to the lives of the men in his command, and far, far too concerned with public relations. The seeds of such a split had long been there. From the start, top Marine officers had felt that Almond, who had never been part of an amphibious landing in his life, minimized the dangers and difficulties, was improperly respectful of their needs, and did not listen to anyone he outranked. Nor could two officers have been more different. Almond was almost self-consciously audacious; Smith, the least charismatic of Marine commanders, was low-key and professorial. (Indeed, his nickname, which no one dared use to his face, was the Professor.) Some of the tension reflected the very different nature of leadership in the Army and the Marines. The Army was big, and relationships between commanders and their men were often impersonal; the Marines were a small service, the relationship between officers and men more intimate, indeed intense. If anything, O. P. Smith was even more careful than the average Marine officer. He had been the assistant division commander of the First Marines in October 1944, when they landed on the island of Peleliu. That had been one of the cruelest and costliest battles of the war in the Pacific. There had been a major intelligence miscalculation, and the Marines, upon landing, had found their numbers matched by some nine thousand extremely well-dug-in Japanese. It was the kind of experience that tempered a man forever.

If the officers’ relationship had begun poorly, it disintegrated once combat began. Indeed the feud, in the words of Marine historian Edwin Simmons, eventually became “the stuff of legends.” Simmons, who fought at Inchon and the Chosin Reservoir as a young Marine officer, thought that no small amount of the tension came from the way World War II had been fought in two very different theaters. The Army men who fought the Germans in Europe had been able to bring in vastly superior firepower, and often, when a German unit cracked, large numbers of them surrendered and the rest retreated quickly, allowing the Allies to race ahead and make major gains. The men in the Pacific, Marines and Army, on the other hand, fought a far more grinding war, and when the Japanese gave way, they did it ever so slowly, the Allied advances often seeming to be measured in yards, while relatively few Japanese surrendered.

9. T
HE
I
NCHON
L
ANDINGS,
S
EPTEMBER
1
5,
1950

Smith had warned Almond that the ease of the Inchon landing was deceptive, that they had overwhelmed small detachments of rear-echelon troops, but
that taking Seoul might be a very different thing. There was, he said, based on some preliminary recons, evidence of a well-defended city protected by thousands of elite North Korean troops. Smith was accurate in his projections. Originally MacArthur’s G-2 had estimated about six to seven thousand enemy troops in the Inchon-Seoul area, but as the UN forces struck at Inchon, Kim Il Sung had rushed some twenty thousand additional troops, one full division and three separate regiments, to the Seoul area. There were in the end upward of thirty-five to forty thousand troops defending the Southern capital, some of them relatively green, but they fought hard. The road to Seoul, Smith later noted laconically, was “one of those routine operations that read easier in newspapers than on the ground.” The Americans had little superiority in numbers. Their advantage lay in hardware and firepower. The North Koreans had the advantage of fighting defensively. In an urban situation, when street fighting was required, that was no small asset. That meant that the fighting would be difficult and costly, much of it block by block, and that, because of American dependence on heavy weaponry, much of the city was sure to be turned into rubble. But as the offensive slowed, as each hundred yards of ground became dearer, the pressure grew on Smith, and Almond became more aggressive, reflecting pressure from MacArthur. Almond was dissatisfied with the pace
Smith was setting, and he became—in a process to be repeated in several other battles still to come—the de facto division commander, flying around in his small spotter plane, giving orders directly to Smith’s regimental, battalion, and even company commanders, without going through Division. He was sure that he was a brilliant tactical officer, and he flew over the battlefield, radioing instructions to whatever unit he spotted below him. Smith protested angrily about Almond’s intrusion into his command. “If you give your orders to me, I’ll see that they are carried out,” he told Almond at one point, but it made no difference. Almond continued to direct Smith’s men. Almond’s code name was Fitzgerald, and finally Smith issued orders to Colonel Alpha Bowser, his G-3, that he was not to accept any more orders during battle from Fitzgerald without confirmation from Division.