The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (72 page)

A FEW WEEKS
after the breakout from Kunuri on the Anju road, Paul Freeman ran into Keyes Beech, the
Chicago Daily News
reporter. Beech was intrigued by Freeman’s role: he had been in China as a young officer and he had seen the Chinese Army up close in those days when it had been something of a joke. Now he was fighting them. What did he think? “These are not the same Chinese,” Freeman had answered.

I
N THE DAYS
following the retreat from Kunuri, the great question was not whether it was bad, but how bad it was going to be. How far south would they have to retreat? When Johnnie Walker had met with MacArthur in the late-night session on November 28, he had been confident that if they retreated back to the Pyongyang area and created an east-west arc where the country was narrowest, Pyongyang-Yangdok-Wonsan, they could hold. Later Truman himself would talk about this line and say that that was where they should have drawn a line in the first place. The arc looked relatively narrow, especially compared to the vast wider spaces north of it, as the country mushroomed out. But at the waist it was still 125 miles long—with seven American divisions covering it, which meant a division sector would be about twenty miles. It was still very far north; the roads were terrible, and it would be extremely hard to supply many of the units. The Chinese might well be able to slip around them, thus isolating them. They were in effect now dealing with all the cautionary realities that they had paid so little attention to in the previous six weeks. But as the first Chinese success became apparent, the
myth
of battle, so important to the men engaged, suddenly favored them: there were so many of them, they were such fanatics, fearless in the face of their enemies; they fought brilliantly at night; they could slip up on a UN position and be inside it before the first shot was fired. The fear factor, which had weighed on the Chinese before the battle began, the fear of vastly superior American weaponry, now burdened the UN forces. The most dangerous virus that can infect any army—the fear of its adversary—had now struck the Eighth Army. As they had so recently underestimated Chinese military capacities, they now magnified them. As they had gone so cavalierly north, they were now unprepared to hold any kind of a moderate fallback position. In the west it was not a retreat but a rout, of an army that had become, because of the carelessness at the top, a shambles.

Now, it seemed, no one was in charge. The people in Tokyo, their illusions of total victory completely shattered, were frozen. In a way, it was as if the crisis
existed within MacArthur himself: he had always wanted those around him to see him as omniscient; now that he had been defeated on the battlefield by an Asian army and peasant generals, it was as if he had lost faith not just in his own forces but in himself. He had spoken before the Chinese entry into the war of achieving the greatest victory in the history of Christendom, of rivers running red with Chinese blood. Now he spoke in hardly less apocalyptic terms of either widening the war (and using the atomic bomb) or abandoning the Korean peninsula altogether. The last thing he was prepared to do was admit the mistakes he had made, and then try to piece his broken army back together. He was a man who liked to talk about the Asian concept of losing face; now he himself, good Caucasian though he was, had lost face not just before the entire world, but before his own troops, and perhaps most important of all before himself. Later, both Omar Bradley and Matt Ridgway talked of this as a period where his mood swings, always considered a problem by other commanders and senior civilians, were more pronounced than ever.

To no one’s surprise MacArthur did not take responsibility for the defeat; if anything he soon spoke as if he had been the principal victim of Washington’s policies. Even worse, as a commander he could not bring himself to visit his men or the country where the defeat had taken place, as if to go there would mean having to face those who knew how badly he had failed. He stayed in the protective lee of the Dai Ichi, among his staff, not visiting Korea until
December 11,
two weeks after the Chinese strike. Some of his cables back to Washington in those days smacked of the purest fantasy: he claimed that Tenth Corps, in great jeopardy on the east coast when the Chinese had come in, was not, as everyone in Washington knew, fighting for its very life, but still on an offensive mission and had tied down six to eight Chinese divisions that might otherwise have been hammering the Eighth Army. “When messages like that came in,” Ridgway later said, “it was as if the madness were in the room.”

There had been a moment just before the Chinese struck when, as his biographer William Manchester wrote, MacArthur had been “a colossus bestriding Korea until the nemesis of his hubris overtook him.” And then after the worst had happened, “he could not bear to end his career in checkmate.” Suddenly, he looked to outsiders, even those who bore him some measure of goodwill, like an old man hopelessly out of touch. The British general Leslie Mansergh, who visited him in Tokyo then, observed that “he appeared to be much older than his seventy years. Signs of nerves and strain were apparent.” He seemed to Mansergh completely disconnected from the battlefield reality: “When he emphasized the combined efforts and successes of all front-line troops in standing shoulder to shoulder, and dying if necessary in their fight against communism, it occurred to me that he could not have been fully in the picture. I cannot
believe he would have made these comments in such a way if he had been in full possession of the facts which I would inevitably learn later, facts that some Americans had been less than staunch. It occurred to me then, and was emphasized later, that the war in Korea is reproduced in Tokyo with certain omissions of the more unpalatable facts.”

He became, Clayton James, his generally sympathetic biographer, wrote, “depressed and short tempered at GHQ and often spent the nights suffering insomnia and pacing back and forth along the hallway at his home. His moods would swing to extremes—from buoyant optimism about winning the war before Christmas 1950, to alarmist predictions a little later that his troops would be forced to withdraw to Japan unless mightily reinforced.” No one around him, James noted of that period, could bring certain subjects up with him, such as his dubious choice of Ned Almond as a corps commander or his decision to split his forces. He was irritable when the press made fun of him for relabeling what had once been a grandiose all-out boys-home-before-Christmas offensive as “a reconnaissance in force,” successful, in his words, because it prematurely triggered the Chinese attack.

The mood swings had always been a problem, as the people dealing with him in Washington were very much aware. Omar Bradley wrote of “his brilliant but brittle” mind snapping in this period when he realized that his civilian superiors in Washington were not going to permit an all-out war with China, a larger war in which he would be able to reclaim victory and thus redeem himself. Matt Ridgway described him to one writer as a man capable of being brilliant and completely lucid at one moment and the next minute, during the very same conversation—as if he had suddenly thrown a switch—soaring off into a private world that only he understood (and inhabited), where defeats were not defeats and the victories of his adversaries not really victories. When he described MacArthur’s behavior in the weeks after the Chinese entered the war, Dean Acheson would quote Euripides: “Whom the gods destroy they first make mad.”

In the days after the Chinese attack and as the extent of the defeat became clear, it often seemed surreal for those reporters dealing with the command, the contrast between reality in Korea and in Tokyo. Joe Fromm, the
U.S. News
reporter who had been on Charles Willoughby’s enemies list, long remembered one particular scene in that stretch. About a week after the defeat at Kunuri, there was a press briefing in Tokyo at which Willoughby presided. There he was, the chief of intelligence, at the lectern, as full of certitudes as ever, seemingly unshaken by defeat, and trying to prove that he and his people in G-2 had been right about the Chinese all along, had, in fact, been tracking them from the time they left the south of China and had known exactly
what they were planning to do. Indeed, even when MacArthur had made his famous home-by-Christmas pledges, he had known that a great many Chinese had already crossed the Yalu and that there were troops from at least thirty divisions on both sides of the border in easy striking distance of American forces. Well, if that were true, one reporter asked, why had he gone ahead with his major offensive, knowing he was outnumbered three to one? “We couldn’t just passively sit by,” Willoughby answered. “We had to attack and find out the enemy’s profile.” The command, it turned out, had not been surprised at all. “I went back to my office,” Fromm said years later, “and I thought to myself, Now they say that they always knew, because they’re never wrong, and now they say they were never surprised because they can never be surprised, and yet if you checked with the kids who fought there, someone fucked up, because the kids who fought there didn’t know about all the Chinese the way MacArthur and Willoughby knew about them. It’s madness. Pure madness. Someone is crazy.”

Gradually a new line began to emerge from Tokyo. To the degree that things had gone wrong, it was because Washington had hamstrung MacArthur, preventing him from attacking Chinese bases on the other side of the Yalu. He had not waited very long to launch his own defense in friendly journals and with friendly editors. On December 1, ten days before he could bring himself to visit his men in the field, a long article appeared in
U.S. News
in which he attacked the administration for not letting him go in “hot pursuit” of the Chinese by bombing their Manchurian bases. That, he said, placed on him “an enormous [military] handicap, without precedent in history.” In Washington it was viewed as another Posterity Paper. Truman was predictably furious. On December 6, he imposed a gag rule on all parties, demanding that any policy statements on Korea by anyone be cleared with State. Of all the rules put in place at this time, it was the one MacArthur paid the least attention to.

Later Bradley ruminated that this was another critical moment when the Joint Chiefs badly failed the president. Washington had been impotent, forced to listen to bad news without being able to do anything to change the nature of the battlefield. To Bradley it seemed that “MacArthur was throwing in the towel without the slightest effort to put up a fight.” In Washington, they knew that the Chinese had broken off contact after Walker retreated south of Pyongyang, and showed no taste for pursuit. “Why then,” Bradley wondered, “was the Eighth Army running to the rear so hard and fast? Why hadn’t MacArthur gone to Korea to steady Walker and rally the troops with his famous rhetoric? It was disgraceful.” It was a defeated Army. Walker probably should have been relieved right then and there; his position had been untenable for too long. A new man was obviously needed on the battlefield, either
Matthew Ridgway or Jim Van Fleet, another rising star who had done well in steadying anti-Communist forces in Greece. In addition, MacArthur should have been
ordered
to combine his two forces, Eighth Army and Tenth Corps. In the top echelon at this time, only Dean Rusk, Bradley noted, seemed to be pushing for such serious acts to break the mood of pessimism that had taken hold of the military. (Why, Rusk asked, couldn’t we “muster our best effort and spirit to put up our best fight?” The British, he said, had done that time and again early in World War II—why couldn’t we?)

It was the bleakest time for the Truman administration. The war, which the president had thought was virtually over, had not only been enlarged, but the commanding general was now surfacing as the administration’s most serious adversary, as much a political as a military one, blaming the administration for a lack of support, and in effect for the defeat. The president himself, normally very much in control in press conferences, had slipped badly on November 30, as the Chinese offensive began. He answered a question about what the United States was going to do in Korea by saying they would do whatever was necessary to meet the challenge. “Will that include the atomic bomb?” another reporter asked. Truman could easily have ducked it, but he answered, “That includes every weapon we have.” Then another reporter asked, “Does that mean there is active consideration of the use of the atomic bomb?” And Truman responded, “There has always been active consideration of its use.” Then he made things even worse by saying it was something the military people would have to decide and adding that the military commander in the field would be “in charge of the use of all these weapons.”

That terrified a great many people—American citizens and allies alike—because it implied that MacArthur, the commander in the field, was in charge of whether or not to use atomic weapons. Slowly, awkwardly, the administration pulled back from the president’s words. The Joint Chiefs were especially weak in those months. Brave and otherwise independent men often became quite bureaucratic once they were members of the JCS. That reflected one of the great secrets of the military culture—how officers who had been so brave in battle, fearless when it mattered, could be so bland and cautious as they reached what was seemingly a career pinnacle. That had been true in Korea; it would be even truer in Vietnam. There were, it appeared, two very different kinds of courage in many military men—bravery in battle, and independence or bravery within the institution—and they did not often reside side by side.

The Chiefs wanted MacArthur to consolidate his forces, to fold Tenth Corps back into the Eighth Army and create a unified command in which American troops would be protecting the flanks of the main force. They believed that the superior mobility of their own forces, when combined with the
limited logistical ability of the Chinese, would allow the UN troops to pull back forty or fifty miles, regroup, and then present a much more formidable defensive line—backed by air and artillery—should the Chinese continue to advance. Except for the difficult talk of extricating the Marines from the area around the Chosin Reservoir, it was doable, they believed, because in most places the Chinese had broken off contact after their initial strike. As early as November 29, the Chiefs had cabled MacArthur suggesting just that. It was—and this was critically important—a suggestion, not an order. But he immediately turned it down, cabling them on December 3, “There is no practicality nor would any accrue thereby to unite the forces of Eighth Army and Tenth Corps.” The Joint Chiefs were stunned. They could not understand the military logic behind the cable, except that, implicitly, their suggestion might have been taken as an indictment of his earlier decision to split his forces. The cable was a reminder that even when the general was wrong, he was never wrong.