The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (87 page)

I
N WASHINGTON, THERE
was a profound sense of relief, for the fact that they would no longer have to think the unthinkable and be forced off the peninsula in some terrible Dunkirk-like humiliation, as MacArthur’s cables had only recently seemed to imply. But the improved battlefield did not end the tensions between Tokyo and Washington. If anything, the Far East commander now became even more difficult in his dealings with Washington, more openly critical of the Truman administration’s strategy for the war, more openly condescending about Ridgway’s successes (except when taking credit for them), and finally more openly political, as if he were not merely a commander under the authority of the president but wore the hat of military consultant on hire to the Republican leadership in Congress as well. Where he had only recently dissented from Truman and the Joint Chiefs in doomsday terms, claiming that the sheer size of the Chinese Army meant the United States lacked the ability to stay on the peninsula without major additional forces or the use of nuclear weapons, his argument was now quite different. He was frustrated, he told sympathetic editors and politicians on the right, because we had lost our will to win in Korea, even though by his terms winning translated into nothing less than all-out war with China on the Asian mainland.

Now, his reputation damaged by the first great Chinese offensive and the retreat of his troops, with his military peers in Washington paying less and less attention to him, and with Ridgway stalemating the Chinese forces in a way he had said could not be achieved, MacArthur seemed to be spoiling for a fight with Washington. The fight was more political than military. This was to be about a wider war, or perhaps even a total war, with an adversary that the senior civilians (as well as their military advisers) considered an ancillary enemy: China, not Russia, had already showed in its struggles against the Japanese that it had the capacity to absorb endless numbers of invading troops even as the invaders might think they were winning.

There were, it should be noted, no political benefits from Ridgway’s successes for the Democratic administration. An embattled administration remained no
less embattled, an unpopular war no less unpopular. What the Ridgway strategy seemed to promise was more of the same, more of what had made the war unpopular in the first place. The longer it went on, it now appeared, the greater the political price to be paid. The domestic issue that the Republicans had seized on, subversion, seemed to some people to be validated by the fact that we were now fighting the Chinese Communists in Korea. If, in terms of his relationship with the Joint Chiefs and the president, MacArthur was on the defensive, he still had reason to believe that the people who were for him back in America, whose political agenda and geopolitical vision he seemingly embodied, were on the ascent. It was a situation guaranteed to bring out the worst in him. Cut off, and essentially bypassed by Washington, he was spoiling for a fight.

The president—and in terms of the public’s exhaustion with the Democrats, there was no easy separation from the Roosevelt administration, which had preceded him—had probably governed for too long in too hard a time, where there were too many forces outside his control. The news that the Russians had the atomic bomb, the fall of Chiang, the Hiss case headlines, and the Korean War itself had placed the administration in an ever more unpalatable position. With the Chinese engaged in Korea, the war seemed darker than ever, without an acceptable solution in sight. What made this so hard to swallow for Truman and the men around him was the fact that the military situation had gotten much worse because of the miscalculations of MacArthur, who was now lining up against them politically and showed no interest in accepting any of the blame.

All of this made the final collision between the president and the general inevitable, for there were no restraints now on the general’s side. By late January 1951 there were signs that he was committed ever more publicly to pushing for a larger war. He had flown to Suwon on January 28. Ridgway had greeted him on arrival, and the journalists gathered around them had overheard MacArthur say, as he stepped off the plane, “This is exactly where I came in seven months ago to start this crusade. The stake we fight for now, however, is more than Korea—it is a free Asia.” The word “crusade” as well as the reference to a “free Asia” were immediately picked up by British journalists and published in London, greatly upsetting the British government, which sensed, accurately enough, that the commander in Tokyo wanted a larger war, quite possibly an all-out war with China.

MacArthur did not see what was now taking shape in Korea as most other senior military men, and certainly the Joint Chiefs, did. No command interested him save his own. He had no interest in the threat the Soviets might pose in Europe. Always aware that the Soviets could easily make countermoves if the United States escalated the war in Korea, Truman feared crises in, among
other places, Berlin, Indochina, Yugoslavia, and especially Iran. A minor incident would be created, the president liked to say, and the Russians would use it as an excuse for an intervention. As for bombing China’s cities, Truman and his people thought the general was overlooking what would happen
after
the bombs dropped. Then the first calls would go out for the UN to bomb the Soviet port of Vladivostok and the Trans-Siberian Railroad, because of all the materiel the Russians would send in by train. Truman doubted very much that MacArthur considered the way this would escalate the war, ultimately placing
Japanese
cities at risk from
Russian
countermoves.

When Joe Collins and other members of the Joint Chiefs tried to make their case to MacArthur, he simply turned a deaf ear. As Max Hastings, the British military historian, wrote, “It will never be certain how far MacArthur’s affronted personal hubris influenced his attitude to the Chinese, how far he became instilled with a yearning for crude revenge upon the people who had brought all his hopes and triumphs in Korea to nothing. [But] it did seem probable that he did not consider it beyond his own powers to reinstate Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist regime in Beijing.” If Hastings was not entirely sure what drove MacArthur in those last months in Tokyo, Omar Bradley had few doubts. As he later put it, in words unusually harsh for one general to write about another, “MacArthur’s reaction arose, I feel certain, at least in part from the fact that his legendary military pride had been hurt. The Red Chinese had made a fool of the infallible ‘military genius.’ By then it must have been clear to him that his failure to send X Corps in pursuit of the North Korean Army after Inchon and to split his forces and send X Corps to Wonsan was an error of grave magnitude…. Furthermore, the Chinese had made a mockery of his intelligence estimates, of his vainglorious boasts that his all-out air assault including bombing the Korean ends of the Yalu bridges would make northwest Korea a desert, and his assertion that our men would advance to the Yalu and ‘be home by Christmas.’ The only possible means left to MacArthur to regain his lost pride and military reputation was now to inflict an overwhelming defeat on those Red Chinese generals who had made a fool of him. In order to do this he was perfectly willing to propel us into an all-out war with Red China and possibly with the Soviet Union, igniting World War III, and a nuclear holocaust.”

If anything, Ridgway’s almost immediate successes at Chipyongni and other places with the same force levels MacArthur had so recently deemed wholly inadequate made things worse. What others viewed as a limited victory was, in effect, a second great defeat for MacArthur’s pride. Equally wounding was the fact that, because of his battlefield successes and his blunt, candid style, Ridgway was developing a very admiring press corps. The limelight,
which MacArthur so craved, was, late in his career, going over to a subordinate, something he had never permitted before. Reporters liked Ridgway; he was professional and straight, a general obsessed by his mission, who spoke to them in an honest, blunt way, not unlike Joseph Stilwell had. His obsession seemed to be with the war itself, and not how he looked in their dispatches. He was generous in crediting subordinate officers. There was a tone in the new coverage that MacArthur especially hated, an implicit sense that the good Ridgway was replacing the bad MacArthur, someone in touch replacing someone hopelessly out of it.

Soon a new pattern emerged: Ridgway would plan a major offensive, and just as it was about to kick off, MacArthur and his top people would suddenly fly in from Tokyo, go to the relevant headquarters, where the general would immediately hold a press conference—as if to steal back Ridgway’s increasingly admiring press corps—and claim credit for the planning. When Ridgway’s Operation Killer was about to kick off, MacArthur flew to Suwon and announced that it was he who had ordered the attack. Ridgway later wrote angrily that neither MacArthur nor his staff had had any part in the planning of the operation: “It is not so much that my own vanity took an unexpected roughing up by this announcement as that I was given a rather unwelcome reminder of a MacArthur that I had known but had almost forgotten,” a general all too eager to keep his “public image always glowing.”

As Walter Millis wrote, the one person not ready to deal with the improved military situation was the general himself, “MacArthur had provided for every contingency save one—the contingency of ‘success.’” Soon MacArthur escalated his assault on the Truman administration in a constant series of barbed remarks to journalists and political figures and in his cables back to Washington. As early as December, after Truman put out his directive demanding that all statements on Korea be cleared through the State Department, MacArthur quite deliberately violated it. His complaints against the administration were of a kind: the limits imposed upon his command, unique, he seemed to think, in the history of warfare; the lack of an adequate number of troops to get the job done; the sanctuaries offered his enemies, with no mention of the sanctuaries the Americans had—most notably the industrial and port facilities of Tokyo and Yokohama, exceptionally tempting targets that the enemy did not touch. It was all part of the odd set of quid pro quos now being established as the great powers struggled to figure out what in this ever more dangerous world they could actually do and what they dared not do. At the heart of MacArthur’s messages lay the most politically charged aspect of all, what he began to describe as a failure of will on the part of an administration unwilling to seek a real victory. In the rhetoric of the time, failure of will sounded perilously close to appeasement.
His line was relatively simple: a stalemate in Korea was a defeat, while only a wider war with China would bring genuine victory, and in the past America had always sought total victory.

The Republicans back in the United States had been charging the administration with appeasement and the loss of China—now here America was fighting the Chinese, and the country’s most famous general was all but accusing the same administration of appeasing the enemy. His new dissent was perfectly tailored toward his political constituency, the more militant anti-Communist part of the American right wing. They wanted, it seemed, to win China back without the loss of a single American boy on Chinese soil. More, these calls had a certain popular resonance now that the United States was stalemated in Korea. Some voters were angry and frustrated; they wanted something different even if they were not sure what it was; it need only cost very little in human terms—that is, in terms of American casualties.

If the United States did not defeat Communism in Asia, MacArthur suggested in letters to his close friends in the press corps and in Washington, the failure would cost them dearly in Europe. One could save Europe from Communism only by saving Asia from Communism first. He was eager to do it, and the forces, he assured them, were there—for there were those troops of Chiang’s ready to march. He was willing to inflict on the Chinese, and on Communism, a terrible defeat, if only Washington would free his hand, he lamented. There was no small irony in this because MacArthur had been one of the most influential people in bringing the Russians (and thus the Communists) into Korea in the first place. That had been some six years earlier at the end of a different war against a different enemy, and he was then the man charged with commanding the Allied force about to invade the Japanese home islands. He was hardly alone in wanting the Russians to enter the Pacific War. Most senior military men felt the same way. The few who knew about the Manhattan Project were hardly sure it would work or become so decisive a military instrument. That he wanted the Russians to enter the war in order to alleviate the pressure on the Allied forces was the most natural impulse for any general. But now, it was as if the second Douglas MacArthur, the MacArthur of the Cold War, had never even been introduced to the first Douglas MacArthur, the commander during World War II, who had once wanted Soviet help.

Now, the Cold War deepening, he implied that he had
always
opposed Russia coming into the war. Unfortunately for him, there were any number of witnesses who knew better. One of them was Colonel Paul Freeman, who, having held a brief combat command in the Philippines in late 1944, was about to fly back to Washington, where he was once again to work for
George Marshall. Before leaving the Philippines, however, Freeman was suddenly summoned for a command performance by MacArthur. It was a fascinating meeting that lasted for almost two hours. Freeman understood that he was to be a messenger to Washington, an instrument to express the general’s views. The first part of the meeting was devoted to MacArthur’s traditional resentment of Washington. Freeman listened and finally dissented as best he could to a great figure. General Marshall, he said, had frequently supported MacArthur as much as possible in terms of forces and supplies and had taken MacArthur’s side in his desire to liberate the Philippines when the top Navy people wanted to bypass them and go directly for Taiwan. That was not exactly what MacArthur wanted to hear, but sheer personal honor dictated that it be said.