The Korean War (22 page)

When the G-3 of 1st Marine Division, Colonel Alpha Bowser, first arrived in Tokyo in the first days of September, he was greatly dismayed by the uncertain mood he encountered: ‘It seemed very “iffy” to me. The feeling about whether we could go on holding at Pusan fluctuated from day to day. They appeared to be in a dreamworld at MacArthur’s headquarters. I could not understand how they could be so sanguine about what was happening to them. It scared the hell out of me.’
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Lieutenant-Colonel Ellis Williamson, G-3 of X Corps, also found the atmosphere ‘pretty dismal’ when he arrived in Tokyo from California. When first he heard talk of Inchon, he was among those staff officers who feared that the landing was being conducted on the wrong side of Korea. But MacArthur said to them: ‘It will be like an electric fan. You go to the wall and pull the plug out, and the fan will stop. When we get well ashore at Inchon, the North Koreans will have no choice but to pull out, or surrender.’
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Inchon was the only plausible target for an amphibious envelopment. Kunsan was so close to the besieged Pusan Perimeter that to make a landing there would be meaningless. Chinnampo, Pyongyang’s port, was too far north. Posung-Myon, below Inchon on the west coast, offered inadequate scope for a break-out inland. Yet Inchon’s thirty-two-foot tidal range was one of the greatest in the world. Only on three plausible dates – 15 and 27 September and 11 October – would the tides be high enough to give the big landing craft three brief hours inshore, before the coast became once more an impassable quagmire of mud. Beyond this problem, beyond the fierce current up the Flying Fish approach channel, there was no hope of achieving tactical surprise at the seawall where the main landing force must go ashore. Before the Americans
could even assault Inchon, they must unmistakably signal their intentions eleven hours in advance, by seizing the offshore island of Wolmi-do, which commanded the approaches. Thereafter, the problems became worse: the limited cargo-handling facilities, the imminence of the typhoon season, the steep overlooking hills from which a competent enemy could pour a devastating fire on to the beachhead. Finally, the tide times dictated that the main landings must take place at evening, leaving the assault force just two hours of daylight in which to gain a secure perimeter ashore, amid a city of 250,000 people.

The memory of Anzio still bulked very large in military memory, when just such a grand envelopment as Inchon had landed – in Churchill’s memorable phrases – not ‘a wild cat to tear out the heart of the Boche’, but ‘a stranded whale’, an invasion army besieged under heavy fire in a strangled perimeter. Why now take such vast risks, when the commitment of the two available divisions to Eighth Army at Pusan should make possible a break-out by more conventional means? The Marines’ General Shepherd opposed Inchon, because he perceived the North Koreans as a fanatical enemy capable of mounting as fierce a resistance to the Americans as the Japanese on Iwo Jima six years earlier.

Arrayed against all these arguments, and their proponents glittering with brass, MacArthur stood alone. He, too, admitted a fear that Inchon was a long march from the Pusan Perimeter. Yet he also saw the deeply demoralised state of the UN forces in Walker’s command. To commit the last readily available reinforcements at Pusan risked a disastrous strategic stalemate. MacArthur was determined upon a grand gesture, reaching out for strategic freedom, a war-winning thrust. Against all the reasoned arguments of admirals and generals and staff officers, he deployed only the rocklike, mystic certainty of his own instinct.

No man who was present ever forgot the conclusive 23 August meeting on the sixth floor of the Dai Ichi between MacArthur and America’s foremost commanders in the Far East. Stratemeyer was there, and Radford, and Collins and Sherman from Washington;
there was Shepherd, Fleet Marine commander, Struble and Doyle for the US Navy. Collins spoke openly of the army’s fears about the consequences of withdrawing the Marine brigade from Pusan for the landing. Sherman advocated a safer landing at Kunsan. Then other naval officers, led by Admiral Turner Joy, outlined the overwhelming difficulties, as they saw them, of putting an amphibious force ashore at Inchon. It was Rear-Admiral James H. Doyle who summarised the navy’s attitude, concluding bleakly: ‘The best I can say is that Inchon is not impossible.’ Then MacArthur stood, puffing on his corncob pipe.

He spoke with that slow, deep resonance of an accomplished actor [recalled one of the officers who heard him]. ‘Admiral, in all my years of military service, that is the finest briefing I have ever received. Commander, you have taught me all I had ever dreamed of knowing about tides. Do you know, in World War I they got our divisions to Europe through submarine-infested seas? I have a deep admiration for the navy. From the humiliation of Bataan, the navy brought us back.’

Then – literally with a tear in his eye – he said: ‘I never thought the day would come, that the navy would be unable to support the army in its operations.’
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It was a great theatrical performance. MacArthur’s peroration embraced the communist threat to Korea: ‘. . . It is plainly apparent that here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest. The test is not in Berlin or Vienna, in London, Paris or Washington. It is here and now – it is along the Naktong River in South Korea . . .’ He summoned up the ghost of his hero, General Wolfe, whose assault upon the heights of Quebec had also been opposed by his staff. He asserted the very implausibility of his own plan as its strongest argument for surprise, and thus success: ‘The very arguments you have made as to the impracticabilities involved will tend to ensure for me the element of surprise. For the enemy commander will reason that no one would be so brash as to make such an attempt.’
Then, finally: ‘I can almost hear the ticking of the second hand of destiny. We must act now or we will die . . . We shall land at Inchon, and I shall crush them.’ The deep voice fell away to a whisper. After forty-five minutes of oratory such as the world seldom sees save from the stalls of a theatre, the Supreme Commander returned to his chair. The Chief of Naval Operations stood up and declared emotionally: ‘General, the navy will get you to Inchon.’

This was not the end of the debate, for many of the most senior officers present left the briefing room unconvinced. But it was the turning point. Shepherd and Sherman made one more vain private attempt to convert MacArthur to a landing at Posung-Myon. But in the absence of a flat rejection from Washington, MacArthur continued to make his plans. On 28 August, he received the formal consent of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to the Inchon landings.

Yet even as the plans for the landing were finalised, the doubts persisted. The Chiefs of Staff in Washington gained the written sanction of the President for the operation, a step that was militarily quite unnecessary, but reflected their anxiety to ensure that they were not saddled with sole responsibility for disaster. Faced with the new communist drive against the Pusan Perimeter early in September, General Walker showed deep unhappiness about releasing forces from his front for Inchon. It was decided that the Marine Brigade would be taken out of the line and sent to sea only at the last possible moment; and that a regiment of the 7th Division would be kept in Pusan Harbour as a floating reserve to deal with a possible Eighth Army crisis, until it became essential for it to sail for Inchon.

The planners were irked to discover that, throughout the three-year American occupation of Korea, nothing had been done to assemble raw information about the geography of the country. Even the dimensions of the Inchon tidal basin were unknown. In haste, Tokyo set about remedying the yawning deficiencies in SCAP’s knowledge. Agents put into the Inchon area reported that there were only some 500 North Korean troops on Wolmi-do, and
a further 1,500 around Inchon. But just a few hours’ warning would be necessary for the North Koreans to move major reinforcements from the south-east. In an effort to keep the enemy in confusion until the last possible moment, a British naval task force was committed to carrying out a deception bombardment against Chinnampo, while a British frigate landed a raiding party at Kunsan. A courageous US naval officer, Lieutenant Eugene Clark, was put ashore at Yonghungdo, fifteen miles south of Inchon with similar coastal conditions. He returned to confirm the navy’s worst fears about the waist-deep mud, the shallow water extending three miles offshore, the high harbour wall against which the Marines must land.

Lieutenant-Colonel Robert Taplett, a tall, steady South Dakotan commanding the 3/5th Marines, was more worried about the prospect of the landing than most of his officers, ‘because I knew more about it. I thought it would be a very rough affair. I received an extraordinary message stating that once we were committed to the landing, we would continue with the operation until we had suffered 82.3 per cent casualties. I thought: “God, what kind of idiot would write an order putting in a decimal point like that?” ’
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Yet, against the background of such fears, it has been a mistake by some historians to presume that Inchon represented a great triumph for the underdog of the Korean campaign, against all odds. Rather, the mood of apprehension and outright dismay in which the landing was prepared showed how low the morale of the UN armies in Korea had sunk, and how great was the psychological dominance the enemy had achieved over their commanders, with the critical exception of MacArthur. The strength of the North Koreans’ continuing thrusts against the Pusan Perimeter masked the enormity of their losses since the war began. Allied intelligence was seriously overestimating the size of the forces facing Walker’s divisions. The staff continued to believe that the North Koreans possessed numerical superiority. Yet in reality, Kim Il Sung’s ruined regiments besieging Pusan could now muster only some 70,000 men, against a total of 140,000 in Walker’s
command. The Allies possessed absolute command of the air and sea, and overwhelming superiority of firepower. The ferocity and effectiveness of the enemy’s assault troops should not be permitted to mask the immense handicaps under which the communists laboured, lacking sophisticated logistic and technical support. Their intelligence gathering, for instance, was as lamentable as the American army’s security. The intention to land at Inchon was one of the worst-kept secrets of the war, the subject of open discussion among thousands of men in Japan and Korea. Yet miraculously, no word leaked through to Pyongyang. Not a man was moved to strengthen the communist defences in the last critical days before the armada sailed.

At Walker’s headquarters in Korea, pessimism continued to prevail, not only about Eighth Army’s predicament, but about the western landing. It was MacArthur’s knowledge of this spirit, or lack of it, that must have contributed significantly to his decision to appoint his own Chief of Staff, Lieutenant-General Edward M. Almond, to command the Inchon landing force, designated X Corps. So much criticism was subsequently heaped upon MacArthur for his decision to divide military authority between two separate commands in Korea, which would have important and unhappy consequences later, that it is worth examining his motives for doing so. The most obvious, and the least admirable, was that Almond was the Supreme Commander’s protégé , a ferociously ambitious soldier who had played a somewhat undistinguished role as a divisional commander in Italy in World War II, and now hungered for a more promising battlefield command. Almond was not a man who inspired much affection among his subordinates. O. P. Smith, the 1st Marine Division commander whose poor relations with his corps superior would become a serious blight upon the campaign, was antagonised by their first meeting before Inchon, when Almond dismissed the difficulties of amphibious operations: ‘This amphibious stuff is just a mechanical
option.’ Smith then ‘tried to tell him a few of the facts of life. But he was rather supercilious and called me “son”, which kind of annoyed me.’
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Yet there was an entirely legitimate case for placing the conduct of the Inchon landings in hands other than those of General Walton Walker. MacArthur well knew the low morale that existed in Eighth Army headquarters, and it presented him with a difficult dilemma. Walker had conducted a stubborn defence of Pusan. But there was grave reason to doubt his ability now to lead the sort of imaginative and dynamic operations MacArthur planned. MacArthur considered, and rejected, the possibility of relieving him of his command. This would have been a most unpalatable step to the American public. As is often the case in desperate situations, the figure of ‘Bulldog’ Walker had been exalted by publicity to heroic proportions. MacArthur’s compromise was to entrust the amphibious operation to Almond. Whatever his Chief of Staff’s vices, he was an undoubted driver of men. MacArthur was supremely confident that this one great effort would be decisive. Once it had succeeded, issues of command would no longer be important. He told O. P. Smith: ‘I know that this operation will be sort of helter-skelter. But the 1st Marine Division is going to win the war by landing at Inchon.’
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Among the senior officers of the Marine Division, there was never a moment’s doubt of the importance of the landing, not only for the cause of the United Nations, but for their corps’s survival. Since the end of World War II, they had been compelled to watch its remorseless shrinkage to a shadow of its wartime might. Many naval officers made plain their belief that the Marines should be confined to a role providing token shipboard contingents with the fleet. No less a figure than General Omar Bradley had declared his conviction, at the 1949 Congressional hearings on the B-36 bomber, that in the nuclear age there would never again be large-scale amphibious operations. ‘The Marine Corps was fighting for its very existence,’ said General Lem Shepherd.
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In Korea, and
above all at Inchon, he and his fellow-Marines perceived a supreme opportunity to show their nation what the corps could still do.