The Korean War (40 page)

a) the capability of the Moscow-Peiping axis to inflict a decisive defeat upon United Nations forces if they make the decision to do so; b) the risk of extending the Korean conflict to other areas and even into the general war at a time when [the United States was] not ready to risk general war; c) the heavy additional drain on American manpower and resources without a clearly seen outcome of the effort; d) loss of unity among [America’s] allies and in the United Nations in support of the Korean effort, and e) the diversion of additional United States effort from other vital requirements.
⁴⁵

It is easy to focus attention upon Washington and London’s misjudgements in the winter of 1950–51, and to forget those of the other side. If, at the end of 1950, Peking had shown itself ready to negotiate a ceasefire based upon the
status quo ante
in Korea, Mao Tse Tung’s government would have been in an overwhelmingly strong position to gain its seat at the UN, and to divide America from her allies if Washington proved reluctant to negotiate. MacArthur was not alone in his hubris. Peking deluded itself that absolute military victory, the reunification of Korea under communist rule, lay within its grasp. Between December and May, when repeated defeats at the hands of the UN gradually convinced the Chinese that total victory was not attainable, they showed themselves entirely intractable until their moment had passed, and threw away a commanding political advantage. In December, as the first communist power to inflict a great defeat upon the West, China’s worldwide prestige was at its zenith. Had Peking accepted a negotiated end to the struggle with its own armies victorious, China’s military standing for a generation to come would have been immense. Instead, however, by continuing the war, the communists gave time for the West to reassert its own military might, to demonstrate that even the greatest peasant army could be repulsed and defeated. If Washington had made a devastating miscalculation in the autumn of 1950, by driving for the Yalu, Peking’s error that winter was equally great, in reaching out for a victory beyond its powers.

Pragmatic considerations almost certainly weighed far more heavily than moral ones, in bringing about America’s decision against extending the war to China in the winter of 1950. There were grounds for overwhelming doubt as to whether bombing China, unleashing Chiang’s Nationalists upon the mainland, or enforcing a blockade would have a decisive impact upon China’s capacity to continue the war in Korea, or upon the stability of Mao Tse Tung’s regime in Peking. However, any of these options created a real danger of Soviet intervention. If this took place, the Pentagon was doubtful whether American forces in the Far East could hold
their ground, or even whether a third world war could be avoided. Any major initiative against China by the United States would cost Washington the support of the United Nations – more serious, that of the Western Allies. President Truman and his advisers were scarcely enthusiastic about, or even satisfied with, the policy of waging a limited war for limited objectives, to which they became tacitly committed in the winter of 1950, after seeing imminent victory slip from their grasp. But their debate, and its conclusion, had a decisive influence upon the struggle with General Douglas MacArthur, which reached its climax three months later. For MacArthur attempted to pursue an argument about the war, and about its extension to China, which had been effectively concluded in Washington before the Supreme Commander made his play.

How close did the United States come, in the winter of 1950, to employing atomic bombs against the Chinese? Much closer, the answer must be, than her allies cared to believe at the time. If Truman and the fellow-members of his Administration recoiled from bearing the responsibility for so terrible an act, America’s leading military men, from the Joint Chiefs downwards, were far more equivocal, and seemed far less disturbed by the prospect. All those at the seat of power in Washington drew back from discussion of the nuclear option as the military situation in Korea improved. But had the Chinese proved able to convert the defeat of the UN forces into their destruction, had Eighth Army been unable to check its retreat, and been driven headlong for the coastal ports with massive casualties, it is impossible to declare with certainty that Truman would have resisted demands for an atomic demonstration against China. The pressure upon the politicians from the military leaders of America might well have become irresistible, in the face of strategic disaster. The men who reversed the fortunes of the UN on the battlefield in Korea in the first weeks of 1951 may also have saved the world from the nightmare of a new Hiroshima in Asia.

3. The Arrival of Ridgway

On the Korean battlefield, the United Nations entered the New Year of 1951 still losing ground, still in desperate straits. Yet more than a week earlier, an event took place which was to have an overwhelming influence upon the turning of the tide of the war in Korea. On the morning of 23 December, General Walton Walker was driving from his headquarters to that of 27 Commonwealth Brigade. Walker, the doughty little hero of the Pusan Perimeter, was a weary, almost broken man. His quarrels with Almond, the collapse of his army, the knowledge that MacArthur was considering his replacement, had reduced the morale of the Eighth Army commander and his staff to an ebb as low as that of their troops. At Eighth Army headquarters, officers spoke openly of evacuation as the only course; talked without shame of the need for every unit to have its ‘bug-out route’. Walker was indisputably a brave man. But he was not a clever one. He had given all that he could offer to the cause of the United Nations. Now, a ROK truck turned across the road in front of his jeep. The general was thrown out in the collision, and suffered head injuries from which he died, on the way to hospital.

General Matthew Ridgway was sipping an after-dinner highball at the home of a friend when he was summoned to receive a telephone call from the Army Chief of Staff, Lawton Collins. Walker was dead. MacArthur had asked for Ridgway to succeed him. To lull his companions’ curiosity, Ridgway lingered drinking for a few minutes before driving home with his wife. The next morning, Saturday, he paid a quick call at the Pentagon to collect his papers, chat briefly with Sherman, Chief of Naval Operations, and left that night for Tokyo without an opportunity to see his family again. He arrived at Haneda airport just before midnight on
Christmas Day. The next morning at 9.30 he called upon MacArthur at the Dai Ichi. The Supreme Commander had no hesitation in expressing his enthusiasm for an attack on mainland China by the Nationalist Chinese, as a means of relieving the pressure upon South Korea. He showed his acute concern at the ‘mission vacuum’ in which he considered the army was operating, while the politicians decided where they wanted to go. He painted a bleak picture of the military situation, before assuring Ridgway of his support in whatever he decided to do: ‘The Eighth Army is yours, Matt. Do what you think best.’ At 4 p.m. that afternoon, 26 December, Ridgway was shivering on the apron at Taegu, being met by Eighth Army’s Chief of Staff, General Leven Allen.

Matthew Bunker Ridgway was fifty-six. At the beginning of World War II, he had been a lieutenant-colonel in the Plans Division of the War Department, where he remained until 1942. He then became, first, assistant commander, soon commander of 82nd Airborne Division, which he led with distinction in the Sicilian and Normandy landings. In August 1944, he took over 18 Airborne Corps, which he commanded in the Ardennes campaign. He was regarded not only by his fellow-countrymen, but also by their British allies, as one of the outstanding American soldiers of the war. Had he, rather than Browning, commanded at Arnhem, the outcome of that operation might have been astonishingly different – or certainly, less disastrous. He possessed almost all the military virtues – courage, brains, ruthlessness, decision. He made the grenade and field dressing on his shoulder straps familiar symbols, as much his own trademarks as Montgomery’s beret or Patton’s pistols. It has been cruelly but appositely remarked that Walton Walker’s death, making possible the coming of Ridgway, was the salvation of Eighth Army. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the contribution that Ridgway made to the United Nations cause in Korea, and to the achievement of a tolerable outcome of the war.

Ridgway arrived on 26 December full of hope that with the Chinese impetus temporarily spent, he might be able to organise a
rapid counter-offensive. But within a few hours, visiting his formations, ‘I had discovered that our forces were simply not mentally and spiritually ready for the sort of action I had been planning . . . The men I met along the road, those I stopped to talk to and to solicit gripes from – they too all conveyed to me a conviction that this was a bewildered army, not sure of itself or its leaders, not sure what they were doing there, wondering when they would hear the whistle of that homebound transport.’
⁴⁶

The new commander was dismayed to discover the shortage of essential winter clothing and equipment, the poor food and lack of amenities available to the troops. ‘The leadership I found in many instances sadly lacking, and I said so out loud.’ Ridgway was unimpressed, to put it politely, by ‘the unwillingness of the army to forgo certain creature comforts, its timidity about getting off the scanty roads, its reluctance to move without radio and telephone contact, and its lack of imagination in dealing with a foe whom they soon outmatched in firepower and dominated in the air and on the surrounding seas’.
⁴⁷
He met Sir Robert Mansergh, and told him, according to the British general, that ‘training was needed, and touched on the problem of pampered troops. I said that all ranks felt the absence of information and were in a vacuum. He said he could tell me nothing, because he knew nothing except “Stand And Fight”.’
⁴⁸

The transformation of Eighth Army after the coming of its new commander astonished and profoundly impressed all those who witnessed it. ‘It was incredible, the change that came over the Americans and their discipline,’ said a British gunner officer.
⁴⁹
‘They started to wash their vehicles, and things like that.’ Colonel John Michaelis of 27th Infantry called it ‘magic, the way Ridgway took that defeated army and turned it around. He was a breath of fresh air, a showman, what the army desperately needed.’
⁵⁰
From the outset, Ridgway demanded a new attention to terrain, and the assessment of key features which must be defended. There would be a fresh focus upon defence – and attack – in depth, with unit flanks secured against infiltration. Above all, the army must get off
the roads, must be willing to reach for and hold high ground – some British officers had been bewildered to see American units digging in to defend roadside positions at the base of prominent hills, where they were totally exposed to incoming fire. Ridgway was unimpressed by the performance of the corps and divisional commanders. He wrote to Collins in Washington, urging the need to awaken Americans both in government and across the land to what was taking place in Korea, the demand for ‘a toughness of soul as well as body’. He had no patience with the preoccupation among Eighth Army – and at the Dai Ichi – with evacuation of the peninsula. Ridgway did not believe this should be remotely necessary. The only contingency for which he was willing to prepare was withdrawal to a new Pusan Perimeter: but this one would be dug and prepared on an unprecedented scale. A senior engineer officer and thousands of Korean labourers were soon working day and night, creating a powerful defensive line in the south-east.

Ridgway – and soon MacArthur also – realised the immense advantage of his own shortening supply lines, while those of the Chinese were now extended to the limits of their fragile logistics system. MacArthur told the British Brigadier Basil Coad on 26 January that on the Yalu, the Chinese might be able to support a million men under arms; but at a line through Pyongyang this figure fell to 600,000; at the 38th Parallel, it became 300,000; forty miles south of Seoul, it became only 200,000. This was one of the Supreme Commander’s less fanciful judgements. Prisoners were reporting that as much as 50 per cent of the Chinese front-line length was afflicted by frostbite. ‘While we wished to continue to push the enemy, we could not open our mouth too wide,’ said Hu Seng of Marshal Peng’s staff. ‘China was unprepared for the new military situation created by the deep advance. We were now in a position where we could not continue to reinforce our army in Korea, because we could not supply more men.’ The Chinese offensive had exhausted its momentum. After inflicting a devastating shock upon the UN Command and the nations from which this was drawn, the initiative in the Korean War was once more about to change hands.

10 » NEMESIS:
THE DISMISSAL OF MACARTHUR

In December 1950, by a remarkable paradox, it became General Douglas MacArthur’s purpose to persuade his political masters in Washington, not only that the war in Korea could not be won, but that the absolute defeat of the United Nations was imminent. To this end, his headquarters launched a propaganda campaign of doom-laden pessimism. They exaggerated the numbers of Chinese troops now believed to be in Korea, or capable of being committed. They proclaimed their insistent doubts as to whether the UN armies could confront the enemy successfully. The Supreme Commander’s belief that the war against the communists in Korea should be extended across the border into China had become an obsession. In a long series of letters and cables, he pursued his argument with the Chiefs of Staff about the bombing of the Yalu bridges and beyond.