The Korean War (42 page)

On 27 March, another landmark was passed when the first UN troops – ROK I Corps – once more crossed the 38th Parallel. They
took the town of Yangyang four days later. The Americans kept pace with them, driving north from Uijongbu. But this time, there was to be no headlong race for the Yalu. Ridgway’s objective was merely to reach the ‘Iron Triangle’, south of Pyongyang, the heart of the communist supply and communications network. By 9 April, the UN armies had reached the KANSAS line. Here, with their positions anchored upon the barriers of the Imjin river in the west and the Hwachon reservoir in the centre, they could pause and gather breath before embarking upon the next phase. The line from coast to coast had shortened to just 115 miles. In the days that followed, I and IX pushed forward a few miles further, and a new advance to the WYOMING line was being planned. ‘We now had a tested, tough, and highly confident army,’ wrote Ridgway, ‘experienced in this sort of fighting, inured to the vicissitudes of the weather, and possessed of firepower far exceeding anything we had been able to use on the enemy heretofore. The only development that could possibly cause us to withdraw from the peninsula was, I felt sure, massive intervention by the Soviets. In the spring of 1951, such intervention was not altogether an impossibility.’
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But the next move belonged not to Moscow, or Eighth Army, but to Peking and Washington: Peking, where a massive spring offensive by nineteen Chinese armies was being prepared, in an attempt to undo all that Ridgway had accomplished in his astonishing four months in Korea; and Washington, where patience had at last expired with the dangerous military majesty of the Dai Ichi.

President Truman’s dismissal of General Douglas MacArthur has been the subject of millions of words of narrative and analysis. It is unlikely that any important new evidence will emerge to alter historical perceptions of events in Washington and Tokyo in the spring of 1951. In a primarily military study of the war in Korea, it is redundant to rehearse once again much familiar detail. Here, it is relevant only to summarise the arguments and the events that culminated in the Great Fall of 11 April.

Ten months of crisis in Korea had exercised a powerful influence upon the domestic politics of the United States. They had witnessed the growing ascendancy of the right wing of the Republican party, convinced that the United States faced a co-ordinated external and internal communist conspiracy, of which North Korean aggression was merely one manifestation. Republicans found it intolerable to behold the spectacle of United States military power lurching ineffectually to maintain a tenuous grip in Korea against the communist hordes. If their opposition to deep entanglement in European alliances was founded upon a dislike of the restraint that European liberals thereby sought to impose upon American foreign policy, their enthusiasm for a ‘forward policy’ in the Pacific and the Far East assumed an American freedom of manoeuvre in the hemisphere which events in Korea seemed to deny. It was only five years since the United States had emerged from a war in which she triumphantly projected her huge power across five continents, and emerged with an apparently unchallengeable primacy in world affairs. Yet now, America seemed unable to impose her will upon a nation of tinpot dictators and cotton-clad communists. In the 1980s, this frustration of power seems a commonplace. But in 1950–51, it was a repugnant revelation to much of the American people. It seemed intolerable that American boys should be suffering and dying in thousands in an odorous Asian wasteland, fighting a war with goalposts set by Pyongyang and Peking. Prominent Republicans such as Senator Taft demanded that America should fight for her interests in Asia upon terms that would enable her to use her vast technological superiority. Implicit if not explicit in much conservative rhetoric of this period was the conviction that American policy should not exclude the use of nuclear weapons, America’s greatest technological advantage of all. The Republicans also exploited the charge that President Truman had acted unconstitutionally by sending American troops to Korea without the formal assent of the US Congress, an issue which may have possessed some substance.

The most conspicuous consequence of Senate pressure upon
the Administration for a more vigorous brand of anti-communism was the commitment of hundreds of millions of dollars, and firm guarantees of American support, for Chiang Kai Shek’s regime on Formosa. Dean Rusk declared: ‘We recognise the National Government of the Republic of China, even though the territory under its control is severely restricted . . . We believe it more authentically represents the views of the great body of the people of China, particularly the historic demand for independence from foreign control . . .’ And matching the United States’ new commitments to the anti-communist cause in the Far East, four further divisions were dispatched to reinforce the US Army in Europe.

But these developments of the Cold War were peripheral to the central debate, about what was to be done with America’s hot war against communism in Korea. From Tokyo, MacArthur maintained constant pressure on the Administration, to commit the United States to the defeat of communism in Asia. On 13 February, MacArthur declared that ‘the concept advanced by some that we establish a line across Korea and enter into positional warfare is wholly unrealistic and illusory’. He had now conceived a plan to cut off Korea from China by massive air attack. Even more ambitiously, he proposed to create an impassable boundary between the forces of communism and those of freedom, by sowing a no-man’s-land with radioactive waste. He discussed amphibious and airborne envelopments of enemy forces on a scale that would have dwarfed Inchon. ‘MacArthur believed even more deeply than before,’ wrote Courtney Whitney, one of those closest to his confidence, ‘that Red Chinese aggression in Asia could not be stopped by killing Chinese, no matter how many, in Korea, so long as her power to make war remained inviolate.’
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On 7 March at Suwon, MacArthur proclaimed loftily: ‘Vital decisions have yet to be made – decisions far beyond the scope of the authority vested in me as the military commander, but which must provide on the highest international level an answer to the obscurities which now becloud the unsolved problems raised by Red China’s undeclared war in Korea.’

Truman, in Washington, was making it clear both in public and in private that with the armies close to the line from which the war had begun, it was time to discuss a peace on these positions. MacArthur at once declared his profound disagreement with the President’s view, by issuing his own statement:

The enemy must by now be painfully aware that a decision of the United Nations to depart from its tolerant effort to contain the war to the area of Korea, through an expansion of our military operations to its coastal areas and interior bases, would doom Red China to the risk of imminent military collapse . . . The Korean nation and people, which have been so cruelly ravaged, must not be sacrificed. This is a paramount concern. Apart from the military area of the problem where issues are resolved in the course of combat, the fundamental questions continue to be political in nature, and must find their answer in the diplomatic sphere. Within the area of my authority as the military commander, however, it would be needless to say that I stand ready at any time to confer in the field with the commander-in-chief of the enemy forces in the earnest effort to find any military means whereby realisation of the political objectives of the United Nations in Korea, to which no nation may justly take exception, might be accomplished without further bloodshed.

A constant stream of propaganda now flowed out of the Dai Ichi, directed as much against the Administration in Washington as against the communists. Above all, the general and his entourage were disgusted by the attitude of America’s enfeebled and compromising allies. MacArthur’s staff spread word of a conspiracy by the British, to induce the United States to give Red China Chiang Kai Shek’s seat at the UN. The constant refrain from Tokyo was that any truce, any botched-up compromise in Korea which left the Chinese militarily undefeated, would be a national disaster for the United States.

It was ironic that in this crisis between the civil and military
power, President Truman and his close advisers found themselves in much closer accord with America’s allies than with their own people. There is no evidence to support the view – later widely propagated in the Dai Ichi – that the British ‘conspired’ with Truman, or indeed, had a decisive influence upon his decision, to dispose of MacArthur. But they left no doubt of their fears about where his excesses might lead, and certainly strengthened the will of the Washington Administration to act. On 9 April, that eminently sensible soldier Sir William Slim, Chief of the Imperial General Staff, presided over a meeting of the British Chiefs of Staff at which he expressed a characteristic European view:

in his opinion, General MacArthur personally wanted war with China . . . As he had proved in November and December last year, he had few scruples about colouring both intelligence and operational reports to suit his own ends. In present circumstances, it would be most inadvisable to delegate to the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff responsibility for deciding what constituted ‘a massive air attack’ [around the Yalu]. They were scared of General MacArthur; his definition of the scope of air attack would be what they would work on, and this definition might well be coloured to suit his own wishes.
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In a long message about Anglo-American attitudes to Korea, the Foreign Secretary cabled to the British Ambassador in Washington:

Our principal difficulty is General MacArthur. His policy is different from the policy of the UN. He seems to want a war with China. We do not. It is no exaggeration to say that by his public utterances, he has weakened public confidence in this country and in Western Europe in the quality of American political judgement and leadership. Here we seem to have a case of a commander publicly suggesting that his policy is not the stated policy of his government, not subject to the control of his own government, and whom his own government is, nevertheless, unwilling and unable to discipline.
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No more. The intense debates among the British and other allies about MacArthur were redundant when this cable was sent. London was given no hint or forewarning. But Truman had already determined that MacArthur must be sacked: ‘I could no longer tolerate his insubordination.’ On 5 April, a letter was read on the floor of the House of Representatives, from MacArthur to Representative Joe Martin, answering his request for the Supreme Commander’s comments on Martin’s demand that Chiang’s Nationalists should be permitted to land on the mainland of China.

It seems strangely difficult for some [wrote MacArthur] to realise that here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest, and that we have joined the issue thus raised on the battlefield; that here we fight Europe’s war with arms while the diplomats there still fight it with words; that if we lose this war to Communism in Asia the fall of Europe is inevitable; win it and Europe most probably would avoid war and yet preserve freedom. As you have pointed out, we must win. There is no substitute for victory . . .

The yawning chasm between Washington and the Dai Ichi was now entirely apparent to the governments and peoples of the United States and her allies. Senator Wayne Morse remarked that the nation possessed two foreign policies, ‘that of General MacArthur and that of the President’. There was open speculation in the American press about the general’s sacking, although Washington still doubted Truman’s will to carry it through. ‘MACARTHUR RECALL RULED OUT’, headlined the
Washington Post
. ‘REPRIMAND IS STILL SEEN POSSIBLE’. On Friday 6 April, Truman presided over a meeting of his closest advisers at the White House, to discuss the future of General MacArthur. He did not tell them that he had already made the decision to dismiss his Supreme Commander. Averell Harriman said he believed that MacArthur had given ample grounds for his own removal two years ago, by his high-handedness in opposing aspects of the Administration’s occupation
policy in Japan. Marshall opposed precipitate action, and asked for time to consider. Bradley believed that MacArthur must go, on the plain grounds of insubordination. Both he and Dean Acheson urged ensuring that the White House had the support of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, before taking any action. But all the men in the room knew that the need for secrecy was paramount, to prevent MacArthur’s supporters, in Congress and the country, from mobilising. At a second meeting later that morning, Truman asked Marshall to review all the messages that had passed between Washington and the Dai Ichi in the previous two years. The next day, Saturday, the five men met once more. Marshall declared that, having read the papers, he considered that he shared Harriman’s view: MacArthur should have been sacked two years earlier. Truman now asked Bradley to give him the recommendation of the Joint Chiefs on the future of the Supreme Commander by Monday.

At 2 p.m. on Sunday afternoon, the Joint Chiefs met in Bradley’s office at the Pentagon. After almost two hours of discussion, the Chiefs went up to the office of the Secretary for Defense. They gave Marshall their unanimous recommendation that MacArthur should be sacked ‘on purely military considerations’. It was Bradley who provided the simplest and best reason for MacArthur’s sacking. SCAP had provided overwhelming evidence that he was ‘not in sympathy with the decision to try to limit the conflict to Korea . . . it was necessary to have a commander more responsive to control from Washington.’