The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (24 page)

In Tokyo he never fit in and was never accepted. The old-timers in the inner circle knew that they need not take him seriously. This was especially true of MacArthur’s new chief of staff, Major General Edward Almond, for whom World War II had been a distinct disappointment, and for whom this was undoubtedly the last major assignment. Almond was to be a major player in the Korean War, and his singularly unfortunate rivalry with Walker left an indelible stamp on what happened there. He too had not been a MacArthur man; if anything he had been closer to Marshall, and late in his career, he was trying to prove to the Pacific commander, and the men around him, that he was the ultimate MacArthur loyalist, like a convert to the Catholic Church trying to show that he was more Catholic than the pope. Almond was every bit as driven as Walker and far more of a gamesman. In addition he was trying to make up for lost time—he had had, in the way military men talked about these things, a bad war in Europe. For in World War II, he had commanded the Ninety-second Division, an all-black unit in a still segregated army, all of whose officers were white Southerners (because they were believed to know how to, as the Southern saying went, handle blacks). That had turned out to be one of the last great military manifestations of an archaic, feudal relationship in what was supposed to be a modern, egalitarian, democratic institution. Eleanor Roosevelt’s Running Riflemen, the men of his division had been called sardonically in the Army, after the then first lady who had a special interest in their welfare and performance. Treated as second-class citizens, more often than not by officers whom they saw as the bane of their existence back home, they had often performed as second-class soldiers.

Almond, a Southerner born in December 1892 with all the traditional prejudices of both the region and the era, had ended the war even more racist than when he started. His command in Korea would later be marked by all kinds of gratuitous instances of racism on his personal part, as if he were some kind of political dinosaur in an Army otherwise just beginning to integrate. Before World War II had started, he had ironically enough been a Marshall short-list man, and the command of the Ninety-second had been a reflection of Marshall’s faith in him—that if anyone could take such a difficult assignment and make it work, it would be Ned Almond. He had started the war as a peer—at least in his own mind—of men like Bradley, Collins, Patton, and Ridgway and felt quite bitter about his fate when the war was over, that he had been sabotaged by the luck of the draw.

His ego had always been enormous, right up there, friends thought, with that of Patton. In truth, he had never really thought anyone else was a better commander. To believe that you are among the best of the best, and then have such a troubled command at so critical a professional moment, was a
profound disappointment, and he was sure he had been cheated. Whatever happened in Tokyo or Korea, he once told MacArthur, would never bother him, because he had already dealt with the worst situation that any commander in the Army had ever had—he had commanded the Ninety-second Division. Supremely ambitious men in the Army, graduates of West Point or, in Almond’s case, VMI, are always measuring themselves against their contemporaries: who gets to be bird colonel first, who gets a battalion first, who gets a star first, and, of course, who gets a division first. The others, his peers, had come of age in that epic war, gotten the great commands, performed as everyone expected, and become part of the collective memory of the nation’s proud victory, while he had commanded troops who were part of a social experiment, one that had failed badly, and he was embittered by it. He did not see himself sharing any blame with his troops—in his mind the fault was completely theirs.

Almond was stoic, overly self-confident, absolutely fearless, a man who on occasion seemed to dare death to strike him, and in fact some of the men who served under him in Korea thought he had a death wish. There was, his friends believed, a certain deeply tragic quality to him by the time he arrived in the Tokyo headquarters. It was not just that his great hopes to be an important commander in World War II had crashed because of the nature of the command he had been given; it was something much more cruel, that he sealed away deep inside himself. For in personal terms, he had paid a terrible price during World War II. There had been one horrendous day in 1944 when he learned in a letter from his wife that he had lost both his son and his son-in-law in combat. Young Ned, class of ’43 at West Point, had been killed with the Forty-fifth Division in the Po Valley in Italy, and Thomas Galloway, class of ’42 at West Point, a fighter pilot married to Almond’s only daughter, had been missing over Normandy during the invasion, and the letter represented the confirmation of his death. The news was especially hard for Almond because he had always pushed his son so hard, first to go to West Point and then to go into the infantry. When young Ned had arrived in the combat zone, Almond had written his son’s commander saying don’t make him a staff officer, give him a rifle company.

The night the letter had arrived, Bill McCaffrey, one of Almond’s top staff officers, had asked if he wanted a sedative. McCaffrey had dealt with a situation like this once before, when Townsend Crittenberger, the son of McCaffrey’s corps commander, Lieutenant General Willis Crittenberger, had been killed during the Rhine crossing. Crittenberger had closed himself off in his room for two days and let his subordinates run the unit. Perhaps, McCaffrey thought, Ned Almond would need some comparable break and perhaps something to
help him sleep. “No, no sedative,” Almond had answered. “And, Bill, I’ll command the division tomorrow.” Under no circumstances was McCaffrey to tell Corps what had happened. He wanted no one monkeying with his division, and no sympathy for himself.

Ned Almond had ended that war as a two-star, when most of the men he thought of as peers had three or four stars. Yet even then, at the lowest point in his career, no one dealing with Almond would underestimate him. He was, like it or not, a force. Everything he did had to be done quickly and perfectly. For the men working under him, there was always one more order to obey, one more squad to be moved, and one more piece of paper to be typed, and typed perfectly, or it would have to be done again. Each soldier in each distant squad had to be perfectly placed, and each commander had to know every soldier’s name, no matter how newly arrived the GI might be. Yet in 1945, that kind of drive and ambition had seemed almost pointless. The war was over, the Army shrinking; commands were few, and if an enemy aggressor threatened America, there was always the atomic bomb. What need was there for a used two-star who had already had his great chance? Though he was a man of Europe, in 1946 he had asked for an assignment to MacArthur’s headquarters. The alternative was to serve as military attaché in Moscow, which held little attraction for him. The slot in Tokyo was as the G-1, or personnel chief, not normally a springboard to power, but in that pathetically weak headquarters he proved a standout from the moment he arrived, a man of unusual competence in a staff of second-rate hacks. It did not take long for MacArthur to understand that Almond, Europe or no, Marshall man or no, was more effective than anyone else around, and also that he hungered for one last career boost. Almond was his for the taking, MacArthur realized, someone who could, even without Bataan, become a MacArthur man. In early 1949, when MacArthur’s chief of staff Paul Mueller was rotated home, Almond, who had already made himself incalculably valuable to his commander, got the job. A combat command it was not, but perhaps one day that too would come. The real job of the chief of staff in the Army is often to be the commander’s son of a bitch. Everyone should go away feeling that the commander was a good guy who would make fair (and favorable) decisions on matters both large and infinitesimally small, if only he could be reached. Thus a great chief of staff was there to say no to all the requests demanding things that MacArthur did not want to do or deal with, and make everyone feel that the more benign MacArthur would have approved them if only they could have gotten past the evil Almond.

ALMOND WAS TO
be an important player in the months to come. The politics of the command were very important as the war effort and the strategy unfolded,
not just Tokyo against Washington, but the ferocious politics within the Tokyo command itself, the constant struggle to be the favored aide; and Almond turned out to be a vastly superior player of headquarters politics than Walton Walker was. In a way the constant struggle between him and Walker was a miniature of a larger struggle that was always taking place, the United States Army against Douglas MacArthur’s Army. Of Almond’s many nicknames (the Big-A, Ned the Dread), probably the most important among high-level officers in Tokyo was that of Ned the Anointed, which meant that MacArthur’s arm was always on his shoulder and he was the commander’s principal man, never to be challenged, as he never challenged his superior. It was assumed that he
always
spoke for MacArthur—or at least spoke for him often enough that you did not want to be the one who discovered when he wasn’t speaking for him. Almond in time became MacArthur’s MacArthur, the man who took MacArthur’s vision of what was supposed to happen and brought it directly to Korea, where he employed it, whether it fitted the Korean reality or not.

Almond was much shrewder and infinitely more political than Walton Walker. Walker was a representative of one American Army, commanded by Omar Bradley back in Washington, and Almond had in his time in Tokyo quite deftly become the number two figure in the other American Army, the more or less autonomous one commanded by Douglas MacArthur. He understood from the start that, given the lack of talent among his senior staff (viewed as a bunch of Humpty Dumptys by the rest of the Army), MacArthur needed at least one high-level professional to make the headquarters work. The headquarters was a hothouse of political cronyism and sycophancy, at the center of which was the general himself. Some relatively senior staff members literally used the phrase “Close to the Throne,” to designate one’s standing with the general. Within a year of his arrival in Tokyo, Almond was the man closest to the throne.

Almond was smart enough
never
to get caught up in any of the many cliques, or to take one side against the other. Most important of all, he realized that a genuine connection to MacArthur could only be attained through complete devotion, loyalty, and obedience. MacArthur’s enemies had to become his own enemies. Nothing could be held back. Nothing. And every move had to be the right one. No doubt of his about MacArthur’s greatness could ever be revealed. He had to be a more perfect extension of MacArthur than MacArthur himself. He was ready for the test. “He had,” wrote J. D. Coleman, an officer and a historian who had served under him, “an instinctive knack of ingratiation.” By that Coleman meant that in addition to playing back to his superior what his superior wanted to hear, he had a brilliant ability to anticipate what MacArthur wanted even before the general himself knew that he wanted it.

One of the things that Bill McCaffrey had liked about Almond in his earlier incarnation was his irreverence, but he shed that with MacArthur. Once during World War II, he had been so blunt speaking with Willis Crittenberger, their corps commander, over the phone that McCaffrey had become fearful for his fate. McCaffrey had virtually grabbed the phone away from Almond, because you simply could not speak to a superior that way. But this, McCaffrey thought, was a new Almond, a man who had fallen in love with his commander. If anything bothered some of those who served under him in Tokyo and later Korea, it was his total subservience to MacArthur, along with his gamesmanship, his cool condescension to his peers, and his harshness to those under him—except for a handful of special favorites, his boys, as he was now MacArthur’s boy. Even some of those boys—and no one benefited more from his friendship than Jack Chiles, who went from S-3 to regimental commander under him—knew how difficult and explosive he was. “He could precipitate a crisis on a desert island with no one else around,” Chiles once said. Few neutral observers were fond of him. “He was mean and vindictive and not very talented—one of the biggest sons of bitches I’ve ever met, in uniform or out,” said Keyes Beech, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his Korean War reporting and was a reporter who generally liked military men.

The problem with playing to MacArthur was that it was all or nothing and you had to play to his entire team. Soon enough, Almond found himself swallowing some of his old opinions simply in order to accommodate the Bataan Gang. In the years before World War II, he had often complained to McCaffrey about an officer working as an attaché in Latin America named Charles Willoughby, whom he had quickly come to despise. A pompous, self-important fool, he had often said, always wrong on everything he reported, a judgment shared by many other professional officers. Now, overnight, Almond started defending Willoughby to others as brilliant. McCaffrey watched this rehabilitation process and just shook his head.

Knowing Walker’s vulnerability, Almond set out to diminish his influence further in Tokyo. Although Almond was a mere two-star, he was deft at implying to Walker, a three-star, that he was a de facto five-star, speaking for MacArthur and not for himself, in effect wearing MacArthur’s stars. The phone would ring in Walker’s headquarters, and it would be Almond talking in a peremptory way. Walker did his best to hold his turf and occasionally would say, “Is this Almond speaking or Almond speaking for MacArthur?” But it was a losing struggle. Walker had very little time on his own with MacArthur. He always had to go through Almond. Walker was aware that none of this would be happening without MacArthur’s essential approval, and so he bore his frustrations as best he could. He never challenged Almond, never demanded a better hearing for
his ideas, and never complained through back-channel sources to friends in Washington about the difficulty of his situation.