The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (49 page)

Nor was this some small technical matter that slipped by. When MacArthur first allowed Almond to wear two hats, no one could quite believe what he was doing. In the words of Jack Murphy, then a young lieutenant, but later a serious student of the war, it represented “perhaps the greatest conflict of interest at a high level in the American army that I know of.”

Those doubts hung over many in the command structure as the Americans moved north. After all, a great many men had wandered into various headquarters and seen maps with the Chinese forces waiting just above the Yalu marked on them. In the midst of the Naktong fighting, Murphy had been called back to Eighth Army headquarters. He had looked at a giant map and his eyes had been drawn to three little rectangles in red, up along the Yalu. Then someone told him that each rectangle represented a Chinese Communist unit. Murphy thought that meant there were three Chinese divisions up there, which he decided was a goodly number of Chinese, until he learned that each mark represented not a division, or a corps, or an army (three divisions to a corps, and three corps to an army, and three armies to an army group), but a Chinese
army group
or, as his friends in the intelligence shop informed him, quite likely a total of
twenty-seven
divisions, by a rough estimate, between 250,000 and 300,000 troops. However scary the Naktong fighting had been, just one look at that map, he thought, was scarier still.

Why MacArthur split his command and then pushed its separate wings so
confidently toward a region that screamed out for maximum caution, no one ever entirely understood. Nothing he later said or did adequately explained the decision; nor did anything written either by his own staff members or by journalists sympathetic to him. To Matt Ridgway, since the decision made no sense militarily, there had to be another explanation, especially since MacArthur did not do things casually and because his moves were always political as well as military. It was a sign, Ridgway suggested some forty years later, that MacArthur, post-Inchon, aware of how much more leverage he now had, was in effect creating a separate command in a separate army, ever more outside the reach of Washington and the Joint Chiefs, and of Johnnie Walker. He was going to decrease the role and independence of the Eighth Army commander they had assigned to him, Walker, and create his own system over which he had even more control. Almond was the instrument—a pawn really—of that, Ridgway believed, of taking power from the Chiefs and Washington, and they began to understand what he was doing too slowly and too late. Splitting the command gave him far more—and Washington far less—leverage over the Army in the field. Almond would do whatever he wanted without even being asked. If there were orders MacArthur wanted followed with blind loyalty, Almond would follow them. Walker was another matter, for Walker was not MacArthur’s man. The Inchon campaign had revealed flashes of independence on his part. Splitting the command, Ridgway believed, was deliberately designed to diminish Walker’s independence and thus to limit Washington’s influence on the Korean peninsula. It meant that Walker was no longer the sole Army commander under MacArthur, and that his wings had been significantly clipped; he was now one of two commanders, in effect only a glorified corps commander who still had to go through Almond, in his role as chief of staff, on any number of issues. In addition, because he had been forced into a competition with Almond in a race to the Yalu, he would have a far harder time questioning orders pushing him farther north; he might well be on the defensive with his superior, explaining why his troops had not moved as quickly as those of Almond. In political terms, Ridgway thought, in terms of controlling turf and keeping significantly more power in Tokyo, it was a masterful if dangerous move and a decisive victory in the battle that MacArthur was always waging—the one against Washington. The Chiefs, Ridgway believed, woke up to its full implications much too late.

B
Y THE FALL
of 1950, Chiang Kai-shek’s dream of returning to the mainland was already hopeless, especially since no one on either side of the aisle in Congress, not even the most rabid Chiang supporters, wanted to take responsibility for sending American boys, quite possibly millions of them, to fight in China. Yet the dream of such a return was still very good politics, offering an endless free shot at the White House for its enemies. Their allies in the Chinese Nationalist embassy in Washington encouraged them, although if the top officials in the embassy had news and intelligence that might spell trouble for the United States, they did not always tell their American friends.

In the weeks before the Chinese entered the war, there were massive Communist troop movements toward the Chinese-Korean border. Senior Nationalist officials on Taiwan as well as in the Washington embassy had extremely good intelligence about these movements and, even more important, a rather sure sense about what the Communist government intended to do next. They
knew
how a Chinese government would respond to the crumbling situation in Korea, with American and South Korean armies racing for their border because it was just how they would have responded themselves. But in fact their intelligence was based on more than instinct. Some of their former colleagues during the civil war who had been dragooned into the Communist Army after their divisions had surrendered were still able to pass on by radio what they had learned of the plans of their Communist commanders. Thus, senior Chinese Nationalist officials had very good intelligence—from former Nationalist officers now in the Communist armies and from sympathetic workers in the Chinese rail system as well as other parts of the old governmental structure. They had a powerful sense of the collision about to take place, from the day the United Nations forces crossed the thirty-eighth parallel, and every bit of intelligence they received subsequently confirmed it. (We know this, in part, because some of their cables on this matter were eventually made public by a dissenter within the Washington embassy.) A Chinese entrance into the Korean War promised a conflict they badly wanted—any hope of a return to the
mainland was premised by then on war with the new China. It was their only possible hope for a ticket back. So they were in no rush to alert their American allies about what was going to happen and thus allow them to avoid the consequences of such an encounter. Because the people in the Washington embassy were, by and large, more sophisticated on American matters than their counterparts back on Taiwan, they were at pains to tell those in Taiwan to keep cool and not to share this information with the Americans.

The importance of the Nationalist embassy in Washington cannot be underestimated, in no small part because of the sheer talent of its people, and in part because there was such an important faction of the American political right that wanted to amplify the views of the Nationalists. By 1948, to the degree that the government of Nationalist China existed at all, it did so more in Washington than in China, and its constituents were American politicians and journalists, not the ordinary people of China. It was in Washington that its smartest representatives, men like T. V. Soong and Wellington Koo, operated with great skill. In May 1949, Eric Sevareid of CBS, who had covered China during World War II, reported that “the Nationalist government has all but disintegrated. Its real headquarters, if it has any, is here in Washington where its lobbyists and American supporters are desperately busy trying to scare up another big American aid program for China.”

The forces driving the collision between the United States and China were more powerful than people on either side of the Pacific realized—and Taiwan had become, almost unbeknownst to the Americans, the great sticking point from the moment Chiang took up residence there. Even as Mao took power, America had already begun to separate itself from any ability to deal with him. The United States held back its recognition of his government, even as the principal U.S. allies, including the British, began to move toward it, thereby in many ways isolating America rather than the Chinese, while inevitably pushing them ever more firmly into Stalin’s arms. In addition, hanging on to Chiang meant defending and protecting him, which meant in the end defending and protecting the island of Taiwan. On its own, in the years before the denouement on the mainland, the Joint Chiefs had seen that island as being in no way critical to America’s national security. In March 1949, no less a figure than Douglas MacArthur had said, “There is no earthly military reason why we should need Formosa as a base,” a statement deliberately made public by the State Department (which did not exactly endear Dean Acheson to the Pacific commander). Strategic policies can change, of course. Taiwan now certainly had a higher value than before. But the reversal of that policy, the decision to defend Chiang and Taiwan, would have severe consequences. It might be viewed as a relatively minor adjustment by the administration to greatly
different Asian needs, but it did not look that way to Mao and his followers. To them, it was a major affront. It kept them from making their country whole. The United States had, in effect, stepped between them and the completion of their revolution, at the very moment when the Americans were cutting off all conceivable channels of communications to them. That meant there was less wiggle room for both sides by the week. In Washington, the Truman administration was reacting by instinct and making what its officials thought was a minor geopolitical adjustment; to the victors on the mainland, what Washington was doing was making the liberation of all China impossible. In their eyes it was nothing less than the act of an implacable sworn enemy.

From the moment Chiang left the mainland, few things concerned the Chinese embassy and the China Lobby more than keeping the United States from recognizing Communist China. They succeeded so well that the recognition of China became an enduring domestic issue, one the Democrats feared even to touch for more than two decades. It would take President Richard Nixon, who as a young politician rode the idea that the Democrats were weak in dealing with the Communists to political power, and thus was himself relatively immune from red-baiting, to break the ice in February 1972 with a visit to China, one that no Democratic politician even then could have taken without quite possibly being red-baited by, among others, Richard Nixon. In the meantime, Americans were left to consider a curious question: Which country was China? Was it that vast nation of 500, and then 600 and soon 700, million people, or that small island off its coast with some 8 million people, 6 million of them Taiwanese and an estimated 2 million new arrivals from the mainland? It was, for a long time, an answer Americans could not get right.

The policy questions were the gravest imaginable: Were Taiwan and Chiang that important, if the very act of continuing the embrace of them might help inaugurate a new and more dangerous chapter in our relationship with a very important nation just coming of age in a new and largely unwelcome incarnation in Asia? Did we really owe anything more to a fallen leader who had systematically failed his own people, treated American military, political, and economic advice with contempt, and served as the major source of weapons for his sworn opponents? Was it worth taking the risk of driving this formidable nation, obviously an ascending power and a potentially dangerous one, and surely one day a great power, into the arms of a sworn enemy? Was it worth reinforcing Mao Zedong in his belief that the United States was but the newest imperial power with designs on his country? Were we willing to do exactly what Mao in some way wanted, playing to his paranoia about the United States and helping to harden his attitudes and policies against us? Those were the real questions of the moment, and the answers to all of them were almost
all surely no. But they were also national security questions that were muffled at the time, outweighed as they were by domestic political forces and emotions. Our policy in the end was to continue to support a government that had already died.

No one sensed the future collision more clearly than John Melby, the young China Hand who had been so wise about so many other things as he witnessed the breakdown of Nationalist China. Melby was a fascinating figure; in 1945 he had been sent to China from the American embassy in Moscow at the specific suggestion of Averell Harriman, then the ambassador to the Soviet Union, to keep an eye on what the Russians were up to in that country. Melby soon became one of the embassy’s most despairing and impassioned anti-Chiang voices. He understood immediately that the popularity and success of the Communists had nothing to do with the Russians, that it was the Communists’ ability to respond to indigenous grievance and to the country’s latent nationalism that made them so formidable. That any relationship between the United States and Mao’s China would be extremely difficult he never doubted, but neither did he doubt that it was worth a serious try. In June 1948, a year before the final collapse of Chiang’s regime, he had written prophetically in his diary, “All the power of the United States will not stem the tides of Asia, but all the wisdom of which we are capable might conceivably make those tides a little more friendly to us than they are now.”

The decision in the days immediately following North Korea’s strike south, to move the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Straits, had been a fateful one, much more than the United States had realized. Mao knew he could not best the American military forces on sea and in the air, so when he finally chose to take on the United States, it would be in Korea, so much more accessible to a vast land-based army. His military could cross the Yalu on foot as they could not swim the Taiwan Straits. If the United States had drawn its line in those straits, Korea was by far the more convenient place for Mao to draw his.