The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (25 page)

The nearer the Chinese forces waiting on the border found themselves to the encroaching front, the farther American-led infantry were from their own supply depots to the south. Like Xerxes on his way to his Salamis, the more exposed the advancing Americans became, the more overconfident they seemed—given the assurances of General MacArthur that many of his now victorious forces would be “home for Christmas.” It was hard to know which was more ironic: MacArthur’s uncanny ability to turn initial defeat into sure victory after the successful landing at Inchon, or to turn Inchon’s subsequent victory into sure defeat at the Yalu. After the brilliant Inchon amphibious assault (“Operation Chromite”) and simultaneous breakout from the endangered Pusan perimeter commencing on September 15, 1950, the American-led United Nations coalition had seemed certain to reunify Korea. On MacArthur’s orders, the UN coalition crossed the 38th Parallel on October 7, eager to head northward to wipe out the fleeing North Korean aggressors. MacArthur felt that within another ninety days he could unite the entire Korean peninsula under a United Nations–sanctioned Syngman Rhee government in the south, allied closely to the United States.

Like General Custer at the Little Big Horn, the Americans after Inchon had eagerly sought to pursue the enemy. They had little clue that they were outnumbered and soon to be overrun and cut off by hundreds of thousands of skilled, fresh Chinese Communist troops, fighting near their own homeland and energized by revolutionary anti-Western zeal. Odder still, Americans should not have been surprised. “Red China,” Matthew Ridgway later wrote, “had been threatening by radio almost
daily—from the moment of the American surge after Inchon in September 1950—that it would come into the war if North Korea were invaded.”
¹⁰

If unification appeared a lunatic thought in late summer 1950, when American forces were a few miles from being pushed off the peninsula far to the south at Pusan, now, little more than four months after the start of the war, it seemed almost assured as they reached the Yalu River, well over six hundred miles to the north. General MacArthur had built up an army from a skeleton force of five hundred U.S. advisers and South Korean constabularies, had saved a beachhead at Pusan, and in a matter of weeks had gone on the offensive against veteran North Korean troops. There are few comparable turnabouts in modern military history in which a battered army in the space of weeks turns on, and then nearly ruins, its numerically superior aggressor.

Nevertheless, even with the Communists on the run in autumn 1950, reasons for disquiet were beginning to reach the White House and the Pentagon. If MacArthur persisted in his bellicose rhetoric and widely reported news conferences, the Chinese, if not the Russians as well, could intervene on news that Korea was to be united under an American-sponsored government right in their neighborhood, with American bombers based on their borders. The European allies—the British especially—feared that the humiliated Soviets might retaliate against an American crossing of the 38th Parallel by unleashing its divisions on a depleted Western Europe. Lord Salisbury in mid-November gave a sober speech warning that United Nations offensive forces so far north of the 38th Parallel violated a number of classical tactical and strategic principles, from insufficient manpower to tenuous supply lines.
¹¹

But MacArthur was still riding high both at home and abroad. Since the Communists had wished to destroy South Korea as an autonomous state, then why could not he in turn destroy the idea of an independent North Korea? What did weather, terrain, or empty Communist threats matter after Inchon? Indeed, once the Communists visibly got the war going, MacArthur may have welcomed the notion of sending Nationalist Chinese forces back into Communist China, or using atomic weapons to devastate Communist forces and industry in the region. Even a few civilians in the State Department, such as Dean Rusk and John Allison, had long called not just for “containment” but also for “rollback” and would support MacArthur as he headed northward as rapidly as possible.
¹²

The Joint Chiefs of Staff were worried, but not enough to rein in
MacArthur’s surge to the north. At the end of September, Defense Secretary George Marshall had cabled MacArthur that he had permission to go north as the situation dictated. “A more subtle result of the Inchon triumph,” Ridgway later noted, “was the development of an almost superstitious regard for General MacArthur’s infallibility. Even his superiors began to doubt if they should question
any
of MacArthur’s decisions and as a result he was deprived of the advantage of forthright and informed criticism, such as every commander should have—particularly when he is trying to ‘run a war’ from 700 miles away.”
¹³

By mid-November, as the Chinese were crossing the Yalu in increasing force, MacArthur could still send out a communiqué boasting, “If successful, [the ongoing UN offensive] should for all practical purposes end the war, restore peace and unity to Korea, enable the prompt withdrawal of the United Nations military forces, and permit the complete assumption by the Korean people and nation of full sovereignty and international equality. It is that for which we fight.” But even if MacArthur were right, it was hard to see how a poorly armed and trained South Korean military could defend the entire Korean peninsula against a million Communist troops on its borders without a near-permanent American presence in the tens of thousands.
¹⁴

That the Chinese might mimic MacArthur’s Inchon gambit in reverse—by widening the war with a bold move to likewise cut off an exposed enemy far from home—was lost on his generals. As Ridgway himself later wrote of MacArthur’s inability to accept responsibility for putting his vastly outnumbered forces into a noose on the Yalu River, “It should have been clear to anyone that his own refusal to accept the mounting evidence of massive Chinese intervention was largely responsible for the reckless scattering of our forces all over the map of Korea.” That was an apt description of the radical thinning of United Nations troops as they entered the ever widening geography of North Korea near the Yalu. And the de facto lack of communications between two Marine and Army forces as they marched northward up the two coasts made the American predicament even worse.
¹⁵

Now in the bleak days of midwinter, with his forces reeling “all over the map of Korea,” a shell-shocked General MacArthur warned that unless he was allowed to attack Chinese bases in Manchuria, the American cause in Korea was essentially hopeless. He went back and forth—sometimes promising complete victory, at others warning that a lack of resolve “would be the greatest defeat of the free world in recent times.”
Meanwhile, the confused Joint Chiefs wondered, how might a lost war in Korea be saved by starting another war in China? They were further perplexed about whether MacArthur had been too wildly optimistic in declaring the war all but won in October, or too wildly pessimistic in all but declaring it lost in December—or both.

MacArthur did not mention to Washington, however, that he took for granted that neither the Soviets nor the Chinese would attack American air and supply bases in Japan or Taiwan. But that understanding assumed that the United States also had kept clear of Communist supply depots in Manchuria. The more an embarrassed MacArthur railed against a limited war, the more the cautious minds in Washington grasped that the Chinese and Russians were in fact also waging a limited war. And they, far more easily than America in the region, could escalate at will to other, far more vulnerable theaters.
¹⁶

As the losses mounted, MacArthur began to lose his nerve. “The command,” MacArthur warned, “should be withdrawn from Korea just as rapidly as it is tactically possible to do so.” Finally, it was clear even to the blinkered Joint Chiefs that the mercurial general had gone full circle. By early January, MacArthur and others were reviewing wild contingency plans to evacuate all American forces to Okinawa, the Philippines, and Japan—a panic comparable to the Greek fright after Thermopylae, or Union hysteria after Cold Harbor.
¹⁷

In fact, a self-serving narrative was developing out of MacArthur’s isolated Tokyo headquarters: The problem had not been the general’s reckless orders to his field commanders to race late in the year toward the frigid Chinese border. The disaster followed instead from the cowardly political decision in Washington restricting the scope of the war. MacArthur claimed that his problems were not that his land forces were vastly surprised and outnumbered in a neighborhood where the Communist Russians and Chinese could easily send hundreds of thousands of troops into the Korean theater. Instead, the disaster arose because he had not been allowed to widen the war into China, bomb Communist bases, and reserve the right to unleash America’s nuclear arsenal if need be. When had the United States, the general wondered, not engaged in hot pursuit across borders to punish an aggressive enemy? And were not British spies in their Washington embassy passing on sensitive American strategic planning to the Communists?
¹⁸

As things got worse, a once fawning press turned on MacArthur and trumpeted predictions of American doom. And by early January, the
headlines of the
Chicago Tribune
blared, SMASH THRU THE 8TH ARMY LINE / Chinese Rout One Division and Advance Several Miles.” The
Los Angeles Times
saw even less hope: REDS RACE SOUTH TO DESTROY U.S. FORCES.

Against this backdrop of the growing panic, Ridgway was taking over a seemingly hopeless command pawned off on him by his legendary superior, General MacArthur. The latter was ensconced hundreds of miles away in Tokyo fighting political battles with the Truman administration for his own legacy and reputation, hoping to preserve a possible future career in politics. If the Americans surrendered or were destroyed, Ridgway would be responsible for that defeat as supreme commander in the field—and MacArthur could use Ridgway’s failure as proof that the war effort had been shorted by Washington. Yet if Ridgway were to be successful in restoring the front, the credit would likely go to the old strategist MacArthur, who still enjoyed nominal overall command. Faced with such a lose-lose situation, Ridgway flew to Japan to meet MacArthur himself.

The larger problem in Korea was not just the invasion of hundreds of thousands of Chinese Communist troops. Indeed, almost everything the United States military and State Department had done in Korea had gone wrong from the moment the Second World War ended. Adding to the general chaos of the postwar occupation—and in fear of Communist radicals—the Americans had initially retained hated Japanese colonial security forces to patrol the 21 million Koreans south of the 38th Parallel. Americans also clung to a naïve estimation of Communist postwar intentions in general, and still entertained an unwarranted deprecation of the quality of Chinese and Korean troops in particular. All that resulted in several contradictory and dangerous notions—that the Communist Chinese, for example, in the late 1940s were not bent on hegemony in Korea. And even if they were, they surely could not offer a serious military challenge to the United States.
¹⁹

In the exuberance of the victories over Germany and Japan, American politicians also did not appreciate fully the sacrifices of both Soviet Russia and China in defeating the Axis powers. Much less did the Anglo-Americans grasp the ensuing sense of entitlement in their respective regions of influence that such massive Russian and Chinese human losses
were felt to warrant. After all, the two former allies alone lost more of their population—nearly 40 million in the aggregate—than all other combatants on both sides of World War II combined, and they would fight tenaciously to carve out regional spheres of influence as the spoils of war and compensation for their dead.

As a result, the moment North Korea invaded the south on June 25, 1950, China had already repositioned some of its best units to be nearer the Korean border. More were to come from Manchuria—on the expectation of a wider conflagration. The Soviet Union seemed to have been in charge of much of the foreign policy decisions of its Communist clients—making the North Korean government a “Russian colony,” as the June 5, 1950, issue of
Time
magazine had proclaimed shortly before the war. Meanwhile, Soviet and Chinese advisers and equipment poured into North Korea, confirming the American suspicion that no Communist satellite acted without Moscow’s approval.
²⁰

American thinking about Korea was at first likewise unsophisticated. In the utopian theory of postwar reconstruction, Korea fell to the oversight of the newly created United Nations. But the UN had no real power to enforce its edicts without commitments of American military power—itself on the wane given the public’s desire for a peace dividend after the sacrifices of World War II. With the end of the war, more in America had feared the return of another depression than worried about newly acquired overseas responsibilities. Under brokered postwar UN agreements, both Communist Russian and American occupying troops would depart the peninsula. The Koreans, north and south, would then be free to choose their leaders in supervised elections. Perhaps they would establish an independent—and unified—Korea for the first time since 1910.

In fact, neither Communist Russia nor China was going to allow another government allied with Americans near its borders. Russia felt that all of Korea belonged in its Communist orbit as its proper reward for entering the war against the Japanese, albeit late, on the side of the Allies. The power of the United States did not rest with fear of American boots on the ground—there were not many more than five hundred American troops when North Korea first invaded the south in June 1950. Instead, American deterrence rested solely on its already fading military reputation for helping to defeat Germany and Japan, along with its vast nuclear superiority over the Soviet Union, which had detonated its first nuclear bomb only the year before. Most observers in the Communist world, however, had studied rapid U.S. demobilization and thereby assumed
that America’s foreign policy would probably soon revert to its isolationism of the 1930s. With the European colonial powers of Western Europe bankrupt and exhausted by the war, opportunity was arising everywhere in the Pacific and Asia. Few cared that America had sponsored the new United Nations, or was helping to rebuild Europe, or even that its economy was booming in supplying a war-ravaged world.