The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (26 page)

In tactical terms, on the Korea peninsula in summer 1950, America was rightfully seen as a lightweight that had virtually disbanded its Second World War conventional arsenal in Asia. Scarcely 115,000 ground troops were spread over the Pacific and Japan as the public demanded defense reductions and a redirection in federal spending to new comprehensive social entitlements. At the very moment that global security demands mounted, with the rise of the Soviet Union and the demise of the British Empire, Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson slashed the Navy and tried to disband the Marines altogether. The latter scrambled to cobble together war surplus matériel, most of it obsolete, to maintain some sort of battle readiness.

The result by July 1950 in Korea was that the Eighth Army confronted a Soviet-supplied enemy with mostly outdated Sherman medium tanks and antitank weapons. Naval forces offshore were scant, especially amphibious craft. When the Communists assaulted the surrounded Americans at Pusan in July 1950, American artillery and recoilless rifle rounds bounced off their Russian-made T-34 tanks, of which the Communists had at least 150 supporting their forces. Somehow the military colossus of the Second World War in less than five years found its forces in Korea smaller, more poorly equipped, and far more demoralized than the army of an impoverished nine-million-person Communist North Korea. Unfortunately, this situation developed at precisely the time confident American diplomats were acting as if they enjoyed military parity, or even superiority, in the region.
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In this immediate postwar climate of unreality concerning America’s military readiness, President Truman again considered conventional forces almost superfluous—given the existence of a nuclear arsenal that in one fell swoop had ended the war with Japan. “The concept of ‘limited warfare,’ ” complained Matthew Ridgway later, “never entered our councils. We had faith in the United Nations. And the atomic bomb created for us a kind of psychological Maginot line that helped us rationalize our national urge to get the boys home, the armies demobilized, the swords sheathed, and the soldiers, sailors, and airmen out of uniform.”
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For most American veterans, nothing could be worse than to be recalled to military service at a time of growing American postwar prosperity after years of combat in the wars against Germany and Japan. We now think of Harry Truman as a Cold Warrior who sought to save much of Asia and Europe from Communist domination with his advocacy of containment. But his undeniable Cold War zealotry was not always so evident in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War. Between 1946 and 1949, Truman was eager to demobilize U.S. conventional forces, divert the defense budget to social programs, and rely on America’s nuclear arsenal to provide security. His secretary of defense, Louis Johnson, provoked a “Revolt of the Admirals” when senior naval leaders furiously objected to cuts in the carriers and naval aviation on the dubious proposition that strategic air forces alone, armed with nuclear weapons, could address far more cheaply almost any threat to American security.
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After losing nearly a half million Americans in the Second World War, the public also was naturally reluctant—a mere five years later—to go to war against former allies such as Russia and China to protect prior enemies such as Germany and Japan, which were to be covered under the new American nuclear umbrella and incorporated into regional military alliances. If the United States were to promote a new democratic postwar global order, then it fell to America to rehabilitate an unpopular Germany and Japan and restore both to the family of peaceful nations. Yet that would allow the Communist giants Russia and China the easier task of championing the victims, not the former perpetrators, of Axis aggression.

Given a weary public, some American diplomats were convinced that Japan was the only nation in the Far East that the United States could realistically protect through conventional military means. A few were even naïve enough to air that concession publicly. The usually careful secretary of state, Dean Acheson, in a speech on January 12, 1950, before the National Press Club in Washington, implied that South Korea did not reside within the American defensive sphere—perhaps an understandable caution given U.S. fear of an imminent Communist invasion of Taiwan. Not much later, the influential Senator Thomas Connally, a friend of Truman, asserted that the United States did not consider Korea vital to its strategy. Concerned parties in Asia made a note of all that. But even earlier, a 1947 Joint Chiefs of Staff study had likewise concluded that “From the standpoint of military security, the U.S. has little strategic interest in maintaining the present troops and bases in Korea.” Senator
Connally in May 1950 had all but written Korea off as indefensible against the world Communist juggernaut: “Whenever she [Russia] takes a notion she can just overrun Korea like she will probably overrun Formosa when she gets ready to.”

With senior U.S. officials airing such doubts, it was logically enough concluded abroad that the United States could probably not guarantee the survival of the nascent Syngman Rhee government in South Korea. U.S. equivocation may have in part persuaded Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, and Kim Il-sung that America might not even intervene against a Communist invasion from the north.
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The Joint Chiefs of Staff—none of whom had even visited Korea between 1946 and July 1950—were unanimous in agreeing that most of America’s shrinking military capability should be directed at saving Western Europe. America’s most influential postwar military planners—Omar Bradley, Dwight Eisenhower, and George Marshall—had far more war experience in European than Asian theaters. They all took seriously the warnings of their Western European counterparts not to deplete American strength in far-off tangential theaters. Soviet divisions vastly outnumbered their allied counterparts on the Asian continent—and could advance under a new Soviet nuclear umbrella. The power of the Red Army in the Second World War after 1944, and its destruction of the German Wehrmacht, were still on everyone’s mind.
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In such a climate, strategic thinking in Asia had been largely left to the four-star general and hero of the Pacific theater, Douglas MacArthur—given the latter’s long association with the Pacific and his preeminent record in the victory over the Japanese. Few questioned his proconsulship in Japan, assuming that the lack of postwar violence there was testament to MacArthur’s diplomatic genius and military acumen. But the old general had not returned to the United States in over a decade. He had little insight into the thinking of either President Truman or his own Joint Chiefs—and none at all into the ramifications of the use of nuclear weapons. The mercurial MacArthur had five times turned down invitations to receive medals and honors in Washington. President Truman, who had never met the general, guessed that MacArthur was plotting to be drafted as the Republican presidential nominee in 1952. If that were true, then the general’s accusations of Democratic appeasement of global Communism would be enhanced by his own quick victory over Asian Communists—reminding voters that he still alone preserved America’s military prowess.

As a reclusive proconsul in Japan, MacArthur stayed ensconced in imperial headquarters in Tokyo. From there, he directed the postwar reconstruction of Japan, and nominally oversaw the less important Korean occupation by remote control. He had little notion that entering Korea with outnumbered, green American forces might invite an initial disaster. Yet, on the other hand, the equally naïve Communists had no idea that the Americans would ever intervene with forces large enough to stop their assault at Pusan.

MacArthur acted independently of both the Joint Chiefs and, increasingly, the Truman administration itself. Such autonomy was ill-advised, given that in 1950 he was seventy years old, and still defensive about a number of allegations of strategic ineptitude dating back to the surprise Japanese bombing of the Philippines, the later horrific costs in retaking the islands, and his earlier controversial flight from Corregidor. His intelligence sources were chronically defective. MacArthur was warned neither about the original June 25, 1950, North Korean invasion nor the subsequent massive Chinese attack of late November across the Yalu. Indeed, on October 15, 1950, in the midst of the American-led pursuit of defeated Communist North Korean forces, MacArthur had also assured President Truman at a much-heralded meeting on Wake Island that there was “very little” chance of Chinese intervention, since without Communist air support it would lead to the “greatest slaughter” of the enemy—at the moment that new Russian-supplied MiGs and pilots would soon challenge daylight American B-29 bombing missions.
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Even when the Chinese later crossed the Yalu, few in Washington were willing to question MacArthur. Ridgway related his own surreal conversation with General Hoyt Vandenberg, chief of staff of the Air Force. “ ‘Why,’ I asked him, ‘don’t the Joint Chiefs send orders to MacArthur and
tell
him what to do?’ Van shook his head. ‘What good would that do? He wouldn’t obey the orders. What
can
we do?’ ”
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The politics and strategic landscape of Korea were also ostensibly hostile to the United States. Many liberated Koreans viewed America as increasingly pro-Japanese and unduly forgiving of past Japanese atrocities—which ranged from a brutal occupation of Korea to forced conscriptions of Korean youth and humiliating use of Korean women as prostitutes for Japanese soldiers. Postwar poverty was seen as better addressed by Communist largesse and a friendly—and nearby—China than a capitalist America that was on the side of the old colonialists. For many Koreans, there was not yet all that much difference between autocrats.
The South Korean president, Syngman Rhee, was seen, not without reason, by many in the south as an antidemocratic, American-educated puppet, eased into power after the Japanese left. His far more brutal Communist rival Kim Il-sung was championed as an indigenous, revolutionary, and egalitarian figure who might spread a Chinese-style agrarian revolution.

While the south outnumbered the north in population, 21 million versus 9 million, and produced most of the peninsula’s food on its more fertile and arable land, areas of the north for decades had been heavily industrialized, were more developed by Japanese colonialists, and were richer in strategic minerals. By 1950, North Korea was considered by Communists in both Russia and China as a valuable addition to the Communist bloc, and a necessary buffer state to the new Chinese government.

In logistical terms, Korea was over seven thousand miles distant from the continental United States, but conveniently right on the borders of both Communist China and the Soviet Union. Even if the United States were successful in preserving an independent South Korea, it would, as the Joint Chiefs feared, require a constant U.S. military deterrent presence for years. That might mean a permanent trip wire for a much wider Asian land war. While the Communist giants considered a compliant Korea necessary for border security, the largely unarmed Japanese feared that Communist reunification would turn the peninsula into a sword directed at their heart. Anti-Japanese sentiment sometimes trumped ideology on both sides of the 38th Parallel—to the detriment of the United States, which was an ally of Japan, and to the advantage of Russia and China, which were not.
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When Communist North Korean forces invaded the south with an initial wave of ninety thousand superbly trained troops, backed by Soviet-supplied tanks, and overwhelmed the ill-prepared forces of Syngman Rhee, it was unclear whether the United States would, could, or even should provide for an immediate defense. America was as unprepared to fight a land war in Asia in summer 1950 as it had been surprised by the Japanese navy at Pearl Harbor nine years earlier.
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On Christmas Day 1950, six months after the North Korean invasion of the south, Matthew Ridgway landed in Japan. In just half a year, United
Nations forces had almost lost the war at Pusan, rallied to reclaim the South at Inchon, nearly finished the conflict by overrunning all of North Korea to the Yalu River—and were in danger of losing Seoul for a second time and with it all of South Korea. The next day, Ridgway met General MacArthur for a short briefing. Ridgway immediately found himself in an awkward position. MacArthur was his superior officer—whose own carelessness had contributed to the present fiasco on the Yalu and helped to bring Ridgway to Korea. The septuagenarian World War II hero was still wildly popular at home and had established a formidable public relations lobby both in Japan and the United States. He certainly had proven a superb proconsul in Japan. But as Ridgway knew from his recent tenure at the Pentagon, MacArthur was increasingly dismissed as a megalomaniac by many of the Joint Chiefs, who had long wanted to relieve him. How could a subordinate serve under such a figure at once responsible for both saving Korea at Inchon and nearly losing it at the Yalu?
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Yet even in the apparent collapse of the American cause, Ridgway grasped that once MacArthur had crossed the 38th Parallel, his two-pronged advance to the Yalu had not been entirely foolhardy. After all, he had sent United Nations troops to the northernmost tip of the Korean peninsula with astoundingly light losses—until the hammer of Chinese intervention fell. That fact told Ridgway that the Communists, at least the North Koreans, were not supermen. They could be pushed back again. MacArthur could sound unhinged in his rants about expanding the war, but, better than most, he understood the ultimate hegemonic intentions of both Communist China and the Soviet Union in Asia. The problem with the mercurial MacArthur was not his appreciation of the Communist threat and the misery it meant for millions under its sway, but finding the proper strategy to thwart it.
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In this meeting in Tokyo on December 26—later characterized as “detailed, specific, frank, and far-ranging”—the newly appointed Ridgway was ordered to withdraw to positions to ensure that Seoul not be lost for a second time. Yet he was still supposed to inflict enough damage on the Chinese to allow some measure of maneuvering for American diplomacy with the Communists. Although Ridgway had not yet landed in Korea and assessed the state of American forces, he wondered whether an immediate offensive might be allowable to MacArthur. “The Eighth Army is yours, Matt,” MacArthur famously replied. In fact, MacArthur had no detailed plans for how to stop the Chinese advance. He seemed more interested in fighting a public relations battle with Washington.