The Savior Generals: How Five Great Commanders Saved Wars That Were Lost—From Ancient Greece to Iraq (27 page)

On arriving in Korea, Ridgway quietly learned that his hopes of immediate offensive operations were in vain. Instead, he discovered that the catastrophe was even worse than reported. His Eighth Army was in shambles. Many of its officers wanted out of the theater altogether. Keeping the advancing Chinese out of South Korea was out of the question. That Seoul would fall a second time to Communists was simply a matter of when and how. The real worry was instead whether growing panic would stampede UN forces back to Japan, losing them even their refuge at Pusan in the south. Ridgway, the World War II veteran, had not experienced American confusion since the ill-fated Operation Market Garden or the German assault through the Ardennes during the Battle of the Bulge.

The initial Chinese assault (dubbed the Chinese First Phase Offensive) between October 25 and November 24, 1950, had already cost the Americans 27,827 casualties, including nearly ten thousand killed and missing in action—far more lost than in the infamous battle for Iwo Jima. For a brief period until late November, sophisticated Russian-made MiG-15s had given the Communists virtual air superiority along a corridor near the Chinese border. There may have been three hundred or so such aircraft stationed in neighboring Manchurian airfields. Slower, vulnerable propeller-driven B-29 heavy bombers—whose fire raids had struck terror in Japan five years earlier—were increasingly confined to night attacks against the north, given that American postwar jet fighters were not up to the MiG-15’s standards and could not protect the B-29s. Once-shattered Communist North Korean divisions had been refitted and resupplied in China. Now they were again far more confident and battle-ready than were their South Korean counterparts, who had started the war six months earlier with scarcely enough equipment for 65,000 troops.
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Ridgway spent the frigid waning days of 1950 visiting his corps and division commanders in the Eighth Army. What he found appalled—but also informed—him. Morale was shot. Rumors circulated of traumatized American troops cheering as they had retreated once again south of the 38th Parallel. Republic of Korea allied troops almost ran over Ridgway himself as he got out in the road and vainly tried to stop their fleeing columns.
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Vast supplies of weapons and materials had simply been abandoned in the north, robbing entire brigades of their firepower while augmenting the stocks of their Chinese pursuers. American GIs—accustomed to enjoying ample supplies of matériel in the latter years of
World War II—were often outgunned by Soviet-supplied superior tanks and airpower. Wrong-headed “scorched earth” orders had resulted in the destruction of roads, bridges, and railways in the north. Yet such a strategy was not very effective, given that the Chinese often advanced mostly on foot.

Such wanton destruction instead had demoralized once friendly Korean populations. Losses of infrastructure would also come back to haunt the mobile Americans if they were ever to go back on the offensive and return to the north. General MacArthur, distant from the battlefield, moreover had no real appreciation of Chinese tactics and organization. Instead, his commanders clung to the notion that enemy columns, like conventional European armies, could easily be targeted by American bombers and stopped through airpower alone. In reality, most Chinese advanced off the main routes in difficult terrain. They often attacked under cover of darkness, and they took masterful advantage of poor weather that hampered air sorties.

American troops, in a fashion also reminiscent of the frostbitten days of the Battle of the Bulge, were inadequately prepared for the brutal Korean winter. Many freezing soldiers had thrown away their helmets in preference for the rare, warmer woolen caps. Some units in their desperation had discarded virtually all their bayonets. Soldiers lit roaring campfires to ward off frostbite, identifying their presence to Chinese infiltrators during frequent after-dark engagements. American victories in World War II had relied heavily on massive American tactical support and strategic air superiority. But neither was assured. Targets were restricted by political considerations. And the Chinese brilliantly timed their advances to coincide with rough winter weather.

Americans were also confused by the unconventional tactics of Chinese invaders. They blew bugles, whistles—almost anything that made noise—when attacking. Some trained propagandists shouted taunts in English. All had been conditioned by months of intensive anti-American propaganda to despise their enemies and “the Wall Street house-dog General MacArthur.” Most units preferred nocturnal attacks. And they almost always sought to infiltrate American lines well camouflaged, or, in a few cases, wearing American uniforms. The terror of the Chinese came not just from numeric superiority, but from the sense of the unknown and mysterious, embellished by Communist propaganda, in the way perhaps that Hernán Cortés’s conquistadors were at first baffled by the tactics and appearance of their Aztec adversaries at Tenochtitlán, or
many of the Greeks in the years before Marathon, according to the historian Herodotus, had feared even to look upon Persian troops. Thousands of Chinese marshaled behind the lines to stockpile supplies, safe from American artillery. Then during the night they frantically marched to predesignated attack points, fresh and undetected.

Americans often went to sleep thinking the Chinese were miles away from the front (and they often were), only to awaken and find that thousands of enemy soldiers had almost magically infiltrated their lines during the night. Moreover, Chinese usually aimed their thrusts at seams in the United Nations lines, either at suspect South Korean divisions or, more frequently, at the gray areas between South Korean and American forces where command responsibility was unsure and American firepower less likely to concentrate.

Fighting Communists was a new American experience. At first, officers concluded that a rabid ideology, when mixed with stereotypical Asian discipline, had created an almost mystical challenge unlike any other in American military history. Americans back home knew that just five years earlier, the Soviet Red Army had beaten the Wehrmacht on the Eastern Front, and that even more recently, Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communists had defeated the better-supplied Nationalist forces of Chiang Kai-shek. These facts contributed to the public impression that Communist fanaticism was a force multiplier to which the Western democracies had so far found no answer. In short, the Chinese Communists enjoyed the same sort of inflated ideological and ethnic reputation that the Japanese had won after Pearl Harbor and Wake Island until Guadalcanal.
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Ridgway also found an absence of American command coordination. That was to be expected after the death of General Walker, and given that General MacArthur was far away in Tokyo. But worse still, Army General Walker as commander of the Eighth Army, and Marine General Almond as head of Tenth Corps, had sometimes worked at cross purposes. There was no real supreme ground commander in Korea, given that General MacArthur allowed his friend Almond to act independently of Eighth Army control. Both Walker and Almond had been headstrong leaders but were often prone to impetuousness. The physical barriers between east and west Korea, intraservice rivalry, and the vastly different rates of advance of the two American armies made it hard for either force to reinforce or cover the other once the Chinese came across the border. It was almost as if there were an Army war and a Marine war,
the two quite independent of each other—not long after President Truman and Defense Secretary Johnson had wished to reduce or even disband the Marine Corps.

Serving alongside the Americans were some thirty thousand allied troops, mostly from Britain, Europe, Greece, and Turkey. They were disheartened and had lost confidence in American leadership. Most had been originally sent largely on the assumption that after Inchon, the war was about over and all but won. They expected peacekeeping roles in the trail of the successful American advance. Now, instead, many of the Canadian, Dutch, French, Greek, and Turkish detachments reached the front during the unexpected massive Chinese counterattack in late November and December—at the very moment when their American sponsors were in headlong retreat.

Indeed, despite a UN Security Resolution authorizing the use of force to repel Communist aggression, only sixteen nations would eventually send troops. Almost all of them were reluctantly persuaded to do so, perhaps on the implicit argument that otherwise both the Truman Doctrine and ongoing Marshall Plan aid programs were not quite assured. In total, only forty thousand non-American foreign troops would fight for South Korea—in comparison with 5,720,000 Americans who would over three years at some point be rotated through the Korean theater.
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British officers had no idea why MacArthur in October 1950 had pursued the Communists past the more defensible “waist” of Korea near the 39th Parallel in a wild-goose chase to the Chinese border. They were equally bewildered as to why the panicked Americans in December had simply fled southward toward the far less defensible 38th—once more neglecting the opportunities at the waist to establish formidable lines of defense while easily outrunning their pursuers, who were without motorized transport and still miles behind them. Too reckless an advance was trumped by an even more reckless retreat. Later Truman regretted that he had let MacArthur reject the sober British advice, pointing to the 39th Parallel on a map and supposedly lamenting that he had not stopped the American advance at the “neck of Korea.”
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A depressed Syngman Rhee was sure that United Nations troops could not save Seoul. This time most likely they would abandon him and the Korean peninsula altogether. Rhee was prescient: Back in Washington
a nasty political fight was brewing between left and right in Congress. There was no unified support for continuing the war, but clear indications that in the 1952 election to come, “Who lost Korea?” would be the central campaign issue. President Harry Truman, soon-to-be presidential candidate General Dwight D. Eisenhower, Senator Joseph McCarthy, Secretary of Defense George Marshall, and General MacArthur himself all had differing agendas, without agreement about what the United States’ common aims were—or how much blood and treasure Americans were willing to pay for what most still saw as a far distant optional war. In fact, the war threatened to destroy the political careers of all five high-profile generals and politicians.

Ridgway wanted to know whether the Soviet Union would pile on and soon send in troops for the final kill, then turn on Japan and Formosa. If the forces of the United Nations stopped the Chinese offensive, should they resume the advance of autumn 1950 and try to unify the entire Korea peninsula under the control of a single democratically elected leader, or go back to the two-state status before the war? Were atomic weapons necessary, or were there even enough of them available to be effective against a vast country like China, and if so, had the newly nuclear Soviet Union reached strategic parity with the United States? Ridgway soon learned that almost no one in Washington had answers to any of those questions—even as he wished to raise far more like them. Just as Grant’s disastrous 1864 offensives had wiped away the optimism of the prior summer and sent the Union into a defeatist mood, so, too, the Chinese invasion now rendered Inchon a distant memory and a real defeat an immediate possibility.

What immediately followed in late December and January was predictable. In just two weeks the Eighth Army in the northwest had retreated back across the Imjin River and was once again south of the 38th Parallel. America’s second army in Korea to the east, the Tenth Corps, had meanwhile fallen back southward to Hungnam. For some reason, before Ridgway took over, UN forces in the east were ordered to be evacuated hundreds of miles by sea, perhaps all the way back to Pusan, abandoning swaths of hard-won territory that were not yet even occupied by the Communists.

To Ridgway, the problem was not just that there were no longer many
United Nations troops in the north, but that those in the south were exhausted from a demoralizing extended retreat. A thin line of troops was guarding Seoul, outnumbered three to one by an oncoming Chineseled army eager to clear the peninsula entirely of foreigners. Back in the United States, there was more loose talk—much of it inspired not just by MacArthur supporters, but also by leaders in Congress and President Truman himself—of using atomic bombs to stop the seemingly unstoppable Communist attack. Ridgway had informally asked MacArthur to authorize the possible use of poison gas once he arrived and fathomed the extent of the collapse of the American forces.
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Alarmed Europeans clamored for restraint. They feared a general nuclear conflagration, diminished U.S. resources for the defense of Western Europe—and the real possibility that the Americans might lose in such an unfavorable theater and thus encourage Communist expansionism elsewhere. The Labour Party–controlled British Parliament was furious that British soldiers might soon find themselves pawns on a nuclear battlefield. Elders in the British government hastily persuaded Prime Minister Clement Attlee to fly to Washington. There Attlee voiced heated objections to almost every element of American foreign policies toward both Koreas and Red China—in vain trying to cajole the Truman administration to make peace with the Chinese in hopes that they would soon prove independent from their Soviet sponsors and settle for some sort of prewar boundary at the 38th Parallel. In general, the Americans were still confident that they could weaken worldwide Communism in Korea, the British equally convinced that an American defeat would empower it.
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President Truman was furious. He felt betrayed, given MacArthur’s rosy reports of an imminent and utter Communist defeat at their meeting on Wake Island in early October 1950. He was angrier still at the dissent coming from the front lines, where MacArthur and others were busy diverting blame away from themselves. Finally, on December 5, just weeks before Ridgway’s appointment, in exasperation he had issued the following order: “No speech, press release, or other public statement concerning foreign policy should be released until it has received clearance from the Department of State.” President Truman added that all commanders were “to refrain from direct communication on military or foreign policy with newspapers, magazines, or other publicity media in the United States.”
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