Those Who Have Borne the Battle (23 page)

General MacArthur, ignoring some of the intelligence reports within his command, believed the Chinese Communists were weak militarily and could not get more than 50,000 or 60,000 troops across the Yalu River and into North Korea. And if they were foolish enough to do this, with no airpower they would be vulnerable. He predicted that if they tried to get down to Pyongyang, “there would be the greatest slaughter.”
¹²
One of MacArthur's top field commanders, General Ned Almond, who was leading the X Corps into eastern North Korea, used the phrase
Chinese laundrymen
to underline his contempt for Chinese military capability.
¹³
MacArthur talked confidently about bringing the “boys home for Christmas.”

Tragically, the only men who would get home for Christmas in 1950 came in hospital transports or in coffins. In late October and November there were increasing reports of contact with the Chinese. Some UN units brought in Chinese prisoners. MacArthur's command insisted these were only a few volunteers, and their participation would be inconsequential. It was a remarkable act of hubris, miscalculation, and overconfidence. It would have horrible consequences for the “boys” at the front. When MacArthur assured Truman that the Chinese could not send in more
than 60,000 men, there probably were already 130,000 Chinese troops in Korea. Within several weeks there would be a significant increase in that force in the northern mountains. Chinese numerical strength, discipline, and ability simply overwhelmed most American positions.

The 2nd Infantry Division, part of the Eighth Army in western Korea, had moved north of Pyongyang in November. Contrary to MacArthur's low assessment of an enemy threat, they were faced with massive Chinese assaults and had to fight their way back to Sunchon. South Korean general Sun Yup Paik would write of their withdrawal, “The God of Death himself hovered with heavy, beating wings over that road.” The 2nd Infantry Division would suffer the heaviest casualties of any American division serving in Korea. Homer Bigart was with the Eighth Army and reported in the
New York Herald Tribune
, “In a series of desperate rearguard actions, United Nations troops today escaped annihilation by overwhelming Chinese forces on the Chongchon bridgehead.”
¹⁴
If they escaped annihilation, they did not escape decimation.

To the East, General Almond's X Corps encountered similar odds. The First Marine Division was surrounded in the mountains at the Chosin Reservoir. The Chinese outnumbered the marines by at least five to one, and they had managed to move onto the high ground on the ridges. Marguerite Higgins was with the marines at Hagaru-ri, and she reported that they heard Peking Radio announce that “the annihilation of the United States 1st Marine Division is only a matter of time.” She called it a Korean Valley Forge as the temperature dropped well below zero and snow and ice blocked every road. The marines fought their way out. The First Marine Division would have the second-highest casualty rate of any division in Korea. Their rate of wounded was the highest. The army's 31st Regimental Combat Team, not as well equipped or as experienced as the First Marine Division, took heavy casualties east of the Chosin Reservoir. The distinguished historian of the US Army in Korea Roy Appleman writes, “I believe that the 1st Marine Division in the Chosin Reservoir Campaign was one of the most magnificent fighting organizations that ever served in the United States Armed Forces. It had to be to do what it did, to fight to a standstill the Chinese forces at every point and then to carry out a fighting retreat southward against
an enemy roadblock and fire block that extended . . . a distance of about 40 road miles. This was done in the midst of extremely adverse weather conditions.”
¹⁵

Along with the Army 7th Infantry Division units, the marines pulled back to Koto-ri and then on to the port city of Hungnam, where a massive evacuation, including 90,000 civilians, was completed by Christmas Eve. Shortly after this the Chinese and North Koreans came south across the thirty-eighth parallel and in January took Seoul once more.

It was a different war now. Keyes Beech described “a fog of defeatism and despair” in a dispatch from Seoul in December. Homer Bigart wrote of the Eighth Army that they had sustained “the worst licking Americans had suffered since Bataan.”
¹⁶
As these setbacks had accumulated in early December, James Reston reported from Washington that all of the news was having an impact so that there was a “sense of emergency and even of alarm about the state of the United Nations Army in Korea.”
¹⁷

The
New York Times
described the hasty and costly withdrawal from North Korea as having serious consequences on the morale of the army. “The discovery that their superiority in weapons, transport, medical treatment, rations and a myriad of modern war devices was no guarantee of victory has struck a hard blow at the morale of the United States troops fighting in Korea.”
¹⁸

A United Nations counteroffensive in midwinter 1951 pushed the Chinese and North Koreans out of Seoul and then to the vicinity of the thirty-eighth parallel. The forces on both sides settled down to a period of heavy warfare from largely stable front lines. For more than two years the fighting continued and the casualties mounted, but without any significant changes in occupied territory. By the spring of 1951 there was some talk of negotiations. General MacArthur was consistently critical of the restraints that he felt had been imposed on his war effort and chose this volatile moment to speak out.

MacArthur described the orders that kept the military from carrying the war into China as “an enormous handicap, without precedent in military history.”
¹⁹
In April 1951 he wrote to Congressman Joe Martin, the Republican minority leader, arguing that “here in Asia is where the Communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest.”
MacArthur was certain that if the free world lost in Asia, Europe would follow. “We must win. There is no substitute for victory.”
²⁰
Martin entered the letter into the
Congressional Record
.

General MacArthur had directly challenged the president and the civilian and military leadership. In response, President Truman relieved MacArthur of his command. It was a politically risky but constitutionally essential move. There was a major outcry in the United States; MacArthur spoke to Congress when he returned, and he was feted with a ticker-tape parade in New York City. But relatively quickly that furor died down. Most Americans did understand and value the essential constitutional authority in this case, and few were truly anxious to see an expanded war. General Omar Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, was blunt in response to a question when he appeared before a Senate committee investigating the MacArthur removal: “Red China is not the powerful nation seeking to dominate the world. Frankly, in the opinion of the Joint Chiefs, this strategy [the MacArthur demand that the war be taken into China] would involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.”
²¹

Bradley's forceful statement, which few then or later really challenged as a geopolitical assertion or as military judgment, posed the real dilemma of Korea. The Soviet Union was understood to be the real threat and the real enemy. How far should Americans extend themselves in fighting what were considered the Soviet surrogates? How could a country sustain support for a war that its top military and civilian leaders acknowledged would be, if carried to its logical conclusion, strategically the “wrong” war?

It had seemed so easy and natural when the troops first engaged. In the first weeks of the Korean War, Gallup determined that 81 percent of Americans supported the US involvement there. There was very little editorial or political criticism. This mood of confidence and support would shortly run against the headwind of setbacks in the field and some vivid coverage of the horror of war. At the outset of the war there was minimal censorship of war coverage. News magazines and newspapers had photos from the front showing the difficulty of the war.
Life
showed some of David Duncan's evocative photos of soldiers crying, of officers discovering they had no ammunition, of medical care in the midst of battle.

Life
and
Newsweek
each featured a photo of an American, obviously a prisoner of the North Koreans, hands and legs tied, shot by the side of the road.
Murdered
was the verb each used to describe this soldier's death.
Life
described “retreating American soldiers, bitter at their own blameless failure and the brutal execution of their comrades.” One reader wrote to the magazine about a photo of a dead officer with his men in July 1950, “Your picture of a dead lieutenant and his men—especially the face of the last boy on the right—seems to portray combat as the young soldier sees it better than any photograph I have seen. In his eyes and the expression of his face are skepticism, horror, and a sudden grownup look from the realization of death.” One officer asked a reporter, “Why don't you tell them how useless it is?”
²²

These stories and photos generated concern, but the images were not sharply different from some that censors allowed near the end of World War II. As long as the objectives of the war seemed clear and the military was making progress toward them, public support was sustained. The Inchon landing and the drive into the North seemed to demonstrate that this war was under control. Gallup pointed out that 64 percent wanted the United Nations to pursue the North Koreans into the North and to force their surrender. By the end of the year, firm censorship rules largely eliminated breakfast-table confrontations with the reality of war. The Chinese intervention darkened the national mood again, this time more permanently. In January 1951, with the Communists once more controlling Seoul and with the Americans nursing major casualties, 66 percent wanted “to pull our troops out of Korea as fast as possible.” President Truman's approval rating fell to 26 percent.
²³
Neither support for the war nor support for the president would ever bounce back significantly from these levels.

A Rand study in the 1990s examined the argument that American support for war was directly (inversely) related to the casualties the United States was suffering. This analysis concluded that war support was more nuanced than this model suggested and that public support for the Korean War related to the level of understanding and support for the objectives, an estimate of the likelihood of accomplishing them, and a calculation as to whether the objectives were worth the cost of
casualties. The study cited a 1951 Gallup poll that asked, “Would you, yourself, be willing to risk your life, or have some member of your family risk his life, to keep the Chinese Communists from taking over Korea and other countries in Asia?” The results were that 34 percent of the respondents were willing to take on this personal risk, and 53 percent were not.
²⁴

In the winter of 1951 American politicians debated the conduct of the war and its aims. A stalemate seemed inconsistent with the country's historical legacy and its culture. “Our policy must be to win,” a number of Republican senators insisted in a public statement. Senator Robert Taft likened it to a football game, where your team always has to punt when it crosses the fifty-yard line: “Our team can never score.”
²⁵
MacArthur's argument that “war's very object is victory, not prolonged indecision,” had a great cultural resonance.
²⁶

In Montana two local draft board members were suspended when they refused to draft anyone unless the United States used atomic bombs in Korea and China. The major veterans groups pushed President Truman to bomb Chinese sanctuaries in Manchuria. But in fact, few Americans were willing to pay the price and take the risk that “victory” in this war might require.

By the spring of 1951 the saber-rattling mood had shifted. After the MacArthur hearings when the administration and the military had made its public case against an expanded war, support for a truce that would divide Korea once more at the thirty-eighth parallel jumped from 43 percent to 51 percent. By the summer of 1951 when peace talks began, some 56 percent of Americans agreed with the statement that this was “an utterly useless war.”
²⁷

 

 

The war continued, nonetheless, and this required a continuing supply of men to fight it. When the war had begun, the postwar authorization for selective service was just expiring. Congress quickly passed legislation extending it. In July 1950 the president issued a call-up of reserve units, and 180,000 would be mobilized in the first three months of the war. These units proved not to be well trained—and they also included a number of
World War II veterans who were not happy to be called up for another war. By the end of 1950 the administration was demobilizing the reserve units. The draft and voluntary enlistments would sustain the force. In 1951 32 percent of new enlisted men were draftees; by 1953 this figure was nearly 59 percent. Congress never agreed with the Pentagon request to end the voluntary enlistment program, and enlistees continued to meet the objectives of the air force, the navy, and the marines.

The Korean War coincided with a demographic change. The young draft-age men were born in the early 1930s, the Depression generation. Birthrates were very low then, so there was concern about the size of the draft pool. Korean War soldiers were younger than those in World War II. In the latter, 10 percent of the army was under age twenty-one; in Korea, half of the army was younger than twenty-one. Congress did remove the legislative cap that provided that women could be no more than 2 percent of the military. Women were not draft eligible, but they could enlist and the numbers increased significantly during the war—but still remained under 2 percent of the greatly expanded military.