The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Read online

  Pinky MacArthur taught above all else the importance of success, that it validated all the other sacrifices, most especially hers, and that success at a personal level could always be viewed as being good for the country—it was part of her mantra, there in all those obsequious letters she wrote to his superiors: the good of Douglas MacArthur and the good of the United States of America were one and the same thing. As her creation, he was different from other generals of his era, even the most egocentric, like George Patton. Whatever else, the Army, with its great hardships in both peacetime and wartime, served to make the bonds of friendship unusually strong among those who had known one another when they were young and endured together through long and difficult and occasionally arid careers. But MacArthur had none of those bonds, none of those wonderful enduring lifetime friendships. He went through his career as a man with an aura, but almost no real friends. In the Army the needs of self are always to be balanced with a sense of obligation, loyalty, and respect for the institution, and the need to observe orders. Loyalty works two ways; not only to make those beneath you respectful of your orders but to teach you what you owe to those who are your superiors. Here Douglas MacArthur, like his father before him, failed a critical test.

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  MACARTHUR WAS STILL a towering national figure at the start of the Korean War, perhaps by then as much of a political figure as a military one, and a national icon, whether Washington liked it or not, the last active connection to both world wars. His performance as the commander in the Pacific during World War II had been judged as nothing less than brilliant. He had been somewhat behind the curve at the beginning of the war in respecting what the new possibilities were for carrier-propelled airpower, and for what the Japanese as soldiers (and as pilots) would be able to do. When the Japanese planes had struck so successfully against his own planes in the early days of the war, he was convinced—and it was a reflection of both personal and national racism—that their pilots must be white men. In the period before December 7, he had talked far too confidently about what the Japanese could not do. He had, for example, told John Hersey, then a talented young writer for Time magazine, that if the Japanese entered the war, the British, Dutch, and Americans would be able to stop them with half the forces they had already allotted to the Pacific, and that it would be easy to bottle up the Japanese fleet.

  But he came to understand, relatively early in the war, one of the major truths about the Japanese as both a culture and a military force—that when they controlled the agenda, and they were in command, and everything was done according to their schedule, they were formidable, and their rigid command structure seemingly unbeatable. Everything seemed to work as planned; everyone followed the strictest orders faithfully; no mistakes were allowed. But if the tide of battle went the other way, if the Japanese lost the initiative, these very strengths worked against them. They became surprisingly inflexible, skilled in fighting an enemy that behaved only as the Japanese Army itself would behave. Because theirs was so hierarchical and so authoritarian a society, with so little value placed on individual initiative, they were not nearly as imposing a force, and they lacked a critical quality required for the battlefield, an ability to respond to the unknown. As such, they quickly became militarily muscle-bound. “Never let the Jap attack you. When the Japanese soldier has a coordinated plan of attack he works smoothly,” MacArthur told his officers. But, he added, “when he is attacked—when he doesn’t know what is coming—it isn’t the same.”

  He also quickly adapted to a new kind of warfare. If he had not understood the possibilities of airpower in modern warfare, and had been caught with his planes on the ground on Clark Field on December 8, then he was a quick learner and soon rectified that. A skilled and quite forthright young air officer named George Kenney had stood up to him and his bullying chief of staff, Richard Sutherland, and then helped teach him what airpower could do in this immense theater—a theater that was a vast ocean populated, as it was, by occasional islands, among them a certain number of Japanese strongpoints. Out of Kenney’s quite practical knowledge of airpower, and MacArthur’s originality of mind, they had jointly fashioned a war plan that stripped the Japanese of their strengths. MacArthur’s dilemma at the start was obvious: his own ground forces were limited, and the Japanese were capable of fighting ferociously in defense on atolls where it would be hard to apply some of America’s technological superiority. The shrewd answer to that dilemma was to avoid confronting the Japanese where they were strongest, and instead he and Kenney concentrated on striking at islands where they were weakest, thereupon creating airfields on other atolls, which in turn allowed them to strike even deeper into Japanese-held territory, and slowly but surely cut off their lines of communication and starve their troops out. They did not so much attack the formidable enemy strongholds as ignore and isolate them. When the Japanese had more than one hundred thousand troops at Rabaul in the Solomons, just aching for a showdown, MacArthur avoided them. “Starve Rabaul! The jungle! Starvation! They’re my allies!” It was a military tour de force. John Gunther, one of the best-known journalists of that era, who had his own problems with the darker side of MacArthur, wrote of him in that campaign that “MacArthur took more territory, with less loss of life than any military commander since Darius the Great.”

  But there was another side of him surfacing at the same time that was far less attractive. Even during World War I there had been signs of the danger of his immense ego. But then he had been young and on the ascent, shrewd enough to button up the other side on most occasions, audacious as a commander and good with his troops, almost always up front with them. In World War II it was different. He was famous by then; he had become politicized, and his ego was constantly in open conflict with his pure military needs. There were more enemies now, and not necessarily the enemy aggressor in the field but civilian and military officials back in Washington; there was an ever greater need for credit, an addiction, really, to fame. In addition, there were fewer restraints on him. By the end of World War II, the part of him that was so talented was in an increasingly fragile balance with the part of him that could be so destructive.

  For he was a man who demanded the ultimate in loyalty from those beneath him, and yet to whom the sharing of credit was the most alien of concepts. He had contempt for those like Eisenhower who allowed their subordinate officers any measure of fame. All dispatches emanating from his headquarters were to begin with his name; thus, the dateline for stories filed from the Pacific would always be “MacArthur’s Headquarters,” implying a dispatch filed from a battlefield headquarters where one man alone made the decisions and did the fighting. All announcements of Pacific victories during the war were to be made in his name. William Manchester once studied the early dispatches from the theater and discovered that in 109 of the first 142 press communiqués sent out in the first three months of the war, no other officer’s name was mentioned. General Robert Eichelberger, one of MacArthur’s senior Army commanders, once told his own public information officer that he would rather have him place a live rattlesnake in his pocket than mention him prominently in dispatches. When Eichelberger, a talented, extremely aggressive field officer who commanded MacArthur’s Eighth Army, was written about in The Saturday Evening Post and Life, both of them important magazines in that era, MacArthur was not pleased. He called Eichelberger in and told him, “Do you realize I could reduce you to the grade of colonel tomorrow and send you home?” Loyalty with him was a one-way street, and he was capable of being remarkably disloyal to the presidents he served and the senior military men back in Washington. Year by year he had become the most political of men, constantly working on his connections to the Republican Party. Even in the midst of a great global war in 1944, MacArthur, fueled by a relentless ambition and deep personal hatred of Franklin Roosevelt, had seemed to align himself with the president’s most bitter political enemies. Then in 1948, he had been part of an attempt to gain the Republican presidential nomination, one that had
failed badly, and in 1950, even as he commanded the troops in Korea, it was the general belief in the White House and among some of the Republican presidential candidates that he was thinking of a race in 1952, in the midst of the Korean War, that he still hungered for it.

  The conservative wing of the Republican Party thought he was one of them, that his politics were conservative, and that was probably more true than not, though he had proved to be a surprisingly liberal governor-general of Japan. On the Richter scale of American politics he was by the middle of the twentieth century far more conservative than liberal, his politics and his attitudes shaped by an entirely different era. But those who knew him well thought that in his politics ideology was always quite secondary; that he lived, more than anything else, in the kingdom of self, and that his politics were the politics of self.

  Nothing had revealed how political he was, as well as his need to be a player on the national scene, more than his role in suppressing the Bonus Army in the early 1930s. The Great Depression had revealed the deepest chasms in American society, and a profound political, economic, and social alienation had taken place. MacArthur was the chief of staff of the Army, and he had aligned himself enthusiastically not merely with the Hoover administration, but with the existing political-economic order, then coming under fierce challenge on many fronts. That he took the administration’s side in that crisis was not surprising and was perhaps even unavoidable. But the way he thrust himself into the epicenter went well beyond the requirements of the job; it was a reflection of his need for fame and glory. The Bonus Army had arrived in Washington, a group of destitute World War I veterans, desperately seeking some kind of relief in the form of their bonus for service in the war. It was 1932, the very height of the Depression. It was a defining political moment for MacArthur; for no matter how famous and celebrated he eventually became as a general during World War II, the stigma of what he did then never entirely left him in the minds of many Americans who had come of age in those years.

  Millions of Americans were out of work then and the Bonus Army, or Bonus Expeditionary Force, as the men in it called their movement, was a ragtag group of veterans who hoped that spring to lobby for a bill sponsored by Congressman Wright Patman of Texas. The bill would have given them each an immediate bonus—on average about $1,000 a man, which was very big money then. Service in World War I was supposed to be rewarded with a bonus of that size either upon the death of the soldier or in 1945, some twenty-seven years after the end of the war. Patman’s bill was designed to expedite the process.

  Perhaps as many as thirty thousand people, most of them veterans but also their wives and children, created an instant squatters’ village, a pathetic little camp of cardboard shacks and tents, in the capital, many of them settling in an area called the Anacostia Flats, just across the Anacostia River, in the southern part of the city. Few of the men were particularly radical, although there were some radicals among them, not surprising in a time when more and more ordinary citizens were losing faith in the traditional untempered capitalism of the era. Courtney Whitney, one of MacArthur’s closest aides, and a man who often spoke for him, later wrote that the Bonus marchers had “a heavy percentage of criminals, men with prison records for such crimes as murder, manslaughter, rape, robbery, burglary, blackmail and assault.” To MacArthur they were nothing but a dangerous anti-American rabble. The Veterans Administration, which kept close records, later reported that 94 percent of them were actual veterans, 67 percent of whom had served the United States overseas. Dwight Eisenhower, then a major and MacArthur’s talented young aide, thought the marchers might be mistaken in what they were attempting, but felt there was a poignant quality to them and their demands—“They were ragged, ill-fed, and felt themselves badly abused.”

  As the political battles in Congress over Patman’s bill heated up, the Bonus Army’s numbers continued to swell. By summer, the ability of the local police to control them was questionable. Hoover, a man largely paralyzed by the Depression, was at the low ebb of his popularity and becoming increasingly nervous about the threat the marchers posed. That summer Patman’s bill was passed by the House only to be defeated by the Senate. Simultaneously, there were several minor skirmishes between Bonus Army members and the local police. Hoover felt it was time to get the veterans out of town and wanted the United States Army to take over the job. At a meeting with top civilian and military officials, including MacArthur, the Bonus Army leaders asked for permission, if the Army were to enter their little encampment, to march out in proper formation and with some measure of dignity. “Yes, my friend, of course!” MacArthur answered. On July 28, the situation came to a head after several scuffles with the marchers. The orders to end the protest came down from Hoover himself. Eisenhower, not wanting the Army too closely associated with what was sure to be, even if carried out skillfully, an odious political act, tried to keep MacArthur somewhat in the background. A brigadier general named Perry Miles, a man of considerable competence, was to lead the troops. A young armored officer, a major named George Patton, Jr., would be in charge of the tanks, a warning of what could happen should the Bonus Army try to resist. Eisenhower was appalled when he realized that MacArthur intended to show up on location to lead the forces of suppression personally. Both he and MacArthur had arrived at their offices that morning in civvies. MacArthur promptly sent Eisenhower home to get his uniform and dispatched his own orderly to his quarters to get his—the one with all the decorations. Eisenhower argued valiantly that this would be a mistake, that a terrible stench would arise from it, and that it would eventually hurt the Army in lobbying on the Hill with Democrats. (“I told that dumb son of a bitch that he had no business going down there. I told him it was no place for a chief of staff,” he later said.) The chief of staff, who often spoke of himself in the third person, replied, “MacArthur has decided to go into active command in the field.” Then he added, “Incipient revolution is in the air.” Eisenhower suggested that if both of them had to visit the scene, they at least do so out of uniform. MacArthur vetoed the suggestion.

  So off they went in full uniform to meet the Bonus Army. Their orders from the secretary of the Army were quite specific. Hoover wanted the marchers tamed, but he wanted no riot. The suppression of the protest should be as restrained as possible. The Army troops were not to cross the river or go near the largest encampment of veterans, on the other side of the river. Eisenhower later recounted how he had told MacArthur that there was a messenger there with specific orders from the president. “I don’t want to hear them and I don’t want to see them. Get him away,” MacArthur answered. He had decided that if he did not receive them, then there would be no need to act on them, and thus no limits set on his movements. The river would be crossed, the encampment destroyed.

  The scene around them quickly turned ugly. Some of the veterans’ pathetic little shacks were soon burning. Eisenhower, aware that there would be considerable press coverage of an event guaranteed to be filled with pathos, tried to get MacArthur out of there. This was, he believed, a civilian matter, ordered by civilians; let them take the responsibility and the heat. Eisenhower might as well have ordered a moth to stay away from a flame. It was as if MacArthur needed to be at the center of the coverage. He deliberately held a late evening press conference, where, having exceeded Hoover’s orders (and created a political crisis that would greatly help the Democratic candidate Franklin Roosevelt in the forthcoming election), he praised Hoover for being so steadfast: “Had he waited another week, I believe the institutions of our government would have been threatened.” In this way did MacArthur present Hoover with a fait accompli. The president could not dissent from what had seemingly been done under his orders. It was a devastating political moment for Hoover. No one understood that more clearly than Franklin Roosevelt, who believed that it would seal his election.

  For millions of ordinary Americans, who in hard times sympathized with the marchers, it was a defining moment; MacArthur became forever in their
minds the kind of military man who abused the rights of ordinary people, a man who was never to be trusted politically and was too militaristic. In some ways, however, he got just what he thought he wanted, for his actions that day helped connect him ever more tightly to those on the right wing who saw the Bonus Army as part of a larger threat to capitalism. He had made himself the favorite general of a formidable, increasingly frustrated political constituency that resented almost every initiative taken during the New Deal. He had politicized himself more than any general ever should, cut himself off from those who politically were on the ascent, and connected himself to those who were momentarily in decline.

  The byplay that day offered a fascinating insight into two Army officers who would play central roles in America’s future: Eisenhower with his supple sense of political consequences, his innate political deftness, and his empathy for the difficulties of ordinary people; and MacArthur with his statement that this was a radical moment threatening an entire economic order and, even more important, with his need to be center stage and to receive the full attention of the press, bedecked in full military uniform, medals and all.

  MacArthur’s own sense of where the country was (and what it was) often seemed badly skewed, especially as he got older and the nation, driven by vast technological breakthroughs, changed at an accelerating rate. He was a distinctly nineteenth-century man, more comfortable with those from an era that was passing than those from an era being fashioned by new political forces, transformed and democratized by dramatic economic changes and changes in communications. That MacArthur dissented from many of the political changes taking place in Washington was not surprising. But with him everything was always more personal; it was as if the men who had arrived with the New Deal were not merely different from those who had preceded them but enemies, usurpers, in no small part because his influence with them was less than it had been with their predecessors. His views of the two Democratic presidents under whom he subsequently served were nothing less than toxic. This was especially true of Roosevelt, who, shrewd and cunning, managed to play the general with exceptional skill, much to the latter’s irritation—the irritation of a classic user who finally runs into someone who is even better at it. (Roosevelt’s view of MacArthur was almost uniquely cynical. He was to be used but not to be trusted. The president once told his aide Rexford Tugwell that Huey Long was one of the two most dangerous men in the country. Who was the other, asked Tugwell, Father Coughlin, then a fiery hate-spilling radio priest? “Oh, no,” Roosevelt answered, “the other is Douglas MacArthur.”)