The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Page 19

  But that incident had helped trigger the back-to-back invitations Truman proffered to MacArthur in September and again October 1945 to come home, consult with the president, be honored by a grateful nation, perhaps be given one more Distinguished Service Cross, and then address a joint session of Congress. A request by a commander in chief, a man newly elevated to the presidency under tragic circumstances in wartime, was never actually a request, though it was masked as one; it was essentially an order. MacArthur nonetheless did not treat it as such and declined, twice. Four-star general he might be, senior American officer he might be, but that was not something any officer should do: if the president summoned, you came. Thus he had been disrespectful to Truman from the start, acting as if they were equals (at best) and there were no chain of command. He was too busy in Tokyo, the general had said, and the dangers of leaving were too great, because of “the extraordinarily dangerous and inherently inflammable situation, which exists here.” Truman was livid—this was coming from a man who had only recently said he needed only half the allotted number of troops because things were going so well. MacArthur was very aware of what he was doing. He told one aide, “And I intend to be the first man in our history to refuse to [return home at a presidential request]. I am going to tell them I have work to do and cannot spare the time.” What MacArthur told his people privately was even more grandiose. If he left Japan right now, he insisted, tremors would run through that country as well as other parts of Asia, which would believe themselves abandoned. He also told some of his aides that he would return home on his own terms and when it best suited his own needs. It would perhaps be an emotional return tied to a Republican convention. When one friend suggested to MacArthur that now might be the right time to go, all the anger and paranoia flared: “Don’t think for a minute I will go now. At one point I might have done so, but the president, the State Department and Marshall have all been attacking me. They might have won out, but the Reds came out against me and the Communists booed me and that raised me to a pinnacle without which they might have licked me. Thanks to the Soviets I am on top. I would like to pin a medal on their a——.”

  The two men, president and general, could not have had more contrasting career curves. MacArthur was already a great national hero in those hard pre–World War II years when Truman was still going from failure to failure; in the early 1930s, when MacArthur had exceeded orders and crushed the Bonus Army, it would not have taken a great stretch of the imagination to envision Harry Truman, then at the low point in his own career, as one of its members. The high-water mark of his career at that point, his service in the American Expeditionary Force in France in World War I, as a captain in the Missouri National Guard, seemed hardly a footnote compared to MacArthur’s extraordinary exploits in that same war. And yet none of that should have mattered starting in 1945: one was president and the other was a general.

  From the beginning, Truman was uneasy with the idea of a commander outside his reach. There was no doubt that he thought frequently of relieving MacArthur. But when someone suggested to Truman, after MacArthur had claimed he didn’t need the allotted troops, that perhaps it was time to relieve him, the president answered, “Wait a minute, W-a-i-t a minute.” That was MacArthur’s great ace in the hole, the fact that the political consequences of removing him were so great because he had a formidable political constituency, one quite deliberately fashioned.

  When John Foster Dulles returned to Washington from his meetings with MacArthur in those first grim days of the Korean War and conferred with Truman, he recommended a change of commanders. MacArthur, he said, seemed too old, and he was bothered by the way his attention span seemed to waver. But Truman already felt himself locked in. His hands were tied, he told Dulles, because MacArthur had been so active politically in the country for so long and had even been mentioned, the president noted, as a possible Republican presidential candidate. He could not be recalled, Truman added, “without causing a tremendous reaction in the country,” where MacArthur “had been built up to heroic stature.” It was a remarkable admission: the president of the United States was about to go to war in a distant land, his armed forces commanded by a general he not only disliked but, more important, distrusted, but whom he feared replacing for political reasons.

  MacArthur saw himself as a great surviving link to a magnificent American past; only Washington and Lincoln were his peers. (“My major advisers, now, one founded the United States, the other saved it. If you go back into their lives you can find all the answers,” he once said.) When he took over as the supreme commander in the Pacific, one of the first things he did was hang a portrait of Washington behind his desk, and then when the war was done, according to Sidney Mashbir, an intelligence officer, he saluted the portrait of Washington, saying, “Sir, they weren’t wearing red coats, but we whipped them just the same.” His hatred of the capitol and the men who presided there in those years was palpable. Faubion Bowers, his military secretary in Tokyo and a man privy to his private thoughts as they came pouring out during monologues on rides in his car, thought MacArthur hated all presidents. Roosevelt to him was Rosenfeld, and Truman he would refer to as “that Jew in the White House.” “Which Jew in the White House?” the puzzled Bowers once asked. “Truman,” MacArthur answered. “You can tell by his name. Look at his face.” Then one day MacArthur disabused Bowers of the idea that he disliked every president. “Hoover,” he said, “wasn’t so bad.”

  MacArthur was given to paranoia anyway, and like most paranoiacs, he quickly made more than his share of enemies. By the spring of 1949, both the State Department and Defense were working on a plan that would effectively diminish a good deal of his power in Japan. Dean Acheson was probably the driving force behind the plans. The idea was to split up the political and military jobs in Tokyo. MacArthur would eventually be brought home to great acclaim, and prominent nonideological replacements would thereupon take up the two jobs, with Maxwell Taylor, a rising star of the Army in World War II, slated to take over the military half. MacArthur, however, got wind of these developments, contacted his own powerful allies in Washington, and brought the plans to the attention of Omar Bradley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, in what the latter called “a scathing diatribe, the like of which I have seldom read.” The tone of it surprised Bradley, who noted that he had never realized “the deep distrust with which General MacArthur viewed our State Department in general and Dean Acheson in particular.” Indeed, noted Bradley, MacArthur must have viewed him as a traitor as well for selling out to State on this issue.

  Things never really got any better. Truman and MacArthur were almost never on the same track, with the same aims. They saw the war that they were about to fight in different contexts; they had, it would turn out, quite different ideas of what would constitute an acceptable victory and how much of the nation’s resources ought to be committed to attaining it. Yet, starting on June 25, 1950, their lives would be twined together as that of a general and a president rarely had been in American history. Truman would find his presidency severely damaged by his inability to control MacArthur, while the general would find his place in history severely damaged by his failure to respect and to take the full measure of the president.

  10

  THE UNITED STATES would go to war totally unprepared. The first American units thrown into battle were poorly armed, in terrible shape physically, and, more often than not, poorly led. The mighty army that had stood victorious in two great theaters of war, Europe and Asia, just five years earlier was a mere shell of itself. Militarily, America was a country trying to get by on the cheap, and in Korea it showed immediately. The blame for the poor condition of the Army belonged to everyone—the president, who wanted to keep taxes down, pay off the debt from the last war, and keep the defense budget down to a bare-bones level; the Congress, which if anything wanted to cut the budget even more; and the theater commander, MacArthur, under whose aegis the troops had been so poorly trained, and who had only five years earlie
r said that he did not really need all the troops Washington had assigned him. But mostly it was Truman—the president has to take full responsibility in a matter like this: the Army of this immensely prosperous country, rich now in a world that was still poor and war-ravaged, was threadbare. It had been on such short rations, so desperately underfinanced, that artillery units had not been able to practice adequately because there was no ammo; armored groups had done a kind of faux training because they lacked gas for real maneuvers; and troops at famed bases like Fort Lewis were being told to use only two sheets of toilet paper each time they visited the latrine. There were so few spare parts for vehicles that some enlisted men went out and bought war surplus equipment at very low prices, using their own money, in order to break it down for spare parts. If there was any upgrade in weaponry, it was almost exclusively in the planes and weapons being designed for the Air Force, not in the weapons employed by infantrymen.

  World War II had dragged a sleepy, isolationist nation to superpower status. Out of the reach of enemy bombs, the United States had become the great arsenal of democracy. Its awesome factories, their modernity then the envy of the developed world, produced formidable weapons of war at a stunning rate. Many critics at the start of World War II had feared that Americans would not be good soldiers, that they had grown soft because of the nation’s material successes. Worse, there was the question of whether because America was so democratic, its men would be able to stand up to soldiers from mighty totalitarian countries like Germany and Japan. But American troops had proved first-rate soldiers, and the country had produced an enviable army from a democratic society, built as much as anything else around the toughness, shrewdness, and skills of its noncommissioned officers, an army that reflected well on the democratic process, where the ability to think for yourself and accept responsibility were valuable assets. In the European theater, the mighty Wehrmacht had been matched by ordinary kids from ordinary American homes, coupled with the growing U.S. technological advantage; that and the sheer ferocity of the Red Army assaulting the Germans on the eastern front had doomed the Third Reich. In the Pacific, the Japanese had fought tenaciously, but again the combination of force, superior American technology, MacArthur’s shrewd campaign designed to isolate rather than confront the enemy’s strongest positions, and finally Japan’s own limited resources had doomed their forces.

  But now, almost daily, there were stories of American units being driven back, of constant North Korean advances. Had Americans in this new postwar era too casually overestimated the ability of U.S. troops? Had they thought that the kind of fighting force the United States had produced by early 1944 was somehow a permanent condition, that America was ipso facto such a powerful—indeed superior—nation that it would always produce better weapons and tougher troops? Did America believe that other nations would know this and deal with it accordingly, always keeping their distance? Certainly there was a sense of that at the beginning of the Korean War, even among those senior military men who knew that the Army was too small and not in very good shape. U.S. expectations of how well the Army would fight greatly exceeded its abilities. The Americans had expected when the North Koreans crossed the border that, whatever the Army’s multitude of flaws, it would not take much to end the incursion. As soon as they knew that they were fighting Americans, the war would turn around, and good news would replace bad news from the front. For it was not just Douglas MacArthur who thought that he could fight the North Koreans with a limited number of troops, it was much of the top military and political establishment, and regrettably altogether too many of the troops themselves.

  Much of that reflected a certain kind of racism, a belief in the superiority of Caucasians over Asians on the battlefield. This was a judgment from which the Japanese with their victories at the very beginning of World War II had been quickly exempted, their triumphs explained in American minds not because they were Asians, but because they were fanatics. These, however, were merely Koreans. How could Koreans defeat Americans? The answer for some of the commanders in those early days was very disturbing. In late July, Major General Bill Dean was reported missing and was eventually captured by the North Koreans after personally leading the defense of Taejon. But a few days before his capture, Keyes Beech of the Chicago Daily News had run into him at a small airstrip. “Let’s face it,” Dean told Beech, “the enemy has something that our men don’t have and that’s the willingness to die.” Beech agreed with him. Himself a Marine veteran of World War II, Beech later wrote that the first American troops sent to Korea were “spiritually, mentally, morally, and physically unprepared for war.” Ordinary troops, pulled from their very comfortable peacetime existences in Tokyo, many of them poor boys back home who now lived with servants and had undergone only the most minimal training, were rushed into combat and had spoken arrogantly of what a piece of cake it would be and how soon they would be back in Japan. And then almost overnight it had turned into a disaster of the first magnitude. The American forces had not been able to hold terrain. The North Korean spearhead units had been very good and were better armed than the Americans. Again and again, the Americans had retreated. The war, by the end of July, was turning into a disaster even as the United States raced to get up to speed, to form new units bound for Korea, and to speed up the deliveries of aircraft, tanks, and bazookas that could stop a T-34 tank.

  In Korea itself, the first big surprise had been how well the North Korean troops fought in those first few days; the second had been how poorly the ROKs had done. They had suffered what seemed like an almost complete collapse on most fronts. The next big surprise—for Americans anyway—was just how poorly the first American troops sent to the Korean mainland did during their initiation into battle. It was more than a surprise; it was nothing less than a shock. The first plan for the use of American troops, Operation Bluehearts, drawn up by Major General Ned Almond, MacArthur’s chief of staff and closest military associate, reflected a wildly optimistic view of how well American troops would fare. It featured MacArthur’s preference for an immediate amphibious strike behind North Korean lines at a place called Inchon, and it was planned as if the North Korean assault was nothing more than the arrival of a few mosquitoes who could easily be swatted away. The landing was to take place on July 16, barely two weeks after the moment when the first American troops made their awkward, clumsy landing on Korean soil. Given the pathetic condition of the American troops in Japan, it was completely undoable at a moment when mere survival was very much in doubt. But it reflected the almost supreme self-confidence of the Tokyo command about what any American troops could accomplish against Korean troops.

  Bluehearts was very quickly discarded, the troops too desperately needed for a much more immediate task—keeping the North Koreans from running American forces right off the peninsula. That it had even been considered reflected how little attention the command had paid to the respective forces gathering in the two Koreas; nor were any of the subsequent plans being put together in Tokyo much better. Much of the decision-making in those early days reflected the essential racism of the moment. Any experienced officer knew that for psychological reasons it was important for the first American troops to be at their best in their initial encounter with the North Korean troops, to fight well from strong positions, and to maximize their potential superiority in hardware. Yet at a moment when shrewd planning was critical, it proved not just careless but clueless. The headquarters sent the Twenty-fourth Division, acknowledged by consensus to be the weakest and least well prepared of the four divisions in Japan, into Korea first because it was based at Kyushu, which was closest to the peninsula. Because it had been stationed farthest from Tokyo, on the southernmost island of Japan, the Twenty-fourth had gotten the last pick of everything coming in country—officers, men, and equipment. Its regimental and battalion officers—this would be a major problem with all units in the early months of the war—were largely second-and even third-rate. It was, said one of its platoon leaders, “literally
at the end of the supply line.” Its equipment, an operations officer for the Thirty-fourth Regiment said, “was a national disgrace.” A good deal of the ammo for its mortars was faulty. Its .30-caliber machine guns were worn down and not very accurate. It had the old 2.36 bazookas. Later one of its officers would write that it was “rather sad, almost criminal that such understrength, ill equipped and poorly trained units were committed.”