Fifties (18 page)

During World War Two, MacArthur once started telling George Marshall a story by saying, “My staff tells me ...” Marshall had cut him off: “General, you don’t have a staff, you have a court.” If MacArthur’s staff was known as a hard-core center for sycophants, then it was likely that the greatest sycophant of all was General Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s intelligence officer. Now, at this vital juncture, he brushed aside the entreaties of those who were warning him that the war had suddenly changed. His estimates continued to coincide with what his boss
wanted
to happen. The Chinese were not going to come in; the time for that was already past. They would have come in much earlier and helped defend Pyongyang, the North Korean capital. To the growing despair of the field commanders, he could not be moved. Jack Chiles, Almond’s G-3, or plans officer, who knew the MacArthur headquarters well, said, “MacArthur did not want the Chinese to enter the war in Korea. Anything MacArthur wanted, Willoughby produced intelligence for.... In this case Willoughby falsified the intelligence reports.... He should have gone to jail.”

The front-line units were told to press on. MacArthur would not be deterred from his drive to link his forces at the Yalu. By November 3, Truman was becoming worried by the recurring reports of Chinese intervention and the hammering of the Eighth Cavalry; the JCS cabled MacArthur asking the extent of Chinese involvement. The next day MacArthur replied that he now saw Chinese intervention as a “distinct possibility,” to give covert assistance to the North Koreans. This would let them “salvage something from the wreckage.” MacArthur ordered George Stratemeyer to bomb the Korean end of the twelve bridges across the Yalu—a violation of the old JCS order to stay well clear of the Manchurian borders. His decision alarmed Washington, which told him to desist. He drafted a cable in which he threatened to resign immediately. An aide talked him out of sending it. Instead, he cabled, “Every hour that this is postponed will be paid for dearly in American and other United Nations blood.... I cannot overemphasize the disastrous effect both physical and psychological that will result from the restrictions which you are imposing ...” He ended the cable with a barely concealed threat: Failure to do as he said would result in “a calamity of major proportions for which I cannot accept the responsibility without his [Truman’s] personal and direct understanding of the situation.”

It was a stunning reversal on MacArthur’s part: Until then he had been saying with great disdain that the Chinese would not come in; now he seemed to be promising a slaughter of his own men. What
he had said would never happen was happening. Characteristically, MacArthur made no apology for what might normally be viewed as a mistake of apocalyptic proportions, the failure to judge accurately both Chinese intentions and his ability to detect and confront them. If anything, his new reading of the Chinese threat seemed to make him more arrogant and more volatile than ever. It was Washington that had dictated policies, he seemed to be saying, for which he would no longer accept responsibility. The buck had been passed. The JCS and the administration, wary of confrontation, backed down and let MacArthur bomb his bridges. It was the gravest provocation imaginable to the Chinese. It was not even tactically intelligent—in a few weeks the Yalu would freeze anyway.

In Washington, the top officials—Truman, Acheson, Marshall—felt events were slipping outside of their control. What were the Chinese up to? They had struck with great success, “and yet they seemed to have vanished from the face of the earth?” wrote Acheson. “And what was MacArthur up to in the amazing military maneuver which was unfolding before our unbelieving eyes?” Acheson wrote in his memoirs. These early days in November represented, Acheson later decided, the last possible moment to avert the tragic confrontation that seemed just over the horizon. The Chinese had given clear warning of their intentions. But, he noted, “We sat around like paralyzed rabbits while MacArthur carried out this nightmare.” When MacArthur announced on November 17 that he would make his final drive to the Yalu, Washington warned him only to take the high ground overlooking the Yalu valley and go no further.

It was a fateful moment. By dint of his arrogance, foolishness, and vainglory MacArthur was about to take a smaller war that was already winding down and expand it to include as an adversary a Communist superpower thereby adding more than two years to its life; he was to damage profoundly America’s relations with China; and he was to help start a chain of events that was poisonous in terms of domestic politics—feeding political paranoia, giving the paranoics what they needed most: a tangible enemy. His troops pressed on. He interpreted the silence from the Chinese forces after the November 1 assault as a sign of exhaustion. He was sure that his air offensive had curtailed the ability of the Chinese to reinforce any units already in Korea. He told the U.S. ambassador to Korea on November 17 that the Chinese had only 30,000 men in the country (in fact, the figure was at least 300,000 by this time). On November 24, MacArthur flew to the front, to be present for the start of the drive. He toured the front-line ranks and then returned to Tokyo, where he
issued a communiqué boasting of how American air power had isolated the battlefield, and describing the operation he was then unleashing. “If successful, this should for all practical purposes end the war,” he said. The arrogance of that communiqué was remarkable, even for MacArthur. As Clay Blair noted, it tipped off the Chinese that a major offensive was coming and at the same time let the Chinese know that we were unaware of the size and intentions of their troops. There was no stopping him. “Complete victory seemed now in view,” his successor Matt Ridgway, who was generally sympathetic to him, later wrote, “a golden apple that would handsomely symbolize the crowning effort of a brilliant military career. Once in reach of the prize, MacArthur would not allow himself to be delayed or admonished. Instead he plunged northward in pursuit of a vanishing enemy and changed his plans from week to week to accelerate his advance without regard for dark hints of possible disaster.”

The drive toward the Yalu began on November 24, the day after Thanksgiving. The weather was terrible. The wind-chill factor made it twenty or thirty degrees below zero. Rifles froze and men had to piss on them to thaw them out. Batteries in vehicles froze and the jeeps and trucks could not be started. For the first day and a half the offensive went reasonably well. There was little resistance. But on the evening of November 25, the Chinese struck again. It was a terrifying moment. The Americans clung to the thin, narrow, icy roads in valleys while above them, on the high ground, well-armed, well-led, and well-clothed Chinese troops rained down murderous fire. The Chinese came at American units in a kind of V, called Hachi-Shiki’s. As they got closer, they unfolded the V and began to envelop the American position on its flanks. Like the In Min Gun, they would send a smaller unit to the rear to hammer the Americans as they tried to retreat. Panic resulted, and more often than not, the victims threw down their heavy equipment as they ran.

It was clear from the start that this was a devastating assault. Many of the American units were in desperate trouble. Still, on November 27, Ned Almond launched the second part of the offensive—the X Corps offensive, the other pincer to link up with the Eighth Army. There was a certain madness to it all. MacArthur, Joe Collins wrote years later, was marching forward “like a Greek hero of old to an unkind and inexorable fate.” The front-line troops were being hammered by forces that greatly outnumbered them, and some commanders—those of the Marines, for example—were instinctively moving their men back and regrouping them. On the morning of November 28, Almond visited various forward units by helicopter.
He continued to urge them forward. He dismissed the Chinese as nothing but the remnants of a few divisions fleeing north. “We’re still attacking and we’re going all the way to the Yalu. Don’t let a bunch of Chinese laundrymen stop you,” he said. So much for the Fourth Field Army. He moved to raise the morale by giving out medals. Don Carlos Faith, a battalion commander, was given a silver star and told to give two more to men of his own choosing. Faith was appalled. As a way of showing his displeasure, Faith singled out the two soldiers nearest him—a wounded sergeant and a headquarters mess sergeant. The moment Almond flew away, Faith tore the medal from his jacket and threw it in the snow.

By November 28 it was clear that this was an epic disaster and that the great MacArthur had been outgeneraled by the Chinese. The question was suddenly how much of the 2nd Infantry Division and how much of the First Marines would get out alive. The heaviest burden fell on the 2nd Infantry Division. Trying to slip out of what seemed like a three-sided trap, the commanders of the 2nd hit what at first seemed like a company-strength blocking force to their south—nothing that they could not handle. In fact, they were moving into one of the most brutal ambushes in military history. The most basic rule of warfare is that it is critical to hold the high ground, and in this case the Chinese held all the high ground and the Americans were in the thin valley road below; as the Chinese fire rained down, it dawned on the Americans that there might be a regiment or two manning this position.

It was a gauntlet, and the military historian S.L.A. Marshall would so describe it in his book
The River and the Gauntlet.
Over six miles, the Chinese had some forty machine guns and about ten mortars. Along the way the Americans fought not just the constant machine gun fire raining down on them from above, but struggled with new roadblocks caused by their own abandoned vehicles. Five miles along the way, there was a terrifying stretch known as the Pass. It was a brief quarter-mile-long cut in a hill. Along it were steep embankments fifty feet high. There was no possibility of slipping out and escaping through the hills. Everywhere, men seemed to be dead and dying. When the division commander, Laurence (Dutch) Keiser reached the Pass in the midafternoon, he found it so clogged with the wreckage of American vehicles as to be virtually impossible. “Who’s in command here?” he asked one group of men huddled behind a truck. No one answered him. At one point Keiser stumbled on a corpse. The body came alive. “You damn son of a bitch,” it said, cursing its general. “My friend, I’m sorry,” was all the division commander could say.

Some three thousand men were killed, wounded, or somehow lost running the Gauntlet that day. That it wasn’t worse was a miracle. In the final few days of November alone, the 2nd Division took some five thousand casualties, or roughly one third of its men. December was just as ghastly. In the words of the British military historian Max Hastings, “Most of the Eighth Army fell apart as a fighting force in a fashion resembling the collapse of the French in 1940, the British in Singapore in 1942.”

In the weeks following the Chinese attack, MacArthur seemed to be offering the President only the choice between a much larger war in which he claimed he would ultimately triumph or a complete rout. The Truman administration was in many ways fighting if not for its life, at least for its legitimacy. On November 30, at a White House press conference a reporter asked Truman whether, since he had said that America would take any and all steps to meet its military obligations, that might include the atomic bomb. The President answered, “That includes every weapon we have.” “Mr. President,” a reporter continued. “You said ‘every weapon we have.’ Does that mean that there has been active consideration of the use of the atomic bomb?” “There has always been active consideration of its use,” he answered. It was a time of desperation; MacArthur’s arrogance had not only resulted in a devastating defeat in the field but a psychological defeat for us as well.

The meetings at the Pentagon were the bleakest that anyone could remember. The word
Dunkirk
hung constantly in the air. The Joint Chiefs were paralyzed by the constant bad news from the front: They no longer trusted or believed in MacArthur but they were afraid to challenge him. Finally Matt Ridgway, the Army vice chief of staff tried to embolden his colleagues. Though technically not a chief he asked for permission to speak: “My own conscience finally overcam my discretion.” He blurted out, “We need to take immediate action. We owe it to the men in the field and to the God to whom we have to answer for these men’s lives to stop talking and act.” A little later, as the meeting was breaking up, Ridgway grabbed General Hoyt Vandenberg and asked him why the Joint Chiefs didn’t send orders to MacArthur
telling
him what to do. Vandenberg just shook his head. “What good would that do? He wouldn’t obey the orders. What can we do?” “You can relieve any commander who won’t obey orders, can’t you?” Ridgway asked. Vandenberg gave him a long look, both puzzled and amazed. “This was,” Acheson later noted, “the first time that someone had expressed what everybody thought—that the Emperor had no clothes on.” Now a collision course was set.

By early December, the UN forces had retreated from Pyongyang in a rout and the Chinese had occupied it. Four days later, large elements of Tenth Corps withdrew from Wonsan by sea and two days later it moved out of Hungnam. On December 15, Truman declared a state of national emergency.

What probably saved the American and United Nations forces was a fluke. On December 23, General Walton Walker, who had a reputation for driving recklessly, was killed in a jeep accident. Walker, who had been the commander of the Eighth Army since the American forces first arrived in Korea, was considered tough and feisty, but in far over his head in terms of the larger skills needed for so demanding an assignment. Some of the top American generals had wanted to relieve him much earlier but had been afraid of the consequences as far as public relations were concerned. Now Matt Ridgway would command the Eighth Army. He got the news in Washington on December 23. The next day he left for Tokyo, asking the Army Vice-Chief of Staff Ham Haislip to tell his wife that he would not be spending Christmas with her—he simply could not bear to tell her himself. In Tokyo he talked with Douglas MacArthur, who praised the toughness and skills of the Chinese infantrymen and spoke somewhat mordantly of the limits of air power in isolating a battlefield and stopping infiltration by the enemy. Then MacArthur told him, “The Eighth Army is yours, Matt. Do what you think best.”