The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (46 page)

Mystique—indeed a certain mystery and distance from mortals—was power, MacArthur believed, and he worked carefully on it. No outsider was to have too much access to him; certainly not until he was ready to perform. What he wanted to project to the larger public was the most calculated of self-portraits. Each word describing him was, if at all possible, to be carefully chosen. When, during World War II, a profile of him was written that described him as being aloof, he tried to have the censors change the word to austere. No intimacy with subordinates was permitted. He was to be above other generals. Dwight Eisenhower, on becoming his top aide in the Philippines in the 1930s, was startled to discover that MacArthur would sometimes refer to himself in the third person, saying things like: “So MacArthur went over to the senator…” In these years, he saw himself—and portrayed himself—as the man who embodied the nation’s living history,
history’s man
. It was an honor to be received by him, and if you came, it was to admire him as an icon, a living monument. There were daily rituals and they were to be observed; for example, at lunches in Tokyo held regularly for visiting VIPs, Mrs. MacArthur would greet guests who had, of course, arrived ahead of MacArthur, and then as he finally entered she would say quite reverentially, “Why, here comes the general now.” He would then greet her, in the words of one witness, “as if he hadn’t seen her for years.”

This then was the brilliant, highly original, temperamental commander who dominated the most important of briefings on Inchon on August 23, almost two months after the first North Korean strike. It took place at MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo. Joe Collins, the Army chief of staff, Forrest Sherman, the chief of naval operations, and Lieutenant General Idwal Edward, the Air Force operations deputy, flew out from Washington. Hoyt Vandenberg, the Air Force chief of staff, did not attend. It was believed by some sensitive to divisions in the services that he did not want to legitimize an operation that essentially belonged to the Navy and the Marines. The Marines,
whose job it would be to lead the landing if Inchon were approved, were not invited to the meeting, their own questions and doubts never to be raised, which became something of a sore point. During the meeting Admiral Doyle and his men briefed the assembled brass in painstaking detail for almost an hour and a half. Nine different members of Doyle’s staff got up and spoke about every technical and military aspect of the landing. Then Doyle himself got up. “General,” he said, “I have not been asked, and I have not volunteered my opinion about this landing. If I were asked, however, the best I can say is that Inchon is not impossible.” With that he sat down.

Joe Collins again suggested that they consider Kunsan or Posung-Myon, south of Inchon, both of them less risky landing sites. His cautiousness did not surprise MacArthur—it was what he expected. Then MacArthur spoke. He had prepared for this moment over and over in his mind. He knew the reservations of every man in the room, and his principal target was Sherman, the Navy chief, who had as yet not signaled what he felt. Without Sherman’s approval, without the cooperation of the Navy, there would be no Inchon. Joe Collins might have strong reservations, but the Army brass in Washington would not lightly overrule an Army commander in the field. MacArthur was at his best that day; he took a room full of senior officers who were essentially against him and made them believers. As he started, he later wrote, he heard the voice of his father saying, “Doug, councils of war breed timidity and defeatism.” He was not, he said, interested in a safer landing farther south. There was no great benefit in that. “The amphibious landing is the most powerful tool we have. To employ it properly, we must strike hard and deep!” The difficulties presented by Inchon were very real but not insurmountable. He was sure they could do it. All of the arguments he had heard against making the landing, he said, were in reality arguments for its success. There was a very real chance that the enemy would be completely unprepared. “The enemy commander will reason that no one would be so brash as to make such an attempt.” MacArthur said he himself would be like James Wolfe at Quebec in 1759. Because the banks of the St. Lawrence River to the south of Quebec were so steep, the Marquis de Montcalm, defending the city, had placed almost all his troops on the city’s north side. Wolfe and a small force had, however, come up from the south, scaled the heights, and caught Montcalm’s troops completely by surprise. It was a great victory, one that virtually ended the Anglo-French colonial wars in North America. “Like Montcalm, the North Koreans would regard an Inchon landing as impossible. Like Wolfe, I could take them by surprise.”

He had great faith in the Navy, he said, instantly wiping the slate clean from what been a historic, indeed marathon, clash of wills throughout the Pacific
campaign. If anything, he insisted, “I might have more faith in the Navy than the Navy has in itself.” The Navy—and this was said as if Sherman were the only man in the room—“has never let me down in the past and it will not let me down this time.” Kunsan, he commented, knowing that it was the favored landing place of both Joe Collins and Johnnie Walker, “would be an attempted envelopment that would not envelop.” It might bring a relatively easy linkup with the Eighth Army—but it would only place more troops in a larger Pusan Perimeter, where he believed they were singularly vulnerable. “Who will take responsibility for such a tragedy? Certainly I will not.” He would, he swore, take complete responsibility for the Inchon operation if it failed. (“I wouldn’t have taken that promise too seriously,” Bill McCaffrey, one of Almond’s staff members, later noted. “After all he had said the Chinese would not come in, and when they did, and it turned out he was very wrong, and we were hit terribly hard, he accepted no responsibility at all, and he blamed everyone except himself.”) If he was wrong about the landing, MacArthur told his audience, he would be there on the spot commanding. “If we find that we can’t make it, we will withdraw.” At that point Doyle dissented: “No, General, we don’t know how to do that,” he said. “Once we start ashore, we’ll keep going.”

Then he put his sights directly on Sherman and spoke of his affection for the Navy. Long ago, in the darkest moments of another war, he said, the Navy had come to Corregidor and carried him out to safety so he could continue to direct Allied forces against the Japanese. Then, step by step, the Navy had carried him to victory during the Pacific War. “Now in the sunset of my career, is the Navy telling me that it will not take me to Inchon and that it is going to let me down?” In the back row of a room so filled with brass was a young Army officer named Fred Ladd, an aide to Ned Almond. He smiled to himself when MacArthur made the last pitch—he’s got them now, Ladd thought. No senior military man will be able to resist such a great personal challenge. Admiral Sherman then spoke for the first time. “General, the Navy will take you in.” MacArthur had won. “Spoken like a true Farragut,” he replied, knowing he had moved his man. (As he said that, Admiral Doyle, furious with the way his serious objections were being pushed aside, said to himself, “Spoken like a John Wayne.”) Then, theatrical as ever, MacArthur lowered his voice, making them strain to catch his words: “I can almost hear the ticking of the second hand of destiny. We must act now or we will die…. Inchon will succeed. And it will save a hundred thousand lives.” He had carried the day, and he knew it. “Thank you,” Sherman said. “A great voice in a great cause.”

“If MacArthur had gone on the stage, you would never have heard of John Barrymore,” Admiral Doyle later said. Sherman was aboard, although the next day, slightly removed from the power of MacArthur’s presentation and his one-
on-one challenge, he felt his doubts renewed. “I wish I had that man’s optimism,” he told one friend. Collins was still uneasy too, but uneasy or not, the Chiefs were aboard, and five days later they wired their approval to MacArthur. (Why, Mike Lynch later asked Walker, had MacArthur triumphed over the doubts of the Joint Chiefs? “MacArthur has everyone thinking of Korea as an island, and Seoul the final objective. Once it’s taken the war would be over,” Walker answered prophetically.) Nonetheless, on August 28, the Joint Chiefs back in Washington were still nervous—so much of their limited resources to be invested into a plan that had so many things that could go wrong—and they sent one last message to MacArthur, suggesting Kunsan. The general dealt with the message in classic MacArthurian style. He never acknowledged that he had received it or that it existed. He just went right ahead, although in ever greater secrecy, making sure that the exact plans for Inchon did not reach Washington until the operation was already under way. He did this very deliberately, holding back on telling Washington what he was doing until it would be too late to stop him. What he did was, in the words of Clay Blair, “an astonishing course of deceit and deception.” He waited and waited, and then on September 8 he sent several immense volumes that contained his final plans back to Washington in the care of a young staff officer, Lieutenant Colonel Lynn Smith, telling Smith not to get there too quickly. Smith followed orders: The JCS expected a senior officer but instead got a light colonel at virtually the last minute. Smith was immediately ushered into a room with the Joint Chiefs and began his briefing. “This is D-day isn’t it, Colonel?” Joe Collins asked. Smith said it was. Collins asked when the assault would begin. “The landing at Wolmi-do will begin in six hours and twenty minutes—17:30 your time,” he answered. “Thank you,” said Joe Collins, “you’d best get on with your briefing.” In the long run, what MacArthur did at that moment damaged him with the Chiefs. He was not playing games with civilian authorities, which (within certain limits) was permissible, but with his peers, men with four stars, who felt that they were as responsible as he for the lives of the young men in his command and the success of the operation. That, within the culture of the military, was unforgivable. Eight months later, when Truman fired MacArthur, it was, as Joseph Goulden pointed out, one of the principal reasons that the president had the Chiefs’ unanimous support. It was their way of paying MacArthur back for blindsiding them on the Inchon planning.

NORMALLY IN AN
amphibious landing the element of surprise is crucial, but strangely in this case it seemed to be missing. Everyone in Tokyo appeared to know what was coming and where and when it was going to take place. In the Tokyo Press Club, a great center of rumors about the war, it was already labeled
Operation Common Knowledge. The question of who would command at Inchon had been answered almost as soon as approval came from Washington. Most senior officers in Washington and some in Tokyo had expected the command—that of a corps—to go to Lieutenant General Lem Shepherd, the experienced Marine commander. MacArthur in all ways owed Shepherd a great deal for his support in getting him the Marine division in the first place, and Shepherd as a Marine lived by amphibious landings. Everyone, it turned out, was in for a surprise. The commander would be Major General Ned Almond, who would go forth from then on wearing two hats. When Joe Collins, the Army chief of staff, first heard the news, he was stunned and furious: he half rose out of his chair and exclaimed
“What?”
according to John Chiles, an Almond staff member. Collins did not like Almond, and he did not like the idea that MacArthur had not only carved out the Inchon command, separating it from Eighth Army, but had given it to Almond, his own man, without even conferring with the Chiefs. (Among some officers in both Korea and Washington, it was known thereafter as Operation Three-star, because it was viewed, among other things, as a blatant attempt to get Almond his third star.)

MacArthur was effectively minimizing not just Johnnie Walker, the Chiefs belatedly realized, he was minimizing
them
. No other general would have dared do something like that, especially without consulting them; it was a classic example of MacArthur being MacArthur, and acting outside the reach and approval of his superiors, delighting in sticking his finger in their eyes. It was also a very political move, for it placed much of the Korean command in the hands of someone whose loyalty was completely to him, and was outside the reach of the Chiefs. Shepherd might be a fine officer, an old-fashioned man with old-fashioned loyalties, but that was the problem; he would have been loyal to MacArthur, but he would have been loyal to the Joint Chiefs and the Marines as well. That made him in MacArthur’s view a man of divided loyalties, and that was unacceptable in this case.

Nobody in the Pentagon was happy with the move, and the Marines viewed it as a disaster. They were already wary of Almond because he had blocked both Shepherd, the Marine theater commander, and Major General O. P. Smith, the Marine First Division commander, who was ticketed to command the landing from the critical late August planning meeting. In addition, there was a private fury among some Marines about the way that Almond had treated Smith, a much revered officer, at their first meeting. Smith had thought he was going to be briefed by MacArthur himself, but when he arrived at the Dai Ichi, he found that he was there primarily to see Almond, and then was kept waiting for an hour and a half. Clearly it was to be Smith’s first lesson in
understanding the real command structure. Worse, Almond then greatly irritated the veteran Marine officer by calling him “son,” a singularly patronizing term, especially for a fifty-six-year-old Marine general, who had seen more combat than Almond had and was only ten months younger than he was. When Smith tried to make the case for how difficult amphibious landings could be, Almond blew him off—that stuff, Almond answered, was all “purely mechanical.” Besides, as Smith noted in his diary, Almond said there was no organized enemy in the area anyway. A supercilious man, Smith thought to himself, though much of his rage about Almond he decided to keep to himself, fearing the more he articulated it, the more it might divide the fighting men, Marines and Army, in the command. Some of the other officers just under Smith were in a rage. The mildest condemnation came from Colonel Alpha Bowser, Smith’s G-3, who called Almond “mercurial and flighty.”