The Korean War (13 page)

Yet no one could deny his stature as a symbol of American authority and will to prevail, presiding over the vast military might deployed to destroy the Japanese empire in Asia. His military achievement in the Second World War was very real. Even his pomposity, his studied grandeur, suited the role in his country’s affairs that he had been called upon to fulfil. Then, when the Japanese surrender came, MacArthur was the architect of that supremely imaginative gesture, the pardoning of Japan. Only a regal figure could have dared to do it, when the starving skeletons of the Allied servicemen who survived were still being released from Japan’s prisoner-of-war camps, when the people of the United States had been impressed for four years with the baseness and animality of their Japanese enemies. By 1950, MacArthur was seventy years of age. He had gained heroic status in the eyes of the Japanese people, who believed – perhaps not entirely incorrectly – that he had saved them from slavery; while his unsuccessful flirtation with the 1948 Republican nomination for the Presidency failed to diminish his position in the eyes of America – the homeland he had not lived in since 1936 – as her greatest warrior of the Second World War.

For a young officer to join the staff of the Supreme Commander Allied Powers in Tokyo was an experience akin to becoming a page at the court of a seventeenth-century European monarch. His palace was the squat concrete mass of the old Dai Ichi insurance building. The restoration of self-government to Japan had scarcely diminished SCAP’s authority over the nation he had first conquered, then resurrected. MacArthur remained the most powerful man in Japan, a legend not merely to Americans, but to the Japanese people who still crowded outside his headquarters each day to watch his ceremonious arrivals and departures. The ruler worked an unusual routine: arrival in the office at 10 a.m., departure at 2 p.m. for lunch at home, return at 4.30 p.m., when he might remain until 9 p.m. or later. Weekends and public holidays meant nothing to him. The more cynical members of his staff disputed his need for their assistance since, in the words of one,
‘he made every goddam decision himself’.
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But the ‘Bataan gang’ still dominated the court. Willoughby, his intelligence officer, was nicknamed ‘Sir Charles’ by the staff, for his pomposity. Of his key men, only General Almond, the Chief of Staff, was not a Bataan man, and very conscious of it. MacArthur liked and trusted Almond, for reasons unclear to some of his staff, who did not. They respected the Southerner’s energy and dedication, but they disliked his fierce temper and arrogance. Almond could never take the liberties with the Supreme Commander that, say, Willoughby might. If Willoughby wanted to buttonhole MacArthur, he might lurk ready to catch him, apparently by chance, as he walked down the corridor past the honor guard to take the elevator.

‘Well, Charles’ – the deep, sonorous, actor’s voice.

‘Oh – you’re going home?’

‘Oh no, Charles’ – taking Willoughby’s upper arm in that characteristic gesture – ‘come back in.’
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The curious group of men around the Supreme Commander could not be said to create a happy, relaxed atmosphere: rather, one of strained, ambitious professionalism. Almond never took time off, because MacArthur did not. Staff officers rode, shot skeet, played a round at the Far East Golf Club, worked out how many more months they must suffer on the rota before it became their turn to be allowed to have their wives come out to join them. But there was not a great deal of laughter, even at the big, formal parties of which there were so many, in a country where servants were two for a nickel, and any man with the right connections could buy a case of Canadian Club for $25.

Many of the staff were at just such a party, in the garden of one of the spacious villas every senior American in Tokyo possessed, late on the Sunday morning of 25 June 1950. MacArthur himself was not, of course, for he never attended mere social functions. He was already at the Dai Ichi. Almond called his aide, Captain Fred Ladd, and murmured discreetly to him: ‘Get two or three of the cars lined up – we’re going back to the office.’

‘Are we coming back here?’

‘No.’

They left the wives at the party, drove across the city, and took the elevator to the top floor of the Dai Ichi, where they found a ferment of conferences and briefings already in progress. What units were available? What could be done to bring them up to strength? What equipment did they lack? How could they be transported to Korea? The answers to all these questions were much less than satisfactory. The Supreme Commander developed an early rage on Monday afternoon, when he heard staff officers discussing the difficulties of finding quarters in Tokyo for some American personnel already evacuated from Seoul with their families.

‘What do you mean – find space for the husbands? Why aren’t they at their posts? I want them all rounded up – use the military police if you have to – and sent back to their posts in Korea where they are supposed to be.’
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While the evacuation aircraft were landing at Kyushu, all through Tuesday 27 June, the military reconnaissance party, detailed by SCAP to fly from Japan to Korea to make an urgent investigation of the military situation, waited at the airfield. At last, at twilight, the group of fifteen officers headed by Brigadier John Church boarded the transport, and took off for Korea. They were met at Suwon by the US Ambassador, John Muccio, standing with a cluster of Koreans alongside the abandoned Chevrolets of the Embassy evacuees. They drove to a nearby school, where they were briefed on the situation, as far as anybody knew it: ‘The location of enemy forces was unknown, in short,’ said Lieutenant-Colonel George Masters, an ordnance officer from Far East Command who was among Church’s group. ‘But it was reckoned that they would be in Seoul at any time.’
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In reality, the enemy had taken the city that day.

The next day, the 29th, intermittent American aircraft landed at the strip. Some, from Japan, carried ammunition. Clusters of South Korean troops appeared from nowhere on the tarmac, hastily unloaded the cargo, and once more vanished. Two Japanese-based USAF B-26s set down, damaged while carrying out strafing
runs. The crews were sent off to headquarters. A few minutes after they had gone, two communist Yaks appeared overhead, and machine-gunned the tarmac and the cripples before making off. Scarcely had these vanished when another aircraft arrived from Japan. This one carried MacArthur himself, together with a clutch of press correspondents. He had come to be photographed and reported inspecting the scene of battle.

MacArthur’s brief visit was characteristic. His Constellation, christened the
Bataan
, was bounced in flight by a communist fighter, which had to be driven off by the escorting Mustangs. MacArthur alone of its passengers watched the drama with keen curiosity, unencumbered by fear. He landed to be met by Ambassador Muccio, a distraught Syngman Rhee, and Brigadier Church. In a nearby schoolhouse, Church briefed the visitors on the military situation. Then, for eight hours, MacArthur drove by jeep through the rear areas of the battlefield. He saw the great columns of terror-stricken refugees pouring south, streams of South Korean soldiers among them. He watched the smoke from artillery and mortar bombardment pockmark the horizon, gazed upon the distant buildings of Seoul, already in enemy hands. He later declared that it was there, at that moment, that he conceived the notion of a great amphibious landing behind the enemy flank. Then he drove back to the
Bataan
. On the airstrip, to the deep dismay of Brigadier Church’s mission, he told the fourteen American officers that they were to remain ‘and put some backbone into the Koreans’. Then he strode up the steps, and ordered his pilot back to Tokyo. He sat puffing his corncob pipe through the flight back, scribbling notes for his report to Washington. He declared unequivocally that the situation in South Korea could only conceivably be restored by the commitment of United States ground forces. Men must be thrown in as fast as they could be shipped aboard ships and aircraft. He acknowledged the shortcomings of his Occupation Army for immediate combat, but saw no possibility of waiting until they were trained or re-equipped. Days, hours, were now vital. He urged the Administration that the American
commitment should be made on the most powerful possible scale: ‘. . . Unless provision is made for the full utilization of the Army-Navy-Air team in this shattered area, our mission will at best be needlessly costly in life, money, and prestige. At worst, it might even be doomed to failure.’ Even now, MacArthur was not sketching a plan for the expulsion of the North Koreans from the South. He was demanding resources sufficient to inflict absolute defeat upon North Korea. He saw no lesser purpose for which it was worthwhile, or even conceivable, to wage war.

It was still the early hours of the morning of 29 June in Washington when MacArthur’s report began to rattle off the printer in the Pentagon. The Army Chief of Staff, General Lawton J. Collins, ‘Lightning Joe’, who had been Bradley’s ablest corps commander in north-west Europe, was woken from his makeshift bed in an anteroom to the Joint Chiefs’ quarters. Collins proposed to see the President with the report as soon as the White House could decently be disturbed. No, said MacArthur. Truman must be seen at once. With every passing hour, the North Korean T-34s were driving deeper and deeper into South Korea. At 5 a.m., Truman was in the Oval Office, ready to act upon MacArthur’s recommendations.

This was still 1950, less than ten years after Pearl Harbor and more than ten before the Tonkin Gulf resolution became the cornerstone of an impassioned debate about the rights of presidents to make war. Truman, like Roosevelt before him, considered it his function to make executive decisions in defence of the interests of the United States around the world, without need for prior reference to Congress. In his own mind, before MacArthur’s report arrived, he knew what he would do. There was some discussion with Acheson about a proposal that had come in the previous evening, from Chiang Kai Shek. The Nationalist leader offered 33,000 men to the UN cause in Korea. Truman liked the idea of involving as many of America’s allies in the war as possible. He wanted to accept. Acheson was appalled, recognising the likelihood that war with North Korea would at once become war with Mao’s China. The Chiefs of Staff then cast a deciding vote against
the proposal, on the purely pragmatic grounds that they doubted the training and usefulness on the battlefield of Chiang’s divisions.

So it must be Americans, at first alone, who sought to check the communists. Truman approved MacArthur’s request for authority to commit men drawn from the Occupation Army in Japan. From the White House, the order passed through Frank Pace, the Army Secretary, to Collins at the Pentagon, and thence back to the Dai Ichi. Its substance was declared to the world within hours: a naval blockade of the entire Korean coast had been ordered; the United States Air Force in the Far East was to be committed to the war against the communists. And, ‘General MacArthur has been authorized to use certain ground units.’ Within hours, the first men of the 24th Division were emplaning for Korea. American forces in Japan, jerked unceremoniously from the ease and, indeed, unashamed sloth of occupation life, began the painful struggle to adapt themselves to a war footing. MacArthur and his staff at the Dai Ichi immersed themselves in the huge task of intervention in a campaign against a ruthless and victorious enemy, with one of the least impressive forces the United States had ever put into the field.

An aide to Almond, MacArthur’s Chief of Staff, Captain Fred Ladd later became one of the most respected American soldiers and advisers in Vietnam. Looking back on Korea many years later, Ladd believed that even in those first days of the war at the Dai Ichi, the roots of all the later disappointments and disasters were there to be seen:

All those officers, those generals: they really thought that they were going to go over there and ‘stop the gooks’ – just the same as in Vietnam. Just who ‘the gooks’ were, they didn’t know, and didn’t want to know. You could have asked any American senior officer in Korea: ‘who commands the Korean 42nd division – ROK or communist – and what’s his background?’ He wouldn’t have known what you were talking about. A gook is a gook. But if the Germans had been the enemy, he’d have known.
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Yet MacArthur would have asked: What was the choice? If he, or America, stayed their hands until the nation was militarily ready, South Korea would have been gone. Better, surely, to stake out and defend some claim upon the soil of South Korea, however precarious, than discuss from Tokyo how to recover a peninsula entirely fallen to the communists. And whatever the virtues of Kim Il Sung’s hordes, the defects of the 24th Division and its sister formations in Japan, American soldiers could surely somehow prevail against a barefoot Asian army.

Whatever the next communist move, the Truman Administration was now committed to use such a measure of force as proved necessary to restore the independence and integrity of South Korea. It remained only to discover how many of America’s allies and of the members of the United Nations would lend tangible aid for the cause to which they had voted commitment.

3. London

The British Cabinet met at 11 a.m. on Tuesday 27 June, to consider the integration of the French and German coal industries, white fish, grants for marginal hill land, and support for the United Nations in Korea. Clement Attlee and his ministers agreed, without recorded dissent, that ‘it was the clear duty of the United Kingdom Government to do everything in their power, in concert with other members of the United Nations, to help the South Koreans to resist this aggression’.
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Yet this gesture was to impose strains and stresses upon the sagging economic and military strength of Britain
far beyond the proportionate cost that the United States’ vast commitment imposed upon its own people.