The Korean War (41 page)

It will never be certain how far MacArthur’s affronted personal hubris influenced his attitude to the Chinese, how far he became instilled with a yearning for crude revenge upon the people who had brought all his hopes and triumphs in Korea to nothing. But there can be no doubt that in the winter of 1950, the sense of destiny which had guided MacArthur from Corregidor, back across the Pacific, to the reconstruction of Japan, the salvation of South Korea and the landing at Inchon, now persuaded him that he should confront the power of communist China. It seems probable that he did not consider it beyond his own powers to reinstate Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalist regime in Peking. Certainly, his
enthusiasm for committing Nationalist troops in Korea in the largest possible numbers seemed to go beyond any direct military considerations in the peninsula. If Nationalist divisions were deployed in Korea in strength, if they could drive Mao Tse Tung’s legions back to the Yalu, would not the momentum to allow them to go further become irresistible? Given the strength of militant anti-communist feeling in the United States, if the Chinese Nationalists got as far as the border of their own country, would not the pressure upon the Administration be overwhelming, to allow them to reverse the ‘loss’ of China, which had caused so many prominent Americans so much grief? ‘Brave, brilliant, and majestic,’ one of MacArthur’s biographers, William Manchester, has written, ‘he was a colossus bestriding Korea until the nemesis of his hubris overtook him. He simply could not bear to end his career in checkmate.’
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In an attempt to curb the extravagant statements emerging from the Dai Ichi, on 6 December Truman had issued his presidential order to all US theatre commanders, warning them to exercise ‘extreme caution’ in their public pronouncements, and to clear all of these with the State or Defense Departments. But MacArthur continued his propaganda campaign, merely issuing his threats and demands ‘off the record’ to correspondents. There was a real danger, he warned, that if he was compelled to continue the war under the present restrictions imposed by Washington, the evacuation of the entire peninsula would become necessary.

His play was called. On 29 December, a new directive from the Joint Chiefs of Staff confirmed that he could expect no further major reinforcements, and that Washington remained convinced that Korea was the wrong place to precipitate a major war. MacArthur was called upon to maintain a front as best he could in ‘successive positions’. If his armies were forced back to the Kum river, then the United States would indeed be obliged to preside over an evacuation. But the JCS reminded SCAP, somewhat limply, that ‘a successful resistance to Chinese-North Korean aggression at some position in Korea, and a deflation of the military and political
prestige of the Chinese Communists would be of great importance to our national interest . . .’ In other words, MacArthur must continue to do his best with what he had, upon existing terms.

The general disagreed. On 30 December, he dispatched a reply to Washington, bitterly protesting the flagging will for victory that he perceived in the Administration, and the attempt to make himself a scapegoat for disaster. He made four demands of his own. First, for a blockade of the Chinese coast; second, for an onslaught on China’s industrial capability for making war, by air and naval bombardment; third, for the reinforcement of the UN forces in Korea by Chinese Nationalist forces; fourth, for all restrictions imposed upon Chiang Kai Shek’s forces to be removed, enabling them to launch direct attacks upon the Chinese mainland. This programme, MacArthur declared, would not only save Korea, but inflict ‘such a destructive blow upon Red China’s capacity to wage aggressive war that it would remove her as a further threat to peace in Asia for generations to come’.

Once again, amid acute dismay in Washington, MacArthur’s proposals were rejected. The stakes in Korea, he was informed, had risen as high as the Administration intended that they should go. If the peninsula could not be held within the existing framework of UN operations, then it must be conceded to the communists. MacArthur’s tone towards Washington now became increasingly distraught. He accused the Joint Chiefs of crippling his authority, and suggested that the morale of his men was suffering acute damage from ‘shameful propaganda which has falsely condemned their fighting qualities’. This assertion alone suggested a disturbing measure of ignorance, or wilful fantasy, about events during ‘the big bug-out’. He spoke of ‘extraordinary limitations and conditions’ imposed upon his own command, and ended with an armaged-donistic flourish: Eighth Army could hold, he said, ‘if overriding political considerations so dictate for any length of time up to its complete destruction’.

Many years later, General Charles Bolté, Chief of Plans at the Pentagon, freely conceded the nervousness even the Joint Chiefs
suffered, in dealing with MacArthur: ‘We were all rather scared of him. When you considered what he had been . . .’
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Yet if, in the past, the Administration and the Pentagon had sometimes havered in their handling of MacArthur, they did so no longer. His threats and bombast received a response of exemplary dignity. A new JCS directive on 12 January reasserted American policy. The following day, in a personal letter, President Truman sought to restore some heart to MacArthur for continuing the struggle in Korea. Even if the mainland was lost, he urged, the struggle might continue from the offshore islands. Even if evacuation became necessary, it would be made clear to the world that this ‘is forced upon us by military necessity, and that we shall not accept the result militarily or politically until the aggression has been rectified’. MacArthur’s credibility suffered a serious blow a few days later, when Collins, Vandenburg and Bedell Smith reported back to Washington after a tour of the front in Korea. They discovered the remarkable change of mood that Ridgway was already creating, the growing optimism that the line could be held. If Ridgway lacked the status of MacArthur, he was a battlefield soldier of great distinction. The new commander of Eighth Army offered Washington hopes and judgements incomparably more acceptable than those emerging from Tokyo.

In one respect, however, MacArthur correctly perceived an undeclared, radical change of policy by the Administration. There was no longer either hope or expectation of achieving a unified non-communist Korea. Washington’s hopes now centred upon exerting sufficient military leverage to cause Peking and Pyongyang to negotiate upon the basis of a return to the pre-war division of Korea. The United Nations’ objectives from the spring of 1951 to the end in 1953 were plainly limited. At an acceptable cost in casualties to Eighth Army, Ridgway’s forces sought to kill sufficient communists and defend sufficient real estate to secure peace.

That was all, and for many soldiers it was not enough. In the two years that followed, it became progressively more difficult to define the war aims of the UN in terms comprehensible, far less
acceptable, to the men on the line. Even some higher commanders never entirely came to terms with the new, undeclared circumstances. Month after month throughout 1951, long after the peace talks began, army and corps planners devised elaborate schemes for airborne or amphibious envelopments, for full-blooded thrusts to the Yalu. None was ever to be implemented.

Ridgway’s achievement in the first weeks of 1951 was that despite all this, despite the political congealment that disgusted and infuriated the chief inhabitant of the Dai Ichi, Eighth Army’s commander successfully motivated his beaten and battered forces to make important gains, and decisively to demonstrate their ability to turn the tables on the Chinese. The enemy entered the New Year with the very problem that so afflicted the UN two months earlier: a long and vulnerable supply line. Communist casualties had been enormous, not least from the winter weather. There were still believed to be some 486,000 Chinese and North Korean troops in the country, against around 365,000 under the flag of the United Nations. But the raw figures masked the immense UN superiority of resources, above all air power. The balance of advantage had shifted sharply away from the communists.

Eighth Army now undertook a series of cautious probes, to test the enemy’s mood. In mid-January, the 27th RCT pushed north to Suwon without meeting significant resistance. There were no major Chinese formations more than a few miles south of Wonju. A second reconnaissance by IX Corps on the 22nd also found itself treading empty space. On the 25th, Ridgway launched a more ambitious operation on a two-division front. The Chinese 38th and 50th Armies fell back, offering only sporadic resistance. By 9 February, the ruins of Inchon and Suwon were back in UN hands, and a fine attack by the 25th Division had regained Hill 440, north of Suwon. Ridgway’s men lost just seventy killed, while they counted over 4,000 dead Chinese on the battlefield. I Corps pushed steadily onwards to the line of the Han river.

Further east, there were now two weeks of much heavier
switchback fighting. An advance by X Corps was met by a counterattack against three ROK divisions on 11 February. The Americans were forced to give ground in order to hold their line. In mid-February, there was a fierce battle for the town of Chipyong-ni, where the 23rd Regiment of 2nd Division under Colonel Paul Freeman found itself encircled together with the French battalion. But they held on, sustained by air-dropped supplies. The Americans were vastly encouraged to see the effects of their firepower upon headlong night attacks by massed Chinese infantry, the awesome ‘human wave’ technique. ‘We could see them tumbling down like bowling pins,’ wrote Corporal Pete Schultz, a machine-gunner with the 1/23rd. ‘As long as the flares were up we never had trouble finding a target, and the flares also slowed the advance as the Chinese took what cover they could to avoid being seen . . . As soon as it got light enough some Boxcars came flying in, and those beautiful parachutes with more supplies came falling down. I will never forget that sight. It was just beautiful. As it turned out, we did not need it. We had held, and tanks from 5th Cavalry Regiment broke through to our positions. The Chinese had left.’
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The Chipyong-ni battle represented not only a fine performance by American units, but also an important stage in the rehabilitation and revival of the morale of 2nd Division, which had been so crushingly handled at Kunu-ri. After a week of hard fighting, in which North Korean forces broke through close to Chechon, exposing the X Corps’s flank, the communist offensive ran out of steam. It was a decisive moment of the war, of incalculable importance to the spirits of the UN forces. They had confronted the strongest offensive that the Chinese could throw against them, and they had driven it back. Formations that, only a few weeks earlier, possessed no thought beyond escape from Korea on any terms, now found renewed energy and will. The ‘gooks’ could be beaten. Americans had done it once, they would do it again. A British observer, Air Vice-Marshal C. A. Bouchier, reported exultantly to London: ‘The myth of the magical millions of the Chinese in Korea has been exploded. In the last United Nations offensive, the Americans have
learned how easy it is to kill the Chinese, and their morale has greatly increased thereby.’

Ridgway’s army jumped off on the next phase of his advance, Operation KILLER, on 21 February. By 1 March, they had closed up the UN line south of the Han, driving back the Chinese with huge casualties, by the progressive, massive use of firepower. The advance of the seven American divisions now in the line was the twentieth-century successor to the Roman ‘tortoise’: instead of long columns, exposed to surprise attack, Ridgway’s formations deployed at every stage for all-round defence in depth, securing themselves against infiltration while they waited for the massed artillery and air strikes to do their work upon the Chinese positions. On 7 March, KILLER was succeeded by RIPPER, a measured advance to a new phase line, IDAHO, on the central front. Ridgway successfully dissuaded MacArthur from providing his customary signal to the enemy of an impending offensive, by visiting the front to be photographed ‘firing the starting gun’ with the formations involved. The envelopment of Seoul that followed the success of RIPPER made the communist evacuation of the capital inevitable. On 14 March, the victors recovered a devastated city, a metropolis of ruins and corrugated iron, in which only the Capitol and the railway station survived, of the principal buildings. An attempted airborne envelopment of the retreating enemy by the 187th RCT at Munsan – the only major parachute operation of the war – was unsuccessful. Another disappointment was the extraordinary escape of the North Korean 10th Division, which had been fighting since January in the south of the country as guerrillas, far behind the UN lines. Now, seeing the protracted shift in the strategic situation which was taking place, the 10th broke through the ROK lines near Kangnung, to rejoin the communist armies. The British General Sir Richard Gale reported to London: ‘The enemy has conducted his withdrawal methodically and with no little military skill. He knows how to make the best use of the terrain, both on a large scale and on a minor tactical scale.’
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In a shrewd letter to London on 12 March, the British Military
Attaché, Brigadier A. K. Ferguson, drew attention to local problems which, at theatre level, were precisely those which so irked General MacArthur:

I foresee difficulties in maintaining morale indefinitely in present circumstances, in view of the ill-defined task set for the United Nations forces. You have no doubt heard of General MacArthur’s remark of some months ago, when he said he was fighting ‘in a political vacuum’. It seems to me that the reputed objective of UN forces in Korea which is ‘to repel aggression and restore peace and security to the area’ is much too vague under present circumstances to give the Supreme Commander in the field a military objective, the attainment of which would bring hostilities to a close. While it is outside my province to discuss the political issues, I consider the question of the maintenance of the morale of the troops to be a matter for serious consideration. For the past ten days, ‘Operation Killer’ has been conducted in Korea with the publicly pronounced intention of ‘killing Communists’. While this no doubt gave the US 8th Army a limited objective, it is neither a desirable nor lasting objective which will appeal to any educated individual. Already many British and American officers and other ranks have asked such questions as ‘When will the war in Korea end?’, ‘When do you think the UN forces can be withdrawn from Korea?’, ‘What is our object in Korea?’ Such questions tend to make me believe that, unless the British and American forces in Korea are given some definite goal at which to aim, the commander in the field will have the greatest difficulty in maintaining morale. I have only included British and American troops, because generally speaking the relatively small numbers of troops of other western nations which are represented are adventurous mercenaries who are as content to serve as part of an international fighting brigade in Korea as elsewhere.
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