9
The Big Bugout
As Walker’s Eighth Army reeled before the Chinese offensive in the first days of December, one morning Colonel Paul Freeman of the 23rd Infantry turned bitterly to his executive officer. “Look around here,” he said. “This is a sight that hasn’t been seen for hundreds of years—the men of a whole United States Army fleeing from a battlefield, abandoning their wounded, running for their lives.”1 Freeman was among those few senior soldiers in Korea who never lost their grip, who remained bewildered to the end of their lives about the fashion in which their commanders and their comrades allowed the collapse of the American Army in North Korea in the winter of 1950. Freeman watched with pride his own 1st Battalion, holding the Chinese on the Chongchon for thirty hours, his regiment undertaking thirteen successive redeployments without losing a man. Suddenly he received an air-dropped message from 2nd Division “to extricate ourselves as best we could” and retired under cover of a powerful artillery barrage. Only then did he begin to discover what was happening to the rest of the Army: in the 25th Division, only the 27th Infantry held together effectively. In the 2nd Division, Freeman’s regiment remained the only combat-effective unit by the turn of the year.
Private Pete Schultz, a platoon runner in A Company of the 1/23rd, had been feeling somewhat dejected about the promise of MacArthur’s “home for Christmas”: “Here I was, full of life, eighteen years old, fresh out of basic training, and about as green as they come. I wanted to see some action.”2 He spent the night of November 25 crouching in a foxhole listening to the intense firing all around him, without the remotest idea what was going on. A small-town boy from Kansas, Schultz found the action that he wanted in the next few days. The memories merged into a blur: picking among abandoned supply dumps as they retreated; manning a .30-caliber machine gun, watching the tracer arch toward a cluster of Chinese on the next ridgeline; running to clamber up on the hulls of their supporting tanks when they heard the engines rev up, a sure sign that they were about to move. They feared above all being left behind, finding themselves last out. “A lot of men convinced themselves that each was the last man left in the Eighth Army,” said Lieutenant Carl Bernard of the 21st Infantry.3
Lieutenant Karl Morton of the 5th RCT found the first reports of the retreat incomprehensible, for his unit had scarcely been engaged. The first symptom of defeat was the absence of transport to carry them back. They began to walk. And as they walked, day after day their morale sank. They did not fight, but they heard rumors. Faster, faster, they were constantly warned, lest you be cut off by the Chinese. Morton’s thighs became raw, agonizing, with the constant slapping of wet fatigue cloth against them. One of his corporals walked with a toilet roll on his rifle barrel, in permanent misery from diarrhea until they somewhere found him a packet of cornstarch to solve the problem. One day they watched from a roadblock as men of the 2nd Division moved past “in awful disarray.” Only one black battalion, led by a ramrod-straight white-haired colonel, still appeared to possess all its equipment. As they marched on, and on, they discarded gear to lighten their burdens: rocket launchers went first, then spare clothing, ammunition, even sleeping bags. One evening at dusk they saw a solitary soldier pedaling maniacally past them on a bicycle. They tried to stop him: “Hey, what’s going on up there?” The cyclist did not check, but shouted back over his shoulder, “Hell of a lot of Chinamen!” As the supply system cracked, men grew desperate in their hunger. Morton saw two soldiers discover an abandoned, half-empty can of peas coated in days of dust. They simply scraped off the dust with a bayonet and wolfed the remains. The young lieutenant found this spectacle, of thousands of men on the margins of panic, very frightening.4
As Captain Fred Ladd drove north to a divisional headquarters, against the endless stream of traffic fleeing southward, to his astonishment he saw among the files of marching men a leathery NCO whose face was instantly familiar. Sergeant Davis had served with his father, half a lifetime ago, in the 15th Infantry. Davis faced Ladd with tears in his eyes: “This just isn’t the goddamn American Army—running away. We ought to be taking up positions.” Ladd could find no words of comfort for the old NCO: “I know, I know.” He nodded helplessly. Then he drove away, and Davis trudged on, shrunken, southward.5
In ten days the men of the Eighth Army retreated 120 miles. By December 15 they had crossed the 38th Parallel and the Imjin River, and still they were moving south. Since the destruction of the 2nd Division south of Kunu-ri, they had scarcely even been in contact with the Chinese. Yet while the Marines conducted their measured, orderly retreat from Chosin despite acute difficulties of terrain, in the west Walker’s army astoundingly collapsed.
Few men ever forgot the sights of those days. They looted what they could carry from the vast supply dumps in Pyongyang—alcohol, tobacco, sugar—but acre upon acre of equipment was put to the torch. The great pillars of smoke from the fires were visible for miles to the retreating army. “The march out of Pyongyang will be remembered mainly for the intense cold, the dust, and the disappointment,” recorded an officer of the 8th Royal Irish Hussars, a British Centurion tank regiment. “Nothing appeared to have been attempted, let alone achieved. Millions of dollars’ worth of valuable equipment had been destroyed without a shot being fired or any attempt made to consider its possible evacuation. Seldom has a more demoralizing picture been witnessed than the abandonment of this, the American forward base, before an unknown threat of Chinese soldiers—as it transpired, ill-armed and on their feet or horses.”6 Yet everywhere they expected the Chinese to catch up with them. It was almost as if they were tiptoeing away. As the British armor clattered noisily across the bridge south of Pyongyang, Captain James Majury of the Ulsters found himself desperately wishing that the tanks would make less noise. A young troop commander’s tank knocked over an ROK soldier in the long files trudging alongside the roadside. A track ran over the man’s leg. The horrified young officer jumped down to aid the Korean. But even as he knelt the man’s platoon officer pulled the Englishman’s pistol from his holster and put a bullet in the mangled man’s head.
On the road south of the North Korean capital, General Paek Sun Yup of the ROK 1st Division met the 27th Infantry’s commander, Colonel John Michaelis, whom he greatly admired. The Korean was deeply depressed by the loss of Pyongyang, his home city, which he had entered in such triumph a few weeks earlier. Now he asked the American what was happening. “I don’t know,” said Michaelis. “I’m just a regimental commander. But we may not be able to stay in the peninsula.”7
• • •
The Korean people were, of course, the principal victims of the Chinese winter offensive, as they were of every phase of the war. As the Eighth Army straggled south in disarray, everywhere around them a great human tide of refugees surged and stumbled. When the army monopolized the road, the civilians fled along the railway line. Many scarcely knew where they were going or why—only that they had lost whatever they had owned behind them and sought to attain something fresh in front, if it was only shelter from the battle. But Moon Yun Seung and his family knew why they were on the railway embankment south from Pyongyang—to escape the Communists. Moon was eighteen, and until 1945 his family had owned a silk mill in the north. When they lost that, they moved to Pyongyang and became silk traders. But in the autumn of 1950, as the Communists fled from their own capital, they left behind them an epidemic of grim rumors. Moon was assured that the Americans proposed to drop an atomic bomb on Pyongyang. He and his family moved hastily back to the village where once they had owned their mill, and it was there that they saw their first Americans, advancing north at the height of their triumph. Then, when the Chinese came and the retreat began, Moon and his family began walking. “There were too many people,” he said. “We could not keep together. When the American fighters came, machine-gunning the roads, everyone scattered like bean shoots.” He never saw his family again. For eighteen days he walked toward Seoul, scavenging scraps of food from abandoned houses, pathetically waving a South Korean flag when the F-86s strafed the refugee columns, as he saw them do repeatedly. In Seoul, Moon had expected to find refuge with a friend of his father. But this man, like three quarters of the population after their dreadful experience the previous summer, had fled. Moon kept walking south. He was picked up in one of the ROK Army’s periodic roundups of conscripts, but after three months was rejected as unfit—this despite the bleak United Nations’ joke that an ROK medical examination merely involved holding a mirror to a man’s mouth to check that he breathed. Moon was a scavenger in Pusan when he was run over and his leg broken by an American army truck. A Scandinavian medical team rescued him. He spent six months in a Swedish hospital, a year on crutches. Finally, he got a job as a longshoreman at the docks. He was merely another stray scrap of flotsam amid a great sea of such private tragedies in the winter of 1950.8
• • •
Lieutenant Bill Cooper and a couple of brother officers of the 5th Northumberland Fusiliers left their positions guarding the Han bridges to drive into Seoul on Christmas Eve. It seemed fantastic to leave the snow and the refugees, the sense of imminent disaster outside, and walk into the brightly lit Chosan Hotel, where a ferociously drunken party was in progress. Men of all ranks lurched around the corridors clutching their Korean bar girls. If there was no food to be had, everybody was helping themselves to drink. At last the British walked out once more to their jeeps in the darkness, to the reality of Korean figures scuttling urgently through the snow, of acute desolation and apprehension. Cooper had spent much of the voyage out from England attempting to diminish the bloody-mindedness of his platoon, largely recalled reservists, about their commitment to Korea. He told them, “It’s going to be no good sitting on top of some mountain saying ‘I shouldn’t be here’ while some bugger blows the top of your head off.” For all his efforts, he felt that throughout their time in Korea “there was still that undercurrent of resentment.” Yet now, Cooper’s men, like the rest of the British 29 Brigade, were warned to be ready to move.9
• • •
When the North Koreans held Seoul in the summer of 1950, thirteen-year-old Suk Bun Yoon’s father had a miraculous escape. Denounced as an anti-Communist, he was taken to a hillside outside the city, along with a group of others, and shot. But the wound was not fatal. He crawled away and eventually found his family and convalesced with them through the winter. His son became the most important male in the household, which did not cost his education much, since by the end of the year almost all his teachers had been recruited or taken prisoner by one side or the other. But his father was still a sick man on January 3, 1951, when the family determined that they must flee Seoul. That evening they made their way among thousands of Koreans on a similar mission, toward the frozen Han River. It was a terrible spectacle, a terrible night. Shellfire broke the ice in some places, and the boy watched struggling refugees sink helpless into the river, while thousands more ran hysterically past them. Somewhere in the darkness and the hysterical crowds, their grandfather disappeared: “We simply lost him. We never saw him again. Maybe he froze to death.” In the days that followed, the family crawled south with their possessions. They had gone only twenty-five miles when they were overtaken by the Chinese. That night, in an abandoned house, they held a family conference. It was decided that as they were, they stood no hope of breaking through to the UN lines. They left their grandmother and Suk’s three younger brothers and sisters, aged ten, seven, and three, in the village, reliant upon the charity of the peasants. Suk and his parents struggled on through the darkness, amid the gun flashes and refugees and wailing infants, until at last they crossed into the ROK lines.
To a Westerner, the decision to abandon the very old and the very young seems almost fantastic. But as the UN armies so often observed, the people of Korea seem to draw their character from the harsh environment in which they live. This was the kind of parting, the kind of decision that was commonplace in hundreds of thousands of Korean families that created the legions of starving orphans and infant beggars that hung like flies around every UN camp, supply dump, refuse heap. Behind the UN lines, for the next two months Suk and his parents lived with an aunt deep in the countryside. Only when the Eighth Army at last moved forward again did the boy return to the village in search of the rest of the family. They found the children. Their hair was dropping out. They were in rags; their bodies were lice-ridden; they could not readily digest food. But they were narrowly alive. Thanks to canned food begged and stolen from the armies, they survived. Their grandmother was dead. The surviving family was ruined, destitute, homeless. But like millions of other Koreans that winter, they clung tenaciously to the margins of existence and waited for better times.
• • •
Among the Eighth Army, mile by mile and day by day on the road southward, as men abandoned equipment and lost their officers, allowed themselves to be washed with the great tide of American and Korean humanity flowing south away from the Communists, the withdrawal became “the big bugout.” The impulse to escape not only from the enemy but from the terrible cold, the mountains, from Korea itself became overwhelming for many men. In December 1950 most of the Eighth Army fell apart as a fighting force in a fashion resembling the collapse of the French in 1940, the British at Singapore in 1942. The men of 45 Field Regiment RA were reduced to hysterical laughter by an American intelligence report announcing that the Chinese were employing large numbers of monkeys as porters. Rumor of every kind, the more dramatic the better, held sway over the minds of thousands of men. “Everything the Chinese were showing they could do, their aggressiveness, was strange to us,” said Major Floyd Martain. “What we knew of the Chinese in America was so different—they were so submissive.”10 Most Americans expected Chinamen to be dwarves, but they found themselves assaulted by units which included men six feet and over. Yet the enemy wreaking such havoc with the Eighth Army was still, essentially, fighting a large-scale guerrilla war, devoid of all the heavy firepower every Western army considered essential. It was a triumph not merely for the prestige of communism, but for that of an Asian army.
From Walker’s headquarters to Tokyo and on to the Joint Chiefs’ offices in the Pentagon, there was bewilderment and deep dismay about the collapse of the Eighth Army. For public consumption, the sheer surprise and weight of the Chinese offensive were emphasized. But professional soldiers knew that these were not enough to explain the headlong rout of an army that still possessed absolute command of sea and air, and firepower on a scale the Communists could not dream of. The Chinese victories were being gained by infantry bearing small arms and regimental support weapons—above all, mortars. The Americans had been subjected to very little artillery fire, and no air attack whatever. The mobility of the Chinese, moving across mountain ranges without regard for the road network, was achieved at the cost of carrying very limited supplies of arms and ammunition—of behaving, indeed, like a large guerrilla army. Chinese peasants might be somewhat better attuned to hardship than Western soldiers, but they were not superhuman. The men of the UN complained of the difficulty of fighting the ferocious cold as well as the enemy. But the winter was neutral. The Chinese were far less well-equipped to face the conditions than their opponents, possessing only canvas shoes and lacking such indulgences as sleeping bags. Marshal Peng’s casualties from frostbite dwarfed those of the Americans. And the Chinese could expect no ready evacuation or medical care. UN soldiers told terrible stories of taking prisoners with whole limbs blackened and dead in the cold. Chinese veterans later declared that 90 percent of the “Volunteers” in Korea suffered from some degree of frostbite in the winter of 1950. Their Twenty-seventh Army suffered 10,000 noncombat casualties: “A shortage of transportation and escort personnel makes it impossible to accomplish the mission of supplying the troops,” declared a Twenty-sixth Army document of November 1950, later captured by the UN. “As a result, our soldiers frequently starve. . . . They ate cold food, and some had only a few potatoes in two days. They were unable to maintain their physical strength for combat; the wounded could not be evacuated. . . . The firepower of our entire army was basically inadequate. When we used our guns, there were often no shells, or the shells were duds.”11
The Chinese could achieve great shock power, but they possessed only the most limited ability to sustain an attack, whether at company or army level. They missed dazzling opportunities to annihilate rather than merely drive back MacArthur’s army in Korea in the winter of 1950 because they could move only as fast as their feet could carry them, and their radio communications were so poor that they could not coordinate large-scale movements effectively. Some PLA units were out of contact with their higher formations for days on end. The key to tactical success against the Chinese was to create all-round defensive perimeters, and not to allow panic to set in when it was discovered, as it so frequently was, that the Communists had turned a unit’s flank. If UN firepower could be brought to bear in support of a counterattack, this was almost invariably successful. But in those weeks of November and December, Peking’s armies achieved psychological dominance not only over UN units at the front, but over their commanders in the rear. After the first battles of November, the flimsiest rumor of the men in quilted jackets being observed on a main supply route behind the front was enough to spark fears of encirclement, and often outright panic. The undoubted Chinese skills as tacticians, night fighters, navigators, masters of fieldcraft and camouflage caused even many senior officers to forget the enemy’s huge disadvantages in resources and firepower. Worse, the leaders of the UN forces in Korea found themselves facing the stark fact that, man for man, most of their troops were proving nowhere near as hardy, skillful, and determined upon the battlefield as their Communist opponents. It is difficult to overestimate the psychological effects of this conclusion upon strategic and tactical decision-making.
Yet even at this phase the struggle was not entirely one-sided. The Chinese were learning bitter lessons about the potential of air power. They discovered that their truck drivers could not move by day because they could not hear the sound of enemy aircraft. Every infantry movement had to be completed before dawn, the men deeply covered by the snow into which they dug themselves, before the prowling Mustangs, Corsairs, Panthers found them. A nationwide system of air-raid precautions was created, sentries stationed at intervals of two hundred yards along every mile of the Chinese supply routes, ready by whistle and rifle shot to warn of impending air attack the moment engines were heard.
Hung She Te, the Chinese officer responsible for all logistics inside Korea, performed miracles with his legions of porters and oxcarts. But throughout that winter campaign of 1950, the overwhelming limitation upon the Chinese was not manpower, of which their reserves were almost unbounded, but supply. Chou En Lai exhorted every family in China to fry flour for the “Volunteers.” Great columns of men and trucks moved south across the Yalu each night, backs bent and springs groaning under their burdens. They learned to place wide brooms on the front of vehicles to sweep aside the puncture nails dropped on the roads by U.S. aircraft. They organized emergency-repair parties to replace broken bridges and ruined roads within hours. But the Chinese were never able, in that first campaign, effectively to deploy artillery in support of their advance. Probably the most critical contribution of American air power in the Korean War was the interdiction of supply routes during the winter battles of 1950. This alone, it may be argued, prevented the Chinese from converting the defeat of the UN forces into their destruction.
How could Marshal Peng and his staff organize their own intelligence about UN movements effectively when they lacked equipment to intercept American communications or aircraft to conduct effective reconnaissance? Thirty-five years later, the face of Hu Seng, one of Peng’s secretaries, cracked into a craggy grin at the memory: “It was very easy to get intelligence, in the beginning. There was no censorship in the West at that time about troop movements. We gained much vital information from Western press and radio.”12 Daily from July, from the agency wires in Seoul clattered details of the landings of the Marines, the arrival of new foreign contingents, the assault on Inchon (ten hours before this took place), the deployment of the first F-86 Sabre fighters. At the end of December censorship was introduced of all disclosures concerning the UN Order of Battle. Western correspondents introduced private codes to evade this. The Eighth Army asked for a press blackout on the UN evacuation of Seoul until this was completed. The story was broken in the United States within hours by a correspondent who simply did not submit his copy for censorship. Restrictions on reporting were never, of course, enforced on the media outside the Korean peninsula.
The impetus of the Chinese advance could be sustained only into the new year of 1951 by the vast captures of arms and supplies on the drive south. Thousands of Chinese picked up new American weapons, learned to eat C rations, and handle some American heavy weapons. “We quickly got used to American biscuits and rice,” said Li Xiu, a regimental propaganda officer with the 27th Corps, “but we never cared for tomato juice. We were particularly glad to get carbines, because we found rifles so heavy to carry. Without the American sleeping bags and overcoats that we captured, I am not sure we could have gone on. Two thirds of our casualties were from the cold that winter, against one third from combat. The main problems were always—how to avoid American planes and artillery, and how to catch up with the Americans in their trucks.”13
“The chief problem was to gather all the prisoners,” said Li Hebei of the 587th Regiment. “On New Year’s Day, an order was issued for our troops to compete to see which unit could collect most prisoners as a New Year gift for Chairman Mao. American prisoners at first didn’t understand the ‘lenient policy’ of our volunteers toward them. But after a period of contact, they began to believe it. We gave them whatever we could offer to eat. One or two were very stubborn, and would not admit that their action was aggression. Because of our poor weapons and equipment, they didn’t take us seriously. So we did some work to persuade them. We told them, ‘The U.S. is far from Korea, but the Yalu River is the border between Korea and China. If you cannot accept this, let us settle it on the battlefield.’ Always the problem was, how to win the battle with less advanced weapons than the enemy.”14
• • •
For all the shame and humiliation of the precipitous American flight from North Korea in the winter of 1950, the simple truth remains that the very speed of the retreat saved many units from annihilation, and left the Eighth Army with forces that could be rebuilt to fight another day. It was bitterly apparent that where the Chinese could catch American troops at that time, they could almost invariably defeat them. But American mobility was not entirely useless. It enabled many thousands of men, who would not otherwise have done so, to outrun their pursuers and escape to fight better another day.
Yet nothing could diminish the dismay both in Korea, and in the capitals of the West, about the performance of the Eighth Army in the retreat from the Yalu. After the winter battles, the British General Leslie Mansergh visited Korea and delivered a devastating secret report to the British Chiefs of Staff upon the situation that he discovered there.
• • •
“I doubt whether any British really think that the war in Korea will be brought to a successful conclusion. The reason for this is primarily because of the American lack of determination and their inability, up to the time of my visit, to stand and fight. Most Americans sooner or later bring the conversation around to an expression of the view that the United Nations forces ought to quit Korea. The British troops, although sympathetic to the South Koreans in their adversity, despise them and are not interested in this civil war. . . . I would judge the American morale as low, and in some units thoroughly bad. They appear to think that the terrain is unfavourable for American equipment and methods. . . . It must be remembered that many thousands of the Americans joined the Army for the purpose of getting a cheap education after their service and that they, at no time, expected to fight. Their training is quite unsuited to that type of country or war and, in spite of lessons learnt, they will not get clear of their vehicles. . . . Their rations, supplies, and welfare stores are on such a scale as to be comic if they were not such a serious handicap to battle. . . . Regular American officers have been a high proportion of those lost. As a result, the problem of replacement of men with experience is becoming very difficult. . . .
“They have never studied or been taught defense. They appear only to have studied mechanised and mechanical advances at great speed. They do not understand locality defence in depth or all-round defence. They do not like holding defensive positions. They have been trained for very rapid withdrawals. Americans do not understand infiltration and feel very naked when anybody threatens their flank or rear.”15
Mansergh expressed respect for American artillery, whose gunners the British had also found more courageous than the infantry, and for the performance of the U.S. Marines. But he was highly critical of the staff work within the Eighth Army:
“They do not understand the importance of reconnoitring ground. Units in action almost invariably overestimate the enemy against them, the casualties inflicted, and the reasons for their rapid withdrawal; this I have known in our own units in war, but it appears worse here and more frequent. At night, main headquarters blazed like gin palaces. . . . Roadblocks, car parks, dumps etc. were as crowded as Hampstead Heath on a bank holiday.”16
Mansergh summarized his conclusions about the problems of the U.S. Army in Korea: “a) training on wrong lines b) bad staff organisation c) low quality infantry d) disinterest in the war in general e) weak and inexperienced commanders at all levels.” The general’s views must certainly have been influenced by those of Brigadier Basil Coad, commanding the British 27 Brigade in Korea since September. Coad at about this time submitted an unhappy report of his own, citing the lack of liaison with American higher commanders and the general inadequacy of direction: “Since the withdrawals started, the behaviour of some senior staff officers and Formation HQs was, at times, quite hysterical and resulted in the issues of impossible orders which, if obeyed without question, would have resulted in unnecessary loss of life. American commanders frankly tell me that they have never taught defence in any of their military schools. The American soldier does not like being attacked, especially at night, and with exceptions will not stand and fight. I think their [the British contingent’s] attitude to the American infantry is largely one of contempt.”17
“Standards of discipline in the U.S. Army in Korea, never very high, are now lower than I have ever known them,” wrote the military assistant to the British Ambassador that December. “Officers told me quite openly that it is useless ordering their troops to attack, because they simply won’t go. The U.S. Army is still roadbound, and it is very difficult to describe their tactics, since it seems that tactics in the normal sense of the word do not exist. In an advance, motorised columns headed by a few tanks are sent up the roads making use of what is described as ‘prophylactic fire.’ This seems to consist of everyone who has a weapon blazing away on either side of the column into the blue.”18
In assessing the justice of these British opinions, it is necessary to make some discount for the chronic skepticism of one nation toward another’s methods of making war. Throughout the twentieth century there has been a measure of jealousy in the British Army, traditionally accustomed to fight with scanty means, toward the vast weight of resources available to the Americans. Yet the evidence of such able American professionals as John Michaelis and Paul Freeman supports the British view of U.S. performance in the winter of 1950. Matthew Ridgway himself, on his arrival, wrote of the remarkable difference between the demeanor of the American and British troops under his command. A problem that was already familiar from World War II reasserted itself in Korea, as it would again in Vietnam: the disproportionately low percentage of the nation’s best manhood that served the infantry regiments of the United States.I Because the American instinct for war favors a technological, managerial approach, far too many of the ablest men are diverted to technical and managerial functions. At the time of Korea, indeed, overwhelmingly the most talented section of America’s young manhood remained in colleges at home, as a result of the workings of the Selective Service Act. Yet in this war as in every war, it was upon the infantry that the greatest burden of battle, and of casualties, fell. As in America’s other major Asian war a generation later, terrain and the circumstances of the enemy made it difficult to employ technology and firepower anywhere near as effectively as upon a European battlefield against a European enemy. From beginning to end in Korea, the United States Army labored under grave disadvantages in fitting itself to meet the enemy on favorable terms.
• • •
“It is well-nigh impossible for any man to retain a vision of United Nations action in Korea as a great and essential experiment in international relations [wrote a British correspondent on December 27 in a private report to the War Office in London] should he be subjected for long to the atmosphere of Korea. Inefficiency and squalor among the civil population make some contribution to the overall feeling of disillusionment. But the major fault lies with the morale of the armed forces. Men of the United States Army so completely dominate the scene, numerically, that their attitude is all-important. It can be very simply expressed: ‘How soon can we get t’hell out of this goddamn country?’ That is the one question in the minds of every GI and almost every officer up to the rank of colonel encountered in Korea. Half has no thought beyond the single objective of escape. Of the remainder, a few felt that crossing the 38th Parallel was a mistake, either tactical or moral. But far more took the view that the United States should stop consulting anybody, and should use the atomic bomb. They did not wish it employed against the North Koreans, or even, to any great extent, against the Chinese Communists. Their emotional reaction to the whole problem was that the Russian is solely responsible, and that therefore the logical thing to do is to atom bomb Moscow. . . . Offensive thinking amongst junior officers and men was confined almost entirely to the Marines. It was prompted mostly by a drive for revenge for the losses inflicted on them at the Chosin Reservoir, and was accompanied by a distrust and contempt for higher leadership almost more frightening than the lack of fibre of their army compatriots. There can be few occasions in history when officers and men of a fighting force have expressed themselves so freely and violently, in public, on the subject of their commanding officers.”19
• • •
“Dear Folks,” Private First Class James Cardinal of the 3/5th Cavalry wrote home to his parents in the Bronx on January 7, 1950, “We are now about 60 miles NW of Taegu, holding a mountain pass thru which the entire 8th Army is moving headed south. It looks like the beginning of the end. The Chinese are kicking hell out of the U.S. Army, and I think we are getting out, at least I hope so. I think they are going to evacuate all UN troops from Korea soon, as it’s impossible to stop these Chinese hordes. Theres just too many of them for us to fight in Korea. If the big wheels in Washington decide to fight here it will be the biggest mistake they ever made, as I don’t think we can hold the Chinks. Anyway, lets hope they decide to evacuate us.
“When you get complaining and bitching letters from me, remember every soldier over here feels that way. The troops over here are mad, mad at America, Americans and America’s leaders. We all feel we’ve been let down, by our incompetent blundering leadership, from the White House down. It seems to me to be—to hell with the troops in Korea. If we must fight communism, let’s do it in Europe which is the cradle of western culture and our own civilization. It seems to me that’s more worth fighting for than some barren oriental wasteland, with uncountable hordes of savage warriors. It’s about time that all of you back home awakened to the truth of the matter, and let your voices be heard thru letters to your congressmen. That’s the only way to get direct action. Well, folks, that’s all for now. I’m in the best of health and spirits and hope that you all and the rest of the family are too. Love, Jimmy.”20
• • •
The American Army had reached its lowest point of the Korean War. Corporal Robert Fountain, late of Task Force Smith, gazed around the schoolhouse at Chonan in which he found himself sheltering in the depths of the retreat, and recognized the very same building in which he had taken shelter in July, in the midst of the first traumas of the war. It was too much to bear: “We had fought all the way south, and all the way north. I thought—‘Look what we have suffered, and we are back where we began. I have nothing in this country, and I never will.”21 Corporal Fountain was not alone in his dismay. Defeat on the battlefield had also provoked a crisis of confidence among statesmen and politicians at home which now threatened, for a time, to escalate the Korean War into a nuclear conflict.
Washington and Tokyo
On the morning of November 28, Truman told his personal staff in his office at the White House, “General Bradley called me at 6:15 this morning. He told me a terrible message had come in from General MacArthur. . . . The Chinese have come in with both feet.” This was the day, he wrote later, “when the bad news from Korea had changed from rumors of resistance into certainty of defeat.”22
At a meeting of the National Security Council later that day, the President, Marshall, and the Joint Chiefs agreed that all-out war with China must be avoided. Acheson said he believed that if the United States bombed China’s airfields in Manchuria, the Russians would come into the war. Yet none of this caution prevented Acheson from denouncing Peking’s action the following day as “an act of brazen aggression . . . the second such act in five months. . . . This is not merely another phase of the Korean campaign. This is a fresh and unprovoked aggressive act, even more immoral than the first.” Dean Rusk declared, at the November 28 meeting of the National Security Council, that the Chinese intervention “should not be on our conscience, since these events are merely the result of well-laid plans, and were not provoked by our actions.” To a remarkable extent, Washington still failed to consider exclusively Chinese motives for intervention and focused upon Russian reasons for inciting Chinese action and the new interpretation that must be placed upon Moscow thinking. The CIA predicted that the Russians would give the Chinese maximum support. Bedell Smith said there was now “a much better case than they previously thought for believing Russia plans for war soon. . . . They probably do not plan on war now, but are willing to have it if they can bog us down in Asia.”23
MacArthur now issued a desperate plea for reinforcements. But Frank Pace, the Army Secretary, said that the only available unit was the 82nd Airborne Division. MacArthur again demanded to be allowed to use men of Chiang Kai Shek’s Nationalist Army. His request was again refused. He also wanted more air and sea power, and some additional forces were dispatched. All the senior soldiers were now increasingly bitter about the political restriction upon bombing beyond the Yalu. Bradley wrote on December 3: “We used to say that an attack on a platoon of United States troops meant war. Would anyone believe that now if we don’t react to the Chinese attack?”24 No one wanted war with China, he said, but if the Eighth Army was driven out of Korea, the United States should retaliate by hitting China’s cities.
In Tokyo, from the first moment of the Chinese intervention, MacArthur issued a flood of bulletins and statements which drifted further and further from reality as each day went by. First, he declared that his own drive to the Yalu had forced the Chinese hand, interrupting plans for a grand Communist offensive which would have been disastrous for the United Nations. He rejected utterly the suggestion that his forces were engaged in a retreat. He castigated “ignorant” correspondents for their inability to distinguish between a planned withdrawal and a “full flight.” His flights of Olympian rhetoric contrasted ever more grotesquely with the reality of what was taking place within his command: “Never before has the patience of man been more sorely tried nor high standards of human behavior been more patiently tried and firmly upheld than during the course of the Korean campaigns.” He cast direct blame upon the Administration in Washington for imposing restrictions upon bombing and military operations beyond the Yalu—“an enormous handicap, without precedent in military history.”25 Harry Truman wrote, “Now, no one is blaming General MacArthur, and certainly I never did, for the failure of the November offensive. . . . But . . . I do blame General MacArthur for the manner in which he tried to excuse his failure.”26
When the British General Leslie Mansergh met MacArthur in Tokyo at this period, he found him intensely emotional:
“At these times, he appeared to be much older than his seventy years. . . . Signs of nerves and strain were apparent. . . . When he emphasised the combined efforts and successes of all front-line troops in standing shoulder to shoulder, and dying if necessary in their fight against communism, it occurred to me that he could not have been fully in the picture. I cannot believe he would have made these comments in such a way if he had been in full possession of facts which I would inevitably learn later, facts that some Americans had been far from staunch. It occurred to me then, and was emphasised later, that the war in Korea is reproduced in Tokyo with certain omissions of the more unpalatable facts.”27
And if MacArthur was prey to powerful private delusions about what was taking place within his command, he was also entering the most perilous political waters with his public statements about the course of things to come. His enigmatic comments, when questioned by a magazine interviewer about the desirability of employing the atomic bomb, left nothing to the imagination:
“Question: Can anything be said as to the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of the bomb in the type of operations in which you are now engaged?
“Answer: My comment at this time would be inappropriate.
“Question: In the type of warfare now going on in Korea, are there large enough concentrations of enemy troops to make the bomb effective?
“Answer: My comment at this time would be inappropriate.”28
But if MacArthur was alone in reflecting aloud about the possibilities of employing atomic weapons, he stood among a large company within the military who were privately thinking furiously about the possibilities. On November 20, J. Lawton Collins told colleagues that it was conceivable that the JCS would be called upon to present views about the possible use of atomic weapons.
Then, at a press conference on November 30, President Truman allowed himself to be trapped into making a statement on the atomic bomb which reverberated around the world, caused consternation among America’s allies, and whose repercussions were never entirely stilled for the remainder of the Korean War. Truman declared that the United States would take “whatever steps are necessary to meet the military situation.” A reporter inquired, “Will that include the atomic bomb?”
Truman said, “That includes every weapon we have.”
“Mr. President, 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. . . .”
Among America’s allies, above all in Europe, unease had been mounting for many months about developments across the Atlantic. The stridency of conservative Cold War rhetoric, the rise of McCarthy, increasing fears in government circles, prompted by diplomatic reports from Tokyo, about the extravagances of MacArthur, coupled with the Administration’s inability to control him, had combined to create the gravest unease about the course on which the United States might be headed. For the most part, real fear of what the Russians might attempt, coupled with nervousness about any statement that might encourage American isolationism—above all a possible American retreat from Europe—encouraged discretion in Allied public statements about Washington policy. The British had never been enthusiastic about the commitment to Korea. Henceforward, they were the most reluctant partners in the war. As early as November 13 the Cabinet’s OS Committee reported its view “that it was no longer practicable, without risking a major war, to attain the original objective of occupying the whole of North Korea and placing it under a UN regimen. They were doubtful whether the UN forces could reach the northern frontier without making air attacks on targets in Manchuria, and even if the frontier could be reached, it would be a difficult task to hold it along a line of about 450 miles in mountainous country. Korea was of no strategic importance to the democratic powers; and further operations there should now be conducted with a view to preventing any extension of the conflict and avoiding any lasting commitment in the area. The Chiefs of Staff favour shorter lines along the 40th Parallel.”29
• • •
Truman’s statement of November 30, publicly declining to exclude the nuclear option in Korea, provoked the British to new ecstasies of uncertainty. In a debate that evening in the House of Commons, Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin made it apparent that he had no clear idea of American intentions toward China, or indeed of any change in American policy in the Far East. The Tory front bencher R. A. Butler said, “I want to come immediately to some circumstances which have arisen this evening, and which have caused many of us great concern and anxiety. . . . I want to express, at any rate on my own behalf, and I believe on behalf of a great many other Honorable Members, my very great disquiet . . . the horror that many of us would feel at the use of this weapon in circumstances which were not such that our own moral conscience was satisfied that there was no alternative.”
Attlee, the Prime Minister, expressed his wholehearted sympathy and agreement with Butler. Even Churchill, whom no one had accused of lack of zeal in the confrontation with communism, declared in the House of Commons, “The United Nations should avoid by every means in their power becoming entangled inextricably in a war with China. . . . The sooner the Far Eastern diversion . . . can be brought into something like a static condition and stabilised, the better it will be. . . . For it is in Europe that the world cause will be decided. . . . It is there that the mortal danger lies.” Attlee concluded the debate by announcing that he proposed himself to fly to Washington to meet the President.
If Britain was always the most junior of partners with the United States in the struggle to defend South Korea, in 1950 she also remained indisputably the second non-Communist power on earth, the most important ally of the United States. Attlee’s meeting with Truman in December 1950 provided both sides with an important opportunity to articulate their private convictions about the state of the global confrontation. As had been the case since the Korean War began, British views were deeply colored by fear that American strategic attentions were being diverted from Europe toward the Far East. The British were also profoundly opposed to direct confrontation with China, with their own vital trade interests in the Far East. Attlee came to Washington as “more than the spokesman of the United Kingdom and even the U.S.A.’s allies in NATO.” He also represented “the fears and doubts of all the states which had supported the original decision by the UN to resist the North Korean attack.”30 Truman, meanwhile, came to the conference table as leader of an Administration which was even now suffering humiliating defeat upon the battlefield, and which stood beleaguered by its political critics at home. Senator McCarthy was demanding the resignations of Acheson and Marshall and threatening impeachment proceedings against the President. Attlee’s very coming provided new ammunition for Truman’s Republican critics, for it provided new evidence of the unwelcome influence of enfeebled Europeans upon American policy, the very force that they alleged had done so much to “lose” China for the United States. Even had Washington been immersed in torrential downpours, the British were wise to arrive with no umbrellas at the airport.
The discussions that began on December 5, and included both British and American Chiefs of Staff, were held under the shadow of real fear that the United Nations might be compelled to evacuate the Korean peninsula. One of Field Marshal Sir William Slim’s first questions to the American delegation was whether MacArthur had been ordered to withdraw. Marshall told him that no such order had been given, but that the Supreme Commander had been told that “the security of his command is his first consideration.” Probably the chief significance of the discussions was the reassurance that Attlee gained from Truman, that the United States was not actively considering the employment of nuclear weapons in Asia. Much discussion also centered upon British economic and financial difficulties in sustaining their program of rearmament, which Washington strongly supported. At this time the United States possessed an extraordinary proportion of the world’s stockpile of vital metals and other strategic materials. The British made it clear that, without greater access to this, their defense buildup could not continue.
Sir Oliver Franks, the British Ambassador in Washington whose close friendship with Acheson made him a key participant in the talks, believed that the Administration never seriously considered the use of nuclear weapons in Korea. In this he may have underestimated the pressures that would have closed in upon Truman had the Americans been driven out of Korea with heavy loss. And even Franks, like Attlee, acknowledged fears about what the Americans might do “if their backs were to the wall. There was a fear of the consequences of hot pursuit into China, or bombing across the Yalu. There was a fear that War, with a capital W, might break out in the Far East. The last thing that we wanted to see was the United States getting bogged down with China, because we saw no end to it.”31
The most interesting feature of the discussions was the clarity with which they emphasized the differing British and American attitudes to Communist China. The British pressed their view that all-out war with China must be avoided at all costs. They remained convinced that Communist access to China’s UN seat must be held out as a possible negotiating card with Peking. This the Americans strenuously resisted. Acheson asserted that “in his view, the central moving factor in this situation was not China but Russia. Some promise of support must certainly have been given by them before the Chinese intervened. There would not be many who would advise the President to embark upon an all-out war with China on land, sea, and air. But on the possibility of negotiations, they were far less optimistic. . . . This was the very worst moment at which we could seek to negotiate with the Communist forces in the world.” Acheson, traditionally the Europeanist, sharply reminded the British at the Washington meetings of the United States’ global responsibilities, and made plain his belief that the British position toward China was founded upon self-centered political and commercial considerations. If the U.S. gave up now in the Far East, “we are through. The Russians and the Chinese are coming in, and other Far Eastern peoples would make their best terms with them.”
The Americans agreed that it was doubtful whether MacArthur’s army could hold on in Korea. They would willingly settle for a cease-fire based upon the restoration of the prewar position, but saw no real prospect of attaining this. Truman said that he wished it to be on record that he could not agree to voluntary withdrawal from Korea: “We must fight it out. If we failed, we should at least fail honorably.”
Attlee replied sturdily that the British would stand shoulder to shoulder with the Americans in the bridgehead. But he then turned to the much more contentious issue of China. He believed that Britain and the United States had different appreciations of the new China. It was a mistake to think Peking the pawn of Moscow. Western policy should be to detach the Chinese from the Russians. The West could look with considerable satisfaction upon other societies whose nationalist aspirations had been indulged—India, Pakistan, Burma. Acheson declared that he agreed with Attlee’s overview, but could not see how it helped to determine an immediate policy. When the British expressed their concern for the risk to their interests in Hong Kong, Malaya, and Singapore if the Chinese mainland was attacked, Bradley inquired sarcastically whether a Chinese attack on Hong Kong would mean war when it was not considered war for the Chinese to attack American troops in Korea. Field Marshal Slim asked whether a limited war against China would be likely to provoke the invocation of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty. Marshall said that it would, and Truman acknowledged his concern about this possibility. Slim remarked that if the Soviet Air Force intervened in the war, “we should have to say good-bye.”
At a session following dinner at the British Embassy on December 7, the vexed question of MacArthur was raised, and Attlee voiced British anxieties. Truman agreed that some of the Supreme Commander’s statements had been unfortunate. Acheson said there were two questions: “First, whether any Government had any control over General MacArthur, a point on which he desired to express no view; and secondly, the question of what arrangements should be made for consultation in future.” Marshall declared that wars cannot be run by committee. Yet the British were determined to emphasize their misgivings about direct military action against China. Their greatest cause for concern when they left Washington after the summit was that they seemed “not to have convinced the Americans of the need to make a serious effort to reach a political settlement with the Chinese, and not to have shaken them in their intention to undertake some form of ‘limited war’ against China.”32
As from the beginning of the war, the chief British motive for supporting America in Korea continued to be fear that if she did not do so, America’s sense of betrayal by her Western allies might have disastrous political and strategic consequences for Europe. It was not that the British did not sincerely share Washington’s dismay at North Korean aggression—merely that they feared that the political and military costs of preserving Syngman Rhee’s shoddy dictatorship in South Korea were in danger of exceeding any possible gains. This apprehension would persist to the end of the war.
On the American side, President Truman and his advisers clearly perceived, as much of the American public did not, that the legitimacy of U.S. policy in the Far East rested heavily upon maintaining the concept that a wider cause and greater principles than mere U.S. national interest were being contested in Korea, and were being upheld by a family of nations. If Attlee and his delegation failed to gain many explicit assurances in Washington, certain implicit understandings were achieved: above all, that Britain and other major allies would be consulted before any major step was taken to expand the war. This concession to British sensitivities, as it became known in the upper reaches of the U.S. military, caused disgust at the Dai Ichi and among higher commanders who believed the moment had come for a showdown with communism. It was knowledge or suspicion of what had been said between the British and American governments in Washington in December 1950 that sowed the seeds of belief in an Anglo-American conspiracy against MacArthur in the MacArthur camp during the crisis of the following spring.
The British delegation might have returned to London in less tranquil spirits had they been aware that, even if the President had not lied to them, he had certainly not disclosed the extent of American nuclear contingency planning. Since mid-November the Army Plans and Operations Division and the Joint Strategic Survey Committee had been conducting studies about the possible use of nuclear weapons in Korea. On November 28, Plans and Ops recommended that the armed forces should ensure their readiness to make “prompt use of the atomic bomb . . . as, if and when, directed by the President.” On December 7, Acheson correctly predicted that the British would demand consultation on any planned American use of nuclear weapons. He recorded that he would promise to move “in step with the British . . . but will agree [to] nothing that will restrict his freedom of action.”33 As the Chinese entered Pyongyang, the Joint Chiefs dispatched a memorandum to all commands giving their view “that the current situation in Korea has greatly increased the possibility of general war. Commanders addressed should take such action as is feasible to increase readiness, without creating an atmosphere of panic.”34 Throughout December and into the New Year, a ground swell of opinion within the United States demanded that the country’s armed forces should no longer be compelled to endure punishment at the hands of the Communists if this could be prevented by the ultimate expression of American technology, the atomic bomb. The national commanders of the four largest veterans’ organizations petitioned the President to use “such means as may be necessary” to check the Communists.35 On December 24, MacArthur submitted a list of “retaliation targets” in China and North Korea, requiring twenty-six atomic bombs in all. He requested four bombs for use against Communist forces in North Korea, and four on “critical concentrations of enemy air power.” The remainder were destined for enemy installations and industrial concentrations.36 Such politicians as Senator Owen Brewster and Congressman Mendel Rivers pointed out publicly how effectively the atomic bomb had been used against the Japanese.
Yet if Truman and his advisers had talked very toughly to the British about their refusal to concede defeat as the price of a cease-fire with the Chinese, they had also underlined the extraordinary change in American objectives in Korea brought about overnight by the Chinese intervention. In a few short days of battle and retreat, Washington had tacitly renounced any prospect of presiding over a unified, non-Communist Korean state. The Administration was now willing to consider a peace proposal based upon restoring the prewar status of Korea, divided at the 38th Parallel. This was a momentous change of heart, and one which proved entirely unwelcome when it became known at the Dai Ichi.
And if the Americans were often impatient of what they perceived as crude displays of self-interest by the British, in the aftermath of Attlee’s visit, they brooded to considerable effect about what the British delegation had said. First, the British had cast some penetrating doubts upon the likely effectiveness of limited war with China. Nothing could be worse for the United States than to launch a blockade of the Chinese coast, or even a bombing offensive against industrial targets, only to find that these made no impact upon Peking’s behavior. Acheson also declared at the National Security Council meeting of December 12 that the Anglo-American talks had emphasized how important a close relationship with Britain remained, “since we can bring U.S. power into play only with the cooperation of the British.”
In the weeks following the departure of the British delegation, the domestic debate about policy in Korea raged with increasing bitterness in the United States, in both public and private forums. The Administration’s standing with the electorate fell to unprecedented depths. A December 8 Gallup poll found 49 percent of respondents disapproving of Truman’s leadership, and only 20 percent of those who had heard of Acheson thinking well of him. It was a paradox of the period that right-wing Republicans alternated between demands for all-out war with China and immediate withdrawal from Korea. A January opinion poll found 49 percent of Americans believed that the U.S. entry into Korea had been a mistake, and 66 percent considered that the U.S. should now abandon the peninsula. These confused responses would become wretchedly familiar a generation later in the midst of another Asian war. In 1950 they represented the impotent political thrashings of a public opinion unaccustomed to frustration of its will at home or abroad, to military defeat—least of all at the hands of a primitive people, or to the exercise of patience. Grass-roots America had only the dimmest perception of what was taking place in Korea, but it understood with disagreeable clarity that little glory or happiness was being won there. It was incomparably easier to understand the rhetoric of Republicanism, demanding that America’s full might should be employed to bring the Asians to heel, than the uncertain pleading for restraint from the Administration. Why should the United States be called upon to exercise restraint, when the enemy was apparently displaying none?
It was in the hope of focusing public understanding on the importance and seriousness of what was taking place in Korea that Truman declared a state of national emergency on December 16. The Administration now believed that Korea could be held—following the return of General Collins, the Army Chief of Staff, from a fresh visit on December 8—and should be held. Kennan and Rusk recalled the defiant example of the British in 1940: to abandon South Korea now “would set a poor example of what it means to be a friend of the United States.” Truman and his advisers had determined to resist the calls of the allies for an immediate cease-fire, and to resist any such resolution in the United Nations. They were determined that MacArthur’s army must improve its military position, regain some lost ground, to be able to negotiate from reasonable strength. To appease world opinion, Washington felt obliged to take a desperate diplomatic gamble, supporting a United Nations resolution calling for an immediate cease-fire in Korea proposed by a clutch of Asian states on December 11. The Americans, who wanted no such thing, counted upon the Chinese rejecting it.
Fortunately for the Administration’s hopes, the Chinese indeed dismissed the resolution, since it included no call for the removal of all foreign troops or for the withdrawal of the Seventh Fleet from Taiwan, or for the recognition of Peking at the UN. Washington now forced through its own resolution, against the deepest misgivings of Britain and the other allies, branding China an aggressor. Even such a moderate man as Bradley believed that, if the United States suffered the humiliation of military expulsion from Korea, she should retaliate with air attacks upon the Chinese mainland.
As the military position in Korea continued to deteriorate into the New Year, a growing divide became apparent between America’s political and military leaders about possible responses. Admiral Sherman, consistently the most bellicose of the Joint Chiefs, demanded early in the New Year that America should stop equivocating and recognize a full state of war with China. On January 12 the Joint Chiefs recommended hitting China with “damaging naval and air attacks” if the Communists attacked American forces outside the Korean peninsula. They also favored sponsoring guerrilla action in China, allowing the Nationalists to invade the mainland, and “aerial reconnaissance” of Manchuria and the Chinese coast. If the UN did not agree, said Admiral Sherman, “the time had come for unilateral action by the United States.” When Acheson and the National Security Council proved unenthusiastic, Bradley emphasized that the JCS were not advocating a large-scale invasion of the Chinese mainland. But he remarked that there was “heavy popular pressure for the United States to do something,” unilaterally if necessary. Marshall took the point, but suggested that the United Nations would deteriorate into a mere forum for debate if the United States acted alone in Korea. Truman postponed any decision by referring back the whole subject of direct action against China for further study.
Then, through the last days of January and early into February, imperceptibly the mood began to shift in Washington. As it became evident that military disaster was no longer imminent in Korea, as the choices before the Administration became less stark, so passions cooled and the more dramatic options receded. State Department analysts argued strongly against the view that the Chinese intervention in Korea represented a Soviet buildup to a new world war. Washington was at last beginning to look much more closely at narrower, more nationalistic reasons for Chinese behavior. In the eyes of the “hawks,” MacArthur notable among them, the change of mood in Washington represented a weakening of the American position, influenced by the feeble fears of the allies and, above all, the British. Yet the British might legitimately claim that events increasingly supported their interpretation of Chinese behavior. Acheson told Bradley, “We are fighting the wrong nation. We are fighting the second team, whereas the real enemy is the Soviet Union.”37 Increasingly, senior members of the Truman Administration and the State Department began to develop the view that would grow increasingly dominant in the months that followed: that the United States was fighting the wrong war against the wrong Communist power in Korea. On January 30, Peking attempted to get a letter through to the U.S. government, a gesture Marshall declared should be treated with “the utmost seriousness.” CIA estimates of Chinese casualties suggested cause for growing concern in Peking. Washington began to adopt a more attentive attitude to straws in the wind that suggested possible Chinese interest in a cease-fire. On February 12, C. B. Marshall of the Policy Planning Staff suggested to Paul Nitze that stabilization in Korea would save “two sets of faces.”38 Acheson, more than any other man, may claim credit for having discouraged the President’s most bellicose advisers, arguing constantly for further discussion and delay. A February 23 paper from the State Department summarized his arguments against any escalation or change of policy in the Far East:
“a) the capability of the Moscow-Peiping axis to inflict a decisive defeat upon United Nations forces if they make the decision to do so; b) the risk of extending the Korean conflict to other areas and even into the general war at a time when [the United States] was not ready to risk general war; c) the heavy additional drain on American manpower and resources without a clearly seen outcome of the effort; d) loss of unity among [America’s] allies and in the United Nations in support of the Korean effort, and e) the diversion of additional United States effort from other vital requirements.”39
• • •
It is easy to focus attention upon Washington and London’s misjudgments in the winter of 1950–51 and to forget those of the other side. If, at the end of 1950, Peking had shown itself ready to negotiate a cease-fire based upon the status quo ante in Korea, Mao Tse Tung’s government would have been in an overwhelmingly strong position to gain its seat at the UN and to divide America from its allies if Washington proved reluctant to negotiate. MacArthur was not alone in his hubris. Peking deluded itself that absolute military victory, the reunification of Korea under Communist rule, lay within its grasp. Between December and May, when repeated defeats at the hands of the UN gradually convinced the Chinese that total victory was not attainable, they showed themselves entirely intractable until their moment had passed and threw away a commanding political advantage. In December, as the first Communist power to inflict a great defeat upon the West, their worldwide prestige was at its zenith. Had they accepted a negotiated end to the struggle with their own armies victorious, China’s military standing for a generation to come would have been immense. Instead, however, by continuing the war, they gave time for the West to reassert its own military might, to demonstrate that even the greatest peasant army could be repulsed and defeated. If Washington had made a devastating miscalculation in the autumn of 1950, by driving for the Yalu, Peking’s error that winter was equally great, in reaching out for a victory beyond its powers.
Pragmatic considerations almost certainly weighed far more heavily than moral ones in bringing about America’s decision against extending the war to China in the winter of 1950. There were grounds for overwhelming doubt as to whether bombing China, unleashing Chiang’s Nationalists upon the mainland, or enforcing a blockade would have a decisive impact upon China’s capacity to continue the war in Korea or upon the stability of Mao Tse Tung’s regime in Peking. However, the exercise of any of these options would have created a real danger of Soviet intervention. If this took place, the Pentagon was doubtful whether American forces in the Far East could hold their ground, or even whether a third world war could be avoided. Any major initiative against China by the United States would cost Washington the support of the United Nations—more serious, that of the Western allies. President Truman and his advisers were scarcely enthusiastic about, or even satisfied with, the policy of waging a limited war for limited objectives, to which they became tacitly committed in the winter of 1950, after seeing imminent victory slip from their grasp. But their debate, and its conclusion, had a decisive influence upon the struggle with General Douglas MacArthur, which reached its climax three months later. For MacArthur attempted to pursue an argument about the war, and about its extension to China, which had been effectively concluded in Washington before the Supreme Commander made his belated play.
How close did the United States come, in the winter of 1950, to employing atomic bombs against the Chinese? Much closer, the answer must be, than its allies cared to believe at the time. If Truman and the fellow members of his Administration recoiled from bearing the responsibility for so terrible an act, America’s leading military men, from the Joint Chiefs downward, were far more equivocal and seemed far less disturbed by the prospect. All those at the seat of power in Washington drew back from discussion of the nuclear option as the military situation in Korea improved. But had the Chinese proved able to convert the defeat of the UN forces into their destruction, had the Eighth Army been unable to check its retreat, and been driven headlong for the coastal ports with massive casualties, it is impossible to declare with certainty that Truman could have resisted the demands for an atomic demonstration against China. The pressure upon the politicians from the military leaders of America might well have become irresistible in the face of military disaster. The men who turned the tide on the battlefield in Korea in the first weeks of 1951 may also have saved the world from the nightmare of a new Hiroshima in Asia.
The Arrival of Ridgway
On the Korean battlefield, the United Nations entered the New Year of 1951 still losing ground, still in desperate straits. Yet more than a week earlier an event had taken place which was to have an overwhelming influence upon the transformation of the war in Korea. On the morning of December 23, General Walton Walker was driving from his headquarters to that of 27 Commonwealth Brigade. Walker, the doughty little hero of the Pusan Perimeter, was a weary, almost broken man. His quarrels with Almond, the collapse of his army, the knowledge that MacArthur was considering his replacement had reduced the morale of the Eighth Army commander and his staff to an ebb as low as that of their troops. At Eighth Army headquarters, officers spoke openly of evacuation as the only course and talked without shame of the need for every unit to have its “bugout route.” Walker was indisputably a brave man. But he was not a clever one. He had given all that he could offer to the cause of the United Nations. Now an ROK truck turned across the road in front of his jeep. The general was thrown out in the collision and suffered head injuries from which he died on the way to the hospital.
General Matthew Ridgway was sipping an after-dinner highball at the home of a friend when he was summoned to receive a telephone call from the Army Chief of Staff, Lawton Collins. Walker was dead. MacArthur had asked for Ridgway to succeed him. To lull his companions’ curiosity, Ridgway lingered drinking for a few minutes before driving home with his wife. The next morning, Saturday, he paid a brief call at the Pentagon to collect his papers, chat briefly with Sherman, Chief of Naval Operations, and left that night for Tokyo without an opportunity to see his family again. He arrived at Haneda airport just before midnight on Christmas Day. The next morning at 9:30 he called on MacArthur at the Dai Ichi. The Supreme Commander had no hesitation in expressing his enthusiasm for an attack on mainland China by the Nationalist Chinese as a means of relieving the pressure upon South Korea. He showed his acute concern at the “mission vacuum” in which he considered that the Army was operating while the politicians decided where they wanted to go. He painted a bleak picture of the military situation before assuring Ridgway of his support in whatever he decided to do: “The Eighth Army is yours, Matt. Do what you think best.” At 4 P.M. that afternoon of December 26, Ridgway was shivering on the apron at Taegu, being met by the Eighth Army’s Chief of Staff, General Leven Allen.
Matthew Bunker Ridgway was fifty-six. At the beginning of the Second World War he had been a lieutenant colonel in the Plans Division of the War Department, where he remained until 1942. He then became first assistant commander, soon commander of 82nd Airborne Division, which he led with distinction in the Sicilian and Normandy landings. In August 1944 he took over the XVIII Airborne Corps, which he commanded in the Ardennes campaign. He was regarded not only by his fellow countrymen but by their British allies as one of the outstanding American soldiers of the war. Had he, rather than Browning, commanded at Arnhem, the outcome of that operation might have been astonishingly different—or certainly less disastrous. He possessed almost all the military virtues—courage, brains, ruthlessness, decision. He made the grenade and field dressing on his shoulder straps familiar symbols, as much his own trademarks as Montgomery’s beret or Patton’s pistols. It has been cruelly but appositely remarked that Walton Walker’s death, making possible the coming of Ridgway, was the salvation of the Eighth Army. It is difficult to overstate the importance of the contribution that Ridgway made to the United Nations’ cause in Korea, and to the achievement of a tolerable outcome of the war.
Ridgway arrived on December 26 full of hope that with the Chinese impetus temporarily spent, he might be able to organize a rapid counteroffensive. But within a few hours, visiting his formations, “I had discovered that our forces were simply not mentally and spiritually ready for the sort of action I had been planning. . . . The men I met along the road, those I stopped to talk to and to solicit gripes from—they too all conveyed to me a conviction that this was a bewildered army, not sure of itself or its leaders, not sure what they were doing there, wondering when they would hear the whistle of that homebound transport.”40
The new commander was dismayed to discover the lack of essential winter clothing and equipment, the poor food and lack of comforts available to the troops. “The leadership I found in many instances sadly lacking, and I said so out loud.” Ridgway was unimpressed, to put it politely, by “the unwillingness of the army to forgo certain creature comforts, its timidity about getting off the scanty roads, its reluctance to move without radio and telephone contact, and its lack of imagination in dealing with a foe whom they soon outmatched in firepower and dominated in the air and on the surrounding seas.”41 He met the British General Leslie Mansergh and told him that “training was needed, and touched on the problem of pampered troops. I [Mansergh] said that all ranks felt the absence of information and were in a vacuum. He said he could tell me nothing, because he knew nothing except ‘Stand And Fight.’ ”42
The transformation of the Eighth Army after the coming of its new commander astonished and profoundly impressed all those who witnessed it. “It was incredible, the change that came over the Americans and their discipline,” said a British gunnery officer.43 “They started to wash their vehicles, and things like that.” Colonel John Michaelis of the 27th Infantry called it “magic, the way Ridgway took that defeated army and turned it around. He was a breath of fresh air, a showman, what the army desperately needed.”44 From the outset, Ridgway demanded a new attention to terrain, and the assessment of key features that must be defended. There would be a fresh focus upon defense—and attack—in depth, with unit flanks secured against infiltration. Above all, the army must get off the roads, must be willing to reach for and hold high ground—some British officers had been bewildered to see American units digging in to defend roadside positions at the base of prominent hills, where they were totally exposed to incoming fire. Ridgway was unimpressed by the performance of the corps and divisional commanders. He wrote to Collins in Washington, urging the need to awaken Americans both in government and across the land to what was taking place in Korea, the demand for “a toughness of soul as well as body.” He had no patience with the preoccupation among the Eighth Army—and at the Dai Ichi—with evacuation of the peninsula. Ridgway did not believe this should be remotely necessary. The only contingency for which he was willing to prepare was withdrawal to a new Pusan Perimeter—but this one would be dug and prepared on an unprecedented scale. A senior engineer officer and thousands of Korean laborers were soon working day and night, creating a powerful defensive line in the southeast.
Ridgway—and soon MacArthur also—perceived the immense advantage of his own shortening supply lines, while those of the Chinese were now extended to the limits of their fragile logistics system. MacArthur told the British Brigadier Basil Coad on January 26 that on the Yalu the Chinese might be able to support a million men under arms, but at a line through Pyongyang this figure fell to 600,000; at the 38th Parallel, it became 300,000; forty miles south of Seoul, it became only 200,000. This was one of the Supreme Commander’s less fanciful judgments. Prisoners were reporting that as much as 50 percent of the Chinese front-line length was afflicted by frostbite. “While we wished to continue to push the enemy, we could not open our mouth too wide,” said Hu Seng of Marshal Peng’s staff. “China was unprepared for the new military situation created by the deep advance. We were now in a position where we could not continue to reinforce our army in Korea, because we could not supply more men.” The Chinese offensive had exhausted its momentum. After inflicting a devastating shock upon the UN Command and the nations from which it was drawn, the initiative in the Korean War was once more about to change hands.
I. This problem is discussed at more length in the author’s Overlord: D-Day and The Battle for Normandy (London and New York, 1984).