6
When MacArthur came out onto the deck of the Mount McKinley the morning after the Inchon landing, his first question to the Marines’ General Shepherd was, “Have we seen or heard anything of the Russians or the Chinese?”1 It was an inquiry he repeated, insistently, each day thereafter as his army drove deep inland. The Supreme Commander was perfectly aware of the political embarrassments and military implications of killing, capturing, or even encountering Chinese or Russian advisers or troops. Yet as each day passed with no word of their presence, MacArthur’s assurance grew. Peking and Moscow had backed off. This was a struggle between the United Nations and the crumbling divisions of Kim Il Sung. The Communists had reached out for their easy victory in South Korea, and come within a hairbreadth of achieving it. Yet when the will of the United States—the will, indeed, of the nation’s supreme representative in Asia, Douglas MacArthur—was tested and shown to be strong, that of the enemy had crumpled. In MacArthur’s perception, strengthened by each day of triumph after September 15, the crisis had passed.
Since June 25, 1950, the key figures in Tokyo, Washington, London, and indeed throughout the Western world, had explored a remarkable range of emotions. The shock of Kim Il Sung’s invasion was succeeded by alarm about its global implications. Truman and his allies and generals overcame these fears, in their determination that the Communist onslaught must be resisted. Then, through July and August, as defeat followed defeat upon the battlefield, it appeared that the only fruit of their efforts would be a massive humiliation for Western arms. Yet now, after the miracle of Inchon, the great burden had been lifted from their shoulders. From the brink of defeat, MacArthur’s genius had brought them to the verge of overwhelming military triumph. Fears that the North Korean invasion signaled a worldwide Communist offensive had proved unfounded. The Russians, perceived as prime movers in Kim Il Sung’s invasion, now appeared anxious to distance themselves from the Korean adventure, and certainly unwilling to commit their military power to Kim’s support. The balance of advantage in Korea lay firmly with the UN, with the Western powers. The wider dangers had receded. The leaders of the Truman Administration, who had been so sensitive to the global risks of the original Communist invasion, were overtaken by something close to euphoria. Firmness had paid off. The Communists were in full retreat. No new world war would start in Korea.
The chief problem that now exercised Truman and Acheson, their allies and military commanders, was that of how the utmost political and strategic advantage could be extracted from military victory. The starting point for the debate was the view, held instinctively by many citizens of the Western Powers, that it would be intolerable if Kim Il Sung proved to have been able to launch and retreat from the failure of his monstrous adventure without cost to his own regime. Beyond his unprovoked invasion of a neighboring state, the atrocities his forces had inflicted upon the people of South Korea compounded the original outrage. If the North Koreans were now permitted to withdraw behind their original frontier, the 38th Parallel, and remain there unmolested, the huge efforts and sacrifices of the United Nations—and of the South Korean people—would seem hollow indeed. It would be absurd, said Acheson, “to march up to a surveyor’s line and stop.” It seemed equally inappropriate for MacArthur’s army to pursue the North Koreans into their own land merely to complete the destruction of the enemy’s forces, then withdraw, leaving Kim Il Sung’s regime in place.
The United Nations’ mandate for war was based upon the General Assembly vote of June 27 calling on members to “furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security in the area.” The Soviet Union, which returned to its seat on the Security Council on August 3, argued in vain that the conflict did not come under the definition of aggression since it was a war, not between two states, but between two parts of the Korean people temporarily split into two camps under two separate authorities. Once the Russians were back at the UN, the possibility of directing the war through the forum of the Security Council, rather than at the behest of Washington, finally vanished. But weeks before Inchon there had been intense private debate in Washington as to whether the occupation of North Korea was a legitimate United Nations or, more frankly, American war aim. The Defense Department believed that it was perfectly justifiable. So did some senior officials in the State Department, led by Dean Rusk and John Allison of the Far Eastern Division. The Policy Planning Staff raised serious doubts as to whether it was possible to invade North Korea without precipitating a wider war with China or the Soviet Union, and expressed doubts whether other UN members would support such a move. But even the PPS concluded in late July that a decision about invading North Korea or integrating it with the South could be postponed until these became more immediate military options.
Characteristically, while others havered, MacArthur alone harbored no doubts. In mid-July in Tokyo, he told Collins and Vandenburg that his war aim was not merely the repulse of Kim Il Sung’s invasion, but the destruction of his army, for which the occupation of North Korea might prove necessary. There is no evidence that the two Chiefs of Staff disputed MacArthur’s view, though they were perfectly aware that he had no authority to make such a decision for himself. When Collins returned to Tokyo in mid-August, he told the Commander in Chief that he personally favored crossing the 38th Parallel, but warned that Truman had not yet reached a decision on the issue. From the outset, while the State Department expressed serious reservations about the feasibility or desirability of sustaining Syngman Rhee as ruler of all Korea, MacArthur made it plain that he strongly supported this course. On September 1 the National Security Council circulated a frankly inconclusive working paper, NSC 81, which rehearsed the arguments for and against taking the Korean War to the enemy’s homeland. It took note of the danger that the Russians would intervene to prevent the loss of their suzerainty over North Korea, but contrarily suggested that Moscow was unlikely to risk the wider war that could result from intervention. Finally, NSC 81 proposed a compromise: any crossing of the Parallel should be conducted only by ROK forces, and solely in pursuit of tactical objectives. It proposed that MacArthur should be required to “request new instructions before continuing operations north of the 38th Parallel with major forces for the purpose of occupying North Korea.”
The Joint Chiefs of Staff condemned the “unrealistic” approach of NSC 81. They were determined that the military should have the flexibility they needed to complete the destruction of the North Korean People’s Army, wherever its elements took refuge. An amended version—NSC 81/1—was agreed between Acheson and the Joint Chiefs at an NSC meeting on September 9, almost a week before Inchon. The passage in the original specifying that UN forces “should not be permitted to extend into areas close to the Manchurian and U.S.S.R. borders of Korea” was redrafted. Now it was agreed merely that they should not cross those borders. NSC 81 decreed flatly that only ROK troops should operate near the Russian and Chinese borders. NSC 81/1 declared only that it should be “the policy” not to deploy other UN forces in these sensitive areas. The paper restated Washington’s determination that the U.S. “should not permit itself to become engaged in a general war” with China. But it also affirmed the position consistently adopted by the Administration since the war began—that if Chinese forces intervened in Korea, the U.S. would defend itself by whatever means it possessed, not excluding the bombardment of targets on the Chinese mainland. The political future of North Korea was not discussed in NSC 81/1, perhaps chiefly because the Administration regarded this as a matter of detail rather than new national policy. On September 1, Truman had publicly declared the right of all Korea to be “free, independent and united,” and committed the United States to do its part to see that all Koreans gain that right “under the guidance of the United Nations.”
There was an interval of almost three weeks between the drafting of NSC 81/1 and the promulgation of a formal JCS directive to MacArthur based upon its conclusions. A measure of confusion overtook the Pentagon during this period. The Defense Secretary, Louis Johnson, was sacked by Truman and replaced by General George Marshall. Meanwhile, in Korea, the distant military hopes that underpinned Washington’s discussions in early September had been translated into triumphant reality. The victorious UN forces were streaming northward, the broken remains of Kim Il Sung’s army in full retreat before them.
Now, the JCS told MacArthur:
“Your military objective is the destruction of the North Korean armed forces. In attaining this objective, you are authorized to conduct military operations, including amphibious and airborne landings or ground operations north of the 38th Parallel in Korea, provided that at the time of such operations there has been no entry into North Korea by major Soviet or Chinese Communist Forces, no announcement of intended entry, nor a threat to counter our operations militarily in North Korea. Under no circumstances, however, will your forces cross the Manchurian or U.S.S.R. borders of Korea and, as a matter of policy, no non-Korean ground forces will be used in the northeast provinces bordering the Soviet Union or in the area along the Manchurian border. Furthermore, support of your operations north or south of the 38th Parallel will not include air or naval action against Manchuria or against U.S.S.R. territory.”
Although the directive cautioned MacArthur that changing military and political circumstances might make modification of these instructions necessary, a secret “eyes only” signal from Marshall to MacArthur on September 29 explicitly declared Washington’s commitment to an advance into North Korea, but explained the desirability of avoiding public advance announcements of the crossing of the 38th Parallel, which might precipitate a new vote in the United Nations.
America’s allies, Britain prominent among them, had publicly expressed their support for a move into North Korea. They were overtaken by the same euphoria that gripped Washington, the same belief that with the war almost over, it remained only to ensure that the maximum advantage was extracted from victory. But the Soviet Union was back at the Security Council. If there was a UN vote about crossing the 38th Parallel, the Russians would certainly veto it. There might then be serious questions about the legitimacy of the actions of MacArthur’s army. On September 30 the general responded from Tokyo to Marshall’s message. He would take care, he said, to caution General Walker against saying anything too specific about operations around or north of the Parallel. He made it clear that the only delay in ordering his forces to advance beyond it was not political but logistical. The Army would drive north as soon as it was ready: “My overall strategic plan is known to you. Unless and until the enemy capitulates, I regard all of Korea open for our military operations.” On October 2, MacArthur made a broadcast to North Korea, calling upon the Communist forces to lay down their arms. He neither expected, nor received, any response. He continued his preparations for the drive north across the 38th Parallel.
MacArthur’s strategy was guided by two principal considerations. First, he wanted forces moving fast northeastward up North Korea to cut off Communist forces retreating toward the Manchurian border. Second, the Taebaek Mountain Range, running up the spine of North Korea, made west-east movement across the country intensely difficult. The principal road and rail routes up Korea are determined almost entirely by the lines of the north-south river valleys. MacArthur was one of the great twentieth-century exponents of amphibious operations. At Inchon he had exploited the flexibility and resources of American sea power to cut short a land campaign across difficult terrain. Now he proposed to do the same again. He would withdraw Almond’s X Corps from South Korea through Inchon, load it aboard his shipping, and transport it direct to North Korea’s east coast port of Wonsan, whence the Marines and the Army’s 7th Division could strike north toward the Manchurian border. Meanwhile, Walker’s Eighth Army would drive directly north from Seoul, for Pyongyang and the west of Kim Il Sung’s dominions.
MacArthur’s plan roused immediate opposition from Eighth Army. First, Walker considered it absurd to subject X Corps to the immense upheaval of withdrawal from Seoul, and sea movement to Wonsan, when the ROK Army was already driving up the east coast in the face of negligible opposition. Second, Eighth Army’s commander was disgusted by MacArthur’s determination to maintain a divided command, with Almond continuing to report directly to the Commander in Chief. It seemed a deliberate insult to Walker, the defender of the Pusan Perimeter, the savior of American arms in the first desperate weeks of war, to withhold X Corps from his command, when all military logic demanded a unified ground authority.
Here were the seeds of serious difficulties ahead. Many of those in Korea believed that MacArthur was once again exercising his notorious weakness for favorites—granting his own Chief of Staff, Ned Almond, a privileged opportunity to gain independent glory. Yet, in MacArthur’s defense, there were good reasons to doubt the ability of Walton Walker and his staff to conduct a vigorous major offensive on their own. The doubts about Walker’s fitness for high command that were raised before Inchon persisted at the 38th Parallel. Visitors to his headquarters were often unimpressed by the confusion and lack of direction that they found there. MacArthur felt ill disposed to increase Walker’s authority in the field. But there was no incentive to remove Eighth Army’s commander when the war was almost won, the spine of Communist resistance broken. The detailed administration of the drive into North Korea against a foe in utter disarray scarcely seemed momentous. After the event, MacArthur’s critics heaped devastating criticism upon the casualness, the military unsoundness, of the command arrangements for the drive into North Korea. It is difficult to dispute these charges. Yet the critics, in their turn, ignored the real grounds for doubt about the capabilities of Walton Walker. They also discounted the mood of the time. If MacArthur was guilty of allowing himself to lapse into complacency about the imminence of undisputed victory, he succumbed to a failing from which a host of his most distinguished contemporaries were not immune.
On September 28, ROK troops advanced north of the Parallel. American units waited impatiently for the signal to follow them, to complete the wretched task upon which they were embarked and go home before winter. Yet still the political and diplomatic maneuverings in Washington continued. Abroad, America’s allies were growing ever more uneasy. The British were alarmed by the signals now emerging from Peking, though their Foreign Secretary had earlier been a prominent supporter of reunifying Korea. How was the British government to explain to its own people the new situation? “It would . . . be necessary,” Attlee told his Cabinet on September 26, “to present clearly to public opinion the reasons justifying a military occupation of the whole of Korea, its temporary character and limited objectives.”2 The British government would dearly have liked to hold back its own contingent in Korea from crossing the 38th Parallel, but recognized that this was impracticable if the rest of the Eighth Army was moving into the North. Bevin, the ever-robust Foreign Secretary, “felt there was insufficient foundation for their apprehension that China or Russia might thereby be provoked into active intervention,” but he suggested that the President or the UN General Assembly might make one more appeal to the North Koreans to lay down their arms before Walker’s army entered their country. The British Chiefs of Staff recommended holding back MacArthur’s army for a week or so, while offering the North Korean Army one further chance to surrender. This uneasy message, drafted amid much private wringing of hands, the British communicated to the Americans.
In reply, Bradley told Tedder, Britain’s senior military representative in Washington, that UN forces on the Parallel were already making just such a final appeal to reason to the Communists. The British, their fears a little abated, sought to strengthen the American diplomatic position by securing the passage through the UN General Assembly, on October 7, of a resolution calling for “all appropriate steps . . . to ensure conditions of stability throughout Korea” and the formation of a unified government elected under UN auspices. This passed by 47 to 5, with 7 abstentions. Its purpose was to provide a cloak of UN support for military operations in North Korea, while preserving some vagueness about what form these operations would take. A growing body of moderate opinion in the West believed that action by Syngman Rhee’s army in the North, restricted to battle between rival bodies of Koreans, presented a much lesser threat of Chinese or Russian intervention than a major foreign presence. In this they probably deluded themselves. Given the doubtful military abilities of the ROK Army, the Communists could almost certainly have driven Rhee’s unaided forces out of the North, with or without Chinese intervention. The dilemma for Washington and its allies would then have been unresolved.
But to Acheson’s dismay, MacArthur now declared openly and directly to the North Koreans that unless they laid down their arms, he would take “such military action as may be necessary to enforce the decrees of the United Nations.” Yet again, the general had swept aside diplomatic niceties, ignored critical political sensitivities, overridden fundamental constitutional limitations upon his own powers. And yet again, however unhappily, the Administration in Washington muffled its own doubts and fears. The insuperable difficulty of containing or controlling MacArthur remained the same as ever: the general commanded in Tokyo upon his own terms, as he always had. Either MacArthur was endured or dismissed. Yet how could he be removed without devastating damage to the image and authority, not only of the Truman Administration, but of the United States? He was not merely the Pacific victor of World War II, but the sole begetter of triumph at Inchon, heroic arbiter of the destinies of a free Korea. It is not only with hindsight that it is apparent that MacArthur’s gigantic hubris could lead only to tragedy. Many men in Washington and Tokyo also perceived this in the fall of 1950. But they could see no realistic means of ridding themselves of this old man of the sea. The play must be acted out to the end.
Washington continued to share with Tokyo the most fundamental misconceptions about the enemy’s behavior and intentions. The Administration based its policy now, as from the outbreak of war, upon the conviction that the Communist powers were acting in concert. Available intelligence about Chinese thinking was negligible. It was much more plentiful, both from covert and diplomatic sources, about Moscow’s frame of mind. By the winter of 1950 it was apparent that the Russians greatly regretted the North Korean adventure, were eager to distance themselves from it, and to prevent any widening of the war. Soviet signals to this effect were received, and understood, in Washington. Yet these entirely blinded the Administration to the danger of unilateral action by Peking. For the first, but by no means the last time in Korea, a preoccupation with ideological confrontation blinded the leaders of the United States to the nationalistic considerations at play. They simply did not entertain the prospect that the Chinese might act in Korea for their own reasons, quite heedless of Soviet wishes or policy.
On October 9 the Eighth Army at last advanced in full force across the 38th Parallel. For almost a week they encountered serious resistance. Then the North Koreans broke and fled north in full retreat. The 1st Cavalry and 24th Infantry began a headlong pursuit, the long convoys’ road race interrupted only for spasmodic small-unit actions against isolated enemy rearguards.
• • •
At this moment, with military victory imminent and the Eighth Army heavily committed, MacArthur was astonished to receive a message from Washington informing him that the President sought his presence at a personal meeting on Wake Island, in mid-Pacific between Tokyo and the west coast of the United States. On the morning of October 15, nursing acute disgust for what he regarded as a piece of political grandstanding by Truman, the general and his staff took off from Haneda aboard his Constellation.
Truman wrote simply in his memoirs that a moment had come at which he considered his lack of personal contact with MacArthur a handicap: “I thought that he ought to know his Commander in Chief, and that I ought to know the senior field commander in the Far East.” Yet there is little doubt that for once, MacArthur’s skepticism about Washington’s motives was justified. Truman was politically beleaguered at home, under fire from the Right for supposed softness toward the Communists. There were indeed good reasons for President and Supreme Commander to meet. But the timing was such that it remains difficult to doubt Truman’s desire to associate himself in the public mind with victory in Korea, and with the victor.
MacArthur was anyway the least tractable of men. The consequence of this apparently blatantly political act by the President was to cause him to approach the meeting in a mood of cynicism bordering upon contempt. He flew to Wake Island on October 15, 1950, entirely unreceptive to open discussion of serious issues. When Truman stepped down onto the tarmac the following morning to be greeted by his theater commander, the general did not salute. He shook hands, as an equal. “I’ve been a long time meeting you,” said Truman. “I hope it won’t be so long next time,” said MacArthur with historic triteness. They talked alone for an hour in a Quonset hut on the edge of the airstrip. Both Acheson and Marshall had declined to join Truman on the trip. Acheson afterward shook his head about the folly of private talks, “the sort of lethal things which chiefs of state get into” that lead to disastrous misunderstandings about points of view and decisions. On this occasion, according to Truman’s subsequent account, MacArthur assured him that the Chinese would not attack, that victory was imminent, that he himself had no political ambitions. Then the two men emerged into the mounting Pacific heat and drove across to an airport office building for a full-dress meeting with their entourages.
Even at this, no formal record was taken. MacArthur told the gathering that “formal resistance will end throughout North and South Korea by Thanksgiving.” He planned to withdraw the Eighth Army to Japan by Christmas, leaving X Corps as an occupation force. He reiterated his view that even in the unlikely event that the Chinese intervened, “now that we have bases for our air force in Korea, if the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang there would be the greatest slaughter.” If the Russians provided the Chinese with air support, their competence was so limited “that I believe the Russian air would bomb the Chinese as often as they would bomb us.” There was some desultory discussion about the political future of Korea, in which MacArthur warmly supported Syngman Rhee’s claims to primacy. Truman agreed, “We must make it plain that we are supporting the Rhee government, and propaganda can go to hell.” An hour and a half after it began, the meeting broke up. Truman invited MacArthur to stay for lunch, but the general demurred. Urgent military business called him to Tokyo. To his surprise, he found himself facing a brief awards ceremony, at which Truman presented him with his fifth Distinguished Service Medal. Amid eager public protestations of goodwill toward his commander in the field, Truman took off from the airstrip, declaring to reporters, “I’ve never had a more satisfactory conference since I’ve been President.”
MacArthur left for Tokyo in a rage. He considered himself diminished by the summons to be cross-questioned by a group of political hacks for whom he felt only contempt. “Who was that young whippersnapper who was asking questions?” he demanded insistently, until his staff divined that he referred to Dean Rusk, the Assistant Secretary of State. “That conference,” wrote MacArthur later, “made me realize that a curious, and sinister, change was taking place in Washington. The defiant, rallying figure that had been Franklin Roosevelt was gone. Instead, there was a tendency towards temporizing rather than fighting it through.”3
With hindsight, the Wake Island conference can be seen as a disastrous landmark in the Korean conflict, as fatal to the interests of the Truman Administration as to those of the tenant of the Dai Ichi. Before Wake, Washington had been given ample grounds to doubt the tractability and judgment of MacArthur. Having summoned the general to meet the President, however, the Washington delegation signally failed to use the opportunity to drive home to MacArthur his absolute responsibility to accept instructions from his government. Instead, they allowed themselves to be impressed by his charisma, his sublime assurance, his omniscience about unfolding events in the Far East. They went home reassured that Chinese or Soviet intervention in Korea was not a significant danger. MacArthur, meanwhile, returned to Tokyo with all his antipathy to the leaders of the Administration confirmed. Whatever Truman and his party had done at Wake, this would have been unlikely to deflect the victorious MacArthur from his chosen course. Yet, by failing to use the opportunity to pursue a serious, prearranged agenda, by causing the Supreme Commander to fly 2,000 miles from his headquarters in the midst of a campaign merely to exchange banalities, Truman and his associates diminished, rather than reasserted, their authority over the general. It is difficult to regard Truman’s initiation of the Wake meeting as other than a serious error of judgment by the President, prompted by uncharacteristically frivolous political considerations. Its cost to his stature in dealing with MacArthur, his weakening of his own position in the months that followed, are hard to overestimate.
• • •
On October 19, Pyongyang fell. General Paek Sun Yup led the 1st ROK Division into the city, the infantry clinging to the hulls of American armor. They swept aside the flimsy Communist barricades and clattered through almost empty streets. Most of the civilians had fled or were in hiding. Paek felt “utterly exhilarated. I had left five years earlier as a refugee. Now I was back with 10,000 men, 100 guns, and a battalion of M-46 tanks.”4 Kim Il Sung and his government had fled into the northern fastnesses. Fascinated, the South Korean and American officers poked among the chaos of his abandoned office in the old Japanese provincial governor’s residence. There was an orgy of mutual souvenir photograph-taking, for this was the first war in which every soldier—among the UN at least—carried a camera in his pack. An American civil affairs officer, Colonel Archibald Melchior, chose a council of “representative non-Communist citizens” to run the enemy’s capital from North Koreans plucked almost arbitrarily from the streets. “We thought the war was over,” said General Paek. “The North Koreans were now completely wiped out, throwing away their weapons as we met them.” On October 20, from MacArthur’s headquarters, Colonel Charles Willoughby circulated an intelligence summary throughout Far East Command:
“Organized resistance on any large scale has ceased to be an enemy capability. Indications are that the North Korean military and political headquarters may have fled into Manchuria. Communications with, and consequent control of, the enemy’s field units have dissipated to a point of ineffectiveness. In spite of these indications of disorganization, there are no signs, at the moment, that the enemy intends to surrender. He continues to retain the capability of fighting small-scale delaying actions against UN pressure. . . .”
• • •
While the Eighth Army pushed north from Seoul, X Corps was in motion in the east. The 1st Marine Division had embarked at Inchon. Alongside the Marines, the 7th Division was assigned to move south to Pusan to embark for Wonsan. Spirits in the formation were not high. The 7th’s limited experience of combat during the advance from Inchon had done little to convince them of their own effectiveness. Lieutenant Jim Sheldon and his platoon of the 17th Infantry were sent on a motor patrol to secure an ammunition factory, which they found deserted. But a few hours after their arrival they were dismayed to encounter a column of North Koreans arriving to replenish their stocks, which provoked a little firefight in which the Americans lost four wounded. There was much wild firing at shadows in the darkness that night. In the days that followed, a succession of successful minor skirmishes with Communist stragglers began to persuade them that they were quite competent soldiers. Their commanders thought otherwise, and embarked upon a hasty field-training program. This ended abruptly when sixteen men were killed and eighty wounded by white phosphorus bombs from their own 4.2-inch mortar company during a demonstration exercise before spectators. It was in the aftermath of this grim fiasco that they were ordered to move to Pusan: “Morale in the regiment was pretty low,” said Sheldon.
• • •
On the LSTs, plowing north toward Wonsan, the Marines cleaned their weapons and equipment, talked and slept with little sense of stress. O. P. Smith was exultant about the showing of his men in the battle for Seoul, optimistic that even when the war was over, the division had staked a formidable claim to be retained under arms. Smith’s Operations officer, Al Bowser, nursing a bad cold, was chiefly preoccupied with the problem of where the formation might spend the winter. He had no thought for the far northern mountains or the Yalu, but merely for some coastal location where conditions might be made endurable if they had to remain. But with luck, they would not. With the North Koreans in headlong retreat, the war could be over in a matter of weeks. If that was the case, the Marines had already been told that two regiments would return at once to the United States, leaving only one regiment for garrison duty in Japan.
The Marine landing at Wonsan was seriously delayed by Communist mines blocking the harbor entrance. On October 12 two minesweepers were lost, impacting on Russian-built mines. It took two weeks, and cost three more minesweepers, before the field was cleared. To the intense irritation and discomfort of Smith and his men, they wallowed offshore in the transports while the Navy bustled hither and thither. Then, to their embarrassment, the Americans learned that the South Koreans were there before them. The ROK 3rd and Capital Divisions had entered Wonsan on October 10, after a dramatic two-week dash from the 38th Parallel. The Capital Division was already fifty miles north and still going. The 1st Marine Division staged its amphibious landing at Wonsan on October 25, twelve days after its own advance and technical parties had arrived by land and air. Even Bob Hope was there before them. To their profound chagrin, by a stroke which entered Marine legend, the entertainer staged a USO show in Wonsan the night before the division stormed ashore to take possession. The 7th Division suffered even more acute delays and counterorders before being put ashore at Iwon in the last days of October and the first days of November. X Corps was at last deployed, in time for MacArthur’s last act. Men’s thoughts were chiefly addressed to going home.
• • •
As the Eighth Army’s drive north continued, MacArthur made plain his contempt for the carefully drawn niceties of Washington and the UN about restricting movement near the Chinese border to South Korean forces. He responded witheringly when he heard of a British proposal for the establishment of a buffer zone south of the Yalu, jointly policed by China and the UN: “The widely reported British desire to appease the Chinese Communists by giving them a strip of North Korea finds its historic precedent in the action taken at Munich on September 29, 1938. . . . To give up any portion of North Korea to the aggression of the Chinese Communists would be the greatest defeat of the free world in recent times. Indeed, to yield to so immoral a proposition would bankrupt our leadership and influence in Asia, and render untenable our position both politically and morally.”5
When he issued orders, on October 20, for “all concerned” within his command to prepare for a “maximum effort” to advance rapidly to the border of North Korea, the Joint Chiefs made no attempt to interfere. Fear of Chinese intervention had sunk so low that on October 23, at a joint meeting in Washington of the British and American Chiefs of Staff, Bradley declared soothingly, “We all agree that, if the Chinese Communists come into Korea, we get out.” On October 24, MacArthur’s new directive removed all remaining restrictions on the movement of American troops toward the Yalu. Walker and Almond were “authorized to use any and all ground forces as necessary, to secure all of North Korea.” The Joint Chiefs in Washington queried this order, which was “a matter of some concern here.” MacArthur brushed them aside. General Collins and his colleagues were in no doubt that they were being flatly disobeyed by the commander in the field. In the same week they requested MacArthur to issue a statement setting at rest fears in the UN Security Council that the Chinese might move across the Yalu to protect their vital Suiho electrical generating plant unless this was declared safe from UN military action. MacArthur declined to give such an assurance unless he was sure the plant was not powering Communist munitions production. Yet again, with the war almost over, the Joint Chiefs showed their unwillingness to precipitate a confrontation. Washington resigned itself to playing the hand against the Communists MacArthur’s way.
“We are going to go ahead and force the issue now,” a Department of State spokesman told a correspondent in Washington.6 The decision to advance north across the 38th Parallel was a classic example of military opportunity becoming the engine of action at the expense of political desirability. No rigorous debate was carried to a conclusion about UN, or U.S., objectives in occupying the North. The very great political and diplomatic hazards were submerged by the public perception of the prospect of outright military victory. At the root of American action lay a contempt, conscious or unconscious, for the capabilities of Mao Tse Tung’s nation and armed forces. The Chinese Communists were perceived as a sinister ideological force in Asia, but not a formidable military one. Far greater courage and determination would have been required from the Truman Administration for a decision to halt the Eighth Army at the 38th Parallel than was demanded for acquiescence in MacArthur’s drive to victory. If there remained a measure of apprehension within the Administration about entering North Korea, there was also the powerful scent of triumphalism among many prominent Americans. Harold Stassen declared in a speech in support of Republican candidates on November 5 that the war in Korea was “the direct result of five years of building up Chinese Communist strength through the blinded, blundering American-Asiatic policy of the present national administration . . . five years of coddling Chinese Communists, five years of undermining General MacArthur, five years of snubbing friendly freedom-loving Asiatics, and five years of appeasing the arch-Communist, Mao Tse Tung.” Now Mao was to be appeased no longer. American arms were being carried to the very frontier of his vast land.