The Cold War (12 page)

The cost would be heavy for the U.N. forces that went to South Korea's aid, but (as in the Persian Gulf War) it would be heaviest for the United States, which supplied half the allied ground troops and almost all the air and naval forces: Washington spent some $15 billion in Korea and lost thirty-four thousand dead. The cost to the North and South Koreans, as well as the Communist Chinese, was much higher. But by the end of the summer of 1953, the goal of reversing North Korea's aggression had been realized. And on a larger scale, the United Nations had demonstrated that for the sake of maintaining global peace it was willing to make war on a truly world-class level—provided, of course, that the world's richest power was willing to foot much of the cost in money and lives.

DAVID MCCULLOUGH

In the history of the Cold War—in the entire history of American arms, for that matter—few personal showdowns have been quite so freighted with consequence as the confrontation between Harry S. Truman and Douglas MacArthur. How often do two such dominating figures find themselves on a collision course from which neither is willing to veer? On the one hand, there was Truman, the artillery captain of World War I, the accidental president, the surprise victor of the election of 1948, whose decisions at the start of the Cold War would define the West's diplomatic and military policies for the next four decades. On the other, there was MacArthur, a fighting division commander in 1918, a Medal of Honor winner, the supreme commander of Allied forces in the southwest Pacific during World War II, the master of the operational art turned benevolent autocrat who had presided over the reconstruction—and democratization—of Japan, who had led the U.N. forces in Korea. This American Kitchener was a genuine hero, but then (although people did not recognize it at the time) so was Truman. The two men distrusted each other at long distance: MacArthur had not set foot in the United States since 1937. They would meet only once, and then for a few morning hours in the Pacific, at Wake Island on October 5, 1950. “Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MacArthur,” Truman had once noted in his diary. “Don't see how a country can produce such men as Robert E. Lee, John J. Pershing, Eisenhower, and Bradley and at the same time produce Custers, Pattons, and MacArthurs.” The feeling was mutual.

It was the crisis of the Korean War and MacArthur's repeated acts of insubordination that brought on the ultimate confrontation. He was a man no one dared to challenge until it was almost too late. As the disaster
of the summer of 1950 changed to the triumph of Inchon and then disaster again, and a third world war loomed, Truman would come to one of the most difficult decisions of his presidency.

DAVID McCULLOUGH is one of the most deservedly popular historians of our time. His
Truman
—from which the following account is excerpted—won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for biography;
The Path Between the Seas,
his description of the building of the Panama Canal, won a National Book Award for history. His other books include
The Johnstown Flood, The Great Bridge, Mornings on Horseback,
and, most recently,
John Adams,
which earned him his second Pulitzer Prize for biography. Millions know him as the host, and often the narrator, of television shows such as
The American Experience
. The past president of the Society of American Historians, McCullough has also won the Francis Parkman Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Award.

I
T WAS, IN MANY RESPECTS
, one of the darkest chapters in American military history. But MacArthur, now in overall command of the U.N. forces, was trading space for time—time to pour in men and supplies at the port of Pusan—and the wonder was the North Koreans had been kept from overrunning South Korea straightaway. Despite their suffering and humiliation, the brutal odds against them, the American and Republic of Korea units had done what they were supposed to, almost miraculously. They had held back the landslide, said Truman, who would rightly call it one of the most heroic rearguard actions on record.

In the first week of July, MacArthur requested thirty thousand American ground troops, to bring the four divisions of his Eighth Army to full strength. Just days later, on July 9, the situation had become so “critical” that he called for a doubling of his forces. Four more divisions were urgently needed, he said in a cable that jolted Washington.

The hard reality was that the army had only ten divisions. In Western Europe there was just one, and as former British prime minister Winston Churchill had noted in a speech in London, the full Allied force of twelve divisions in Western Europe faced a Soviet threat of eighty divisions. The NATO allies were exceedingly concerned lest the United States become too involved in distant Korea. Years of slashing defense expenditures, as a means to balance the budget, had taken a heavy toll. For all its vaunted nuclear supremacy, the nation was quite unprepared for war. But now, in these “weeks of slaughter and heartbreak,” that was to change dramatically and with immense, far-reaching consequences.

On Wednesday, July 19, first in a special message to Congress, then in an address to the nation, Truman said the attack on Korea demanded that the United States send more men, equipment, and supplies. Beyond that, the realities of
the “world situation” required still greater American military strength. He called for an emergency appropriation of $10 billion—the final sum submitted would be $11.6 billion, or nearly as much as the entire $13 billion military budget originally planned for the fiscal year—and announced he was both stepping up the draft and calling up certain National Guard units.

“Korea is a small country thousands of miles away, but what is happening there is important to every American,” he told the nation, standing stone-faced in the heat of the television lights, a tangle of wires and cables at his feet. By their “act of raw aggression … I repeat, it was raw aggression,” the North Koreans had violated the U.N. Charter, and though American forces were making the “principal effort” to save the Republic of South Korea, they were fighting under a U.N. command and a U.N. flag, and this was a “landmark in man-kind's long search for a rule of law among nations.”

As a call to arms, it was not especially inspirational. Nor did he once use the word “war” to describe what was happening in Korea. But then neither was there any question about his sincerity, nor was he the least evasive about what would be asked of the country. The “job” was long and difficult. It meant increased taxes, rationing if necessary, “stern days ahead.” In another televised address at summer's end, he would announce plans to double the armed forces to nearly three million men. Congress appropriated the money: $48.2 billion for military spending in fiscal 1950–51, then $60 billion for fiscal 1951–52.

Was he considering use of the atomic bomb in Korea? Truman was asked at a press conference the last week of July. No, he said. Did he plan to get out of Washington anytime soon? No. He would stay on the job.

That Truman was less than fond or admiring of his Far Eastern commander, Douglas MacArthur, was well known to his staff and a cause of concern at the Pentagon. Truman's opinion in 1950 seems to have been no different from what it had been in 1945, at the peak of MacArthur's renown, when, in his journal, Truman had described the general as “Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat,” a “play actor and bunco man.” The president, noted his press aide Eben Ayers, expressed “little regard or respect” for MacArthur, calling him a “supreme egotist” who thought himself “something of a god.” But working with people whom one did not like or admire was part of life—particularly the politician's life. Firing the five-star Far Eastern commander would have been very nearly unthinkable. John Foster Dulles told Truman confidentially that MacArthur should be dispensed with as soon as possible. Dulles, the most prominent Republican
spokesman on foreign policy and a special adviser to the State Department, had returned from a series of meetings with MacArthur in Tokyo, convinced the seventy-year-old general was well past his prime and a potential liability. Dulles advised Truman to bring MacArthur home and retire him before he caused trouble. But that, replied Truman, was easier said than done. He reminded Dulles of the reaction there would be in the country, so great was MacArthur's “heroic standing.” Nonetheless, at this stage Truman expressed no doubt about MacArthur's ability. If anything, he seemed to have been banking on it.

By the first week in August, American and ROK forces, dug in behind the Naktong River, had set up the final defense line to be known as the Pusan Perimeter, a thinly held front forming an arc of 130 miles around the port of Pusan. On the map it looked like a bare toehold on the peninsula. On the ground the fighting went on as savagely as before. But the retreat was over. At his briefing for the president on Saturday, August 12, in his customary, dry, cautious way, Omar Bradley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, described the situation, for the first time, as “fluid but improving.”

Truman's special assistant Averell Harriman, meanwhile, had returned from a hurried mission to Tokyo, bringing the details of a daring new MacArthur plan. Harriman had been dispatched to tell the general of Truman's determination to see that he had everything he needed, but also to impress upon him Truman's urgent desire to avoid any move that might provoke a third world war. This was Truman's uppermost concern, and there must be no misunderstanding. In particular, MacArthur was to “stay clear” of Chiang Kai-shek. Truman had instructed Harriman to tell MacArthur that the Chinese Nationalist leader, now on Formosa, must not become the catalyst for a war with the Chinese Communists.

MacArthur had no reservations about the decision to fight in Korea, “absolutely none,” Harriman reported to Truman at Blair House. MacArthur was certain neither the Chinese Communists nor the Soviets would intervene. MacArthur had assured Harriman that of course, as a soldier, he would do as the president ordered concerning Chiang Kai-shek, though something about his tone as he said this had left Harriman wondering.

Of greater urgency and importance was what Harriman had to report of a plan to win the war with one bold stroke. For weeks there had been talk at the Pentagon of a MacArthur strategy to outflank the enemy, to hit from behind, by
amphibious landing on the western shore of Korea at the port of Inchon, two hundred miles northwest of Pusan. Inchon had tremendous tides—thirty feet or more—and no beaches on which to land, only seawalls. Thus an assault would have to strike directly into the city itself, and only a full tide would carry the landing craft clear to the seawall. In two hours after high tide, the landing craft would be stuck in the mud.

To Bradley it was the riskiest military proposal he had ever heard. But as MacArthur stressed, the Japanese had landed successfully at Inchon in 1904, and the very “impracticabilities” would help ensure the all-important element of surprise. As Wolfe had astonished and defeated Montcalm at Quebec in 1759 by scaling the impossible cliffs near the Plains of Abraham, so, MacArthur said, he would astonish and defeat the North Koreans by landing at the impossible port of Inchon. But there was little time. The attack had to come before the onset of the Korean winter exacted more casualties than the battlefield. The tides at Inchon would be right on September 15. Truman made no commitment one way or the other, but Harriman left Blair House convinced that Truman approved the plan.

By early August, General Bradley could tell the president that American strength at Pusan was up to 50,000, which, with another 45,000 ROKs and small contingents of U.N. allies, made a total U.N. ground force of nearly 100,000. Still, the prospect of diverting additional American forces for MacArthur's Inchon scheme pleased the Joint Chiefs not at all. Bradley continued to view it as “the wildest kind” of plan.

Then, on Saturday, August 26, the Associated Press broke a statement from MacArthur to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, in which he strongly defended Chiang Kai-shek and the importance of Chiang's control of Formosa: “Nothing could be more fallacious than the threadbare argument by those who advocate appeasement and defeatism in the Pacific that if we defend Formosa we alienate continental Asia.” It was exactly the sort of dabbling in policy that MacArthur had assured Harriman he would, as a good soldier, refrain from.

Truman was livid. He would later say he considered but rejected the idea of relieving MacArthur of field command then and there and replacing him with Bradley. “It would have been difficult to avoid the appearance of demotion, and I had no desire to hurt General MacArthur personally.”

But whatever his anger at MacArthur, to whatever degree the incident had
increased his dislike—or distrust—of the general, Truman decided to give MacArthur his backing. “The JCS inclined toward postponing Inchon until such time that we were certain Pusan could hold,” remembered Bradley. “But Truman was now committed.” On August 28, the Joint Chiefs sent MacArthur their tentative approval.

In time to come, little would be said or written about Truman's part in the matter—that as commander in chief he, and he alone, was the one with the final say on Inchon. He could have said no, and certainly the weight of opinion among his military advisers would have been on his side. But he did not. He took the chance, made the decision for which he was neither to ask nor to receive anything like the credit he deserved.

In the early hours of September 15—it was afternoon in Washington, September 14—the amphibious landing at Inchon began. As promised by MacArthur, the attack took the enemy by total surprise; and as also promised by MacArthur, the operation was an overwhelming success that completely turned the tables on the enemy.

The invasion force numbered 262 ships and 70,000 men of the X Corps, with the 1st Marine Division leading the assault. Inchon fell in little more than a day. In eleven days Seoul was retaken. Meantime, as planned, General Walton Walker's Eighth Army broke out of the Pusan Perimeter and started north. Seldom in military history had there been such a dramatic turn in fortune. By September 27 more than half the North Korean Army had been trapped in a huge pincer movement. By October 1, U.N. forces were at the 38th Parallel and South Korea was under U.N. control. In two weeks it had become an entirely different war.