The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (45 page)

I
NCHON WAS TO
be Douglas MacArthur’s last great success, and his alone. It was a brilliant, daring gamble. It surely saved thousands of American lives just as he had predicted. He had fought for it almost alone against the doubts of the principal Navy planners and very much against the wishes of the Joint Chiefs. Inchon was Douglas MacArthur at his best: audacious, original, unpredictable, thinking outside the conventional mode, and of course, it would turn out, very lucky as well. It was why two presidents, who had grave personal and professional reservations about him, had held on to him nonetheless. “There was one day in MacArthur’s life when he was a military genius: September 15, 1950,” wrote his biographer Geoffrey Perret. “In the life of every great Commander there is one battle that stands out above all the rest, the supreme test of generalship that places him among the other military immortals. For MacArthur that battle was Inchon.”

He had understood Inchon’s value from the start, that it was the best way to employ his superior technology when his troops were still badly understrength and threatened with being driven off the peninsula. From the beginning, he was determined to avoid a strategy in which American forces were ground up in traditional infantry tactics in harsh terrain by a numerically superior enemy. He eventually carried the day, and in the end it was everything he had promised it would be, although he was so enamored of capturing Seoul—so great a public relations triumph—that he and the officers under him did not throw out a good net to block the retreating North Korean troops, and he partially diminished the value of his own strike. If there was one serious flaw in his plan, it was the totality of his success, which gave him, if anything, more leverage over Washington and the Chiefs. Because he had stood for it against everyone else, on all other issues afterward it was hard to stand up to him. He had been right on Inchon and those who doubted him had been wrong, his supporters now argued when doubters subsequently grew nervous as he pushed his troops ever closer to the Yalu. He had rolled the dice once against great odds, and it made it harder to stop him as he pushed forward toward an even greater roll.

Douglas MacArthur had made the mistake of underestimating the abilities of the North Korean forces in the first days of the war. (He had spoken of what would happen if he could put only one division, the First Cav, into Korea—“Why heavens you’d see those fellows scuddle up to the Manchurian border so quick, you would see no more of them.”) But he soon came to realize that he was fighting a ferocious, resilient, well-led, and courageous force, “as capable and tough,” he told Averell Harriman in an early meeting in Tokyo, as any soldiers he had ever encountered. That assessment immediately affected his sense of strategy. Therefore, well before the American troops were pressured into the Pusan Perimeter (in danger of being “like beef cattle in the slaughterhouse,” MacArthur later said), he was already focused on an amphibious landing that could bring superior American technology to bear in a way that might actually turn the war around with a single, decisive stroke.

The lessons of World War I were always with him. The British, French, and German generals, he believed, had betrayed their men again and again by sending them forward in hopeless charges against the very heart of enemy machine gun and artillery emplacements. It was a war of lion-hearted soldiers, it was always believed, commanded by donkey-brained generals. When it was all over and the awful casualties were assessed, it was almost impossible to tell who had been the victor and who the loser in the set piece battles on the Western Front. Part of MacArthur’s belief that Europe was a decadent place, less important than Asia in the American future, was rooted in what he had observed in World War I. The generals on the winning side had been so careless with their men as to make him believe they were representatives of a bygone era. World War I had taught him the dangers of frontal challenges. In his deft campaign in the Pacific, vast island-hopping distances accomplished with minimal casualties, he struck more often than not at islands that were not Japanese strongpoints, a strategy premised on what he had learned in the first war. It was part of his immense complexity as a man that he could sound, in his often overripe Kiplingesque sentences, like a bloodthirsty warrior who loved the thrill of battle almost as an end in itself, but when an actual battle was being planned, could be surprisingly cautious when it came to the lives of his men.

He had used American air and sea power to strike where the Japanese least expected it, isolating and stranding their forward people and strongest positions, rather than contesting them, and he intended to do exactly that again in Korea. As early as July 4, he was already thinking of landing behind In Min Gun lines. He had little sense of how poorly trained, equipped, and led the first wave of American troops he had dispatched to Korea were. In no way were they ready for a complex amphibious operation. At first, the operation was to
be called Operation Bluehearts, and it was to take place on July 22. But that was a hopeless schedule. So Operation Bluehearts was junked, but the idea of an amphibious landing was not. On July 10, when Lieutenant General Lem Shepherd, the Marine commander in the Pacific, visited Tokyo, MacArthur had wistfully said that he wished he had a Marine division on hand, and if he did, he’d land them behind North Korean lines. His hand went to the map of Korea. “I’d land them here…at Inchon.” At that point Shepherd had suggested that MacArthur ask for a Marine division—it would, after all, serve both their interests. MacArthur needed troops, and the Marines badly needed roles and missions. The pressure to cut back the defense budgets had made the Marines’ institutional future shaky, and they seemed momentarily to be without adequate political sponsorship. Both the Army and the Air Force appeared eager to usurp the Marines’ traditional roles. MacArthur was all too aware of the vulnerability of the Marines: he had been sure Shepherd would jump at his suggestion, and he had. The Marines could, Shepherd promised MacArthur, have a division ready for him by September 1.

The more MacArthur thought about an amphibious landing, the more he fixed on Inchon. One hundred and fifty miles northwest of Pusan, it was on the west coast, well behind the North Korean lines. It was the principal port for Seoul, some twenty miles away, depending on how direct the route was, and even closer to Kimpo, the country’s main airfield. Inchon was also potentially a disaster looking for a place to happen. Any amphibious landing was fraught with danger, but Inchon seemed like it might be far worse than any other site. “We drew up a list of every natural and geographic handicap—and Inchon had all of them,” said Lieutenant Commander Arlie Capps, one of the staff members on the team of Admiral James Doyle, the Navy’s top amphibious planner. Almost everyone agreed that Inchon had the look of a place created by some evil genius who hated the Navy. It had no beaches, only seawalls and piers. The small Wolmi-do (Moon Tip) Island, presumed to be well garrisoned, sat smack in the middle of the harbor, effectively guarding the port and splitting the landing zone in two. The currents inside were notoriously fast and tricky—and none of these factors was the worst of Inchon’s perils; the real danger was the tides. Other than the Bay of Fundy, these might be the highest in the world, reaching peaks of thirty-two feet. At low tide, as Robert Heinl wrote in his thoughtful account of the campaign,
Victory at High Tide,
anyone trying to land would have to walk across at least a thousand yards, and at other points up to forty-five hundred yards, of a mud flat, with the gooey consistency of “solidifying chocolate fudge.” It was not so much a beach as it was a potential killing field. If someone had thought to mine the harbor, and some harbors in Korea had already been mined with the help of the Soviets, it would be an unmitigated disaster. “If ever there
was an ideal place for mines, it was Inchon,” said Admiral Arthur Struble, the senior Navy officer in the Pacific. Worse yet, the window of opportunity during which the operation could take place was unbelievably narrow. There were only two days in the near future when the tides would be high enough to permit landing craft access to Inchon’s seawalls and piers: September 15, when the tides would be 31.2 feet high, and October 11, when the height of the tides would again reach 30 feet. There was an additional problem—the morning high tide on September 15 came at 6:59, just forty-five minutes after sunrise; the second high tide was at 7:19
P.M.
, thirty-seven minutes after sunset. Neither was ideal for something as complicated as an amphibious landing. The October date held no attraction: MacArthur was in no mood to wait an additional month with his troops penned up in the Pusan Perimeter, while giving the Communists more time to mine Inchon. The morning of September 15, it would have to be. For MacArthur, it was all or nothing.

Almost everyone else was appalled, most especially the Navy people assigned to plan and execute the landing. Back in Washington the Joint Chiefs were wary, and MacArthur was very much aware of that. Technically they were his superiors, but he saw them as small-bore bureaucrats, men who had gained their power by accommodating themselves to politicians whom he despised. He knew that if he wanted success at Inchon, he had two battles on his hands and the first was with them. He had always expected the Joint Chiefs to oppose the landing. Some of this was his paranoia, but some was reality. He disliked and disrespected Omar Bradley, the chairman, whom he looked on as a pal of Eisenhower (a demerit there), a protégé of Marshall’s (another demerit), and a man who had fought, in his view, without great skill or daring in Europe (a third demerit) with far greater forces than MacArthur had ever been given in the Pacific (a fourth demerit) and had now become close to Truman (the ultimate demerit).

If their relationship was terrible, then most of the enmity, as usual, was on MacArthur’s side. Each man had collected a good deal of baggage over the years. MacArthur was sure Bradley hated him because he had vetoed a major command for Bradley during the planning for the invasion of Japan. There was no evidence of that, but there was a good deal of evidence that Bradley, like other senior figures in the postwar national security world, was uncomfortable with so senior a figure being effectively outside his reach. MacArthur believed (with good reason) that in 1949 Bradley had been a co-conspirator in a plot sponsored by Dean Acheson to limit his power in Japan by splitting his job. MacArthur got wind of it and was furious. Later, Admiral James Doyle, who did most of the planning for the Inchon landing, mentioned to MacArthur Bradley’s lack of warmth when the two had met in Tokyo. “Bradley is a farmer,” MacArthur told Doyle.

The Chiefs were wary, in no small part because of the risk itself, so dangerous an undertaking involving so large a share of America’s available troops. (MacArthur himself spoke of Inchon being a five thousand to one shot.) But some of their wariness stemmed from intra-service rivalries. For a variety of reasons, some noble, some less so, almost everyone was against the plan. Among the exceptions were Averell Harriman and Matt Ridgway, and in time Truman himself, who gave his trust in the end to the man in the field. Inchon’s lead planner, Admiral Doyle, had significant doubts of his own; and like many other men he had to deal with Ned Almond, who became MacArthur’s lead man on Inchon, and Doyle quickly came to dislike him for his peremptory, bullying style and his tendency to isolate MacArthur from things he needed to hear. If they were going ahead, Doyle believed, then MacArthur must know all the terrible risks involved, and he told Almond this. “The General is not interested in the details,” Almond replied, but an irritated Doyle was not to be brushed aside. “He
must
be made aware of the details,” the admiral insisted. In time he won his case, and made sure that MacArthur knew those details, for in the details were the dangers.

It was as if Almond had tried to separate Doyle from doing his job, because MacArthur was always the great MacArthur, a man above mundane details. Those lesser details—whether or not a plan would work—could be dealt with by lesser commanders who were lesser men. That grandeur was implicit in the way MacArthur dealt with everything and everyone. Now he prepared for one of the great performances of his life—convincing the Navy and other doubters to go along with Inchon. A great performance was needed before the representatives of the Navy and the Joint Chiefs, and a great performance he would give.

He was still the most theatrical of men. In World War I he had worn riding breeches, a turtleneck sweater, and a four-foot scarf—“the fighting dude,” his men called him. He did not merely seek the limelight, he had an addiction to it. He was aware of camera positioning, always making sure that his famous jaw jutted at just the right angle for photographs. Indeed, as he grew older, not only did his staff censor all news photos, ensuring that nothing insufficiently heroic went out, but they tried to impose certain ground rules for camera angles. Not only was he to be shot, if at all possible, from the right side, but one
Stars and Stripes
photographer had been under orders to shoot the general while kneeling himself, in order to make him look more majestic. He always wore his battered old campaign hat. It was his trademark, and no photographer was ever to be allowed to show that he was partially bald, and working on what would be known eventually as a major comb-over. He needed to wear glasses in his office but did not like to be seen wearing them, and so they too
were not to be photographed. That everything was a performance had always been true. “I had never met so vivid, so captivating, so magnetic a man,” William Allen White, the famed editor from Emporia, Kansas, wrote after meeting him during World War I; MacArthur, he added, “was all that Barrymore and John Drew could hope to be.” Bob Eichelberger, his senior Army commander in World War II, dealing with the censorship of wartime, had coded his letters for his wife. In them, MacArthur was always Sarah—as in Sarah Bernhardt, the great actress of that era. “Do you know General MacArthur?” Dwight Eisenhower was once asked by a woman. “Not only have I met him, ma’am,” Eisenhower answered, “I studied dramatics under him for five years in Washington and four in the Philippines.”