The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (56 page)

So the positions were marked out. Stalin had the stronger hand. He knew the Chinese intended to intervene, more for reasons of their own than for any love of the Koreans, and he knew they were dependent upon him for air and naval technology if they were ever to assault Taiwan. Mao was furious with the Soviet pullback. On October 12, three days before Chinese troops were to cross the Yalu, Mao sent a cable to Peng telling him to put the previous war orders aside for the moment. All troops were to stay in their current positions. He and the rest of the leadership would now have to reconsider. Without the expected air cover, a difficult decision, but one that he felt sure his army could handle, had just become infinitely harder, the casualties likely to be far greater.

Peng too was angry about the Russian decision—it was his men who were now at risk. He reportedly threatened to resign as commander. But none of this
greatly affected Mao’s thinking. It is quite possible that he was always suspicious of the Soviets and never thought they would do their part. Certainly his decisions had always been based on what was good as he saw it, for
China,
not for the Soviets or the Koreans. Mao was going to send troops in the end because not to do it would show that the new China, his China, was powerless around its borders. So again, Russian air cover or no, he spoke forcefully before his colleagues for intervention. They would be getting a great deal of Russian military gear, and the Russians, he added, would at least protect China’s territorial sovereignty. He asked Peng not to resign as commander. Even without Soviet air cover, he believed, they could still fight the Americans successfully. Their superior moral spirit would be the deciding factor. When the meeting was over, the Chinese had decided—again—to intervene. They would attack the South Korean troops first, Mao told Zhou in a cable. “In short, we believe that we should enter the war and that we must enter the war. Entering the war can be most rewarding, failing to do so may cause great harm.” Zhou was to continue negotiating with the Russians, he said, to try to maximize the amount of aid they would get. Chinese troops would set up essentially defensive positions in the mountainous areas of the extreme north. October 19 was set as the new D-day to cross the Yalu.

On October 16, Peng met with his division commanders to go over plans and to bolster morale. What he told them was this: if they did not fight the Americans here, they might have to do it on Chinese soil. But he had come back to them without Soviet air cover, and he still faced considerable uneasiness among his subordinate commanders. A number of senior officers in the field had sent him a cable expressing their reservations about fighting the Americans without air protection. “The enemy,” the cable said, “could concentrate large numbers of planes, artillery and tanks to wage heavy attacks against us without any worries.” The terrain would make it difficult to create defensive positions “in the chilly weather and out of frozen soil. If the enemy started an all-out offensive it would be less than possible for us to hold our ground.” The commanders wanted at least to wait until spring. They said they spoke for the majority of battle commanders.

Because of that dissent, Peng flew to Beijing on October 18. Mao listened to his report about the uneasiness of so many senior commanders, but saw no possibility of changing the course of events—or altering the time schedule. The decisions were now finalized. The troops would begin their crossing on the night of the nineteenth. They would cross after dusk and stop moving just before dawn broke each morning. In order to gain experience, only two or three divisions would cross the first night. Peng flew back to Andong and told his subordinate commanders that any additional challenges to the decision
would be viewed as insubordination. The way for the collision of the two countries, the United States and China, was now set. On the night of October 19, the crossing began. It went smoothly, although not all the troops were entirely enthusiastic. “The gate of hell,” some of those who had once served with the Nationalists called the bridge they took over the Yalu.

There was one other matter to be settled, and that was who would command the troops. Mao had decided on Peng. But Kim Il Sung thought the Chinese would let
him
command their troops. He obviously needed to be reeducated: there was no possibility that a Korean leader, one that the Chinese regarded with complete contempt, was going to be put in charge of Chinese troops. Peng himself was contemptuous of the way that the North Koreans had gone about the business of fighting the South. “Adventurism is all one can see! Military control has been extremely childish. On the nineteenth Pyongyang issued an order to defend to the death. As a result 30,000 defenders could not escape [from advancing UN troops],” he had written in one report. For a time, the Chinese held back on letting Kim know that he was no longer in charge of the war. It was essentially a Chinese command now.

O
N OCTOBER
15, five and a half years into his presidency, Harry Truman finally met Douglas MacArthur. By that time, MacArthur’s troops were racing toward the Yalu, and Chinese troops were four days from crossing the river heading south. Truman had wanted to meet with MacArthur from the moment he assumed the presidency. Twice the general had turned down what were in effect presidential commands to return to Washington. Now, post-Inchon, it was a good time to get together, the White House believed. For there were politics to the meeting too: the off-year election was coming up in early November; Inchon had been a great success; and Truman and the people around him, after taking so much heat during the early days of the war, were not above trying to share some of the glory that now surrounded MacArthur.

Truman, a man of elemental common sense, had always felt that he did well with people when he sat down and talked with them. Truman believed that he could read other people quite skillfully when they were face-to-face, and they could see that he played it straight, that he did not waste other people’s time and on serious issues meant what he said. He had connected with generals like Eisenhower and Bradley, but not MacArthur. Mostly what he sensed about his commander was his grandiosity. Two days before the meeting, while on the way to Wake, he wrote a note to his cousin Nellie Noland, saying, “Have to talk to God’s right hand man tomorrow.”

In the end what drove the meeting from the White House side was politics. George Elsey, a close personal assistant and sometime speechwriter, whose idea the meeting was, and who pushed hard for it, had first suggested it to Truman in late September, right after Seoul was retaken, during a cruise down the Potomac. There was a precedent for it. Late in World War II, Roosevelt had gone to Honolulu to adjudicate issues that had arisen between Admiral Chester Nimitz and MacArthur. Truman at first was unsure about the trip, and finally went along, his special counsel, Charles Murphy, said, because his staff pressured him to go. No one, of course, spoke openly of the politics of it—but it was always there. Some White House people, most particularly Matt Connelly,
the president’s appointments secretary, thought it a mistake, and told the president so. Why? Truman asked him. “When does the king go to the prince?” Connelly answered. Dean Acheson, who believed MacArthur was always a hostile force, thought a trip mixing politics and policy a particularly bad decision. He had, he later said, “a vast distaste for the whole idea,” and wanted no part of it. When Truman asked him to go, he demurred: “While General MacArthur had many of the attributes of a foreign sovereign, I said, and was quite as difficult as any, it did not seem wise to recognize him as one.” Of the Joint Chiefs, only Bradley went. General Marshall, by then secretary of defense, did not choose to go, in part because his own relationship with MacArthur was very poor, and because he did not like mixing politics with national security.

At first Honolulu seemed the most logical venue, but MacArthur insisted that it was dangerous for him to be away from his headquarters for long, so Wake Island was chosen instead, some 4,700 miles from Washington and 1,900 from Tokyo. (One of the real reasons MacArthur did not want to go that far was that he did not like to fly at night.) Nor had MacArthur even wanted to go the shorter distance to Wake. On the way out from Tokyo, the general was in a foul mood, grumbling constantly to John Muccio, the American ambassador to Korea, about being forced to make the trip. What a waste of time, he said, being summoned all this distance primarily for political reasons. Didn’t they know “that he was still fighting a war”? A diva like MacArthur wanted no Washington political diva, especially one from the other party, to share his applause. To fly so far to meet the president violated his unofficial sense of hierarchy: people were to come to him.

Still, the meeting did take place on October 15, 1950, with MacArthur almost openly resentful. The encounter spawned many stories, some not true—in particular one that MacArthur deliberately tried to delay his own plane’s arrival so that Truman would land first and thus have to wait for the general. Others were true—that the general did not salute the president of the United States. Among those surprised by that quite deliberate sign of disrespect was Vernon Walters, a young officer who was then considered a gifted translator and eventually emerged as a figure close to a number of Republican politicians, including Richard Nixon. It was the second sign that MacArthur did not believe anyone from Washington outranked him, Walters thought. The first had come when he had not bothered to greet Secretary of the Army Frank Pace. “In my book,” Walters later wrote, “the Secretary of the Army was the boss of all American soldiers regardless of rank.” But to Walters the real snub was the failure of MacArthur to salute the president. That was a very serious breach of protocol. Truman, Walters noticed, took no note of it. That was the
good thing about being president; if you decided to see something, then it had happened, and if you chose not to, then it had not.

It was no surprise that the meeting began in an atmosphere of mutual suspicion. But it was also true that, on the surface at least—and it was almost all surface—it went very well. It was taking place, after all, at the best moment in the war so far. But there was a serious issue on the agenda, especially in the minds of the Washington team: the nature of Chinese intentions. Mounting rumblings from Beijing about China entering the war—and not just via K. M. Panikkar—had certainly left Washington anxious. How seriously should they be taken? the president and the men around him wondered. The first words from Truman, Vernon Walters later remembered, were: “All of our intelligence indicates that the Chinese are about to intervene.”

The White House had the whip hand in terms of controlling news coverage of the meeting. Truman brought the elite of the White House press corps, but MacArthur was not allowed to bring his favorite Tokyo journalists, especially the wire service reporters from the Associated Press, the United Press, and the International News Service—derisively dubbed “the Palace Guard” by other Tokyo journalists, who often thought their stories could have been written by members of MacArthur’s staff, or the general himself. The fact that they were left behind in Japan only added to MacArthur’s irritation; the control of images was for once beyond his control. It did not enhance his mood.

The site itself could hardly have been more primitive. Nonetheless, the two men seemed to get on reasonably well, or perhaps more accurately, both were on their best behavior. At their first meeting, MacArthur asked if he could smoke his pipe and Truman answered that he could, adding that he had probably had more smoke blown in his face than any man alive. There were actually two meetings at Wake: a private one between Truman and MacArthur, where they talked about Chinese intentions, and a longer one attended by everyone, where the major issue was once again China—and how quickly the war might be over.

There is an excellent transcript of the main meeting. Vernice Anderson, an experienced secretary who worked for Phillip Jessup, a State Department official, was seated just outside the room where the second meeting was taking place, and because the door was left open, she decided to take notes. As a result, there is a complete stenographic record of the conversation. This became quite important a few months later, when the war turned infinitely more bitter, and when MacArthur showed little desire to accept any responsibility for his miscalculations over the Chinese entry.

Victory, MacArthur had assured Truman, “was won in Korea.” After a brief discussion of the postwar future of a unified Korea, Truman asked MacArthur
the critical question—what were the chances of Chinese or Soviet intervention? “Very little,” MacArthur answered. “Had they intervened in the first or second month, it would have been decisive. We are no longer fearful of their intervention. We no longer stand hat in hand. The Chinese have 300,000 men in Manchuria.” Of these, he said, about 100,000 to 125,000 were situated along the Yalu, and only 50,000 or 60,000 could have gotten across it. “They have no air force. Now that we have bases for our Air Force in Korea, if the Chinese tried to get down to Pyongyang it would be the greatest slaughter in the history of mankind.”

As for the threats coming from Beijing, Dean Rusk remembered, MacArthur was quite dismissive. He did not, he said, “fully understand why they [the Chinese] had gone out on such a limb, and that they now must be embarrassed by it.”

Then MacArthur spoke about the coming landing of Tenth Corps at Wonsan and the fact that Pyongyang would fall in a week and that North Korean resistance would effectively be ended by Thanksgiving. He hoped to be able to withdraw the Eighth Army by Christmas. Omar Bradley asked if there was a possibility one of the divisions fighting in Korea could be released for duty in Europe. Yes, the general answered, and suggested the Second Infantry Division, which would have thrilled members of that unit who had fought so hard in the Pusan Perimeter. The paperwork was soon started for moving the Second Division out of Korea.

Neither Truman nor any of his senior staff pushed MacArthur very hard on the details. That was, regrettably, true on the most sensitive of subjects, the instructions they had set out for him concerning the area around the border and what they were going to do if there were signs of a Chinese—or Russian—presence. The news was so good that no one wanted to know more. It was as if what they did not say and did not know would not hurt them. So what would happen if the Chinese
did
enter the war and somehow managed to elude MacArthur’s Air Force was never discussed. Each of the principals, in the name of good manners and good politics, dodged the harder questions. MacArthur could be charming when he wanted to, and though he had grumbled all the way from Tokyo to Wake about their exploiting him for political reasons, he was on his best and most supplicating behavior, telling the president that no commander in history had ever received more support from a president.

Truman, for his part, was no less evasive in dealing with the hard, dangerous questions ahead, especially those posed by the possible entry of the Chinese into the war. No one reminded MacArthur of the embargo against sending UN troops to provinces abutting Manchuria. All of that was deliberate. At one point, when the meeting seemed to be going far too quickly, Dean
Rusk tried to slow it down a bit, fearing that the skeptical press corps would seize on the brevity and write that this confirmed that it was all about public relations. He passed a note to the president suggesting that they go a bit more slowly. Back came the answer, “No, I want to get out of here before we get in trouble.” At the end, before they parted, Truman pinned a Distinguished Service Medal on the general (his fifth), this one “for valor and for courageous devotion to duty and superlative diplomatic skill.” On the way to the airfield, MacArthur asked Truman if he was going to run for reelection. Truman responded by asking MacArthur if
he
had any political plans. None, the general answered: “If you have any general running against you, his name will be Eisenhower, not MacArthur.” Eisenhower, Truman said, did not know the first thing about politics: “His administration would make Grant’s look like a model of perfection.”

The meeting in the end had been false in almost every sense. A potentially great threat to UN forces had been minimized, how to deal with it barely discussed. MacArthur had been more right about the meeting than anyone realized: it had been about sharing the Inchon glory in the last weeks before an off-year election. As the two groups prepared to depart Wake, optimistic statements were issued. “I’ve never had a more satisfactory conference since I’ve been president,” Truman told reporters later that day. A communiqué was drafted and initialed by both men, as one reporter on the scene noted, “as if they were the heads of different governments.” The general, John Gunther noted, seemed restless and in a hurry to get away. He took out his pocket watch, looked at it, rubbed it carefully, and put it back in his pocket. He refused to talk to reporters. “All comments,” he said, “would have to come from the publicity man of the president,” edgy words, as Gunther noted, with a slight stinger in them, for presidents have press secretaries, not publicity men. “Each man,” Acheson wrote later, “was to think an understanding had been established, but each would have a different idea of what it was.”

One of the problems was that each side had a very different view of whether Chinese entry into the war was a good or bad thing. A few weeks later, when it had all gone sour, Matt Ridgway, who had monitored the unraveling of events with a mounting pessimism from Washington, remembered a moment when he and Harriman had visited with MacArthur back in early August 1950. The subject of Taiwan had come up and MacArthur had suddenly become quite passionate.

If the Chinese were foolish enough to launch an attack against the island, he himself would rush down there, take command personally, and “deliver such a crushing defeat that it would be one of the decisive battles of the world—a disaster so great it would rock Asia, and perhaps turn back Communism.” Then he had paused and commented that he doubted they would be
that foolish, before adding, “I pray nightly that they will. I would get down on my knees.” Not many other American soldiers, Ridgway thought, were praying for a war on the Asian mainland with a nation that had a population of some 600 million. At first, Ridgway had thought it was merely MacArthurian grandiosity, the voice of an old man aching for an even larger place in history. Later, trying to understand MacArthur’s drive north, Ridgway wrote, “Whether this vision of himself as the swordsman who would slay the Communist dragon was what prompted his eventual reckless drive to the borders of Manchuria no one of course can now divine. But I suspect that it did add luster to his dream of victory.”

Of the two forces that would soon meet on the battlefield, only the Chinese now knew what was going to happen next. The Americans, political and military, remained blissfully, almost consciously, ignorant. Events in Korea were never to be so positive again. Truman would soon find MacArthur as hostile and suspicious as ever. MacArthur, for his part, would eventually write that the Wake meeting convinced him of “a curious and sinister change” that had taken place in Washington, reflecting a diminished administration will to fight Communism. As for Truman himself, in a 1954 interview with Jim Lucas of Scripps Howard, MacArthur said, “The little bastard [Truman] honestly believes he’s a patriot.”