MacArthur never went that far. Four months after Wiley’s speech the General told Lord Alanbrooke that although he was still resigned to the loss of North China, he felt that further Russian intrusion in Asia should be met by force. Thereafter his reports of the growing disaster on the mainland were models of precision—they were even, Acheson’s gibe notwithstanding, oracular. But he could hardly be called a passive spectator. His feelings, an aide recalls, “were a mixture of disappointment and frustration because of his lack of control over developments outside his authority in Japan. . . . Chagrin turned to near pathological rage as he helplessly watched Chiang Kai-shek’s regime being systematically overrun.” Long before the Kuomintang’s last stand, he had prophesied the forfeiture of the lower Yangtze Valley and Shanghai. In 1949 Claire L. Chennault bluntly told those who would listen to him that “the United States is losing the Pacific war,” and foresaw “a ring of Red bases . . . stretched from Siberia to Saigon.” MacArthur had been telling Washington the same thing for some time. He was especially exasperated with the liberal argument that KMT rule had been less than exemplary. To Karl L. Rankin, who visited him in Tokyo, he said of Chiang: “If he has horns and a tail, so long as he is anti-Communist, we should help him. Rather than make things difficult, the State Department should assist him in a fight against Communists—we can try to reform him later.” Walter Judd of Minnesota would later remember the General telling him: “For the first time in our relations with Asia, we have endangered the paramount interests of the United States by confusing them with an internal purification problem in Asia.” This, Richard H. Rovere and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., note, was “a penetrating statement of a complex situation.”159
MACARTHUR SAYS FALL OF CHINA IMPERILS U.S., a Life headline had read on December 20, 1948. The story had vexed the Joint Chiefs, who had agreed that Red conquest of the mainland would constitute no threat to American security in the Pacific, and later it would be cited as an example of the General’s bypassing of authority to appeal directly to the public. But in this instance he was blameless. Earlier in the year the House Foreign Affairs Committee had asked his opinion of Mao’s victories, and he had replied that “it would be utterly fallacious to underrate either China’s need or its importance.” Two months later a Senate committee had asked him to return and testify on Far Eastern affairs. He had declined, but more cables had been exchanged between the Dai Ichi and the Capitol. As long as the initiative remained on the Hill and his replies were nonpartisan, his behavior was above reproach. Congressmen paid his salary. He had to respond to their official inquiries.160
MacArthur’s view was that American policy in China was suicidal, that the United States could not escape sharing in the KMT’s defeat. Once Chiang had been vanquished, he said, Japan would be threatened. Indeed, he suggested, Nippon might become a latter-day Bataan. That was extravagant, but his requests for aid were sensible. It was unthinkable, he said, to land GIs on the mainland, but he thought a strengthened U.S. military posture in the Far East was reasonable. He asked for more ships, clouds of airplanes, and six divisions of infantrymen, and he believed Chiang should continue to receive all the military equipment and technical advisers he wanted. In 1944 he had disagreed with the view that Formosa was the key to the conquest of Japan and that the Philippines weren’t. Now, however, with Japan secure, strategic priorities had changed. He recommended to the Joint Chiefs—this was confidential; no word of it reached the Hill at the time—that Washington should “proclaim to all the peoples of Asia our firm intention to safeguard the Pacific” by declaring its vital interest in Formosa. While he doubted that American troops would be needed to prevent Mao from leaping over Formosa Strait and seizing the island, he thought transports should be prepared to carry them there.161
This was a highly sensitive point. The Republican leadership wanted an American commitment to Formosa, together with an administration announcement that no Peking regime would ever be recognized by the United States. The second could wait; the first was urgent, and was being quietly debated in the Pentagon, Foggy Bottom, and the White House. In late December of 1949 the National Security Council convened to resolve the issue. The council’s mood was dovish. Some participants even wanted to abandon all U.S. military positions in the western Pacific, retreating to Hawaii, if necessary. The Chiefs submitted MacArthur’s appraisal but reported that they were opposed even to sending Formosa a U.S. military mission. Acheson agreed that MacArthur should be overruled, reasoning that the American military establishment lacked sufficient force to defend Formosa while meeting commitments elsewhere, and Truman took this line on January 5, 1950: “The United States has no desire to obtain special rights or privileges or to establish military bases on Formosa at this time. Nor does it have any intention of utilizing its armed forces to interfere in the present situation. The United States Government will not pursue a course which will lead to involvement in the civil conflict in China. Similarly, the United States Government will not provide military aid or advice to Chinese forces on Formosa.”162
In the ensuing tumult, MacArthur continued to hold his tongue. Privately he told his staff that he believed America had suffered a grave defeat, but, for the present, at least, he kept his temper. A public quarrel would have been devastating to American interests, disclosing that in one respect Acheson was right: the U.S. armed forces, less than five years after the great Allied victories of 1945, were far weaker than its adversaries suspected. “In the Far East,” Robert D. Heinl, Jr., writes, “thanks largely to the wise proconsulship of Douglas MacArthur, the position of the United States appeared strong.” On paper, Walton H. Walker, who had succeeded Eichelberger as commander of the Eighth Army, led one regimental combat team and four divisions: the 7th, 24th, and 25th Infantry, and the 1st Cavalry. In fact, his units were undermanned and flabby; they had, in the later words of William F. Dean, one of their commanders, become accustomed to “Japanese girlfriends, plenty of beer, and servants to shine their boots.” Altogether, Walker could field less than eighty thousand soldiers. Aircraft were few and obsolescent. SCAP’s naval forces comprised just one light cruiser and four destroyers. None were fit, because no one dreamed that they would ever be needed. MacArthur himself, in withdrawing the last of his troops from Korea in the early summer of 1949, had observed that the country was “not a proper place for the employment of American troops” because stationing “United States ground troops in continental Asia” involved “inherent dangers.” If left there, he said, “they might be trapped.”163
Not only is it easy to be wise after the event; it is, for military historians, almost irresistible. The strategic value of Gibraltar, Gettysburg, and the Dardanelles was obvious once they had been won or lost, and the eyes of any veteran of the Korean War, if confronted with a map of the Pacific, will instantly dart to the peninsula where he fought. It is incredible to him that the nation’s leaders did not see it there before the first shots were fired. Yet the chances are that he himself had never heard of it before the last weekend of June 1950. The day it became newsworthy, Time reported, “a Dallas citizen was on the telephone, calling his local newspaper. Where was Korea, anyway? Were the people Indians or Japanese? And what time was it there?” Millions were in the same fix. Certainly few of them knew the land’s unhappy history, which had begun, discouragingly, with a partition in 108 B.C.164
America’s leaders had long been aware of the peninsula, though neither they nor their allies knew quite what to do with it. At Cairo in 1943 the Big Four had pledged themselves to its independence “in due course,” whenever that was. At Yalta FDR had suggested a four-power trustee for the country. After a general discussion, however, the matter had been dropped. The Potsdam proclamation had nebulously promised that steps leading to its autonomy “shall be carried out,” but at Potsdam the Joint Chiefs had turned down a Russian proposal for a joint amphibious operation against enemy troops in Korea, explaining that they needed all available landing craft for the coming invasion of Japan.
The day after Stalin declared war on Japan, his infantrymen began landing on Korea’s northern tip. A week after the Missouri surrender ceremony, American troops arrived to join the Russians in disarming local Japanese forces. The Red Army, which had already occupied Seoul and Inchon, retired north of the 38th Parallel, leaving MacArthur’s men to receive the surrender of Nipponese units in the more populous half of the peninsula. According to Lewis Haskins, “several one-star generals hurried into an office of the Pentagon with the statement, ‘We have got to divide Korea. Where can we divide it?’ A colonel with experience in the Far East protested to his superiors, ‘You can’t do that. Korea is a social and economic unit. There is no place to divide it.’ The generals insisted that it had to be done and the colonel replied that it could not be done. Their answer was, ‘We have got to divide Korea and it has to be done by four o’clock this afternoon.’ ” In his memoirs Dean Acheson writes: “A young officer recently returned to the Pentagon, Dean Rusk from the Chinese theater, found an administrative dividing line along the 38th Parallel.”165
There was no long-range planning, no ulterior motive on either side. More or less by chance, Soviet and U.S. commanders had squared off with the Russians north of this fifty-yard line and the Americans south of it. In the north, the Reds set up the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea in Pyongyang, with Kim II Sung, who had been a major in the Red Army, as premier. The United States didn’t recognize Kim’s government. In the south, Syngman Rhee proclaimed the Republic of Korea in Seoul. Russia didn’t recognize his government. Both men were despots; there was little to chose between them. The United Nations adopted a resolution calling for general elections under a UN commission, but since the USSR wouldn’t permit the commissioners north of the 38th Parallel, the impasse continued. It was all very unsatisfactory, but to almost everyone except the Koreans it was also boring. Like Germany, the peninsula seemed destined to survive with a split political personality, the two adversaries swapping polemics and, from time to time, random gunfire. Sebald recalls: “We expected an indefinite prolongation of the tension and small-scale guerrilla action which had become commonplace in Korea.” In March 1950 the United Nations announced that military observers would report on incidents along the border. Everyone assumed that there would be many of them. They would be duly reported by the wire services and the New York Times in a paragraph or two. Stiff notes would be exchanged, outrageous claims made, border guards doubled. Then watchful calm would return. Bloodshed would be slight. No armies would clash. Certainly the peninsula would never become a great world battlefield.166
On arriving in Seoul after V-J Day, John R. Hodge, MacArthur’s local commander, had remarked unforgivably that “Koreans are the same breed of cats as Japanese.” Neither SCAP nor the Pentagon had reprimanded him. The American attitude toward the country, insofar as it existed at all, was almost contemptuous; on September 25, 1947, Eisenhower, Leahy, Nimitz, and Carl Spaatz had reported to the President: “The Joint Chiefs of Staff consider that, from the standpoint of military security, the United States has little strategic interest in maintaining the present troops and bases in Korea.” In envisioning the Pacific as “an Anglo-Saxon lake,” even MacArthur excluded Korea, and in April 1948, on the advice of the Chiefs, Truman declared that military action by either side of the divided country would not constitute a casus belli for the United States.167
SCAP flew to Seoul on August 15, 1948, for the formal inauguration of Rhee as president of the South Korean republic. Larry Bunker remembers it as a clear day, with the Supreme Commander wearing a lei of lovely flowers and reading, with conspicuous pleasure, an editorial “In Welcome of General MacArthur” by Hong Ahn Chai in the Hang Sung Ilbe. The General delivered the principal address. He called the splitting of the country “one of the great tragedies of modern history,” and in an aside to Rhee he said, “I will defend Korea as I would my own country, just as I would California,” but that was merely MacArthur bombast. The decision to shield the new nation or let it fall was not his to make. Besides, he was about to relinquish all responsibility for the peninsula. On New Year’s Day, 1949, Moscow announced that all Soviet forces had been pulled out of North Korea, and in February the General told Secretary of the Army Kenneth Royall that he favored the prompt withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the peninsula. In June the last of the GIs left Pusan. The Dai Ichi’s Korea file was closed. MacArthur was no more responsible for the Republic of Korea than for the Republic of France. The State Department, not the Pentagon, exercised control of U.S. interests on the peninsula. Even before the American soldiers had departed, MacArthur later testified before a Senate committee, “My responsibilities were merely to feed them and clothe them in a domiciliary way. I had nothing whatever to do with the policies, the administration, or the command responsibilities in Korea until the war broke out.”*168
In May, as transports bore GIs away from him, Rhee had said, “Whether the American soldiers go or stay does not matter very much. What is important is the policy of the United States toward the security of Korea.” The Truman administration, however, had decided to let the United Nations worry about the eventual reunification of the divided land. George Marshall, Acheson’s predecessor as secretary of state—Acheson replaced him in early 1949—had held that America should not strengthen Rhee’s army once South Korea was an independent nation, no longer under Washington’s control. His real concern was that Rhee might pounce on North Korea. At the time this was considered likelier than a move southward by Kim II Sung, and indeed Rhee’s militant statements supported this opinion. Accordingly, Seoul’s defenses were limited to sixty-five thousand Republic of Korea infantrymen (ROKs), organized in eight divisions. “Because of Rhee’s constant belligerency,” Sebald writes, the U.S. refused to provide him with “tanks, medium or heavy artillery, or military aircraft.” North Korea had plenty of such offensive weapons, but no one in the United States was paying them much attention. In October 1949 Sinh Sung Mo, Rhee’s minister of defense, had confided in Sebald that much more work remained to be done “before the ROKs could match the North Koreans,” but U.S. Brigadier William L. Roberts, who had headed an advisory team in Seoul, and who was speaking proudly of “my army” and “my forces,” was saying that they could “hold the Commies” should war come. Sebald says of Roberts: “I could hardly imagine a more vociferous advocate of South Korean military prowess.”169
In Washington, Mo’s and Roberts’s reports were filed and forgotten. Indifference to the peninsula was shared by both parties. It is a point of some interest that congressional Republicans fought all appropriations for Seoul. They torpedoed Truman’s request for sixty million dollars of Korean economic aid, and on January 19, 1950, the lower house, at their urging, defeated by a 193 to 192 vote a small measure which would have provided five hundred U.S. Army officers to supervise the equipping of South Korean troops. That evening Acheson wrote his daughter Mary: “We took a defeat in the House on Korea, which seems to me to have been our own fault. . . . We were complaisant and inactive.”170
No one has faulted the secretary for the failure of that bill, but he has been rightly reproached for extemporary remarks that same month before the National Press Club. America’s line of defense, he said, “runs along the Aleutians to Japan and then goes to the Ryukyus [chiefly Okinawa]. We hold important defense positions in the Ryukyu Islands, and these we will continue to hold. . . . The defense perimeter runs from the Ryukyus to the Philippine Islands.” He continued: “So far as the military security of the United States is concerned”—and here he obviously had Formosa and South Korea in mind—“it must be clear that no person can guarantee these areas against military attack. Should such an attack occur . . . the initial reliance must be on the people attacked.” If they proved to be resolute fighters, he vaguely concluded, they were entitled to an appeal under the charter of the UN. To the end of his life Acheson would vigorously deny that this had given the green light for aggression in South Korea by excluding it from the perime
ter, but when he told the press club that the United States was waiting “for the dust to settle” in China after declaring that America’s line of resistance lay south of the Korean peninsula, the Communists could only conclude, as they did, that the United States was leaving Rhee to fend for himself. Students of the USSR were appalled. Moscow knew that the Americans were drafting a Japanese peace treaty without consulting Stalin. Since V-J Day the Russians had been hoping that Washington would give them a free hand in Korea. In George Kennan’s opinion, “When they saw it wasn’t going to work out that way, they concluded: ‘If this is all we are going to get out of a Japanese settlement, we had better get our hands on Korea fast before the Americans let the Japanese back in there.’ ”171
It was not like Acheson to misstate American foreign policy, and in fact he had not done so. He was of one mind with the President, the secretary of defense, the Joint Chiefs, and the congressional leadership. In May 1950 Tom Connally, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, explicitly stated that Russia could seize South Korea at her convenience and the United States probably would not intervene, since Korea was not “very greatly [sic] important.” And Douglas MacArthur, a year earlier, had sounded the same theme. On March 1, 1949, he had told a New York Times correspondent in Tokyo: “Our defensive positions against Asiatic aggression used to be based on the west coast of the American continent. The Pacific was looked upon as the avenue of possible enemy approach. Now . . . our line of defense runs through the chain of islands fringing the coast of Asia. It starts from the Philippines and continues through the Ryukyu Archipelago, which includes its main bastion, Okinawa. Then it bends back through Japan and the Aleutian Island chain to Alaska.” In subsequent interviews he said substantially the same thing to G. Ward Price and to William R. Matthews of the Arizona Daily Star. Like Acheson, he omitted both Formosa and Korea.172