What is significant here is that the General, unlike Acheson and Connally, did not say this after Chiang’s flight to Formosa. He saw, as they did not, that an American people aroused by the fall of China would not stand for the sacrifice of another Asian country to Communist aggression. The McCarthys, Wherrys, Tafts, and Wileys had won their suit in the court of public opinion. Democrats like Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson knew it; to the end of their lives they would believe that the relinquishment of another Oriental state to the Communists would be political suicide. And Harry Truman had grasped it by April 25, 1950, when, running scared from Republican critics, eager to prove that Alger Hiss was not a typical Democrat, he instructed the National Security Council to approve the policy paper that became known as NSC-68. Among other things, this historic document specified that henceforth up to 20 percent of America’s gross national product would be devoted to the military establishment and that the United States would resist any Red threat to non-Red nations anywhere.173
After the President initialed it “approved,” NSC-68 was classified; even Dean Acheson, writing his memoirs nineteen years later, could not quote it. Actually it should never have been kept secret. Had it been published the day it was adopted, the Korean War would almost certainly have been avoided. Unaware of it, Stalin and Kim II Sung assumed that South Korea was ripe for the plucking. If one assumes that totalitarian governments are amoral and hence ethically blameless, then the Truman administration, through its spokesmen, had stumbled badly. MacArthur was hardly prescient, but although half a world away from Washington, he saw his countrymen’s mood more clearly than the White House, the Pentagon, or Foggy Bottom. It is a pity that he was excluded from their councils. As it was, the first inkling he had of the NSC-68 switch was a speech by John Foster Dulles. In the Far East as a special representative of the secretary of state, working on the Japanese peace treaty, Dulles took time out to tour the 38th Parallel and speak in Seoul. On June 17, 1950—very late in the day—he told the South Korean National Assembly that the American people remained “faithful to the cause of human freedom and loyal to those everywhere who honorably support it.” A new line had been drawn. Unfortunately, the language was imprecise, and Moscow, Peking, and Pyongyang, aware that the speaker’s party was out of power in the United States, ignored the warning.174
MacArthur, however, perked up. On May 18, when C. L. Sulzberger solicited his opinion of the containment policy in Asia, Sulzberger had written in his diary: “He smiled and said he was astonished to hear me refer to an American policy.” The General himself later-said he had just about concluded that the administration wasn’t much interested in the Far East. He had urged Dean Acheson to visit it, but Acheson had replied that the pressure of his duties prevented him from leaving Washington.* Heretofore, MacArthur wrote afterward, he had assumed that “under no circumstances would the United States engage in the military defense of the Korean peninsula.” Now Dulles, Acheson’s personal envoy, was saying that it would. The Supreme Commander noted that apparently Dulles had “reversed the previous policy enunciated by the State Department.”175
MacArthur’s admirers later insisted that he had sought the reassignment ot American garrison troops to Seoul, on the ground that his officers were more reliable than the “untrustworthy” State Department types in Seoul and because he suspected an approaching North Korean attack. There is no record of this, and it is unlikely; as late as May of 1950 he said, “I don’t believe a shooting war is imminent.” He had complete confidence in Sebald, who was briefing him on developments across the Korea Strait. And he ignored accumulating evidence of an imminent attack by the In Min Gun, the North Korean People’s Army (PA). On March 10, 1950, the CIA had predicted that the “PA will attack South Korea in June 1950.” Willoughby, who maintained an extensive intelligence net on the peninsula, filed 1,195 reports between June 1949 and June 1950, reporting, among other things, that Chinese Communist troops of Korean descent had been entering the Democratic People’s Republic in great numbers since the defeat of Chiang, and that a massive buildup of Red shock troops, far in excess of Rhee’s forces in the south, was under way north of the 38th Parallel. In the third week of March Willoughby’s G-2, agreeing with the CIA, prophesied war in the late spring or early summer.176
Despite this, MacArthur now, as in prewar Manila, radiated optimism. Five weeks before the conflict, he delivered a MacArthurian lecture to Sulz-berger on the history of war. He began: “You have got to remember that war at the beginning was a sort of gladiatorial contest. You might start with the basis of the fight between David and Goliath.” Professional units replaced individual contestants, he continued, and then the concept of peace treaties emerged, to safeguard victories. “However,” he said, “as the world became more closely integrated and war became a more total concept involving every man, woman and child, and as destruction became so terribly great, war has ceased to be a medium for the settling of quarrels. The opinion of the masses . . . is against it.” Therefore: “I don’t believe that war is imminent because the people of the world would neither desire it nor would they be willing to permit it. That goes for both sides. That is the basic reason for my belief that war is not upon the doorstep.” It was, Sulzberger thought, a fascinating performance. It was also dead wrong.177
Clocks in Washington read 3:00 P.M. on Saturday, June 24, 1950, and Dean Acheson was gardening on Harewood Farm, his Maryland home. Stealthy figures moved in the nearby woods; since the advent of McCarthy, the secretary’s hate mail had become so great that he needed bodyguards around the clock. On Morningside Heights Dwight Eisenhower, president of Columbia University, was holed up with The Maverick Queen, a Zane Grey novel. It was 2:00 P.M. in Kansas City, where Harry Truman’s aircraft, the Independence, was entering its glide pattern; the President was about to take a Missouri holiday. Over the Pacific, where Omar Bradley and Louis Johnson were flying homeward from the Far East, it was midmorning. In Tokyo, on the other side of the international date line, timepiece hands stood at 5:00 A.M. on Sunday, June 25. Atop Renanzaka Hill everyone in Hoover’s Folly was asleep. The first streaks of dawn had flushed the eastern sky thirty-four minutes earlier, and the sacred snows of Fuji were beginning to be visible to the southwest, but sunrise was still an hour away, and the dogs had not yet begun to stir. Sentries had a joke about Blackie, MacArthur’s cocker spaniel. Soldiers weren’t needed outside the embassy, they said, because the slightest noise would bring the cocker to his feet, barking. But not even Blackie could hear the shattering crescendo of sound seven hundred miles to the west as a thousand 122-millimeter PA howitzers, erupting in a single sheet of flame, split the night just above the 38th Parallel. There the sweep-second hands of watches on North Korean officers’ wrists had just touched 4:00 A.M.—wartime, once more, on all the Angeluses of the world.178
NINE
Sunset Gun
1950-1951
Korea hangs like a lumpy phallus between the sprawling thighs of Manchuria and the Sea of Japan. Roughly the size of England and Scotland, it was, in 1950, the home of about twenty million people, most of whom lived in the south. The peninsula has sometimes been called “the Hermit Kingdom,” and most visitors have been only too happy to leave it alone. Sebald had crossed it six times in the 1930s. He had thought then that it was “a nation of sad people—oppressed, unhappy, poor, silent, and sullen,” and he hadn’t changed his mind since. A Korean proverb for the country runs: “Over the mountains, mountains.” The hills in fact seem interminable. They are also dun-colored, granitic, steep, and speckled here and there with boulders, scrub oaks, and stunted firs. In the valleys, streams meander past rice paddies, walled cities, and pagodas fingering drab skies from terraced slopes. The landscape is colorless. There are almost no flowers. The hillsides are gouged with thousands of dells and gorges, many deep enough to conceal battalions of troops. It is ideal terrain for guerrilla fighting.1
That first In Min Gun blitz was, however, a conventional offensive. Under the tactical comm
and of Senior Colonel Lee Hak Ku, gunners manning the howitzer batteries studied the bursts of their exploding shells and corrected their ranges. Then, as Lee lowered his upraised arm in an abrupt gesture of command, wedges of growling, low-slung Soviet T-34 tanks lurched across the Parallel. Overhead, Yaks and Stormoviks winged toward Seoul, a few minutes away. Like the Chinese, the North Koreans still used trumpets to herald charges, and with their first notes PA infantrymen lunged across the border toward their first objectives. Despite the weather—the summer monsoon had just begun, and a heavy rain was falling—PA General Chai Ung Jun put ninety thousand men into South Korea without any traffic jams. Already junks and sampans were landing amphibious PA troops behind ROK lines to the south. As MacArthur later put it, North Korea had “struck like a cobra.”2
Awakening to the din, Syngman Rhee’s constituents fumbled for their clothes. In a few hours they would be on the roads, hurrying from the battlefront, which nevertheless crept ever closer to them. Some would be refugees for the rest of their lives. Their ROKs, helpless against the tanks, panicked, buckled, and broke in a sudden plebiscite of feet. After a brief stand at Chunchon, resistance collapsed. Retreat became a rout. Suddenly the T-34s were reported to be approaching the northern suburbs of their capital. Rhee prepared to move his government to Taejon, ninety miles to the south. Meanwhile, word of the catastrophe which was overtaking him had reached Washington. John J. Muccio, the American ambassador in Seoul, had cabled the State Department: “North Korean forces invaded Republic of Korea at several places this morning . . . . It would appear from the nature of the attack and the manner in which it was launched that it constitutes an all-out offensive against the Republic of Korea.” Next, the United Press correspondent in Seoul began sending out fragmentary bulletins describing heavy fighting all along the receding ROK line. Dean Acheson, summoned from his garden to his telephone, listened in horror and immediately decided to propose that Secretary-General Trygve Lie of the United Nations convene an emergency session of the UN Security Council. Then Acheson phoned Independence, Missouri. His first words were: “Mr. President, I have very serious news. The North Koreans have invaded South Korea.”3
Flying back to Washington the next morning, Truman ordered an immediate conference of his diplomatic and military advisers around the large mahogany dining table at Blair House, 1651 Pennsylvania Avenue, diagonally across the street from the White House. By the time they convened, there were more messages from Muccio, all of them discouraging. Among other things, a strong PA tank column was driving toward Seoul and Kimpo airport, apparently advancing at will. “South Korean arms,” Acheson concluded, summing up the situation, were “clearly outclassed.” On the bright side, the UN Security Council had just voted 9 to o to condemn the PA aggression as “a breach of the peace,” and America’s UN ambassador, Warren Austin, was drafting a second, stronger resolution, calling upon member nations to “render such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security to the area.”* Truman had already decided that the principal assistance should be provided by the armed forces of the United States. In a stunning reversal of its previous public policy, the administration was moving to defend a peninsula which was of negligible strategic value, posed no threat to U.S. security, and had been—so far as the world knew—written off by Washington. Later MacArthur would write: “I could not help being amazed at the manner in which this great decision was being made. With no submission to Congress, whose duty it is to declare war, and without even consulting the field commander involved, the members of the executive branch . . . agreed to enter the Korean War.” He added: “All the risks inherent in this decision—including the possibility of Chinese and Russian involvement—applied then just as much as they applied later.”4
Although the commander in Tokyo was not consulted at that stage, he was an invisible presence at the mahogany Blair House table, and his name was mentioned repeatedly. After canvassing the group, which the President christened his “war cabinet,” Truman made three decisions. MacArthur would be ordered to evacuate the two thousand Americans in Korea, covering the operation with fighter planes which would avoid airspace north of the Parallel. Simultaneously, he would send ammunition and every available piece of military equipment in Japan and on Okinawa to the ROKs. Last, his theater was expanded to include Formosa and the Pescadores, and the Seventh Fleet, now placed under his command, was to patrol the Formosa Strait, “quarantining the fighting,” in Acheson’s phrase, “within Korea.” In those days it was assumed that all Communist nations acted in concert. Truman was worried about Soviet strikes in the Middle East or Berlin, and in official Washington there was a very real fear that Peking, coordinating its movements with Pyongyang, might sail against Formosa. The last thing the United States wanted now was a resumption of the Chinese civil war.5
If anyone in Blair House had misgivings about the mandate which was being given to the General, he kept it to himself. Shaken by Republican charges that they were impotent against Communist challenges, the leaders of the Democratic administration were resolved to take the hardest possible line against the In Min Gun. They desperately needed a victory to refute McCarthy and his fellow GOP demagogues—that, not strategic considerations, nor “the possible conquest of millions of hearts and minds throughout the world,” a catchword of the day, was their chief motive—and Douglas MacArthur, whatever his defects, was adroit at producing victories. As they broke up, some of them were warmed by another flicker of satisfaction, a glint of gallows humor. Had Mao pursued Chiang to Formosa a year earlier, the United States would have stood aside. Since then domestic politics had made official U.S. indifference to Chiang’s fate impossible. Thus Formosa had become a festering sore, a source of endless embarrassment to the White House. Now they would let the Republican conservatives’ favorite General see how he liked it.6
Because the enemy had attacked on a Sunday, telephone circuits between Tokyo and Seoul were closed. As a consequence, most SCAP staff officers were spared a rude awakening. It was a sunny, pleasant morning; the Huffs and several others were lounging beside the embassy swimming pool, enjoying it, when Edith Sebald arrived and mentioned casually that she had just heard about the hostilities on the radio. Huff questioned her excitedly and rushed to tell MacArthur, but the General already knew—had known, in fact, for hours. In the first gray moments of daylight a duty officer had phoned from the Dai Ichi: “General, we have just received a dispatch from Seoul, advising that the North Koreans have struck in great strength south across the 38th Parallel at four o’clock this morning.” MacArthur, remembering Manila nearly nine years earlier, felt “an uncanny feeling of nightmare . . . . It was the same fell note of the war cry that was again ringing in my ears. It couldn’t be, I told myself. Not again! I must still be asleep and dreaming. Not again! But then came the crisp, cool voice of my fine chief of staff, General Ned [Edward M.] Almond, ‘Any orders, General?’ ”7
Barring urgent developments, the Supreme Commander said, he wanted to be left alone with his own reflections. Stepping into his slippers and his frayed robe, he began striding back and forth in his bedroom. Presently Jean stepped in from her room. “I heard you pacing up and down,” she said. “Are you all right?” He told her the news, and she paled. Later Blackie bounded in, tried to divert his master with coaxing barks, and failing, slunk off. Then Arthur appeared for his morning romp with his father. Jean intercepted him and told him there would be no frolicking today. MacArthur put his arm around his son’s shoulders, paused, thrust his hands in the pockets of his robe, and renewed his strides.8
His moods in those first hours of the new war were oddly uneven. At the prospect of new challenges, he became euphoric. George Marshall, during a recent stop in Tokyo, had thought that the Supreme Commander had “aged immeasurably” since their last meeting, but now Larry Bunker discovered him “reinvigorated . . . like an old firehorse back in harness.” Another aide believed the Gener
al had “peeled ten years from his shoulders,” and Sebald noted: “Despite his years, the General seemed impatient for action.” Yet at the same time he appeared to be trying to convince himself that there would be no need for action. That noon a correspondent about to catch a plane for home asked him about the significance of the Korean developments, explaining that he would remain in Japan if there was any likelihood of a widening conflict. MacArthur told him it was merely “a border incident,” that he “shouldn’t be concerned over such a trifle.” He took the same line with Dulles. The ROKs would hold, the General predicted; a few LSTs—landing craft—could bring out any Americans who wanted to leave under an umbrella of fighter planes, and that would be the end of it. Dulles was unconvinced. Later in the day he called again, and was dismayed to find that MacArthur was still confident. The General said that he had heard he might become responsible for Korea, but it was his impression that his duties would be administrative. At all events, he saw no cause for alarm. Dulles was unconvinced. Always the superhawk, he wired Acheson: “Believe that if it appears the South Koreans cannot contain or repulse the attack, United States forces should be used even though this risks Russian counter moves. To sit by while Korea is overrun by unprovoked armed attack would start a world war.” How a big war could be prevented by waging a small one was not mentioned. It didn’t have to be; since Munich the proposition had been accepted as an article of faith by American diplomats in both parties. Later, in the debates over Vietnam, it would be incorporated in the domino theory.9