Worst of all were the tides, among the highest in the world. Indeed, the tidal range, some thirty-two feet, was greatly exceeded only by that in the Bay of Fundy. Except at high tide, the port was reduced to wide, oozing, gray mud flats, rendering it wholly unusable by moving boats. The only dates upon which surf would be high enough to accommodate amphibious ships and landing craft in 1950 were September 15, September 27, and October 11. September 15 was best—MacArthur never considered any other date—but high tide then crested first at dawn, too early for awkward troop transports to maneuver beforehand in the narrow passage, and again a half hour after sundown, too late for a daylight attack. The General had chosen seventy thousand marines and GIs for the assault and placed this force, X Corps, under his chief of staff, the bilious Ned Almond. As many marines as possible would have to be put ashore during the two hours of the first flood tide; twelve hours would pass before the second flood tide would permit reinforcement. Doyle’s gunnery officer said afterward: “We drew up a list of every natural and geographic handicap—and Inchon had ’em all.” Doyle’s communications officer said: “Make up a list of amphibious ‘don’ts,’ and you have an exact description of the Inchon operation.”67
MacArthur turned a deaf ear to them. He noted at the time that in 1894 and 1904 the Japanese had landed at Inchon, seized all Korea, and pursued the enemy across the Yalu into Manchuria.* The anguished naval officers pointed out that nineteenth-century vessels had much shallower drafts. The General serenely replied that he was sure that the problem could be solved. They were unconvinced; so were the marines, Stratemeyer’s fliers, and MacArthur’s own staff. Every flag and general officer in Tokyo, including Walker, whose Eighth Army would be freed by a successful drive against the North Korean rear, tried to talk him out of it. Meanwhile, time was growing ever shorter. Some of the marines had already sailed from San Diego, yet the Pentagon, in one officer’s words, “did not yet know the name of the game.” On Sunday, August 20, the Joint Chiefs, thoroughly alarmed now that they knew CINCFE’s target, sent two of their members, Collins and Admiral Forrest P. Sherman, to Japan “to find out,” in Collins’s later words, “exactly what the plans were.” MacArthur met their plane and, at 5:30 P.M. on Wednesday, convened a major strategic conference in the Dai Ichi to thrash the matter out.68
It was clear from the outset that the two Chiefs had come to dissuade the General. Collins, describing Inchon as an “impossibility,” proposed Kunsan, a hundred miles to the south, as an alternative; it lacked Inchon’s drawbacks and was much closer to the Pusan beachhead. Lemuel C. Shepherd, Jr., of the Marine Corps fervently seconded the motion. Sherman—the man, MacArthur knew, that he must convince—said nothing, but his expression was grim; the day before, according to Shepherd’s journal, the admiral had vehemently expressed himself as “opposed to the proposed plan.” Lesser naval officers took the floor to point out that the General’s objective violated all seven criteria set forth in USF-6, their amphibious bible. CINCFE’s officers were glum and silent. Finally, after nine critics had completed an eighty-minute presentation, MacArthur rose. Afterward he wrote: “I waited a moment or so to collect my thoughts. I could feel the tension rising in the room. Almond shifted uneasily in his chair. If ever a silence was pregnant, this one was. I could almost hear my father’s voice telling me as he had so many years before, ‘Doug, councils of war breed timidity and defeatism.’ ”69
Of the thirty-minute performance which followed, Doyle said, “If MacArthur had gone on the stage, you never would have heard of John Barrymore.” The General began by telling them that “the very arguments you have made as to the impracticabilities involved” confirmed his faith in the plan, “for the enemy commander will reason that no one would be so brash as to make such an attempt.” Surprise, he said, “is the most vital element for success in war.” Suddenly he was reminding them of a lesson they had all learned in grammar school: “the Marquis de Montcalm believed in 1759 that it was impossible for an armed force to scale the precipitous river banks south of the then walled city of Quebec, and therefore concentrated his formidable defenses along the more vulnerable banks north of the city. But General James Wolfe and a small force did indeed come up the St. Lawrence River and scale those heights. On the Plains of Abraham, Wolfe won a stunning victory that was made possible almost entirely by surprise. Thus he captured Quebec and in effect ended the French and Indian War. Like Montcalm, the North Koreans would regard an Inchon landing as impossible. Like Wolfe, I could take them by surprise.”70
The amphibious landing, he said, “is the most powerful tool we have.” To employ it properly, “we must strike hard and deep. ” Inchon’s hurdles were real, “but they are not insuperable.” He said: “My confidence in the Navy is complete, and in fact I seem to have more confidence in the Navy than the Navy has in itself.” Looking at Sherman, he said: “The Navy has never let me down in the past, and it will not let me down this time.” As to a Kunsan landing, he believed it would be ineffective. “It would be an attempted envelopment which would not envelop,” a “short envelopment,” and therefore futile. “Better no flank movement than one such as this. The only result would be a hookup with Walker’s troops. . . . This would simply be sending more troops to help Walker ‘hang on,’ and hanging on is not good enough. . . . The enemy will merely roll back on his lines of supply and communication.” Kunsan, the “only alternative” to Inchon, would be “the continuation of the savage sacrifice we are making at Pusan, with no hope of relief in sight.” He paused dramatically. Then: “Are you content to let our troops stay in that bloody perimeter like beef cattle in the slaughterhouse? Who will take the responsibility for such a tragedy? Certainly, I will not.”71
By pouncing on Inchon and then Seoul, he said, he would “cut the enemy’s supply line and seal off the entire southern peninsula . . . . By seizing Seoul I would completely paralyze the enemy’s supply system—coming and going. This in turn will paralyze the fighting power of the troops that now face Walker. Without munitions and food they will soon be helpless and disorganized, and can easily be overpowered by our smaller but well-supplied forces.” Pointing to Inchon on the wall map, he said: “Gentlemen, this is our anvil, and Johnnie Walker can smash against it from the south.” If he was wrong about the landing, “I will be there personally and will immediately withdraw our forces.” Doyle, stirred, spoke up: “No, General, we don’t know how to do that. Once we start ashore we’ll keep going.” MacArthur had reached them. When another man pointed out that enemy batteries could command the dead-end channel, Sherman, intractable till then, sniffed and said, “I wouldn’t hesitate to take a ship in there.” The General snapped: “Spoken like a Farragut!” He concluded in a hushed voice: “I can almost hear the ticking of the second hand of destiny. We must act now or we will die. . . . Inchon will succeed. And it will save 100,000 lives.”72
It was almost a minute before his audience shifted in their chairs. Then Sherman said: “Thank you. A great voice in a great cause.” The admiral told Shepherd that he thought the General had been “spellbinding,” and he said to another officer, “I’m going to back the Inchon operation. I think it’s sound.” As CINCFE’s charm wore off, they began to have second thoughts. The next day Sherman said uneasily, “I wish I had that man’s optimism.” Collins wanted Kunsan kept alive as an alternative, and one general officer, believing now that he had been “mesmerized by MacArthur,” gloomily called Inchon “a 5,000-to-1 shot.” Nevertheless, the following Monday, four days later, the Chiefs wired SCAP: “We concur after reviewing the information brought back by General Collins and Admiral Sherman in making preparations and executing a turning movement by amphibious forces on the west coast of Korea, either at Inchon in the event the enemy defenses prove ineffective, or at a favorable beach south of Inchon if one can be located. . . . We understand that alternative plans are being developed to best exploit the situation as it develops.”73
It was a green light, though a dim one. Obviously the Chiefs were w
atching their own flanks. On September 7, eight days before the landing, MacArthur received a message from them which, he wrote afterward, “chilled me to the marrow of my bones.” They informed him that they had “noted with considerable concern the recent trend of events in Korea. In the light of the commitment of all the reserves available to the Eighth Army,” they continued, “we desire your estimate as to the feasibility and chance of success of projected operation.” MacArthur’s pencil slashed out his reply: “There is no question in my mind as to the feasibility of the operation and I regard its chance of success as excellent.” After Bradley had conferred with Truman, the Chiefs huddled again. Then they sent the General a cryptic cable: “We approve your plan and the President has been so informed.” MacArthur dryly told his staff that this message, set alongside the other, meant that the Pentagon was establishing “an anticipatory alibi in case the expedition should run into trouble.” What none of them foresaw was that a victory at Inchon would make him appear invincible and the Chiefs impotent—that should he then suggest “that one battalion walk on water,” in Ridgway’s words, “there might have been someone ready to give it a try.”74
In the history of arms certain crack troops stand apart, elite units which demonstrated gallantry in the face of overwhelming odds. There were the Greeks and Persians at Thermopylae, Xenophon’s Ten Thousand, the Bowmen of Agincourt, the Spanish Tercios, the French Foreign Legion at Camerone, the Old Contemptibles of 1914, the Brigade of Guards at Dunkirk. And there was also the 1st Marine Division at Inchon. Veterans of Guadalcanal, Cape Gloucester, Peleliu, and Okinawa, the leathernecks were the cutting edge of the force which the hesitant Joint Chiefs agreed to let MacArthur put ashore behind enemy lines on September 15. In peak condition, thoroughly trained in amphibious warfare, they were now in the hands of the only army commander who really understood that kind of fighting. They represented America’s boldest service, and Douglas MacArthur was the country’s senior officer, “senior,” said one of his subordinates, “to everyone but God.” Heinl writes: “To find a parallel to MacArthur—in seniority, in professional virtuosity, and in autocracy, egotism and personal style, too—would take us back to Winfield Scott.”75
Of his stormy relationship with the Polk administration, Scott said: “I do not desire to place myself in the most perilous of positions, a fire upon my rear, from Washington, and the fire in front from the Mexicans.” He solved the problem by mingling with his troops, beyond the reach of couriers from the War Department, and MacArthur, similarly, had decided to take the field tactically. Rather than risk the gusts of Typhoon Kezia, now between Iwo Jima and Kyushu, the General left Tokyo three days early, carrying a cloth bag into which Jean had packed an extra pipe, tobacco and cigars, two changes of clothes, toilet articles, his straight razor, a razor strop, and his lucky robe. He and his staff left Haneda on the SCAP, his new Constellation, with the press following on the Bataan. Landing at Itazuki airfield, on Kyushu, they drove eighty-six miles over bumpy Japanese dirt roads, he in a new Chevrolet sedan and they in blue MP jeeps, to Sasebo, where he boarded the command ship Mount McKinley.76
Kezia hit them their first night at sea. Pitching and rolling, wrapped in sheets of spray, the vessel labored westward and then northward until, as day broke, a nauseated MacArthur struggled topside to see the clayed, silted, mustard-colored waters of the Yellow Sea beneath him. The typhoon blew away, and he entertained the marine and naval officers with his impressions of celebrities while white-coated mess stewards hovered over him and eavesdropped. Harriman, he thought, would be the next secretary of state. “Everyone seemed happy” over Louis Johnson’s resignation and his replacement by George Marshall. Truman hated the Gimo on Formosa; he would never provide him with solid help. Surprisingly, MacArthur spoke up for Eisenhower when one officer suggested that he lacked leadership. Shepherd later remembered the General’s monologue as “a most illuminating conversation,” but Oliver P. Smith, commander of the marine division, preoccupied with the coming struggle over the horizon, found “the pomposity of his pronouncements a little wearing.”77
On Wednesday, September 13, four allied cruisers entered Inchon harbor, and U.S. destroyers darted in to defy shore batteries. Next, warplanes from four carriers blasted defense redoubts. Then, the following night, the bulk of the UN fleet—261 ships from seven nations—negotiated Flying Fish Channel. MacArthur retired early the night before the landing, hoping to catch a few winks of rest, but he couldn’t fall asleep. A marine sentry awoke Whitney with word that the General wanted to see him. Pacing his little cabin, his hands thrust deep in the pockets of his robe, SCAP said, “Sit down, Court,” and continued to tread the deck, thinking aloud. He knew he was gambling, he said, knew they might be sailing toward a disaster. Then he reviewed his options. Clearly the siege of Pusan must be lifted. Could it, he wondered, be done any other way? “No,” he concluded. “The decision was a sound one. The risks and hazards must be accepted.” Patting his aide on his shoulder, he thanked him, climbed into his bunk, and opened a Bible. Outside, Whitney heard the ship’s clock strike five bells—2:30 A.M.78
At 5:08 the Mount McKinley dropped anchor, at 5:40 the great eight-inch guns opened up on Wolmi Do and Doyle broke out the traditional signal, “Land the landing force.” At that point two North Korean MIG-15s darted toward the cruiser just ahead. Both were shot down, but Whitney hurried below to alert the General to danger. MacArthur, who had fallen asleep at last, yawned and turned over. “Wake me up again, Court,” he said, “if they attack this ship.” As the din overhead grew, however, he rose, breakfasted, and joined the officers watching from the bow. “Just like Lingayen Gulf,” he said of the warships’ salvos, reaching for his field glasses and looking for a place to perch. “His staff,” Shepherd wrote, “. . . was grouped around him. He was seated in the admiral’s chair with his old Bataan cap with its tarnished gold braid and a leather jacket on. Photographers were busily engaged in taking pictures of the General while he continued to watch the naval gunfire—paying no attention to his admirers.” Wolmi Do fell swiftly to a battalion of the 5th Marines at a cost of just seventeen wounded. Told of the light casualties, MacArthur brightened and said, “More people than that get killed in traffic every day.” He told Doyle, “Say to the fleet, ‘The Navy and Marines have never shone more brightly than this morning.’ “ Then he invited all hands to join him for coffee. Glowing, and perhaps gloating, he drafted a dispatch to the Joint Chiefs: “First landing phase successful with losses slight. All goes well and on schedule.” He already felt vindicated, and his mood improved even further when word arrived from the landing force that they had discovered the newly laid foundations of intense fortifications on the island. Had they waited for the next fine tide, they would have been confronted by a fortress.79
This tide was ebbing. Stepping into a barge, MacArthur ordered the coxswain to take him ashore, but it was too late; the waters had already receded, exposing mud flats between him and the beach. The muzzles of enemy gunners less than a thousand yards away began to wink in his direction. Defiant, he stood erect “in a Napoleonic pose,” according to a destroyer commander who was watching him. Shepherd said: “General, you’re getting up pretty close. Somebody’s liable to take a pot shot at you.” MacArthur nodded bleakly. He peered longingly across the mire between him and land, his lips inaudibly forming the words, “I’m sorry”; then he motioned the coxswain to turn back. Aboard the Mount McKinley once more, he told Smith, “Be sure to take care of yourself— and capture Kimpo as soon as you can.” Seizure of the airfield could not proceed until after the main landings, at twilight, and that would be the trickiest part of the operation. Sailors had to beach eight LSTs at dusk on narrow Red Beach, maneuvering them side by side like cars in a parking lot, and unload them all night while the marines raced across a two-mile stone causeway, climbed the city’s nine-foot seawall, and expanded a beachhead. At daybreak they fanned out inland behind but-toned-down tanks. MacArthur followed the course of the battle aboard shi
p, standing beside a map displayed on a forward bulkhead. It was Sunday before he and his entourage could go ashore, where Smith welcomed them to conquered Inchon. There, in the moment of his greatest triumph, the commander in chief yielded to the terrible tension that had sheathed him all week. The “old familiar nausea,” as he called it—the retching which had humiliated him as a West Point applicant and after his White House confrontation with Roosevelt—struck him again. Excusing himself, he turned away, staggered a few steps, doubled over, and threw up.80
In a moment he was again himself, contemptuous of battlefield danger. Pointing to a dead enemy soldier, he told a medical officer, “There’s a patient you’ll never have to work on, Doc.” The corpse was “a good sight for my old eyes,” he said, climbing into a jeep. Down the road they came upon wrecks of PA armor demolished by marine attack planes. “Considering that they are Russian,” he said grinning, “these tanks are in the condition I desire them to be.” To the dismay of Shepherd and Smith, a marine colonel said that if the General wanted to see some freshly destroyed PA tanks, there were some a little farther on. Small-arms fire could be heard spluttering in that direction, and the last thing the Marine Corps needed was the death of the Supreme Commander in its zone. Nevertheless, he sailed recklessly ahead. An agitated leatherneck lieutenant tried to block him, saying, “General, you can’t come up here!” “Why not?” MacArthur asked. The officer said, “We just knocked out six Red tanks over the top of this hill. “ MacArthur nodded approvingly. “That was the proper thing to do,” he said, and climbed the crest, where he looked down disdainfully on North Korean snipers firing in his direction. To the vast relief of the marine commanders, he then descended the slope, remarking that “a downhill grade is easier on old legs like mine.” Jerking his head sideways toward the enemy riflemen, he said with satisfaction that he had been right, that these North Koreans were second-rate troops, that the best PA troops were down fighting Walker in front of Pusan.81