In the beginning MacArthur’s hunt went well. A communique announced that his men had swept forward fifteen miles “against almost no resistance. “ The next day he reported that “the giant U.N. pincer moved according to schedule . . . an air reconnaissance . . . showed little sign of hostile military activity.” There was the barest hint of trouble: “The left wing advanced against stubborn . . . resistance.” However, the right wing “continued to exploit its commanding position. Our losses were extraordinarily light. The logistic situation is fully geared to sustain offensive operations. The justice of our course and promise of early completion of our mission is reflected in the morale of troops and commanders alike.”139
On Sunday, November 26, he reported that the allied drive was continuing “to roll closer” to the Manchurian border without encountering even moderate resistance. Then, on Monday, there was a jarring note: “strong enemy counterattacks . . . stalled yesterday the United Nations general offensive.” The Dai Ichi warned correspondents against unjustified pessimism, but as the hours passed, with officers’ faces lengthening and urgent dispatches piling up from Walker’s Eighth Army and Almond’s X Corps, it was evident that something had gone wrong. Willoughby didn’t finish fitting fragments of information together until late that night, but long before then the substance of them was clear. On a three-hundred-mile front, countless thousands of Chinese Communists—“Chicoms,” as MacArthur’s headquarters had begun to call them—had howled down from what the General had previously described as a “rugged spinal mountain range” too precipitous to shelter troops. MacArthur radioed Washington and Lake Success: “We face an entirely new war.” The Chinese, he said, sought nothing less than the “complete destruction” of his army. Bradley phoned Truman: “A terrible message has come in from General MacArthur.” Truman told his staff: “MacArthur says he’s stymied. He says he has to go over to the defensive. It’s no longer a question of a few so-called volunteers. The Chinese have come in with both feet.”140
No one outside Asia knew what that entailed, because they had never waged war against a nation with China’s almost limitless human resources. Walker and Almond were already fighting 300,000 Chicoms, a force that would eventually be quadrupled. Some GI regiments were outnumbered ten to one. Brutal onslaughts were exploding in their front, on their flanks, and in their rear. Chinese machine guns and mortar shells were sweeping the frozen trails and hairpin curves where GIs sought refuge. And that was only the beginning. Mao had written: “Enemy Advances, We Retreat; Enemy Halts, We Harass; Enemy Tires, We Attack; Enemy Retreats, We Pursue.” Once the UN troops’ drive faltered, the Chicoms were on their heels.141
Lin Piao’s first blow had fallen on the weakest point in MacArthur’s line, the juncture between the Eighth Army and the ROK II Corps at Tekchen. A Chinese assault column here virtually wiped out the improperly aligned ROKs. This Red tide widened the gulf between Walker and X Corps, sent Church’s 24th Division reeling back across the Chongchon, and enveloped the right wing of the 2nd Division, which had been backing up the South Koreans. By Wednesday, November 29, the New York Times reported, Chicom cavalry had “driven a deep wedge between the United States Eighth Army and the X Corps on the east and might have linked up strong North Korean forces northeast of the former Red capital of Pyongyang.” Meanwhile, 150 miles to the east, the 1st Marine Division, which had reached the hills overlooking the Chosen reservoir, had radioed that they were facing a new Chinese division. By nightfall the marines were surrounded, cut off from their base, the port of Hungnam.142
MacArthur gazing down at the Yalu River from his plane, the SCAP, November 1950
MacArthur on air inspection of the Yalu
Asked for the best test of a general, Wellington replied: “To know when to retreat, and how to do it.” MacArthur almost waited too long and came close to digging “a hole,” as Acheson put it, “without an exit.” He continued to urge his field commanders forward for four days after the first enemy breakthrough, withholding pullback orders until his center had been destroyed and the foe was lapping around the inside flanks of his divided army, isolating his right wing and pushing the left wing back toward the sea. By then it was obvious that the Chinese had enough troops to surround Walker as well as Almond and still send fresh divisions south to retake Seoul. Lights burned till dawn on the sixth floor of the Dai Ichi as the General pored over maps and aerial photographs, searching for a way to salvage his offensive. Realizing at last that there was none, he issued instructions for a series of Eighth Army delaying actions while the men of X Corps—the 7th and 3rd divisions, and the marines—fought their way to the coast, where they could be picked up by the Seventh Fleet. Peking radio announced that the General’s men were in “wild flight.” In reality, the withdrawal of his right wing was superb. The GIs and marines there formed a column and hacked their bitter, bloody way through waves of Chicoms, moving ever eastward over a corkscrew trail of icy dirt in subzero cold. At one point they seemed utterly lost, confronted by an impassable abyss; then U.S. pilots arrived overhead with a huge suspension bridge hanging from their flying boxcars and parked it in the chasm. When the survivors reached Hungnam, MacArthur was there to congratulate them; then they marched aboard open-mouthed landing ships and were ferried to Pusan.
America’s allies were unnerved by the shattering reversal of UN fortunes, and so was the American President. During that first terrible week the General repeatedly reported a “fluid situation,” which, Truman acidly noted, “is a public relations man’s way of saying that he can’t figure out what’s going on.” Distraught himself, the chief executive told a press conference on November 30 that nuclear bombs might be used against the enemy and seemed to indicate that the decision would be MacArthur’s. That brought Clement Attlee hurrying over from London. Ross issued a “clarifying” statement: “The use of any weapon is always implicit in the possession of that weapon,” and “only the President” could authorize the dropping of atomic bombs. That reassured America’s allies, but the situation remained ghastly. At Acheson’s suggestion, Truman declared a national emergency. The Joint Chiefs radioed MacArthur: “We consider that the preservation of your forces is now the primary consideration. Consolidation of forces into beachheads is concurred in.”143
Before X Corps’ successful disengagement, both Tokyo and Washington had considered the evacuation of all UN troops from Korea. On November 30 MacArthur concluded that holding a line against the new foe was “quite impractical,” and on December 3 he sent the Joint Chiefs a grim message, reporting that all his troops except the marines were “mentally fatigued and physically battered,” that the ROKs had proved useless, and that the Chicoms had already committed twenty-six divisions to battle, with another 200,000 Chinese in reserve. The enemy soldiers, he said, were “fresh, completely organized, splendidly trained and equipped and apparently in peak condition.” Awaiting an answer, he told Sebald that “the evacuation of all or part of the Americans in Japan”—forty thousand of them—“might become necessary.”144
It was in these desperate days that the Truman administration reversed its Korean policy. MacArthur’s mission was no longer the unification of the peninsula. With Mao in the war as Kim II Sung’s ally, circumstances had altered. The British, hoping to protect their commercial interests in China, wanted to quit, and the Truman administration was feeling less conciliatory toward its more vehement GOP critics. The Joint Chiefs were reconciled to the prospect of withdrawing the General’s entire army to Japan. However, when Collins flew to Tokyo to consult MacArthur about the details, SCAP told him that he had changed his mind since cabling him that uniting the forces of the Eighth Army and the X Corps was impossible. The union had in fact been achieved; the troops were tightly knit; the men wise, now, to Chicom combat tricks. Pyongyang was about to fall to Lin Piao, and the temporary loss of Seoul was inevitable, but after that the General could form a firm sea-to-sea line below the 38th Parallel. “The hysteria about evacuation,” as Acheson noted, had “su
bsided.”145
American and British newspapers gave their readers the impression that UN forces had been ingloriously crushed, which was true, and had suffered staggering casualties, which was not at all true. Indeed, MacArthur’s Korean retreat was one of his most successful feats of arms. Of the U.S. divisions hit by the Chinese in that first rush, only the 2nd had been badly hurt, and its 25 percent casualties were hardly comparable with the 60 percent losses of some GI units in the Battle of the Bulge. The fallback had been orderly; in 1945 Iwo Jima had been twice as expensive, and the number killed and wounded on Okinawa (65,631) had been five times the General’s Eighth Army and X Corps casualties (12,975). In fact, during MacArthur’s nine and a half months in Korea, his total losses were just a fifth of World War II’s ETO casualties during a comparable period. And the price the Chinese had paid for the ground yielded to them was shocking.
Unfortunately, the General couldn’t bring himself to leave it at that. Napoleon once said: “I have so often in my life been mistaken that I no longer blush for it.” SCAP didn’t blush because he refused to concede that the forfeiture of three hundred square miles of hard-won territory was a calamity, refused to acknowledge that his End-the-War, Home-for-Christmas push had been ill-advised. “As far as I can see,” he said, “no strategic or tactical mistakes were made of a basic proportion; [the] disposition of. . . United Nations troops, in my opinion, could not have been improved upon had I known the Chinese were going to attack.”* His attack northward had not been an offensive at all, he now said; it had been “a reconnaissance-in-force”—as though a commander would use his whole army for a patrol. The enemy had “hoped to quietly assemble a massive force till spring, and destroy us with one mighty blow. Had I not acted when I did, we would have been a ‘sitting duck’ doomed to eventual annihilation.”146
He had never responded gracefully to faultfinders, and now they had multiplied tenfold. The concept of a UN expeditionary force to punish an aggressor was turning out badly. Korea had never been more than a peripheral theater to the Joint Chiefs; their principal concern was the Soviet threat to Europe. Later Bradley summed this up in calling the Korean conflict “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy.” America’s allies felt this even more strongly. As long as the delinquent nation had been North Korea, they had been willing to discipline it, buying justice on the cheap. But an involvement with the world’s most populous country, with an army far larger than any force they were prepared to put in the field, was another matter. They were ready to cash in their chips now and depart from the peninsula with the least possible loss of face. At the same time, however, the rout of their troops had humiliated all of them, including the United States. They needed a scapegoat, and the General who wouldn’t own up to his blunder seemed cast for the part.147
Certain themes recurred in the global criticism of the UN’s field commander. It was argued that his division of his forces had been irresponsible, that he had failed to prepare strong defensive positions, that launching an offensive after Chinese units had been identified in North Korea had been a foolish tempting of fate. Attlee, Nehru, and Canada’s Lester Pearson implied that SCAP had become the tool of powerful forces in the United States bent on the destruction of Communist China. The New Statesman and Nation, England’s shrillest voice of anti-Americanism, charged that the Supreme Commander had “acted in defiance of all common sense, and in such a way as to provoke the most peace-loving nation.” Left-wing Labourites took up the cry, and one of them said that “if the Chinese fell a long way back without being pushed”—which hadn’t happened—“they were ready to sit down and talk to somebody. Jistead of anybody going along and sitting down and talking with them, General MacArthur chose that moment to launch an enormous attack bang in the middle of a first-class blizzard.”148
The argument that MacArthur, not the Chinese, was responsible for their woes was echoed by some American intellectuals, including, of all people, McGeorge Bundy, who later became one of Lyndon Johnson’s chief Vietnam hawks. Bundy wrote then that neither U.S. nor UN policy required the occupation of all North Korea “and this MacArthur knew. . . . The decision was his; it was provocation.” Few of his countrymen were prepared to brand the General an instigator of violence, but many, including conservatives, felt he had let them down. Henry Luce’s Time called him responsible for one of the greatest military catastrophes of all time, “the worst the United States ever suffered.” Gardner Cowles’s Look said that he had “grossly miscalculated the intentions, strength, and capabilities of the forces against him,” and that “no nation in the spot we are in now can string along with a leader whose ill-considered decision . . . precipitated and magnified the swift disaster.” The New York Herald Tribune blamed SCAP for “one of the greatest military reverses in the history of American arms” because he had “compounded blunder by confusion of facts and intelligence.” Homer Bigart, a Herald Tribune correspondent in Korea, wrote that the General’s “unsound deployment” of UN troops “made no sense. It was an invitation to disaster.” David Bruce felt that MacArthur had erred in not working “for a fixed line in Korea and a neutral zone,” and Chip Bohlen told C. L. Sulzberger that the Supreme Commander had “made a terrible mistake in pushing this latest Korean offensive. If, as he now claims, he did it to force the Chinese into action before they had built up an even larger force, he was a fool to send isolated units way up to the northeast. He was caught with his pants down and . . . [disregarded] the basic military assumption that the enemy will always do what he appears capable of doing; and it was evident from the last bloody nose we received in Korea . . . that they were capable of plenty.”149
Harold Ickes said, “MacArthur talks too much.” The General’s old gadfly was right. There was a great deal to be said in his defense, but since others were saying it, he should have left the field to them. Some were making points which would have been far less telling from him. Military analysts pointed out that Lee had divided his forces again and again. James Reston told his readers that Truman had shared the General’s conviction that the Chinese wouldn’t intervene, and Stewart and Joseph Alsop wrote that the administration had been afraid of restraining MacArthur because of GOP charges that its policy toward Peking was “soft.” Other columnists noted that it was nonsense to argue that MacArthur’s Thanksgiving offensive had provoked the Chicoms into a counterattack; intervention with over a quarter-million men required weeks of planning. The proposition that the foe was merely shielding Kim II Sung’s hydroelectric facilities also crumbled under examination. The Changjin reservoir, for example, had been dismantled a full month before the arrival of GIs. And anticipating so momentous a move as full-scale Chinese intervention was scarcely within the competence of Tokyo’s G-2. As Willoughby pointed out in Stars and Stripes, although his intelligence had erred, “One can hardly blame the United Nations field command for the Chinese coming en masse at their own time and place. That monumental decision was beyond the local military intelligence surveillance; it lay behind the Iron Curtain and the secret councils of Peiping [sic].”150
But the thin-skinned, deeply wounded General could no more leave the rebuttal to others than he could recognize that he had fallen victim to his own legend of invincibility, that he had demonstrated the wisdom of Dry-den: “Even victors are by victory undone.” Instead he lashed out at “the disaster school of war reporting,” denouncing “irresponsible correspondents at the front, aided and abetted by other such unpatriotic elements at home.” They should have confined their stories, he said, to comments about the “superior manner” in which he had executed his “tactical withdrawal.” Then he began giving his version of what had happened to friendly journalists. On November 28 he sent a self-serving cablegram to Ray Henle of the Three Star Extra news broadcast; two days later he answered a letter from Arthur Krock of the New York Times; and the day after that he gave a lengthy interview to the editors of David Lawrence’s U.S. News and World Report and dispatched a long
message to Hugh Baillie, president of the United Press. Meanwhile he was talking, or writing, to Ward Price of the London Daily Mail; to Barry Faris, managing editor of the International News Service; and to selected members of the Tokyo press corps.151
The morale of his troops, he said, was being sabotaged by “misleading anonymous gossip.” He told Baillie that European leaders preoccupied with the safety of their continent were “short-sighted.” Krock had asked him whether it was true that he had been advised to halt at the 38th Parallel; the General replied: “There is no validity whatever to the anonymous gossip to which you refer . . . . I have received no suggestion from [any] authoritative source that in the execution of its mission the command should stop at the 38th Parallel or Pyongyang, or at any line short of the international boundary.” To Faris he complained that he was the victim of “one of the most scandalous propaganda efforts to pervert the truth in modern times. . . . Any impression that as United Nations Commander I am more than an agent to implement policies determined upon a much higher level is perfectly fantastic. The statement that agreement was made at Wake Island to a British proposal that the United Nations forces stop forty miles short of the international boundary is a pure fabrication.” Answering U.S. News and World Report he accused Washington of giving enemy aircraft safe refuge in Manchuria and called this “an enormous handicap” for him, one “without precedent in military history.”152
Among his fascinated audience was the occupant of the White House. Truman tartly told his advisers that MacArthur was making it “quite plain that no blame attached to himself or his staff.” He was right, but it was also true that the administration was unwilling to shoulder its own share of the blame. No one had recommended that he draw up at the Parallel, by all accounts nothing had been said about such a proposal at Wake. Yet that was what administration spokesmen—not for attribution, but for publication—were telling reporters, Reston among them, in the capital. Unlike them, the General was willing to be quoted, and that was the rub; his accusations were embarrassing the government. Truman said that while MacArthur was “no more to be blamed for the fact that he was outnumbered than General Eisenhower could be charged with the heavy losses of the Battle of the Bulge,” his verbal barrage might lead “many people abroad to believe that our government would change its policy.” Then Truman said: “Every second lieutenant knows best what his platoon ought to do. He thinks the higher-ups are just blind when they don’t see things his way. But General MacArthur—and rightly too—would have court-martialed any second lieutenant who gave press interviews to express his disagreement.”153