Refighting the Last War

D. Clayton James

• Publisher: Free Press
• Year: 2010
• Print ISBN: 9780029160015
• eBook ISBN: 9781451602371
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Weltgeschichte

Distinguished historian D. Clayton James offers a brilliant reinterpretation of the Korean War conflict. Focusing on the critical issue of command, he shows how the Korean War is a key to understanding American decision-making in all military encounters since World War II.Korea, the first of America's limited wars to stem the tide of world communism, was fought on unfamiliar terrain and against peasant soldiers and would become a template for subsequent American military engagements, especially Vietnam. And yet, the strategic and tactical doctrines employed in Korea, as well as the weapons and equipment, were largely left over from World War II.James, the master biographer of MacArthur, uses studies of military crises to examine the American high command in the Korean War. He explores the roles, leadership, personalities, and prejudices of five key commanders—President Harry S. Truman; Generals Douglas MacArthur, Matthew B. Ridgway, and Mark W. Clark; and Admiral C. Turner Joy—and then looks at six crucial issues confronting them in that conflict. From the decision made by Truman, without congsessional approval, to commit United States forces to combat in Korea, to MacArthur's persistent fight for approval of his dangerous plan to assault Inchon, to the judgment to finally open truce negotiations, these turning points illuminate the American way of command in wartime. James analyzes the ground-level results and long-term implications of each choice, and sensitively explores the course that might had followed if other options had been taken. Probing the nature and consequences of these military resolutions, James shows how the conduct of the Korean War, like every new war, bears the imprint of the preceding one.

Part I

THE SENIOR COMMANDERS

CHAPTER 1
Truman: The Right Thing to Do

FROM CONTAINMENT TO CONQUEST

“By God, I’m going to let them have it!” exclaimed President Harry S. Truman to several top officials upon returning to the nation’s capital after learning of the North Korean invasion across the 38th parallel. Secretary of State Dean G. Acheson, Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson, and Under Secretary of State James E. Webb, who were in the limousine with him from the airport to Blair House, had proposals ready regarding the U.S. response. Truman said that “of course” he would listen but warned that “you know how I feel.”1 They knew that after he gave vent to his feelings, he would consider their recommendations; and then he would make his decisions with speed and no later regrets. Actually, he knew little about the internal strife between the North and South Koreans, but he was acquainted with the tension-plagued relations between the Soviet and American occupation forces on the peninsula following World War II. He saw the North Korean action as Moscow-directed aggression that called for a strong American response. If communism was on the march, Truman responded as he would to the spread of some evil force; it must be stopped, for by its nature it could not be appeased. It was not long before the President was recalling how Hitler’s expansionism could not be satiated in the 1930s.

“Help me to be, to think, to act what is right, because it is right; make me truthful, honest and honorable in all things; make me intellectually honest for the sake of right and honor and without thought of reward to me.” Thus Truman recorded in his diary in August 1950 a prayer he had said “over & over all my life.”2 He had emerged from his farm and small-town beginnings in the Mid-west with an image of himself as a simple person committed to doing right and working hard. He had developed a view of the world as an essentially moral battleground where individuals and nations played out their destinies according to such absolute principles as integrity and justice. But by the time he took the oath of office as President, a month before his sixty-first birthday, he was not a simple man and he had come to see the world as very complex. During his years in the White House, however, he would often act as if people and issues were as uncomplicated as they had seemed throughout his childhood and youth in Missouri.

As a banker, artilleryman, clothier, judge, and U.S. senator from 1935 to 1945, he had demonstrated traits of personality and leadership style that would characterize him as President. At most times he was highly principled, decisive, gutsy, unpretentious, and commonsensible. His “horse sense” became legendary not only in Missouri but also on Capitol Hill, particularly during his shrewd leadership of the Senate’s investigation of the defense program in World War II. Nevertheless, he could be cocky, impetuous, and petty with certain persons and groups, and excessively deferential and compromising toward others. While believing sincerely in the moral absolutes on which he had been reared, Truman exhibited his brightest and darkest skills when playing the simultaneous roles of master politician, interest-group broker, and horse trader. Such a political creature, blending enormous power and judgmental morality behind a facade of folksy simplicity, was not to be underestimated, a fact some of his adversaries would learn too late.

Somewhere between his combat experience as a junior officer of field artillery in World War I and his Senate subcommittee’s inquiry into the waste and mismanagement of the military-industrial complex in World War II, Truman cultivated an ambivalent attitude toward things military. He was intensely patriotic and believed in the citizen-soldier’s obligation to defend his country. Indeed, he had served commendably in battle himself. He accepted the necessity to use force or the threat of force, becoming the only head of state ever to order atomic warfare and serving as commander in chief in two of America’s major wars. Two of his three most influential advisers and confidants in foreign affairs were military: General of the Army George C. Marshall and Fleet Admiral William D. Leahy (the third being Secretary of State Acheson).

Nevertheless, Truman’s strong propensity to fulfill the domestic reforms set forth in his Fair Deal program left him frequently at odds with the military establishment, whose annual budgets were slashed severely in the five years after the Second World War. He clashed with his service chiefs over strategic priorities and new weapons systems, particularly General of the Army Dwight D. Eisenhower and Admiral Louis E. Denfield, and he differed sharply with his military occupation commanders in Germany and Japan, especially General of the Army Douglas MacArthur. The President’s relations with the first secretary of defense, James V. Forrestal, were sometimes less than harmonious and became volatile with his successor, Johnson. In fact, by the eve of the Korean War, most leaders of the armed services laid blame for the military’s precipitous decline in strength and combat readiness on President Truman’s apathy, even hostility, toward the defense hierarchy, and on his favored treatment of liberal programs expanding or extending President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal.

Truman’s dreams of civil rights measures, federal assistance to education, and other Fair Deal objectives could not be realized if the United States maintained its post-1945 armed forces on a large scale. Yet American troops in numbers unprecedented in peacetime were deployed in many areas of the globe after World War II either on occupation duty or at bases where they could be used to deter or halt aggression by the Soviet Union and its new communist satellites. If his domestic reforms were not to be hampered by the military burdens imposed by the new global threat of communist expansion, it was imperative that he find nonmilitary responses to Premier Joseph Stalin’s perceived probes and incursions in the Cold War. As alternatives to increased military spending, Truman promoted economic assistance to endangered nations, such as the Greek-Turkish Aid Act, the European Recovery Program, and the Point Four Plan, and he organized collective-security arrangements, particularly the Rio Pact and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO).

His ideal was for the United States to assume only limited liability for the economic and military costs of containing Soviet and Communist Chinese expansionism. During the first five years of his presidency, Truman became increasingly concerned that the Anglo-American alliance be strengthened, that the whole North Atlantic community of nations unite against communism’s spread, and that the United Nations serve as a reservoir for multilateral economic and military efforts to combat global communism. Some of the Truman administration’s efforts in organizing collective opposition to Soviet menaces were successful, notably the Marshall Plan and the Berlin air lift. Such successes, however, strengthened the President’s faith that Stalin’s moves could be countered with methods and means other than unilateral American military power. But he was soon to learn that coalitions could be illusory and disappointing creations. By the eve of the Korean War, the effectiveness of the American military had been sacrificed in large part to the President’s priorities: promotion of the Fair Deal at home and concentration on collective security and economic aid abroad. The situation boded ill if a shift from a cold to hot war should occur.

That change did occur suddenly, on June 25, 1950, when powerful armor-led North Korean Army units crossed the 38th parallel, which marked the boundary drawn in 1945 to separate Soviet and American occupation zones. They rapidly advanced into South Korea against ineffective resistance by the small, poorly trained, and inadequately armed defending troops. Within a week, President Truman ordered into action first air and naval, then ground forces of the United States in defense of the Republic of (South) Korea. The standard historical perception of the President during those first days of the emergency is that of a commander in chief acting boldly, courageously, and decisively to do what was right to repel blatant communist aggression and to save the weak, beleaguered South Korean republic. The commitment was undertaken at the executive level without consulting Congress, much less obtaining a formal declaration of war. Not until months later, when American involvement was still escalating and the tide of battle was turning toward disaster or costly attrition did important opposition leaders on Capitol Hill begin to criticize Truman for acting precipitously and imperially and thereby severely limiting the opportunity for bipartisan support of the war effort.

Truman himself regarded the intervention of the United States in the Korean conflict as the “toughest decision” of his career,3 but, in truth, Secretary of State Acheson was the actual initiator of most of the key early decisions. Truman was at his home in Independence, Missouri, when he heard of the outbreak of war along the 38th parallel, and Acheson rapidly made the initial basic decisions in Washington. When Truman got back to the nation’s capital on June 26, he concurred in Acheson’s prompt action to obtain the United Nations Security Council’s resolution calling for a cease-fire in Korea and the withdrawal of the North Korean invaders from South Korea. Although he liked the strategic recommendations his secretary of state put before him, he realized they pointed toward quick involvement of American troops. Acheson also understood the consequences. “It looked as though we must steel ourselves for the use of force,” he later said of the conclusion he had reached even before Truman’s return. Acheson admitted that before he went to Blair House on the night of June 26 to confer with the President and other key executive advisers, his own mind “was pretty clear on where the course we were about to recommend would lead and why it was necessary that we follow the course.”4

In the next days of tense conferences between Truman and his top advisers, the President went along with virtually all the proposals put forth by Acheson, who, in turn, was framing the early strategic and diplomatic initiatives of the United States in the Korean War. Acheson, not Truman, was the most fervent proponent of committing American air, naval, and ground forces to the Korean action, and it was the secretary of state who was the instigator of the Security Council’s resolution on June 27 calling upon member states to contribute men and matériel to the defense of South Korea. Moreover, Truman’s bypassing of Congress was undertaken upon the persistent advice of Acheson. So strong was Acheson’s influence on Truman that none of the foremost military officials who were involved in the Blair House sessions that final week of June, including boisterous Secretary of Defense Johnson and much-respected Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Omar Bradley, challenged the secretary of state’s main ideas, even on military matters.

Truman surely deferred to Acheson’s judgment in taking the United States into the Korean conflict, but the President made the ultimate decision himself and alone. He agreed with Acheson because he thought what he advocated was right, and both men viewed appeasement of North Korea’s aggression as wrong and fraught with consequences as disastrous as the infamous appeasements of the 1930s. Truman later remarked, “It was my belief that if this aggression in Korea went unchallenged, as the aggression in Manchuria in 1931 and in Ethiopia in 1934 had gone unchallenged, the world was certain to be plunged into another world war.”5 The free world had failed to meet Adolf Hitler’s challenge when he crossed the borders of Austria and Czechoslovakia, and World War II was the result. Now, the North Korean attack across a clear-cut territorial boundary recalled the totalitarian expansionism of the 1930s and carried a parallel threat.

Actually, the North and South Koreans had been engaged in bloody clashes for several years on an escalating scale of violence. The 38th parallel was accepted by neither as more than a temporary occupation border imposed by the United States and the Soviet Union. The Korean War originated in chaotic conditions marked by tensions not only of the global Cold War but also of the indigenous civil war. However, Truman’s primary concern was to contain the great evil, communism, and he saw intervention as his only option. He tended to see choices in black and white and not to evaluate fully the gray areas in between. This precluded an assessment of alternative courses.

Truman’s next decision of monumental significance in the Korean situation was to authorize General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, commander in chief of the United Nations Command (CINCUNC), to advance into North Korea, liberate it from communist control, and bring about the reunification of the Korean nation. Twelve days had passed since MacArthur’s strategically brilliant amphibious assault at Inchon on September 15 that led to the rapid rout and disintegration of the North Korean Army operating below the 38th parallel. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, with Truman’s enthusiastic endorsement, issued a new directive for MacArthur, proclaiming his aim now to be the “destruction of the North Korean Armed Forces.” He was “authorized to conduct military operations north of the 38th Parallel in Korea, provided that at the time of such operations there has been no entry into North Korea by major Soviet or Chinese Communist forces.”6 On September 29, General of the Army George Marshall, who had succeeded Johnson as secretary of defense the previous week, sent a cordial, supportive cable to MacArthur, apparently with the President’s sanction: “We want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the 38th Parallel.”7 MacArthur’s self-assured response was a harbinger of things to come, proclaiming that he considered “all of Korea open for our military operations.”8

South Korean troops marched into North Korea on October 1, and that day MacArthur broadcast an unconditional surrender ultimatum to North Korea. Truman concurred wholeheartedly as Acheson and the U.S. delegation at the United Nations drafted a resolution that, in essence, would give UN approval to MacArthur’s forces liberating North Korea and reuniting the two Koreas as an independent, democratic state. The UN General Assembly adopted it on October 7 by a lopsided margin of forty-seven to five, with seven abstentions.9

With the President’s vision of the Korean debacle as a Cold War issue and with Washington euphoric after the spectacular Inchon triumph, Truman and his military chiefs moved boldly, if prematurely, to launch the liberation of North Korea from communist control. Surprisingly little attention was paid to possible Communist Chinese reactions as official Washington focused on the Soviet Union’s response and potential problems involved in the reunification and rehabilitation of the two Koreas. Truman and his advisers did not anticipate the withdrawal of Allied support in the face of an enormous escalation of fighting and the threat of World War III. The United Kingdom, the British Commonwealth nations, Turkey, and the other countries who had sent men and matériel to defend South Korea now might back away from involvement in a mounting conflict that Truman had initially characterized as a “police action.”

In shifting America’s objective from saving South Korea to rescuing North Korea, Truman also risked the chance of sacrificing the Fair Deal reforms at home, which were always more important to him personally than the outcome on the Korean peninsula. After the invasion of North Korea and the subsequent Chinese intervention, the media in America and in Allied countries frequently spoke of “Truman’s War.” Thus Truman found himself identified with a radically new and impossible objective, the liberation of North Korea, and an unpopular war which would become a bloody stalemate that he could neither win nor terminate. His hasty decisions had led him into an uncharted and undesired war that would ultimately lead to his political demise. The quixotic goal of seizing an entire state was the most absurd case in the Korean conflict of American leaders reveling in the vision of glorious triumphs as in the days of the Second World War.

EUROPE’S PRIORITY AND JAPAN’S OPPORTUNITY

Besides the American entry into the Korean War and the abortive effort to liberate North Korea, Truman played an extremely important role in creating the post-1945 network of collective security arrangements of the United States. Like Acheson and W. Averell Harriman, one of the most trusted White House advisers, Truman believed it...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• PROLOGUE: The Last War Revisited
• Part I. THE SENIOR COMMANDERS
• Part II. THE KEY COMMAND DECISIONS
• Notes
• Index
• Photos