MacArthur’s War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero
by Stanley Weintraub
Free Press. 385 pp. $27.50
General Douglas MacArthur was the U.S. Army’s most daring strategist of the century just past, responsible for some of its most imaginative triumphs as well as some of its most disastrous blunders. Both sides of this record were on full display in the Korean war, a conflict that I covered for the Overseas News Agency and the International News Service and in which Stanley Weintraub, not yet the historian and biographer he was to become, served as a lieutenant on the staff of a U.S.-run prisoner-of-war camp. (Over the ensuing decades our paths have crossed briefly on several occasions, and for reasons unknown my name appears on the long list of those acknowledged in this book.) Today a professor at Penn State and the author of, among many other books, Disraeli (1993) and The Last Great Victory (1995), Weintraub has now returned to Korea with a close history of the precarious eleven months in which MacArthur led American forces from disaster to triumph to disaster.
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The American “police action,” as President Harry Truman called it, began 50 years ago this June, after Washington deluded itself, and misled the Communist world, into thinking that South Korea lay outside the U.S. defense perimeter. When troops from the Communist North suddenly rolled south across the 38th parallel, Truman switched gears and marshaled a United Nations coalition to fight.
Initially, things did not go at all well. Charged with running the war from his post as supreme commander of conquered and occupied Japan, MacArthur, who had built a sterling reputation in World War II as the dauntless leader of Allied forces in the South Pacific, dribbled unprepared, under-strength, and unmotivated U.S. occupation troops into battle. They were all he had at his disposal, and the immediate emergency was acute, but their World War II-vintage bazookas were mere “paint-scratchers” against the modern Soviet-built tanks that led the assault. South Korea’s capital, Seoul, less than 30 miles from the border, succumbed within a week, its defenders forced to retreat to the port of Pusan hundred of miles to the south.
In September 1950, barely a month and a half after the Communist invasion, MacArthur, in one of the most ingenious and glorious feats of his career, landed a strong force at the thinly defended port of Inchon near Seoul. (Because of a 30-foot variation in water level from low to high tide in the narrow harbor at Inchon, both North Korea and a skeptical Pentagon had concluded that no sane commander would attempt a landing there.) Cut off from supplies and reinforcements by the American pincer operation, the Communist army in the South began to disintegrate. Seoul was retaken, and North and South Korea were once more divided at approximately the previous border.
Washington had attained its original objective of driving out the invaders, but now MacArthur’s superiors encouraged him to “liberate” all of North Korea by marching to the frontier of Chinese Manchuria. MacArthur had even more ambitious plans. He wanted to draw China into the fight so that the U.S. could, once and for all, destroy the “international Communist conspiracy,” if necessary by means of nuclear weapons.
MacArthur succeeded in drawing China into the fight, but, as Weintraub vividly shows, not in the way he had planned. By October, so-called People’s Volunteers—actually, regular Communist Chinese soldiers—began moving stealthily into Korea. Yet even as their strength mounted to a quarter of a million men (later to rise to more than three-quarters of a million), MacArthur continued to ignore the clear evidence that China meant to enter the war.
When Mao Zedong finally launched a massive assault, Mac-Arthur’s response was appallingly slow. American and South Korean forces were forced into headlong retreat. In short order, Seoul was once again conquered by Communist forces. Under General Matthew Ridgway who was summoned to lead the troops in the field, Seoul was then retaken—and razed in the fighting. But MacArthur, in violation of explicit orders, now began to demand ever more insistently that the U.S. strike directly at China, a move that would undermine any possibility of a negotiated conclusion to the fight. When he went so far as to criticize Truman’s conduct of the war publicly and repeatedly, the President stripped him of his command. As for the US.-led “police action,” it continued for another two years, costing 34,000 American soldiers their lives and leaving an estimated 1.4 million South Koreans dead, wounded, or missing.
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MacArthur was beyond question a great man, almost as great as he believed himself to be. But as Weintraub makes clear, he was impelled into both his triumphs and his debacles by the same character flaw: a self-confidence so overweening that it amounted to a conviction of infallibility. Decades of unrelenting flattery by the sycophants with whom he had surrounded himself left him with a tendency to disregard any opinion, indeed any fact, that conflicted with his own view of things. The isolation of power bred near-megalomania and impregnable insensitivity. In the end, the fame he had justly won in World War II was deeply tarnished by the catastrophes of Korea, as well as by his overwhelming arrogance.
Along with his probing of this “undoing of an American hero,” Weintraub recounts lucidly and in great detail the exceptionally bloody and turbulent struggle on the Korean peninsula. His narrative helps to place in perspective an episode now being investigated by the Pentagon 50 years after the event—an alleged massacre of hundreds of Korean refugees by U.S. forces under a bridge near the hamlet of No Gun Ri. Whatever the exact sequence of events at No Gun Ri, from Weintraub’s account of the fighting in Korea one comes away with a renewed appreciation of what can happen in the fog of war, particularly when a small force unfamiliar with the terrain is fighting to halt an offensive by greatly superior and better-armed foes. In Korea, an additional element of confusion arose from the Communist infiltrators and saboteurs who regularly wore civilian clothing and blended into the local population “like fish in the water,” as Mao Zedong had counseled them to do.
Though I personally witnessed no massacres of civilians in Korea, I do not doubt that individual and collective acts of barbarism occurred. The crucial point to bear in mind, however, is that there is no evidence, or even any credible allegation, that Americans deliberately killed civilians whom they knew to be civilians. And even if such inexcusable acts could be shown to have occurred, this would hardly erase the fundamental difference between American and Communist behavior.
The U.S. high command never ordered either captives or civilians slain; indeed, the hundreds of thousands of North Korean and Chinese soldiers taken prisoner in the war, if they were lucky enough to fall into American hands, were fed and cared for. The Communists, by contrast, massacred in accordance with commands from above, often from the very top. When the North Koreans took Seoul, their secret police and soldiers slaughtered thousands of “class enemies.”
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Though its central focus is Korea, MacArthur’s War sheds light on patterns of Chinese foreign policy that continue in force to the present day. Mao, Weintraub shows, eagerly encouraged the North to invade the South, and was pleased when MacArthur gave him reason to send his own armies into the fray. Though he genuinely feared an American stab into Manchuria, Mao’s chief purpose was to demonstrate China’s new military power, to make China respected because it was strong.
But in the aftermath of the war and in the decades to come, having learned his lesson the hard way, Mao confined himself to thundering. MacArthur’s initial success at Inchon and the subsequent battering of Chinese forces in the conflict led to an extreme reluctance on the part of Beijing to become engaged in yet another ground war, particularly where the possibility loomed of American intervention. In the battle over Vietnam, for example, China never provided troops or even defensive air power to its North Vietnamese allies, limiting assistance instead to supplies and armaments. It is of course possible that, had the U.S. actually invaded North Vietnam and marched toward the Chinese border, Beijing’s response would have been different; but such a move was never in the cards (partly because of the lesson learned in Korea by the American side).
Taking a much longer perspective, one might even argue that Mao’s reluctance in the aftermath of Korea to extend China’s power by open force of arms dealt a blow to Communist rule worldwide. The Kremlin in particular took note of the implications of China’s bloody nose. In the 1950’s and 60’s, although the USSR moved directly against uprisings in “fraternal, socialist” Hungary and Czechoslovakia, there were no military assaults by Soviet forces on established Western (or Western-supported) governments. Despite many detours and deviations on the long road, Korea might thus be said to have begun a wind-down of Communist power that ended with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.
If so, Douglas MacArthur could also be seen in retrospect as having helped to hasten the collapse of the “international Communist conspiracy”—though hardly in the manner he had intended. The moral, if moral there need be, is the old one that those who make policy often aim at one target and hit another. Success, like failure, can come about in unexpected ways.
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