Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

In the first two weeks of August, another American division and parts of other units, including a Marine Corps brigade, landed at Pusan. By the middle of the month, that enclave was entrenched, and a counter-offensive to drive the North Korean forces back to the 38th parallel was being prepared. At that point MacArthur made a brilliant suggestion: To avoid the hard push up the peninsula, he proposed landing two American divisions at Inchon, halfway up the west side of Korea, fifty miles south of the 38th parallel and only 25 miles from Seoul, the capital. Everything was adverse to the plan, unless there was complete tactical surprise. Fortunately, this was achieved, a rather unexpected event in the East. Marine units landed at Inchon from the sea on September 15th and found little opposition. On September 22nd they captured Seoul and, six days later, were joined by the main United Nations offensive driving up the peninsula from Pusan. About half the PRK forces were captured in the bag, while the rest fled northward across the 38th parallel into North Korea. That frontier was reached by the UN forces as the month ended.

The Red Chinese decision to intervene in North Korea was made about the third week in August and began on October 15th, nine days after American troops crossed the 38th parallel into North Korea. Such an intervention was almost inevitable, as Red China could hardly be expected to allow the buffer North Korean state to be destroyed and American troops to occupy the line of the Yalu without taking some steps to protect its own security. China would have welcomed the restoration of the boundary along the 38th parallel, which Russia had so carelessly destroyed by instigating the PRK attack in June. By October they feared that the United States was about to use the Korean area as a base for a general war on China. In such a war, the Chinese expected to become the target of A-bombs, but believed that they could survive if they could wipe out the United Nations Korean base for ground operations. Accordingly, as soon as it became clear that American forces would continue past the 38th parallel to the Yalu, the Chinese intervened, not to restore the 38th parallel frontier, but to clear the United Nations forces from Asia completely.

The Chinese intervention in Korea, which began on October 15, 1950, was a much greater surprise than Inchon, and gave rise to one of the most bitter controversies in American political history, the so-called Truman-MacArthur controversy. The dispute arose from the fact that MacArthur did not accept his government’s strategic and political plans, and systematically sought to undermine and redirect them, while in constant communication with the press and with the leaders of the opposition political party for this purpose.

The Truman Administration, after the victory at Inchon, did not intend to stop at the 38th parallel, and hoped to reunite the country under the Seoul government. It is probable that this alone triggered the Chinese intervention, but, to reduce that possibility, Washington set certain restrictions on MacArthur’s actions which he soon sought to evade. Washington and Tokyo both knew that the Chinese had about 300,000 troops ready for action in Manchuria north of the Yalu and that neither Russia nor China was attempting to reequip the shattered North Korean forces. To discourage any Chinese intervention, the White House forbade any attack by Chiang on the Chinese coast, any naval blockade of China itself (Korea, of course, was blockaded), or any attack on China or Siberia north of the Yalu, or the use of non-Korean troops in the immediate vicinity of the Yalu as the conquest of North Korea was completed.

On October 9, 1950, two of MacArthur’s planes attacked a Russian air base sixty-two miles inside Russian territory and only eighteen miles from Vladivostok. To make certain that MacArthur understood the reasons for these restrictions, President Truman the next day instructed MacArthur to meet him at Wake Island on October 15th. The two leaders had a lengthy discussion, in which these restrictions were reiterated, but within two months of his return to Japan, MacArthur recommenced his almost daily interviews and letters agitating against these limits.

At Wake Island, General MacArthur assured President Truman that any Chinese intervention into Korea would be most unlikely, and, in any case, would be on a scale which could be handled. Even as he spoke, the first Chinese units were already crossing the Yalu River from Manchuria into North Korea. These engaged in combat on October 26th, and by October 30th some had been captured. MacArthur continued to deny that any significant Chinese intervention was present or likely, and tried to discourage it by a vigorous attack northward against the North Korean remnants. Because of lack of American troops for an attack across the width of the peninsula, he divided his forces into two separate attacks on either side of the peninsula with no direct liaison between the two where a considerable gap was left. Moreover, MacArthur on October 24th canceled the restrictions on use of non-Korean forces close to the Chinese and Russian borders. His special communique of November 5th which opened his northward offensive spoke of it as one which would for “all practical purposes end the war” and bring the United Nations forces “home by Christmas.”

Until November 26th the MacArthur offensive rolled northward against only moderate resistance, but, just as it reached the Yalu frontier at some points, a gigantic Chinese offensive of 33 divisions counterattacked into the gap between the two UN wings.

MacArthur’s communique of November 28th spoke of the Chinese attack as a “new war,” which “has shattered the high hopes we entertained that the intervention of the Chinese was only of a token nature on a volunteer and individual basis. . . .” At once he began an intensive propaganda campaign both to obtain his earlier aims for direct attacks on coastal China and air attacks on interior points and to rewrite the history of the preceding month so that his own actions would seem to be premeditated and skilled ripostes to Chinese plans. In fact, his public statement of November 28th was in sharp contrast with his private message to Washington almost four weeks earlier which estimated the Chinese forces across the Yalu as half a million men in 56 regular army divisions supported by 370,000 district security forces. In the face of such knowledge, no excuse can be found for MacArthur’s use of a divided command with a central gap to attack toward such a force.

The Chinese attack in MacArthur’s mind reduced the American situation in the Far East to a simple choice between two extreme alternatives: either all-out war on China, and possibly Russia, to destroy world Communism once for all or the immediate evacuation of our forces from Korea. The former would have given the Soviet Union a free hand in Europe; the latter would have made it impossible for us to obtain resistance against Communist nibbling from any small states or even from our greater allies elsewhere in the world and would have destroyed our prestige in Asia and Africa. A rapid visit by Generals J. Lawton Collins and Hoyt S. Vandenberg to Korea in January 12-17, 1951 convinced them that the middle alternative, which was still Washington’s policy, namely, to maintain the independence of South Korea, was still possible.

Rather than accept this alternative, MacArthur intensified his press barrage against the Administration, as well as his numerous messages to isolationist Republican politicians in Washington. A directive of December 6th which ordered him to clear his public statements on foreign and military policy with the respective departments was violated, for some months, with impunity. The congressional elections of 1950 had been disastrous to Administration supporters and had been successful for isolationists of both parties, with the Administration’s majority in both Houses cut almost to nothing.