13
MacArthur’s Masterstroke
In mid-September, General MacArthur executed the most brilliant operation of his long career. His amphibious landing at Inchon was the first strategic turning point of the Korean War. After his first visit in late June, he started planning the counteroffensive at Inchon, over 150 miles northwest of Pusan on Korea’s western coast on the Yellow Sea, roughly twenty miles southwest of Seoul. For weeks, the Far East Command had been building up its forces, which MacArthur preempted with a first call on the arriving units sent to Japan.1
MacArthur reasoned that an amphibious landing would break the KPA’s stranglehold on the Pusan Perimeter by attacking far enough north along the Yellow Sea coast to (1) cut off the KPA’s long logistical tail, (2) liberate Seoul, (3) force Kim Il Sung into fighting a war on two fronts, and (4) trap virtually all KPA divisions south of the 38th parallel. He convinced himself that the only way out of the impasse of the Pusan attrition was an amphibious landing behind enemy lines. The risks were obvious and substantial. Failure would mean instant and probably irreparable damage to the UN Command.
Code-named Operation Chromite, the plan on briefing charts looked brilliant. As a sequence of objectives, it was straightforward. First, capture the poorly defended island of Wolmi-do at the entrance to the port of Inchon. Second, use the island as a springboard for the invasion of the mainland. Third, capture Inchon. Fourth, immediately attack northeast to capture Seoul’s major airport, Kimpo, to prevent the North Koreans from flying in reinforcements. And fifth, maintain the offensive momentum to capture Seoul and deliver the capital back to Syngman Rhee. MacArthur fervently believed that the KPA divisions deployed around the Pusan Perimeter would be forced to retreat. The enemy divisions heading north would be trapped between General Walker’s pursuing 8th Army and MacArthur’s Chromite forces positioned to interdict them in the center of the Korean Peninsula.
The strategic implications of such a triumphant outcome were as bold as the risks. The KPA could be annihilated—a classic Clausewitzian outcome of getting into the rear of one’s enemy and wreaking havoc and destruction. MacArthur knew the strategic and tactical mechanics of such an operation because he had learned them in World Wars I and II.
World War I had taught him the dangers of frontal assaults because the Western Front attacks for both sides consistently deteriorated into set-piece, casualty-intensive battles of attrition. World War II had taught him that a deft amphibious campaign of long island-hopping distances, maneuvering around Japanese strongpoints, attacking where the Imperial Japanese Army could be isolated, and leveraging naval and airpower against weaker garrisons was a battle-winning military recipe. MacArthur wanted a military solution where audacity and surprise were at the heart of the plan.
In July, he sent this message to Washington:
I am firmly convinced that an early and strong effort behind [the KPA] front will sever his main line of communication and enable us to deliver a decisive and crushing blow. Any material delay in such an operation may lose this opportunity. The alternative is a frontal attack which can only result in a protracted and expensive campaign to slowly drive the enemy north of the 38th parallel.2
Much has been written about the deliberations between senior officers in Tokyo and their superiors in Washington, but MacArthur had supreme confidence in his plan. There was a major command assemblage for a briefing on August 23, 1950, on the sixth floor of the Dai Ichi war room between MacArthur and many of America’s senior commanders. MacArthur, after listening carefully to the navy’s skepticism and assessment of the risks of the Inchon plan, spoke for forty-five minutes. His peroration carried the room.
“It is plainly apparent that here in Asia is where the communist conspirators have elected to make their play for global conquest. The test is not in Berlin or Vienna, in London, Paris, or Washington. It is here and now—it is along the Naktong River in South Korea. . . . I can almost hear the ticking of the second hand of destiny. We must act now or we will die. . . . We shall land at Inchon, and I shall crush them.” The deep voice fell away to a whisper. . . . The Chief of Naval Operations [Admiral Forrest P. Sherman] stood up and declared emotionally, “General, the Navy will get you to Inchon.”3
Captain Ladd, General Almond’s aide, was present for the briefing and MacArthur’s theatrics. Halberstam reports that Ladd smiled to himself as MacArthur concluded his final pitch—“he’s got them now.” Washington approved the operation five days later.
Historically, Chromite would become MacArthur’s brilliant military triumph and his alone. The assault on Inchon was set for September 15, 1950 (map 13.1). The Inchon amphibious force included the 1st Marine Division, the army’s 7th ID, and some ROK Army units, a total of seventy thousand men, virtually every available amphibious ship, and dozens of other navy warships. The invasion fleet totaled 260 ships sailing from Yokohama under the command of Vice Admiral Arthur D. Struble, one of the navy’s most experienced amphibious commanders. It was not a large fleet by World War II Pacific theater standards.4 Most of the Inchon-bound marines had recently arrived from US bases, while the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade had just been withdrawn from the Pusan Perimeter a few days before.
Map 13.1. General MacArthur’s brilliant amphibious counterstroke at Inchon cut off the KPA in South Korea and enabled General Walker’s 8th Army to go on the offensive.
Source: USMA Atlases.
The memory of Anzio hovered over the Inchon landing, a beachhead that Kim Il Sung was capable of potentially pinching off and strangling. But Kim was no Feldmarschall Kesselring, capable of quickly sizing up the situation and reacting with fire-brigade speed and ferocity as the German commander had at Anzio.
Another factor favored the UN Command. Kim Il Sung had been careless. Normally in an amphibious landing, surprise is crucial. In the case of Inchon, from Tokyo’s Press Club to Yokohama to Pusan, Chromite could have been dubbed “Operation Common Knowledge.” Any intelligence picked up by the KPA about Chromite preparations or MacArthur’s thinking was ignored by Kim. Mao Tse Tung, however, was not so easily taken in. Mao had assigned one of the ablest analysts working with the People’s Liberation Army general staff, Lei Yingfu, Chou En Lai’s military secretary, to divine what MacArthur might be up to and predict where he might strike. Certain OPSEC signatures were obvious to Chinese intelligence: Japan’s harbors, especially Yokohama, were filled with amphibious shipping. There was MacArthur’s long history of World War II amphibious landings. Lei studied all the available intelligence and MacArthur’s military record and concluded that the Americans were preparing a trap for the North Koreans and that they were going to execute a surprise landing far behind the KPA’s lines around Pusan. Lei examined six candidate ports and, given MacArthur’s aggressive personality, put Inchon at the top of his list. Lei, on the day of MacArthur’s council of war in Dai Ichi, passed his findings to Chou, who passed them to Mao. A three-page memorandum was prepared and immediately passed to Kim. It made no serious impression on Kim. Even Kim’s Soviet advisors suggested that he heed the warning, recommending that Kim direct the KPA to consider retreating from Pusan, shortening his logistical tail, and strengthening North Korean defenses at vulnerable ports. A senior Soviet advisor, Pavel Yudin, even pointed to a map and specifically mentioned Inchon as the most likely target. Still, Kim ordered no defensive preparations. He did not even mine Inchon harbor.5
Meanwhile in Tokyo, as Halberstam and Hastings describe the milieu of MacArthur’s military staff, no officer was allowed to make an independent name for himself.6 Indeed, when officers arrived at their new postings in MacArthur’s headquarters in Tokyo, any who had served in Europe during World War II, or worse had worked under Eisenhower or Marshall, was judged to have fought in the wrong theater, served under the wrong commanders, and had the wrong mentors and friends, and thus could expect never to fit in or be accepted.7 General Walker, a Patton man, bore this baggage. There were a few exceptions, like General Ridgway, who would succeed Walker and subsequently MacArthur, but they were very few in number.
MacArthur’s staffing biases, fed by his resentments about the 70/30 allocation of support in the Pacific theater during World War II, are only one dimension of how a theater commander’s egotism can undermine a strategic architecture. Another even more critical dimension is the tone and substance that govern effective civilian-military relations. Generals Eisenhower and Marshall were the archetypes of effective “Managers” who could work effectively and collaboratively with presidents and prime ministers. They worked well in the corporate and collegial politico-military environment that characterized the institutional structures of World War II.
That was not the case in the postwar Far East with the way MacArthur’s “Hero” personality and “the Bataan Gang,” as MacArthur’s inner circle was called, viewed presidential authority. Their views reflected a kind of loyalty test to MacArthur first because most of them had been there at the low point in MacArthur’s career on Corregidor in 1942, where they believed they were abandoned by Roosevelt’s failure to send reinforcements to the Philippines. MacArthur’s long years abroad after the mid-1930s and his highly opinionated views about American politics, often expressed in the form of his own presidential ambitions, harbored a deep-seated problem with presidential authority.8 His egocentric posturing undermined the respect and trust needed for a serious, substantive exchange of views on the Korean War at his meeting with President Truman a few weeks later.
Chromite’s execution went smoothly. Despite the seeming improvisation, the landing went like clockwork, better than MacArthur could have dreamed. Sea conditions proved better than expected. Initial resistance was comparatively light, despite tactical surprise having been given away by the five-day bombardment on the island of Wolmi-do. The navy’s planning had been skillful and detailed, and Admiral Struble’s execution was flawless. The marines quickly captured Wolmi-do Island, which opened up the harbor. The main landings, even though the window of daylight for an amphibious operation was limited by the tides to two or three early-evening hours, were successful, with only twenty Americans killed on the first day.
Recently declassified documents reveal that the AFSA-generated SIGINT was indispensable at Inchon. SIGINT products provided MacArthur and his intelligence staff with a clear understanding of the KPA order of battle, including the locations, strengths, and equipment levels of all thirteen KPA infantry divisions deployed around Pusan as well as the fact that there were no large North Korean units in the Inchon area. In mid-August, SIGINT decrypts indicated that the North Koreans were pulling frontline combat units from the Pusan Perimeter and moving them to defensive positions along the east and west coasts of South Korea, suggesting to analysts that the North was concerned about the possibility of a UN amphibious landing behind KPA lines. By early September, decrypted communications traffic showed that North Korean senior commanders believed US forces might attempt a landing on the Yellow Sea coast, but they incorrectly guessed it would likely occur south of Inchon at Mokpo or Kunsan. Aid’s research implies that Kim might have taken seriously some of what Lei Yingfu wrote in his intelligence memorandum, but not the threat to Inchon. The result was that the KPA was caught unprepared. Their counterattack against the Inchon beachhead was picked up by SIGINT well before it began and was mauled by US air strikes. In a matter of hours, the North Korean force was destroyed.9
MacArthur, who had selected General Almond to command the Inchon landing force, designated 10th Corps, gave Almond ten days to capture Seoul. He wanted to make a grand entrance and a gesture by turning the capital back over to Rhee precisely ninety days after North Korea’s attack on June 25, 1950. So Almond felt pressure to meet an arbitrary, political schedule as soon as the Inchon force was ashore. General O. P. Smith, commander of the 1st Marine Division assigned to 10th Corps, had explicitly warned Almond that the ease of capturing Inchon was deceptive because they had surprised and overwhelmed small garrisons of rear-echelon troops. Taking Seoul was a very different military proposition.10 Marine preliminary reconnaissance missions indicated a well-defended city protected by thousands of elite KPA troops. Smith’s estimates turned out to be true.
Ambitious to establish a successful military record after his mediocre World War II performance, Almond’s aggressive command style reflected his World War II experience of maneuver and firepower in Europe.11 The marines and the army in the Pacific theater fought a different kind of grinding war, attacking one island after another. They took few Japanese prisoners because few ever surrendered. When the Japanese gave ground, they did so grudgingly, often measuring tactical success by how many Americans they killed. Gains were measured in yards, not miles. These different war-fighting perspectives were at the heart of the Almond-Smith tension.
As marine, army, and ROK forces moved toward Seoul, North Korean resistance stiffened. As the KPA lines hardened, friction developed between Generals Almond and Smith. It was almost as if these two officers came from different war-fighting cultures, what Linn would describe as the Manager versus the Hero. Almond, who had come late to join the Bataan Gang, had quickly earned MacArthur’s confidence and become a protégé. MacArthur’s ego did not permit being surrounded by talent that might overshadow his own reputation. Unlike Marshall and Eisenhower, who had mentored and promoted field and staff officers alike into important command positions, the MacArthur staff in the Pacific displayed none of these dynamics. MacArthur’s rewarding loyalty over war-fighting competence in giving Almond command of 10th Corps would later introduce even bigger military risks when MacArthur decided to attack north across the 38th parallel with his forces divided.
The fighting for Seoul became a costly, block-by-block urban battle. Kim after Inchon had rushed twenty thousand additional troops, one full division and three separate regiments, into the Seoul area. Upward of thirty-five to forty thousand KPA soldiers defended Seoul. The North Koreans fought hard and fanatically, and they had the advantage of being embedded in “urban terrain” ruins to fight such a brutal, defensive military operation in a built-up area (MOBA).12 American combat power eventually decided the outcome, but the city was devastated in the process. Amid the destruction, Seoul changed hands for the second time.
The damage to Seoul became an issue of lasting historical controversy. MacArthur had told Almond that he wanted Seoul recaptured quickly. In 10th Corps’ path stood forty thousand still-resolute communist troops.13 David Rees’s history of the Korean War reiterates the fundamentals of the military thought process, which had its origins in World Wars I and II: “the belief that machines must be used to save men’s lives; Korea would progressively become a horrific illustration of the effects of a limited war where one [side] possessed the firepower and the other the manpower.”14
The tension between Generals Almond and Smith intensified.15 Almond took to flying over the battle space in a small reconnaissance spotter plane, as Walker did over the Pusan Perimeter, giving orders directly to Smith’s marine regimental, battalion, and even company commanders without going through Smith’s 1st Marine Division headquarters. Almond “was sure that he was a brilliant tactical officer” as he flew over Smith’s units, “radioing instructions to whatever unit he spotted below him.” Smith protested angrily against this breach of military protocol and finally ordered his chief of operations to refuse to accept any more orders without confirmation from his own headquarters.16 Two factors made this antagonism worse. One was Smith’s belief that the pressure was falsely driven, that it did not reflect the tactical need for quicker battle-space dominance but instead reflected MacArthur’s deadline to capture Seoul by September 25. The other was the confusion and coordination problem within 10th Corps that would last well beyond Inchon. According to one of the official military histories, 10th Corps was a “hasty throwing together of a provisional Corps headquarters” and was “at best only a half-baked affair.”17 The 1st Marine Division did most of the planning for and execution of the Inchon landings because 10th Corps was neither fully formed nor experienced enough in amphibious operations to operate as a functional headquarters. This deficiency was one that would leave serious command deficits after MacArthur ordered the UN Command to cross the 38th parallel and drive north to the Yalu.
A week after the Inchon landing, Walker’s 8th Army broke through KPA lines on September 22, scattering enemy forces into the hills where many units would later regroup to form guerrilla bands. On September 27, Almond’s 10th Corps linked up with the 8th Army near Osan, South Korea. Two days later, MacArthur flew to Kimpo to preside over the solemn ceremony in the shattered Capitol Building in Seoul. He spoke in a flood of rhetoric—“By the grace of merciful providence, our forces fighting under the standard of that greatest hope and inspiration of mankind, the United Nations, have liberated this ancient capital city of Korea.” The ceremony concluded with MacArthur solemnly turning to Rhee: “Mr. President, my officers and I will now resume our military duties and leave you and your government to the discharge of the civil responsibility.” He flew back to Tokyo, “imbued with an aura of invincibility that awed even his nation’s leaders. He was confident that the war for Korea had been won, and that his armies were victorious. Now it was just a matter of cleaning up.”18
MacArthur, with the consent of his superiors in Washington, now planned to complete the destruction of KPA forces in Korea, cross the 38th parallel, and reunify the country under Rhee. MacArthur’s masters discounted warnings that PRC diplomats were expressing in “neutral” capitals and to selected statesmen around the world: it would not tolerate the movement of UN forces across the 38th parallel. Secretary of Defense George Marshall in late September sent him this instruction: “We want you to feel unhampered tactically and strategically to proceed north of the 38th parallel.” President Truman himself approved the message.19 This guidance underscored the Truman administration’s ambivalence with respect to the strategic architecture of the Korean War. The absence of a clear policy for ending the war, based on a front-to-back strategy of waiting to see how far MacArthur, 8th Army, and 10th Corps could drive north, led to operational failure when Chinese attacks slammed into UN forces two months later.