71
MACARTHUR’S FOLLY
By Douglas Niles
Hubris is derived from the Greek hybris, which denotes insolence and violence.
General Douglas MacArthur was a larger-than-life figure, a man who invariably did things in a big way, and one who left an indelible mark upon his country and, eventually, the entire world. The son of a Medal of Honor winner, he would be awarded that exalted medal himself. On the way, he left his imprint on the United States Army, with remarkable terms both as student and commandant at West Point, as a division-level officer during World War I, as a stalwart defender of the status quo against Depression-era protesters in Washington, DC, and as an army commander (of both Filipino and American armies) during World War II in the Pacific. His last great act was to be the United Nations supreme commander during the Korean War.
MacArthur presided over some notable successes, displaying remarkable courage under fire during both world wars, presiding over the army’s half of the island-hopping strategy that took his forces the length of New Guinea and the Philippines during World War II. He had been appointed to command the massive armies gathering to invade the Japanese homeland in 1945 and 1946; when that invasion was rendered unnecessary by the atomic bombs dropped in August of 1945, it was MacArthur who famously accepted the Japanese surrender aboard the battleship Missouri, anchored in Tokyo Bay.
But his record was not without blemish. His violent routing of the Bonus Marchers—a band of penniless World War I vets and their families who had gathered peacefully in Washington during 1932 to seek help from the government—was regarded by many as a brutal act of oppression. In command of all the armed forces of the Philippines by December of 1941, he allowed his own troops to be hit by a surprise attack a full day after Pearl Harbor had been bombed. Neither did his personality make him easy to admire: a tremendously vain and insecure man, he never allowed his subordinates to share in “his” glory, and he constantly and publicly criticized and complained about his superiors, both in the Pentagon and in the White House.
After the Japanese surrender in 1945, he served as the de facto ruler of that island nation as it struggled to recover from a devastating war. By all accounts, he made generous and wise decisions that hastened the Japanese recovery—and also, naturally, kept MacArthur’s name in the headlines. His area of responsibility also included the virtually unknown backwater of Korea, a mountainous nation occupying a large peninsula jutting south from the Chinese mainland. At the end of the Second World War, Korea had been divided, almost haphazardly, along the 38th Parallel of latitude, so that Soviet armies north of that line and American forces to the south could accept the capitulation of the Japanese soldiers garrisoning the peninsula.
The division was intended to be purely temporary, as it was taken for granted that Korea, freed of Nippon occupation, would have its liberty restored as a single country. However, as the fault lines between the Western Allies and the Soviet Union hardened in the immediate aftermath of the war, the division of convenience in Korea became a political boundary. The Americans helped to install Syngman Rhee as president of a capitalist democracy (albeit a repressive one) in the south, while the Soviets installed Kim Il Sung as the dictator of a harsh Communist regime in the north. North Korea became the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, a name coined without any apparent attempt at irony, with a capital at Pyongyang; South Korea would officially be known as the Republic of Korea (ROK) and had as its capital the soon-to-be-thriving commercial center of Seoul.
Korea’s bifurcation became more pronounced when Mao Zedong’s revolutionary Chinese Communists defeated Chiang Kai-Shek’s Nationalists in 1949. With Chiang’s surviving forces exiled to the island of Formosa (which they renamed Taiwan), a powerful and militant Communist state occupied the border directly to the north of North Korea. Kim Il Sung’s confidence was bolstered by this powerful and nearby ally, while his army was strengthened by tanks, combat aircraft, and other equipment from his original benefactor, Soviet chairman Joseph Stalin. Kim skillfully played Mao and Stalin against each other as he curried favor with both.
When Kim’s North Korean Army (NKA) launched a surprise invasion of South Korea on June 25, 1950, he embarked upon a gambit to unite the two Koreas under the banner of world communism. He also provided Douglas MacArthur the opportunity to preside over his most strategically brilliant military operation, one he would unfortunately follow with one of the most catastrophic and far-reaching mistakes of the nascent Cold War.
Immediately after receiving news of the invasion, MacArthur flew to Korea and visited the battlefield south of Seoul, the capital city that had fallen on the second day of the war. He informed President Truman that the ROK was doomed without stout American support—and that support was quickly supplied. American air and naval forces were immediately rushed to Korea, hampering the NKA’s drive to the south, while ground forces arrived more gradually. The enemy’s offensive finally ground to a halt with only one South Korean port, Pusan, in the far southeast corner of the country, remaining free of North Korean control.
Holding the perimeter around Pusan with a thin screen of forces, MacArthur mustered a division of United States Marines and another from the army, together with enough sealift capacity to land these troops on an enemy shore. The shore he chose was Inchon, a port located on a notoriously capricious waterway—but it was the port in South Korea that was closest to Seoul, in the northwest corner of the nation. The landings went off without a hitch beginning on September 15, and less than two weeks later, Seoul had been liberated and the entire NKA—which was still arrayed along the Pusan perimeter, far to the south—had been cut off from support and mostly surrounded. Surviving enemy soldiers either were captured or made their way northward as refugees, leaving their equipment behind. Kim’s invasion had been not just stopped, but obliterated, and the Korean War seemed to be, for all intents and purposes, won.
Except that Douglas MacArthur wasn’t finished. He was determined to occupy North Korea, and to eliminate Kim’s regime once and for all. At the time, this seemed like a sensible goal, and Presidents Rhee and Truman, as well as the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) in the Pentagon, all supported the move to the north, which began at once. In short order, Pyongyang and a succession of North Korean ports on the east coast were occupied by the United Nations forces. If MacArthur had halted there, he would have gained an immense victory, and utterly broken the power of North Korea.
And stopping in North Korea while still more than a hundred miles from the Chinese border was an idea that was starting to make sense to President Truman and the JCS. Concerned about China’s ability to intervene in a war they had thus far remained aloof from, they encouraged MacArthur to halt. But the general was out for ultimate blood and glory, and just as he had not allowed himself to believe the Japanese would attack the Philippines in 1941, he convinced himself that the Chinese would not interfere with his move right up to their border. Perhaps he assumed that the atomic bomb—which Truman was unwilling to use against China—would intimidate Mao. MacArthur continued his northward advance, shrugging off the concerns of his superiors.
The Korean peninsula widens in the north, with many ridges of rugged mountains across the center. The two wings of the UN forces, 8th Army in the west and X Corps in the east, inevitably moved farther apart, and closer to Communist China, as they advanced northward. A vast swath of unknown, unscouted ground lay between the two prongs of the advancing army, which, by now, were far out of mutual support distance.
MacArthur steadfastly ignored rumors and reports of potential Chinese intervention, as if he believed such a thing to be completely out of the question. Even as Chinese soldiers were captured, intelligence sources warned of a massive threat in increasingly strident terms and, on November 1, a Chinese assault broke up a US Army regiment. And yet, when some three hundred thousand Chinese soldiers struck on the twenty-fifth of November, the attack came as a complete surprise to General MacArthur.
Many of the far-flung UN spearheads were hammered by assailants on three sides, while several others were surrounded and wiped out. The 1st Marine Division, encircled and besieged, fought an epic thirteen-day battle southward from the Chosin Reservoir to claw its way out of the trap down a single, serpentine mountain road. Many thousands of American fighting men died, and most of their hard-won gains—including the city of Seoul—were yielded to the advancing Chinese before the UN army’s position was stabilized.
Douglas MacArthur, meanwhile, seemed to remain out of touch with the reality of his war. He pleaded with Truman to bomb China proper, and when the president refused to yield, he blamed his commander in chief for the disaster into which he had led his army. More than once he made the ludicrous argument that the Nationalist Chinese, trapped on their tiny island nation of Taiwan, be “unleashed” against the massive Communist-controlled mainland. With his public criticism of the president, including a letter the general wrote that was read aloud to Congress by a Republican House leader, Truman felt that he had no choice but to remove General MacArthur from command, thus bringing the old soldier’s career to a close in April 1951.
Following MacArthur’s removal, the Korean War lingered for two more years, costing many thousands of lives. When it ended, the border between the two Koreas lay in just about the same place it was when North Korea invaded the south. The Kim Dynasty in North Korea has lasted to this day, and represents one of the most brutal and repressive governments in the world. Yet, if MacArthur had shown a little more restraint in fall of 1950—or President Truman had exerted stern control of his willful general—the war could have ended with a victory for the United Nations, and a North Korean regime greatly reduced in population and territory.
A solid United Nations victory in Korea would not have destroyed the Communist bloc or ended the Cold War, but it is possible to imagine that the lingering showdown between East and West might have been less fraught with nuclear peril. A unified Korea, even if it did not include the entire peninsula, would have spared that nation’s population the legacy of division and distrust that still lingers today, and the majority of the north’s population would likely have benefited from the vibrant economic and social growth that happened in the south. The portion of unoccupied Korea north of Pyongyang may well have been annexed by China, and for those people that would have been preferable to the corruption, instability, and brutality that have been the hallmarks of North Korea’s three-generation dynasty of ruthless dictators.
And it is even possible that, following a stinging and humiliating military setback in 1950, the Communist world would have been less willing to support the rebels in the civil war that racked Vietnam, making America’s tragic involvement there completely unnecessary.