Failing to Give the Devil His Due
O'NEILL, WILLIAM L.
Failing to Give the Devil His Due MacArthur's War: Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero By Stanley Weintraub Free Press. 386 pp. $27.50. Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of...
...Weintraub acknowledges that Secretary of State Dean Acheson played an important, if lesser, role as well, particularly in getting United Nations support...
...Furthermore, of the two divisions that could be spared for the attack just one, the 1st Marines, was combat-ready...
...Nevertheless, the general reader will certainly appreciate a book that says something about enemy thinking and planning in addition to the more familiar story of America's responses...
...A curious feature of MacArthur's War is that Weintraub, although a professional historian, rarely interprets and never speculates, preferring description over analysis...
...otherwise not much could be said in its favor...
...These valuable gains, moreover, had been won at comparatively small cost by America's existing Armed Forces, plus some reserve units...
...Weintraub has enriched his narrative of the Korean War's crucial first year by drawing on personal accounts, and on books and articles about Chinese and Soviet policies that have appeared since the Cold War ended...
...This was the port city of Seoul, capital of the ROK, and the Korean Peninsula was fairly narrow at that point...
...In short, not much hard thinking was going on either in Washington or Tokyo...
...IN its first months the Korean War consisted largely of disasters...
...Truman's reasoning was much the same...
...Trench warfare was the norm thereafter, punctuated by cease-fires, until President Dwight D. Eisenhower negotiated a truce in the summer of 1953...
...The last display of his talent for command came at Inchon...
...China wasted no time launching its counteroffensive on November 26, and within days the rout was on...
...China made no attempt to hide the movement of large numbers of troops to its frontier with Korea...
...Amazingly, that was also shrugged off...
...the Communist world had been taught an important lesson...
...After fierce fighting, for the enemy was slow to recognize the danger behind it, the Eighth Army broke out of the Perimeter and the North Koreans fled...
...the port fell easily to the Americans and their South Korean allies...
...A commander with less than MacArthur's enormous prestige would have been forbidden to mount such a hazardous operation...
...Indeed, the Joint Chiefs of Staff probably failed in their duty by giving his plan their blessing...
...Because he is not the first to exploit this information, there is little here that is new...
...But Mac Arthur was taking a well-calculated risk...
...and the United Nations had proved its worth as a force for order...
...The poorly armed and trained Republic of Korea (ROK) forces were overwhelmed...
...the regional balance of power had been restored, with Japan's security assured...
...Reviewed by William L. O'Neill Professor of history, Rutgers...
...Through India, Beijing notified Washington that it would regard an advance into North Korea as a threat to China's national security...
...Yet he learned fast and his other campaigns in the Southwest Pacific were brilliantly planned and executed, attaining every important objective at minimal cost in American lives...
...The American assault on Inchon took place on September 15 and was a smashing success...
...But he fails to explain why Acheson, who was not very interested in Asia, felt so strongly about stopping the Communists in Korea...
...and South Korean troops began crossingthe 38th Parallel and moving north as soon as they were able, guided by open-ended or ambiguous instructions from Washington...
...To boot, they still believed in an illusion called the Sino-Soviet bloc run by Moscow, and never dreamed Communist China would act independently...
...Its misleading title notwithstanding, Alexander addresses the hard questions that Weintraub ignores or slides over, and he is especially good on the Washington end of a vexing and complicated struggle...
...Weintraub is rightly scornful of MacArthur's mendacity, egotism, theatricality, contempt for orders and those who gave them, inordinate love of publicity, and numerous other character defects...
...In his view, if the Communists got away with seizing South Korea, Europe might be next...
...While the retreat was still on MacArthur began planning his counterstroke...
...The entrance channel was narrow and possibly mined...
...Most of them would have been captured if X Corps, apparently for lack of a followup plan, had not stopped after taking Seoul...
...MacArthur supposed that it might, but if so would be easily beaten...
...The disciplined North Koreans outnumbered and outfought them, until South Korea was reduced to a toehold around the port of Pusan...
...1st Cavalry...
...And once the assault troops reached shore they would face a formidable sea wall that, if defended, would be hard to storm...
...The tidal fall in its shallow harbor was huge, so Landing Ship Tanks (LSTs) could only navigate it during the highest tides of each month...
...The Eighth Army was moved up into western North Korea, and X Corps was shipped to the eastern shore where it was completely isolated from other American forces...
...To them the Soviet Union posed the only risk, and they believed Stalin would not intervene in North Korea for fear of starting a third world war...
...Still, of the roughly 70,000 North Koreans besieging Pusan, probably only about 30,000 made it home...
...Interested readers might want to consult Bevin Alexander's Korea: The First War We Lost (1986...
...MacArthur had a real plan, though, to unify Korea...
...Following the appointment of General Matthew B. Ridgway as field commander, invigorated American and allied forces retook Seoul in the spring of 1951, forming a line of resistance roughly along the 38th Parallel...
...He neglects, though, to give the devil his due...
...author, "A Democracy at War: America's Fight at Home and Abroad in World War II" Stanley Weintraub, a respected military historian and Korean War veteran, has written a brisk, readable narrative of the conflict from June 1950 to the following April, when General Douglas MacArthur was relieved of his command by President Harry S. Truman...
...Few historians admire MacArthur as a man, but the best ones are able to admit that when at the top of his form he was a truly great commander...
...Instead, according to Weintraub's narrative, U.S...
...It was in this mindless fashion that the United States lurched toward disaster, despite the repeated danger signals the Communists sent...
...American troops rushed into battle from cushy occupation duties in Japan did little better...
...Consequently, when MacArthur's offensive kicked off on November 24, the Eighth Army and X Corps were strung out along bad roads, had long vulnerable flanks, and could not support each other...
...All that remained was to declare victory and enjoy its fruits...
...X Corps, as the two-division force was designated, drove westward—the Marines retaking Seoul the hard way, one house at a time...
...Navy, foreseeing exactly such a development, had assembled a powerful fleet that evacuated the survivors, their equipment, and a great many refugees...
...His decision to launch an amphibious attack behind enemy lines made sense, but his choice of Inchon as the landing site alarmed even the toadies on his staff...
...The thought may have crossed Truman's mind, but he had no need to articulate it because both the Pentagon and the State Department were operating on false assumptions...
...Weintraub adequately describes these events, but his failure to explore the larger issues they involved makes MacArthur's War unsatisfying...
...X Corps, meaning for the most part the battered but intact 1 st Marines, fell back on Hungnam where the U.S...
...An example is Weintraub's chapter on the American decision to intervene in Korea...
...To him this was largely a matter of MacArthur taking steps on his own that were subsequently authorized by Washington...
...Unaccountably, for they had achieved their strategic aims as well, the Chinese refused to agree on an armistice, prolonging the war to no purpose for more than two years...
...Humiliated by his defeat at the hands of China, furious that Truman had abandoned all thoughts of victory in favor of a negotiated settlement, MacArthur became progressively more insubordinate and had to be fired...
...When these steps made no impression the Chinese, during the last two weeks of October, destroyed four ROK regiments and then mauled a battalion of the U.S...
...Like most of the "Wise Men" who drew up Truman's containment policy, Acheson saw Europe as the Cold War's center...
...only MacArthur believed the world revolved around East Asia...
...The tragedies that lay ahead could easily have been avoided if Washington had ordered MacArthur to stop at the 38th Parallel...
...In fact, it was precisely because of the Secretary's European orientation that he agreed the North Koreans must be stopped at all costs short of war with the Soviet Union...
...One possibility is that the Truman Administration was afraid to settle for the status quo ante because the Red-baiters at home, including Senator Joe McCarthy, who had been silenced for the moment by the bold action in Korea, would start charging the President with treason again...
...As Washington dithered, MacArthur moved ahead with a plan so astonishingly bad that General Omar N. Bradley, head of the Joint Chiefs, wondered later how it had ever been permitted...
...That makes for good reading, but at times creates false or superficial impressions...
...At that point the United States had scored a remarkable triumph and achieved its strategic objectives: South Korea had been liberated...
...Almost the entire North Korean force was attacking the Pusan Perimeter, and the enemy had to be overconfident after having won so many victories...
...This was the period when virtually all the important decisions and mistakes were made, and when all the significant military actions took place...
...In the United Nations, Soviet Ambassador Jacob Malik warned that invading the North would inevitably widen the war...
...The majority of America's casualties were actually sustained during those years of stalemate, marked by periodic savage attacks and counterattacks...
...In addition, the North Koreans understood how unsuitable Inchon harbor was for amphibious operations, making it unlikely that they had bothered to fortify it or mine the channel...
...It would not have killed Weintraub to acknowledge that thanks to MacArthur's dazzling gamble the Korean War was won in little more than three weeks time after the Inchon landing,—or, rather, that it would have been won had the Americans been less greedy...
...The Eighth Army was driven back into South Korea, Seoul fell again, but stable new positions were established below it...
...In World War II he bungled the defense of the Philippines and did a very bad job of retaking western New Guinea...
...That is true, so far as it goes, but it leaves unanswered the question of why the U. S. was prepared to take additional risks for the sake of unify ing Korea—a desirable aim but one that would not alter the strategic equation...
Vol. 83 • May 2000 • No. 2
