Re: A giant of a man

[<Cfbernard@aol.com>]

You all,

A very competent historian's book on MacArthur inspired this review.

Carl Bernard


MACARTHUR'S WAR, Korea and the Undoing of an American Hero 
by Stanley Weintraub


Vietnam happened, in large part, because we learned the wrong lessons from 
Korea. The enormous human, social and monetary costs of those two 
misadventures demand that we never again commit the same errors. What 
missteps allowed those disasters to ambush us? Ignoring history is often 
proclaimed to be the certain way to repeat it. Misunderstanding history will 
have the same effect. Weintraub's contribution may enable us to hear what 
history has long been screaming at us by clearly showing how General 
MacArthur wasted his resources and ruined his own reputation. Will such 
inanities recur? MacArthur's primary advisors in Korea-Ignorance, Innocence 
and Arrogance-are Siamese triplets who still decree repeated military 
blunders. The mere passage of time (fifty years now!) does not cure folly, as 
Somalia and Kosovo demonstrate. 

An unconscious betrayal of MacArthur by the uniformed sycophants cultivated 
by and attracted to him, was almost inevitable. Few persons had the courage, 
conviction or capability to contest the hasty, illogical decisions made by 
the Army's famous five-star general. That obviated any application of a 
Hegelian process to ameliorate or even validate MacArthur's hasty decisions. 
Moreover, MacArthur's ego, bolstered by his demonstrated potency during 
W.W.II, forbade his stooping to serious consideration of advice or counsel 
from underlings. Pity. A reasoned examination of his extemporaneous 
directives in Korea could have prevented the loss of many young soldiers.

In the five years between W.W.II and the North Korean attack on the South, 
our military had become seriously unprepared to manage exigent events. The 
War was over! Focused on peace, we were disarming. Our intelligence services 
were woefully ignorant of the plans and ambitions of other governments. They 
were far more concerned with Soviet activities than anything in Asia, thus 
made little effort to trace policy evolutions in the two Koreas and China. 
Had they better assessed the behavior of those countries, it is still 
unlikely that they could have conveyed its significance to policy makers in 
Washington or Tokyo. Senator Joseph McCarthy's shocking accusations early in 
February, 1950, significantly disrupted the State Department as well as 
Congress, and absorbed their attention from the events that led to open 
hostilities in Korea five months later. McCarthy's charges had much greater 
consequences than the reduction of knowledgeable Asian specialists. The 
courage of many persons at policy levels sank noticeably when they noticed 
the Senator had turned his attention toward them. 

Merely innocent within the American public, but dangerously ignorant at high 
military and political levels, a general attitude prevailed that future 
conflicts would certainly be fought with nuclear weapons. We believed that 
awe of our massive nuclear superiority would hold most aggressive nations in 
check. Further, the Army chiefs assumed that the psychological and 
operational impact of the two nuclear weapons we had used earlier, and the 
more than 300 others available to us, trivialized any offensive threat of 
only ten in the Soviet's possession. Most deplorable, the Army chiefs 
accepted that infantry fighting skills developed during W.W.II were made 
irrelevant by nuclear weapons. 

This unexamined acceptance of a nuclear weapon defense was extended to an 
excessive confidence in our air power, despite its failures in W.W.II. 
(Hollywood, intending to promote preteen movie attendance, unconsciously 
prompted an unwarranted faith in aircraft by portraying them in B-movies as 
invincible. Lesson yet to be learned: Ban movie producers from the Pentagon.) 
Contrarily, our reorientation to nuclear and air warfare gave low priority to 
the readiness of infantry units. This, and a lamentable personnel policy that 
readily transferred individuals from unit to unit before they became well 
acquainted with one another, or even with their jobs, made the tragic fate of 
my first unit, Task Force Smith, understandable. One shameful aspect of this: 
our Army adopted General Sullivan's "No More Task Force Smith's" as a motto 
and then did nothing to eliminate the chronic causes of such calamities.

Now, half century after Korea, we are still preparing to refight W.W.II. 
Compounding the errors in Korea, Vietnam and all the other failed military 
escapades since, the highest ranks of our military still pattern their 
strategy after forms developed in W.W.II. None of the engagements since that 
time have been nuclear. None are analogous to Pacific island hopping or 
European air warfare. We have paid scant attention to covert "peoples' war" 
even though this is likely to be the form of conflict most common in 
tomorrow's world. t 

Other lessons to be learned from MacArthur's War:

· Washington and FECOM (Far Eastern Command) suspected the Soviets were 
trying to get us committed in an area extraneous to our (and their) real 
interest-Europe. They succeeded in swaying our highest commands because it 
justified what we wanted to believe. Our focus on Europe obscured our 
ignorance about the reality and significance of U.S./Chinese relations, thus 
insuring that critical problems we faced would be ignored.

· We failed to understand our personnel failures from W.W.II (see Stouffer's 
The American Soldier), causing far higher than necessary casualties in Korea 
(and succeeding conflicts) as a consequence. 

· We were hobbled by our "Bible Belt" mentality, i.e. "GOD is on our side." 
Under this perspective the existence of "evil kummunism" becomes proof (not 
mere evidence) of an active devil, boosting our natural belief in the 
justness of our cause.

· U.S. military staff officers distrusted Syngman Rhee with a passion 
bordering on racism. That led to a pre-hostilities policy of keeping 
essential "offensive" weapons from him. Perhaps this kept Rhee from 
initiating attacks, but it guaranteed the failure of South Korea's response 
to the initial North Korean assault, a defeat that sapped SK morale during 
the entire "Police Action."





· Our near total unawareness of the Chinese Army's provisions for attack was 
an unacceptable intelligence gaffe far superseding the naivete that pervaded 
most of our data gathering. We ignored what little we knew about the 
psychological integration and arming of veteran forces captured from Chiang, 
i.e., "speak bitterness" and "auto critique" programs (techniques we usually 
refer to as "brainwashing"). American intelligence also discounted the 
possibility of Chinese intervention in Korea despite the Chinese alert of 
their intentions to the Indians.
· 
·  The inability of JCS to confront/control MacArthur before Inchon, and 
their abject obeisance to his perceptions and intentions afterward, 
demonstrate clearly that the selection process for staff officers (seniority) 
had failed.
· 
· Despite Ridgway's best efforts, command of the 10th Corps from the Dai Ichi 
building-resulting in the continued division of our committed forces-lasted 
until MacArthur's actual departure.
· 
· The Army's attempts to control the media's reportage of happenings in the 
field were unsuccessful.

· At the Wake Island conference with President Truman, MacArthur misled the 
President in several areas, including the potential effectiveness of a 
Chinese intervention in the war. His prognosis for success: "It will be over 
by Thanksgiving."

· The UN (illogically, then) called for reunification of the two Koreas 
despite the paucity of forces available for this. The upcoming meeting of 
their two chiefs fifty years later (June 12-14, 2000) may be different.

· Chiang Kai Shek's blunders certainly led to his defeat by Mao Zedong's 
army, but the psychological, military, and political strength of the Red Army 
should not have been discounted. They had beaten the Nationalist forces, as 
they would do with us north of the 38th parallel.

· Our projection of the "Fulda Gap" mentality to Vietnam points up our lack 
of intellectual preparation for both. Korea, only 5 years after W.W.II, was 
strikingly different from that conflict. Vietnam was a quantum leap from both 
previous wars. We seem not to have learned that we must depart from the 
strategies and tactics that served earlier. Covert "Peoples' Wars" require 
altogether different methodologies.