MacArthur's War

[<Cfbernard@aol.com>]

Bob Dove, Bruce Gardiner,

Thank you for giving me the clue for searching old files.  My reaction to Weintraub's work written in April 2000 is below.  I don't see any need to update it to reflect what Afghanistan is teaching (we are learning ?) about other sorts of war. 

My exposure to MacArthur began with reading of his exploits and statements during WWII.  It was tempered a bit by the USMC's attempt to keep their own place in the sun.  Typical: "With the help of God (and a few Marines) MacArthur got back to the Philippines."  My clerk's job in the headquarters of the 7th Marines in Hopei Province in North China stuck many things about him in my mind.  Going to Japan in 1949 made him the big chief, hence in the consciousness of all of us.  Korea was disconcerting to any soldier as innocent as me.

And this intellectual baggage is what I carried during all my military service, particularly in Laos and Vietnam.  My positive reaction to Weintraub's discussion of the first ten months of Korea owes much to reflections that have never left me tranquil.

Best regards,

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.