This Savage War: Macarthur's Korea

A SOLDIER’S PRAYER 

O Christ, My King, on bended knee

      My Leader I salute!

Help me to serve Thee faithfully;

      Sin’s error to refute.

I beg for grace to do my part

      Throughout this mortal war;

For courage and a soldier’s heart

      Though cannons blast and roar.

Protect me when Death’s flags are high,

      But if it be Thy Will

That I should die, then let me die

      Thy friend, Thy soldier still.

            Chaplain’s Corps, U.S. Army

THE ROAD TO WAR 

Let there be no misunderstanding. As the seeds of war are often sown in the settlement of a preceding war, so it was with Korea. The conflict there arose as a result of the joint occupation and the artificial division of the peninsula along the 38th parallel by the United States (U.S.) and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) for the purpose of taking the surrender of Japanese forces at the end of World War II. It began when Kim Il Sung, armed and abetted by Joseph V. Stalin, launched an offensive to seize control of the entire peninsula.

Although the Cairo and Potsdam declarations expressed the determination that Korea become free and independent in due course after the defeat of Japan, the division along the parallel by ideologically opposed powers assumed a permanent character. Free and independent meant one thing to the Russians and another to the British and Americans. Following the failure of the United Nations Temporary Commission on Korea (UNTCOK) to unite both halves by free elections on 10 May 1948, the Soviets and the Americans sponsored separate governments in their occupation zones, and the line of latitude became a de facto political border and part of the Iron Curtain. A nation was divided along what had been intended only as a temporary surrender line.

Instead of just one nation, two distinct political entities emerged: the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK) in the North, led by Premier Kim Il Sung and sanctioned by the USSR and the Communist-bloc nations; and the Republic of Korea (ROK) in the South, led by President Syngman Rhee and endorsed by the U.S. and the United Nations (UN). Each developed its armed forces with the help of its primary sponsor. Those of the North were larger, more combat experienced, professionally trained, and much better armed and equipped than the inadequate eight-division army of the South.

Communist-instigated civil disturbances and guerrilla activity spread throughout the American zone during the occupation and increased in frequency and intensity as Soviet and American combat forces withdrew during late 1948 to mid 1949. The survivability of Rhee’s government and even the Republic itself were severely tested by the Cheju-do and Yosu rebellions in 1948. And beginning in May 1949, one month before the U.S. Army withdrew its last combat unit, Korean fought Korean in serious border clashes between North and South on the lower Ongjin Peninsula as Kim and Rhee threatened openly to reunite Korea under their control.

Border clashes, raids, and incidents elsewhere along the 38th parallel grew in number, and on 29 May 1950 North Korean artillery fired upon and heavily damaged the South Korean village of Kaesong near the 38th parallel. In the absence of any deterring American ground force after June 1949, it was almost a sure bet that civil war would erupt as both North and South claimed jurisdiction over all of the peninsula.

Kim Il Sung and Joseph Stalin began planning their invasion of the South even before U.S. combat forces had completely withdrawn. They met in Moscow on 6 March 1949 for the first of a series of secret war-planning sessions that called for a two-week operation to overrun all of South Korea. When a speech delivered on 12 January 1950 by U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson to the National Press Club in Washington appeared to exclude South Korea and Taiwan from the American defense perimeter in Asia, Kim and Stalin took it as a green light to carry out their plan. Although they hadn’t expected it, the two dictators triggered an action that would bring China into the conflict, the world to the brink of nuclear war, and test the peacekeeping resolve of the United Nations.

The hostilities that followed lasted thirty-seven months and constituted the first Communist challenge of war against the free world. It stretched the 1947 Truman Doctrine to the limit. Containment of Communist expansionism by military means risked nuclear war if waged to be won; on the flip side it risked becoming a war of attrition if fought with limits. It was a Catch-22. Those issues became critical points of contention between President Harry S. Truman and General of the Army Douglas MacArthur and led to MacArthur’s recall. Truman’s unpopular decision had its tragic consequences, for it prolonged the fighting, turned the American public against the no-win war, and led to the rise of similar issues years later in Vietnam. Like Vietnam to come, Korea began as a civil war and became a front-line picket-state in the greater Cold War.

TO OLD COMRADES 

Men have suffered shot and shell,

Some have lived while others fell,

And stories of these heroes must be told.

So, I’ve taken up the pen

Where my rifle once had been

To tell the world of men and battles old.

Rudyard Kipling wrote the truth

Of how soldiers gave their youth—

Then forgotten and their deeds met with a frown.

So I’ll try to set it straight

And write my best upon the slate

With hope before the shades of life come down.

ARTHUR F. DORIE

PART I

1 

This Savage War

. . . this savage and terrific conflict, the most savage I ever fought in.

General Douglas MacArthur

SHELBY FOOTE, THE distinguished American Civil War historian, has described civil wars as the most brutal of all, frequently fought with no holds barred and in general disregard of accepted rules of warfare. The war in Korea (Chosun) was the first peacekeeping war for the United Nations (UN). It was brutal and vicious from the start. Gen. Douglas MacArthur described the first 10 months of the war, when he was in command, as the most savage fighting he had ever experienced in his long military career. During this period, the North Korea People’s Army (NKPA, or In Min Gun) gave little quarter to prisoners, military or civilian, and only one of every three Americans taken early in the war lived to tell about it.

Although it was only a civil war within a small country, the conflict became a pivotal part of the worldwide Cold War. Korea was a 600-mile-long S-shaped peninsula located in the vortex of three world powers—occupied Japan, China, and the Soviet Union—and shared common borders with the latter two. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist Army, defeated by the Communists on the mainland in 1949, had retreated to the Chinese island of Taiwan (Formosa). The Soviets had developed nuclear weapons and long-range bombers capable of delivering them. Any miscalculation by either side could trigger World War III.

If there was a hell on earth, it had to be Korea. During the early months of the war, Gen. MacArthur’s United Nations Command (UNC) fought up and down the rugged peninsula in battles marked by unit and individual acts of valor, most of which went unrecognized or were soon forgotten. That the five bloodiest months of the three-year conflict in terms of Americans killed in action occurred during MacArthur’s watch was a reflection of the cruelty, bitterness, and savagery of the early war. Few Americans had ever fought under such extremes of hardship—weather, terrain, and brutality. But fight they did, shoulder to shoulder with those from other countries who joined them to stop Communist aggressors from North Korea, China, and the Soviet Union.

2 

Remembrance

They were going to look at war, the red animal—war, the blood-swollen god.

Stephen Crane, THE RED BADGE OF COURAGE

THE KOREAN WAR began on 25 June 1950 with the invasion of the South and ended on 27 July 1953 when an uneasy armistice brought the fighting to a halt, generally along the 38th Parallel where it had started. Battles chewed up cities and villages alike and caused some 2 million civilian and 2.4 million military casualties on both sides. Five million civilians were left homeless.

The first year of the war was one of mobility and maneuver and the last two a positional stalemate resembling the god-awful trench warfare of World War I. When Gen. MacArthur first committed Lt. Gen. Walton H. Johnny Walker’s Eighth U.S. Army (EUSA) from Japan, it was an all-volunteer army whose young enlistees were not truly representative of American society (a small number had been given the choice of joining the Army or going to jail). Eighth Army in Japan had been shortchanged on men, arms, equipment, and training during the postwar Truman years, and its four divisions and two independent regiments averaged 70 percent of full wartime strength. Nevertheless, once it was engaged Eighth Army fought well, and with reinforcements and outstanding naval and air support it saved the Republic of Korea (ROK).

Enlistments and Selective Service were extended with the onset of war, and certain Organized Reserve and National Guard units were called to active federal service, as were individual reservists from all of the armed forces. Even as other American divisions and foreign troop units deployed to join Eighth Army in Korea, the flow of men and arms to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Europe increased greatly.

Like most free-world leaders at the time, Truman had accepted the prevailing domino theory and believed that world Communism was monolithic and controlled by Moscow (later proven to be false). This miscommunication led the president to conclude that Europe was where World War III would begin—if ever there would be one—and that Korea was just a Moscow-planned diversion. Truman later bought into the containment policy, as suggested to him by James V. Forrestal, his Secretary of Defense.

Gen. Alexander M. Haig, Jr., experienced combat firsthand in Korea and later in Vietnam. In his memoir, Inner Circles: How America Changed the World, the soldier-statesman wrote: With the exception of World War II, Korea may have been the most difficult and harrowing foreign war the United States ever fought.

Confronted with extremes of weather and terrain and a satanic enemy, our soldiers, sailors, and airmen stood tall. While certain battles such as those at or near Osan, Taejon, Taegu, Tabu-dong, the Naktong Bulge, Inchon, Seoul, Unsan, Kunu-ri, the Chosin (Changjin) Reservoir, Chipyong-ni, Wonju and others stood out during Gen. MacArthur’s watch (25 June 1950 through 11 April 1951), later battles were often just as brutal. Brave men fought and died on such godforsaken terrain as Gloster Hill, Bunker Hill, Arrowhead, Luke the Gook’s Castle, the Punchbowl, Bloody Ridge, Heartbreak Ridge, White Horse, Old Baldy, and Pork Chop Hill, to name a few.

Although the number of Americans wounded in action was about equal for both periods of the war, almost twice as many were killed in action during the first year as were killed during the last two: 21,329 compared to 12,300. Over all three years U.S. forces suffered 33,686 battle deaths (KIA), 8,177 missing in action (MIA) and unaccounted for, 103,284 wounded in action (WIA), and a further 20,617 dead from other causes. There were many others who suffered frostbite, disabling injury, and illness.

Republic of Korea troops bore the brunt of UNC casualties with some 59,000 KIAs and 291,000 WIAs. Other allied forces also suffered, though considerably less than either the ROKs or Americans. Communist military casualties were far greater. The Chinese lost an estimated 1.5 million (KIA and WIA) and the North Koreans 620,264. Soviet loss figures are not available. Death scythed his way across the Korean Peninsula.

3 

The Invasion

The Korean War began in a way in which wars often begin. A potential aggressor miscalculated.

Secretary of State John Foster Dulles

THE EXTREMELY RAPID and overly extensive demobilization (Bring the Boys Home) of U.S. forces after World War II, the deep cuts in defense budgets, the inability of the UN to reunite both halves of Korea by election, the American failure to provide South Korea with more than a constabulary for its own defense, the withdrawal of the 7th Infantry Division (ID) and the 5th Regimental Combat Team (RCT) covering force from Korea during late 1948 to the end of June 1949, and Truman’s inadvertent removal of South Korea from the American defense perimeter in Asia—all of these and more played into the hands of Stalin, who helped mastermind the invasion of South Korea. The Soviet Union had a green light, as Khrushchev told Haig years later.

Neither the American nor the South Korean government realized the Soviets had built a modern North Korean army that by early 1949 was the most powerful in all of Asia, second only to the Soviet Army in Siberia and superior to Lt. Gen. Walker’s Eighth Army in Japan. The British, Chinese Nationalists, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) estimated the NKPA strength to be 35,000, but the 136,000 estimated by Maj. Gen. Charles A. Willoughby, Gen. MacArthur’s G-2, was much closer to the mark.

While the U.S. embassy in Seoul had severely limited the arming of South Korean forces, the Soviets had trained and armed Kim Il Sung’s with the best weapons possible, especially artillery and armor, and left 150 advisors with each North Korean division. The embassy’s unrealistic evaluation of forces was articulated a few days before the invasion by Harold Noble, First Secretary to U.S. Ambassador John J. Muccio, when he announced to the press, The ROKs can not only stop an attack but move north and capture the Communist capital in two weeks. Noble’s statement was misleading, for Muccio had already recognized that the ROK Army (ROKA) was weak and must be built up to defend itself against an invasion. To do this he sought (unsuccessfully and too late) to provide the ROKA with the planes, tanks, and heavy artillery they had been denied.

As the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) in Washington and Gen. MacArthur’s staff in Tokyo were separately concluding that an invasion by the North might follow the American military withdrawal, a series of secret war-planning sessions began in Moscow. Kim Il Sung, a 30-year-old former Soviet Army officer and first premier of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), met with Stalin on 6 March 1949 for that very purpose. It was agreed that the NKPA would invade South Korea with the Soviets providing arms, air support, antiaircraft and radar support, advisors, intelligence services, and limited logistical support but not ground-combat troops.

By early 1950 neither Kim nor Stalin feared the understrength and underequipped four divisions of Eighth Army, for they were on occupation duty in Japan, and the invasion was to be a blitzkrieg that would quickly overrun South Korea. Maj. Gen. Kim Kwang-hyop, chief of operations of the