MacArthur's Korean War Generals. by Stephen R. Taaffe (review)

Having written two books on the U.S. Army's senior officers in World War II, StephenR. Taaffe extends his investigation of ground forces' senior leadership to the Korean War. His latest book evaluates the generals of the United Nations Command (UNC), the U.S. Eighth Army, and the U.S. X Corps. His work extends the analysis in D. Clayton James, Refighting the Last War: Command and Crisis in Korea, 1950–1953. Taaffe's focus on the uneven operational performance of Army generals is a welcome corrective to the traditional criticism of the rank and file in Korea.

Nevertheless, MacArthur's Korean War Generals, no matter how admirable in intent and breadth of research, has some shortcomings. Apart from the theater staff, the generals with one exception were not Douglas MacArthur's. The only real MacArthur choice for a command in the UNC was Major General Edward M. Almond, who came to Tokyo for a staff billet (G-1) in 1948 and left Korea in 1951 as former theater chief-of-staff, X Corps commander, and a lieutenant general. MacArthur's personal attachment to Almond may explain some of the X Corps commander's high-risk generalship.

The rest of "MacArthur's Generals" were not "his" at all. Instead, they owed their assignments to the confidence of Generals Omar N. Bradley and J. Lawton Collins, former and serving chiefs of staff of the U.S. Army, 1947–1953. Bradley did not stop judging generals for promotion and assignments when he became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) in 1949. Senior commanders also had to pass muster with Secretary of the Army Frank Pace and the Army Staff. Taaffe sees much of this convergence of influence but may ignore another source of opinion, General Mark W. Clark, commanding general of the U.S. Army Field Forces (USAFF), whose inspection teams roamed the Korean battlefields to evaluate the Army's performance. Another source of opinion on Army generalship, not sufficiently discussed by Taaffe, was Major General Frank E. Lowe, U.S. Army Reserve, who went to Korea (1950–1951) as the personal observer of President Harry S. Truman. Lowe's voluminous correspondence with Truman covers the "MacArthur year" as theater commander and contains telling reports on the Eighth Army's generals.

The most convincing part of Taaffe's analysis is his extended treatment of the MacArthur-Almond relationship with Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker, the Eighth Army commander until his accidental death in December 1950. Because Walker did not leave a large collection of papers on his Korean War experience, Taaffe depends on third-party observations of the tension between the three generals who shaped the Eighth Army's employment in 1950. Continually harassed by MacArthur and Almond, Walker had his champions: Secretary Pace and Generals Collins and Bradley, as well as two key Far East Command staff officers, Doyle O. Hickey and Edwin K. Wright, whose influence Taaffe ignores. The pro-Walker faction in the Army helped Walker cope with MacArthur, Almond, and a hostile press by sending Major General Leven C. Allen to Korea to serve as the Eighth Army's chief of staff. Although Allen and Walker had a good personal relationship from World War II, the more significant factor was Bradley's complete confidence in Allen, who had served as Bradley's chief of staff in the U.S. First Army and 12th Army Group (1944–1945). Taaffe inaccurately claims that Walker "had little contact or backing from the army's top leadership" (pp. 209–210).

The relative inattention to commander and chief-of-staff relations in MacArthur's Korean War Generals raises a more important question: Who is competent to evaluate generalship, either during an ongoing war or in the history of that war. The U.S. armed forces since World War I have had one answer: professional peers (i.e., other generals and admirals) who submit fitness reports and sit on promotion boards. This process, however, includes...