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The War against China: Winter 1950 to Spring 1951 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 I’ve worked for peace for five years and six months and it looks like World War III is here. Harry Truman, 9 December 19501 The Chinese attack roused Truman’s fury at MacArthur, who assured him no such thing would happen. However—for military, political, and personal reasons—the president would not relieve the theater commander. MacArthur thereby retained his position to affect events in Korea, including the appointment of Matt Ridgway to ground forces command. Presumed to be a protégé, he was supposed to help MacArthur execute another Inchon-like maneuver, now behind enemy lines into Mainland China. Formosa was to be the launch pad, certainly no sudden inspiration. MacArthur’s standard method was to use new circumstances to conduct operations previously conceived. Dire reports about military conditions in late 1950–early 1951 could justify an attack on China first considered by the CINCFE in 1949. The Joint Chiefs of Staff had other priorities for shipping, particularly when considering withdrawing from Korea. Truman still wanted the army to hang on lest China’s reputation grow as U.S. prestige crumbled. Ridgway prevented defeat but not the way MacArthur wanted. He proved able to preserve South Korea without having to invade, bomb, and blockade the PRC largely thanks to Stalin’s failure to provide offensive airpower The War against China ✪ 135 to his communist ally. With Mao too weak to win, Truman need do no more against the mainland than insert covert agents to conduct relatively minor acts of disruption. However, the result of this mutual restraint proved to be military stalemate. That impasse set the stage for the climactic confrontation between President Truman and General MacArthur. Retreat from the Yalu; Decisions about China The Chinese military forces are committed in North Korea in great and ever increasing strength. . . . This command has done everything humanly possible within its capabilities but is now faced with conditions beyond its control and its strength. Douglas MacArthur, 28 November 19502 On November 25th, forty-five days after Wake Island, Truman wrote his first critical memorandum about his meeting with MacArthur, heretofore considered fruitful for having avoided civil-military conflict. The president, a former haberdasher said to be “immaculate” even in a trench, recorded that “General MacArthur was at the Airport with his shirt unbuttoned, wearing a greasy ham and eggs cap that evidently had been in use for twenty years.” The wardrobe was bad, the advice even worse. The CINCFE “said the Chinese Commies would not attack, that we had won the war, and that we could send a Division to Europe from Korea in January 1951.” Truman would be bitter for the rest of his life, apparently thinking the general a swindler or a fraud: “I considered him a great strategist until he made the march into North Korea without the knowledge that he should have had of the Chinese coming in.”3 These comments only meant that high-placed people in Tokyo were no smarter than those in Washington. China’s intervention “was really a great shocker,” said the secretary of the army; “nobody had expected [it] at all.” Nearly everybody subsequently tried to pass fault up or down the line. The Eighth Army staff held that the “strategic responsibility and collective capability for determining the intentions of [the Chinese] Government . . . were vested in the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of the Army and the [Far East] Theater Command.” Theater headquarters wanted no place on the liability list it centered on the White House. There, the president seemed more outraged at MacArthur than at Joe Stalin and Mao Tse-tung. “Like all egotists do, he wanted to place the blame as far from himself as possible.”4 Truman notwithstanding, one could say the same of Truman insofar as blaming a collective U.S. failure completely on MacArthur. By so doing, he moved away from his old inclination to find fault with “the crazy politicians” rather than the generals. A president so clearly disillusioned with his senior 136 ✪ Truman and MacArthur military commander must have had strong illusions about that man’s prowess before tarnished by defeat. Truman thought about relieving MacArthur but did not do it for more substantial grounds than his explanation: “I had no desire to hurt General MacArthur personally.” There were also good reasons of national security, as Truman told the NSC on November 28th. “We could not cause...

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