At the end of the week he sent Acheson a note of congratulation:
‘Your initiative in immediately calling the Security Council … was the key to what followed afterwards. If you had not acted promptly in that direction we would have had to go into Korea alone. The meeting Sunday night at Blair House … and the results afterwards show that you are a great Secretary of State and a10 diplomat. Your handling of the situation since has been superb.’12
The tone of this note not only illustrates Truman’s instinctive generosity, but points also to a certain buoyancy following the satisfactory turning of a most difficult corner.
All of that buoyancy was going to be needed, for there then began a most dreadful four weeks of military débâcle. For its first year the Korean War simulated the trajectory of a yo-yo. But during its first downward swing no one could tell whether it was going to come up again. The Korean peninsular is on roughly the scale of England and Scotland, with the frontier running near to Leeds rather than north of Carlisle. Seoul, fifty or so miles from the 38th parallel, had already fallen by the time the first Americans arrived, and they made their first contact with the enemy about another fifty miles south of it. They (the 24th Division) were gradually driven back about another eighty miles to Taejon where they fought a desperate but essential five-day delaying action, from July 16th to 21st. This enabled two more divisions to land at Pusan, the port in the far south-east. Around this they were able to hold a foothold about the size of Kent. The remains of the 24th Division—they had lost their commander, General Dean, and a great number of others too—retreated within this perimeter and a stable line was established for the first time by July 27th-28th. Without the successful delaying action at Taejon the invading troops would almost certainly have cleared the peninsula.
United States air superiority held back the mounting of a major North Korean onslaught on this bridgehead until the last days of August. MacArthur, however, injected some political fireworks into the relative calm a few days before the Communists re-started their military ones. He sent a message to the Chicago convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars which sharply contradicted the policy of the administration, and still more of the UN, whose servant in a loose way he was supposed to have become. Truman was furious, although he does not appear to have contemplated the recall of MacArthur at this stage. The coffin into which the incident drove a final nail was rather that of Louis Johnson. Truman was insistent that MacArthur should be made to withdraw his statement, even though it had already rung around the world. Johnson made about four attempts to stop the transmission through the Pentagon of this instruction. On September 12th he was out and Marshall was back in the government in his place.
The end of August or the beginning of September would in any event have been a peculiarly difficult time at which to replace MacArthur. There was violent fighting on the perimeter, although the conduct of this defensive battle was more the responsibility of General Walton Walker. MacArthur was engaged in his last military coup. On September 15th he changed the whole balance of the war with a successful amphibious landing mounted at short notice and carried out on a most difficult coast two hundred miles behind the bulk of the North Korean army which was hammering away at the Pusan redoubt. He put the X Corps ashore at Inch ’on, the port of Seoul. Eleven days later the capital returned to the possession of the Republic of Korea and an armoured column from the south joined up with the seaborne American invaders. The 38th parallel was crossed in early October. By November 21st the Yalu River, the north-western frontier between North Korea and the Manchurian provinces of the People’s Republic of China had been reached. The yo-yo had remounted the string to the limit.
In view of subsequent events MacArthur was criticized for having advanced so far. He claimed that, as he was expressly (and in his view perversely) forbidden air strikes or reconnaissance north of the Manchurian border, it was the only way in which he could find out what was happening in the extreme north of the country, let alone carry out his instructions from the Joint Chiefs of Staff to ‘destroy the North Korean armed forces’. Certainly he was explicitly authorized by a message from Truman on September 29th and, more ambiguously, by a resolution of the UN General Assembly on October 7th, to advance north of the 38th parallel.
A somewhat different criticism was that his generalship was at fault in allowing two entirely separate commands, responsible only to himself, the 8th Army in the west and X Corps across the mountain chain to the east, to operate on too wide a front. Certainly when on the night of November 25th-26th the Chinese attacked the 8th Army with a strength of 18 divisions and followed this up on the 27th with an attack of about 12 divisions on X Corps, the effect was devastating. The 8th Army reeled back and X Corps was cut off and had to be evacuated (very skilfully) by sea. By December 15th X Corps were embarked and the 8th Army had managed to consolidate on a line just north of Seoul. The yo-yo was half way down again.