Truman(74)

In Washington the President and his advisers were left to live with the consequences of their crushing repulse in North Korea. The alarmist view that it left only the choices of all-out war or evacuation proved ill-founded, but was refuted only at the price of another six months of bitter and fluctuating warfare with heavy casualties. Compared with the great swoops of the previous six months the advances or retreats became slower, but this stickiness of movement brought more and not less carnage. The line, more or less on the old frontier, which General Walker was able to establish in December, could not be held. Walker himself was killed on December 23rd and replaced by Ridgway, who soon afterwards took over command of all the UN forces in Korea, thereby relegating MacArthur to the role of a semi-spectator in Tokyo.

Ridgway successfully set about restoring the morale of the 8th Army, and of X Corps when it again took the field. His first task was, however, the melancholy one of containing the second Communist invasion of South Korea and again evacuating Seoul. He was back forty or so miles south of the capital by mid-January. On January 25th he launched a counter-offensive and, after a period of setback in mid-February, he regained Seoul by March 15th and was at the 38th parallel by the end of the month. He advanced cautiously north for another three weeks. Then the Chinese launched their expected spring offensive. Once more the UN troops were driven back south of the parallel but managed to hold a line just to the north of Seoul. It was in this withdrawal that the British suffered particularly heavily, with the near massacre, following a most gallant stand, of a battalion of the Gloucestershire Regiment.

By May 20th the Communists were stopped. On May 23rd the UN command began yet another offensive which took them once again north of the parallel and to the occupation by June 12th of the two tactically important towns of Chorwon and Kumwha. There, as the anniversary of its outbreak approached, the war settled down. On June 23rd Malik proposed at the United Nations that cease-fire negotiations should be opened between the participants. They were, but not with a great will to peace. It took another 25 months before an armistice was signed at Panmunjon.

These long drawn-out negotiations were punctuated by occasional outbursts of hard fighting, by substantial American trouble with the intransigence of Syngman Rhee, and by North Korean accusations, strongly supported by Dr Hewlett Johnson, the ‘Red Dean’ of Canterbury, that the UN forces were engaging in germ warfare, all against the theme of continuing dispute over the repatriation of prisoners of war. This issue was greatly complicated by the facts that the Communists had engaged in some remarkably successful brain-washing of American and British prisoners and that many of the North Koreans in the hands of the UN were determined not to go back. The war dragged on as a running irritant throughout the last eighteen months of Truman’s presidency, and the need to break the log-jam of the stalled negotiations was successfully exploited by Eisenhower in the 1952 campaign. But the crisis went out of the war after June 1951.

During the course of the war Truman had faced three major crunches: first, the decision to resist and then rally the United Nations in June 1950; second, the absorption of the shock of defeat six months later, and the decision to fight back in a still limited war, resisting alike the rival temptations of withdrawal and escalation; and third, the belated dismissal of MacArthur in April 1951.

Although this last was belated, overwhelmingly justified, and essential if the authority of the presidency was to be maintained, it was nonetheless an act of stark courage. I doubt if Franklin Roosevelt would have done it. He would have more successfully massaged MacArthur, while patronizing him a little and certainly not allowing the reverse to happen, as at Wake Island. And he would have shunted him gradually sideways and downwards, so that he ended up somewhere between a grand emissary to the then powerless Emperor of Japan and a keeper of American war graves in the Pacific. But he would probably not have sacked him.

Truman did not decide to do this following the defeat and the Attlee protests of December. In January he was still trying hard, using a mixture of flattery and logical exposition, to find a modus vivendi with MacArthur. This was a hopeless task, for MacArthur, particularly after Ridgway took over the joint command in Pusan, was looking for departure with a flourish and not for quiet cooperation. In mid-March, with South Korea again free of invading troops, Truman ordered careful work to be done on preparing a cease-fire proposal to be put to the Chinese. MacArthur was consulted on the key paragraphs. Thereupon he issued his own ultimatum to the Chinese, couched in terms of such insulting rhetoric that there could be no possibility of their accepting it. That made it impossible for Truman to send his message to the Chinese, and, he subsequently claimed, was when he made up his mind to get rid of him: