— George F. Kennan.
IN THE CLOSING days of September 1950, the Unites States seemed to be in an invulnerable position in the Far East. In the space of a few short days, the entire balance had turned; with almost shocking suddenness an American and ROK army that had been fighting for its life turned and destroyed its tormentors.
Trapped between the anvil of X Corps on the north, and the hammer of Eighth Army smashing upward from the south, not more than 25,000 sur-vivors of the Inmun Gun were able to retreat north of the 38th parallel.
And as American field commanders could at last relax, as the men under them could savor the sweet taste of chasing and killing an enemy that had chased and killed them earlier, in Washington, where early confidence had turned to concern and then apprehension, confidence returned, strongly.
For a moment, the world had seemed to shake, to go awry—but now all was as it should be, as Americans felt it must always be. Men smiled, and vaguely wondered why they had allowed themselves to doubt the inevitable victory.
And with victory, as it had always come to Americans after a war, came the determination to force their will on the enemy, to punish them for the crime of aggression, for starting the war. If the fighting, with its resultant death and destruction, its loss of American lives, resulted only in the return of the
War could never be part of a system of checks and balances; the view seemed immoral. War must always be for a cause, a transcendental purpose: it must not be to restore the Union, but to make men free; it must not be to save the balance of world power from falling into unfriendly hands, but to make the world safe for democracy; it must not be to rescue allies, but to destroy evil.
Americans have always accepted checks and balances within their own system of government, but never without, in the world. Because in the world such checks have never been achieved with votes or constitutions but with guns, and Americans have never admitted that guns may serve a moral purpose as well as votes.
They have never failed to resort to guns, however, when other means fail.
It was inevitable that the United States should take the position that the North Korean Communist State must now be destroyed for its lawlessness and that all Korea should be united under the government of the Taehan Minkuk.
Actually, the Communist world had not broken the law, for one of the continuing tragedies of mankind is that there is no international law. The Communist world had tried to probe, a gambit, and had been strongly checked.
And the Communists would regard an American move to punish the 'law-breaker' not so much as justice but as a United States gambit of its own.
The question was not whether the American desire to reunite Korea under non-Communist rule was a proper goal for the United States, but whether the Communist world could sit by as the United States in turn ruptured the
The desire to join the two halves of Korea under Syngman Rhee was unquestionably proper, and in the best interests of the United Nations—if the U.N. had the power to accomplish it.
On 27 September 1950 the Joint Chiefs of Staff instructed General MacArthur as follows:
His primary objective was to be the destruction of all North Korean military forces.
His secondary mission was the unification of Korea under Syngman Rhee, if possible.
He was to determine whether Soviet or Chinese intervention appeared likely, and to report such threat if it developed.
With the third instruction appeared signs of an elementary weakness in American policy—a decision by the powerful Communist nations to intervene or not to intervene was a political question, on the highest level. The indications would be apparent—or nonapparent—not on military levels but through the channels of political intercourse.
FECOM, a subordinate command, was a collective agency only, not an evaluative one. Yet throughout the fall of 1950 Washington continued to permit FECOM to evaluate not only its own intelligence but also that collected in other parts of the world as well. The eternally dangerous lack of insight into the aims and aspirations of hostile governments was to continue in Washington.
Military intelligence, quite competently, can determine the number of divisions a nation has deployed. Military men can never wholly competently decide, from military evidence alone, whether such nation will use them.
Such decision is not, and will never be, within the competence of military intelligence.
Following the directive of 27 September, two days later General George C. Marshall, the new Secretary of Defense—Louis Johnson, who had given the public what it wanted, had been the scapegoat of the public's error— sent MacArthur a personal communication—JCS 92985—'for his eyes only'—that he was free both tactically and strategically to proceed across the parallel and that President Truman concurred.
Meanwhile, the Republic of Korea had never seriously intended to halt at the old border. It is very doubtful if Syngman Rhee, who lived to reunite his country, would have obeyed a U.N. order to stop short of the parallel, any more than Abraham Lincoln would have favored an order from foreigners to stop the Grand Army of the Republic on the Potomac after Gettysburg. Rhee issued orders to his field commanders, now serving under American com-mand, to move north no matter what the Americans did.
Whatever the ploy and counterploy of the great powers, it was in the vital interests of the Taehan Minkuk to expand to the Yalu.
On 1 October, MacArthur demanded the surrender of North Korea. Kim II Sung made no reply.
At noon, 7 October, American units of the Eighth Army went across the parallel at Kaesong. ROK troops had already gone north days before.
On a clear, crisp October day, Captain Worsham Roberson, assistant surgeon of the 6th Tank Battalion, 24th Division, pulled his battered, dusty old jeep to a halt alongside the highway leading north. A hastily erected sign— the trademark of the passing of American troops anywhere in the world—told him that he was crossing the 38th parallel.
He looked at Captain Harvey Phelps, battalion surgeon, sitting beside him, and the stocky, round-faced Roberson fumbled in his kit, removing a carefully hoarded bottle of Seagram's 7 Crown.
Roberson and Phelps had arrived during the bad days, when the crumbling 24th held onto the Perimeter by a nail. They would never forget their arrival into the lines of the division with the new M-46 90mm-gun tanks, shipped hastily from Detroit Arsenal.
It had been hell to get the big tanks to Oakland, aboard ship, and on land again at Pusan. At Pusan there had been no port facilities to handle a 92,000-pound tank; the ship's officers had groaned and turned pale while the ship's winches and cargo booms strained under the extreme load. But lives, after all, were more valuable than winches, and one by one the 76 tanks had crashed down on the dock.
When the armor growled and roared up to the Naktong, men from the Taro Leaf Division ran forward to meet them, many of them openly sobbing. They crowded around the ugly steel monsters and patted them as if they had been blooded horses.
Under Lieutenant Colonel John Growden, West Point 1937, who had been with Patton, the 6th Tank soon had its baptism of fire.
To Growden came a radio flash from a leading tank: 'We have sighted enemy. What are our orders?'
Growden radioed back: 'Are they definitely enemy?'
'Affirmative!'
