On Desperate Ground Read online

  He was keenly aware of the impact of his decisions. During World War II, through his battles across the Pacific, he would tally in his diary the precise number of casualties the day’s fighting had brought. It was his nightly ritual. With the zeal of a sharp accountant who understands where every last dollar was spent, Smith demanded a reckoning of war’s exact human cost.

  He had enlisted in 1917 and had devoted his life to the Corps. The Marine ethos appealed to his sense of order and rectitude. He had bounced across the globe during his long career: Guam, the Mariana Islands, Washington, D.C., Iceland, the American embassy in Paris. He had lived in a bungalow in the jungles of Haiti and in a castle in the Loire Valley. He had commanded every type of unit from platoon on up. Smith was said to be a “school man and a staff man.” He had studied at France’s prestigious military academy, L’École Supérieure de Guerre—he was the first U.S. Marine ever to do so. Smith, said one account, was “one of those rare men who love to work and who find a natural delight in detail.” If he had come to understand warfare from the perspective of the textbook, he had also seen how poorly and how seldom the theories and abstractions of military science obtained in the context of the grime, grit, and chaos of a battlefield. Smith was a “by-the-book” Marine—but he knew when to throw the book away.

  His command style was preternaturally calm. His chief of staff when he was serving at Quantico found Smith to be a rare gentleman, a dignified man who seldom raised his voice: “If you think of a forceful person as one who beats his chest and shouts loudly and utters tirades, then Smith was not a very forceful person. It was contrary to his personality to make a fuss about things. But the people who worked for him listened for any expression of opinion that he gave and took it on themselves as a directive.”

  Frank Lowe, a retired Army general who was serving as President Truman’s eyes and ears in Korea, described Smith this way: “He is a very kindly man, always calm and cheerful, even under the greatest strain. He is almost professorial in type and this characteristic is apt to fool you because he is an offensive tiger. His concept is to find the enemy and kill him—with a minimum of casualties. His officers and men idolize him, albeit he is a strict disciplinarian—Marine discipline.”

  Smith also happened to be one of the country’s preeminent experts on the tactics and logistics of amphibious warfare. He had practically written the book on the subject. He had taught ship-to-shore landings in classrooms at Quantico and Camp Pendleton, had perfected some of the techniques on the beaches of Peleliu and Okinawa. The Professor was legendary for his seaside drills. Amphibious operations were among the most complicated maneuvers in war, requiring tedious planning, careful choreography, an exquisite sense of timing. They were the Marine signature, the Marine specialty—at the heart of why the Marines existed in the first place.

  Marines were supposed to be “Soldiers of the Sea,” shock troops sent to hector coastlines and establish beachheads. They were finned creatures who washed up on hostile shores, only to sprout legs. Time and time again in the Pacific during World War II, the Marines had demonstrated their indispensability, and MacArthur, having relied upon them throughout his island-hopping campaigns, had long been impressed by their steady, ready competence. Smith’s First Marine Division was the largest, oldest, and most decorated division in the Corps. So when MacArthur decided, against the better judgment of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to forge ahead with an audacious and incredibly risky scheme to storm the harbor at Inchon, it was obvious whom he needed to draw up the plans.

  * * *

  The concept behind Operation Chromite—bold, sweeping, magisterial—was much in keeping with MacArthur’s style. Throughout his long career, he had shown a preference for the grandiose and the unexpected. A martial romantic, MacArthur loved to speak of decisive thrusts, of hammers and anvils and smiting blows. And, in fairness to him, it was terrifyingly clear that something miraculous had to be done to reverse the course of the Korean conflict.

  On June 25, 1950, with little warning, North Korean dictator Kim Il Sung had invaded South Korea with his Soviet-trained, Soviet-equipped army. He quickly took Seoul and steamrolled south in hopes of seizing the entire peninsula. General MacArthur, in Tokyo, did not seem worried at first. “I can handle it with one arm tied behind my back,” he boasted the day Kim’s invasion began. The United Nations Security Council condemned Kim’s aggression and resolved that member states should provide military assistance to South Korea. American troops, later bolstered by U.N. soldiers, were thrown into the breach to help shore up the South Korean army. But by the late summer of 1950, the United Nations forces had been driven down into the southeastern tip of the Korean Peninsula, their backs against the sea. Digging in, they established a perimeter around the coastal city of Pusan. From this toehold they had fought valiantly, but they could not survive indefinitely. Kim Il Sung seemed on the verge of victory.

  MacArthur’s idea now was not to inject more men and matériel into the Pusan perimeter, but rather to secretly land a huge force farther up the peninsula, well behind the battle lines. With that force, he would cut off Kim’s supply chain while swiftly capturing Seoul. (He picked Inchon mainly because it was the port nearest the capital.) MacArthur, who fancied he had an intuitive understanding of “the Oriental mind,” argued that capturing Korea’s largest city, and doing so on September 25, precisely three months after the start of the war, would wreak psychological damage on the enemy. Asians, he believed, were acutely attuned to numerology. Kim’s forces would interpret these developments as a crushing sign that the fates were against them.

  At a strategic conference in Tokyo on August 23, MacArthur used the full force of his personality and stature to convince an assembly of skeptical admirals and generals. “We must strike hard and deep,” MacArthur vowed. It would be an end-run affair that the enemy could not expect. Instead of going in at the foot of Korea, he would enter at its navel. By preserving the element of surprise—by landing en masse at Inchon and seizing Seoul—he would “seal off the entire southern peninsula.” Kim would thus be trapped between the U.N. forces in Seoul and those in Pusan. True to MacArthur’s pet analogy, it would be as though the North Korean troops were caught between a hammer and a mighty anvil.

  When he saw that the assembled war council still doubted the plan, MacArthur jacked his rhetoric into the loftiest registers. “I can almost hear the ticking of the second hand of destiny,” he said, his voice trembling. “We must act now or we will die.” He continued: “I realize it is a 5,000-to-1 gamble, but I am used to taking such odds. Operation Chromite will succeed, and it will save 100,000 lives. We shall land at Inchon, and I will crush them.”

  * * *

  General Smith was summoned to Japan from Camp Pendleton in late August to meet with MacArthur and begin formulating the details. It was there, in downtown Tokyo, in the monolithic Dai Ichi Insurance Building where MacArthur kept his headquarters, that Smith began to sense what a peculiarly sycophantic environment the supreme commander had created for himself. Douglas MacArthur, it was said, didn’t have a staff—he had a court. Smith saw this firsthand.

  The seventy-year-old five-star general was, at that moment, the most powerful military figure in American history. MacArthur’s career had been long and tempestuous, and marked by stunning precocity. He was the youngest superintendent of West Point. He was the youngest chief of staff of the Army. He had become a general in 1918. During World War II, he had presided over the greatest defeat in American history—the fall of Bataan and Corregidor—but he had also presided over the liberation of the Philippines and the Japanese surrender. Now his array of titles stretched plausibility: supreme commander for the Allied powers. Commander in chief of U.S. Army Forces in the Far East. Head of all United Nations troops in Korea. In addition, as the man absolutely in charge of the occupation of Japan, he was the de facto ruler of eighty-three million foreign subjects.

  They called him the
American Mikado, the American Proconsul, the American Caesar. They called him El Supremo, the Great Panjandrum. He was a man in love with the vertical pronoun, it was said, a man with “a solemn regard for his own divinity.” Asia had become his personal domain, and he seemed to know the Far East better than he knew his home country—he had not visited the United States in fourteen years. It was as though he had become the emperor, and a touchy one at that, jealous of his routines and creature comforts, microscopically attentive to the trappings of power and the nuances of publicity. Since the start of the war, MacArthur had been in every sense an absentee general, running his Korea operations from Tokyo. Though he occasionally flew over to the peninsula for a morning photo op or a quick afternoon reconnaissance, he would not spend a single night on Korean soil during the conflict.

  MacArthur greeted Smith warmly, ushering him into his sanctum with fulsome praise. The Inchon landing would be decisive, he said, and the war would be over in one month. Not only that, but Inchon would provide existential security for the Marine Corps. After World War II, there had been talk in Washington of radically downgrading the Marines. With the advent of atomic weapons and the ascendancy of the Air Force, the day of the amphibious landing, some suggested, was over. But MacArthur strongly disagreed, and he believed that Inchon would prove his point. “He pulls no punches,” Smith wrote to his wife, Esther, in Berkeley. “He feels that the operation will forever assure the Marines of their place in the sun. He apparently thinks a lot of Marines.”

  For these reasons, Smith was at first positively inclined toward MacArthur and his plan. But after a few days in Tokyo, he decided that much about the supreme commander’s world was weird and cultish. MacArthur surrounded himself with yes men, many of whom dated back to his days in the Philippines. He appeared to have insulated himself from facts he found inconvenient or unpalatable. He dwelled in a hermetic universe of his own making.

  Because the people who worked for MacArthur seemed to regard him as a deity, the Inchon invasion, having sprung from his head, was thus a providential undertaking that could not be questioned. “With that staff, MacArthur was God,” Smith wrote. “It was more than confidence which upheld him. It was a supreme and almost mystical faith that he could not fail.”

  But in the end, it wasn’t so much MacArthur who worried Smith; it was MacArthur’s chief of staff, Major General Edward “Ned” Almond. Perhaps more than anyone in the Dai Ichi Building, Almond lionized MacArthur, and in many ways mimicked his behavior. The ruddy-faced Virginian was a notoriously difficult man. “Ned the Dread,” he was often called. A whip-cracking officer, Almond had turned in a decidedly lackluster performance in World War II. But MacArthur, seeing qualities in Almond that others had missed, single-handedly rehabilitated his career. Almond was deeply appreciative. “I shall always be grateful,” he wrote. “MacArthur is the only one who has ever given me such a chance.”

  So blind was Almond’s loyalty to MacArthur that many critics came to think of him as a toady. (“Ned the Anointed” was another one of his sobriquets.) In addition to making him chief of staff, MacArthur had named Almond the commander of X Corps, a vast and unwieldy amalgam of mostly Army units that would be wading ashore at Inchon. Organizationally, the First Marine Division would be attached to X Corps, so Smith would have to answer to Almond. In effect, Ned the Dread would be his boss.

  It was thus with some trepidation that Smith first met with Almond in Tokyo. From the start, things did not go well. Almond kept Smith waiting for an hour and a half and then brusquely summoned him into his office. Though he was only one year older than Smith, Almond repeatedly called him “son.”

  “My first impression of Almond was not very favorable,” admitted Smith. He found the Army general “supercilious.” Almond closely interrogated Smith about his command experience, even though it outweighed Almond’s. When they began to discuss particulars of the coming invasion, Smith raised questions about the date and location. Smith and Vice Admiral James Doyle of the Navy had both concluded that Inchon, with its intricate channels, hidden shoals, overlooking heights, and other hazards, was not a suitable site and that the landing should instead be made at a spot called Posung-Myon, some twenty miles to the south. Inchon was the wrong place for the operation, Smith insisted—suicidally wrong.

  The tidal differential at Inchon was among the most extreme in the world; it rivaled that of Nova Scotia’s Bay of Fundy. Smith, who had taken the trouble to consult the hydrographic studies as well as the lunar calendar, knew that on the target date of September 15, the disparity between ebb and flood tides at Inchon would be about thirty-two feet. Accompanying the extreme tidal range would be constantly shifting currents. This raised perilous complications. A slightly mistimed landing would strand the Marines on the tidal flat for many hours. If the North Koreans had even a rudimentary force guarding the harbor, the leathernecks would become sitting targets on an expansive mud bog.

  Then, too, Inchon had no true beach on which to land, only high concrete seawalls that would require specially designed ladders to surmount them. Further, Smith had good reason to believe that the Inchon harbor was sown with Russian mines.

  Almond dismissed these concerns. “There is no organized enemy at Inchon,” he said. Smith could see that Almond knew nothing about amphibious landings—how to negotiate the tidal fluctuations, how to prioritize the targets and objectives, how to orchestrate the interplay of sea, land, and airpower to minimize friendly fire and civilian casualties. The existing scheme was poorly conceived, Smith thought. Almond was “fantastically unrealistic” and ignorant of “formidable physical difficulties.” And it was also obvious that Almond didn’t understand Marines.

  It would be a simple operation, Almond assured Smith, and “purely mechanical.” The date and location were fixed. Counterintuitively, MacArthur had maintained that Inchon’s profound unsuitability as a landing spot was precisely what made it the best place to land: The North Koreans would never expect the Americans to show up there. Almond advised Smith to get to work on the minutiae. Then he dispatched the Marine general from his office.

  Here was the beginning of a personal feud that, according to one Marine historian, “would become the stuff of legends.” These two men could not have been more dissimilar. If Almond found Smith overly cautious, Smith viewed Almond as rash to the point of being cavalier with the lives of his men. Not that Almond didn’t appreciate the personal cost of war—his own son and son-in-law had both died in combat during World War II—but the X Corps commander was very much in the George Patton school of aggressive martial maneuvers. At the root of Smith and Almond’s mutual dislike was something larger than a personality conflict, larger than the inevitable differences arising from the rivalry between the Army and the Marines. What was emerging was a clash of command styles and methodologies—opposing views on what war was about, how it should be fought, what its goals should be. Yet these two men were going into Inchon together.

  And Inchon it would be, despite the glaring drawbacks of the site. It would rest upon Smith and Doyle, upon the Marines and the Navy, upon their teams of planners and engineers, to make MacArthur’s concept a reality—so that Almond’s X Corps could safely come ashore. It would be, as Smith put it, “an administrative maelstrom.” Smith and Doyle had only two weeks to draw up the blueprint.

  * * *

  Now, on the afternoon of September 15, MacArthur’s masterstroke seemed to be working brilliantly, just as he had predicted it would. Smith’s Marines had safely reached the city of Inchon, with a minimum of casualties. By day’s end, Smith’s battalion commanders were reporting twenty-one American dead and 174 wounded: minuscule losses for such a big operation. The last of the landing craft, having been caught by the retreating tide, squatted on the tidal flats like beached whales, and would remain there for the night.

  The journalists aboard the Mount McKinley tried to capture the scene. “Now and then puffs of smoke cam
e softly from the muzzles of the naval guns, waving lazily like huge indolent fingers in their turrets,” wrote Reginald Thompson, a British correspondent. “Overhead, the shells made their invisible sibilant flutter in the sky…[and] clouds of dust hid the world under a yellow pall.”

  “The quake and roar of the rocket ships was almost unendurable,” wrote Marguerite Higgins, a celebrated reporter with the New York Herald Tribune and one of America’s first female combat correspondents. “It looked as though the whole city was burning.” Higgins could see “the crimson haze of the flaming docks,” could hear “the authoritative rattle of machine guns” as “wave after wave of Marines hit the beach [and] blazed a bloody path to the city.”

  Where were the North Koreans? They seemed to be thoroughly cowed. Their redoubts were destroyed, and the wooded hills they once occupied had been so completely incinerated that they appeared to have been shaved clean. The way was clear for many tens of thousands of U.S. troops to come ashore beginning the next day. The bold gamble of Inchon was proving to be a huge success. General Frank Lowe, Truman’s liaison, who had watched the drama from aboard the Mount McKinley, said MacArthur had pulled a “white rabbit out of a hat….I have witnessed a miracle.”

  MacArthur, watching the spectacle unfold while sitting in a swivel chair on the bridge, was ecstatic. He wore sunglasses and a leather jacket and struck what one Navy observer called a “Napoleonic pose.” Inchon, the supreme commander crowed, was “the happiest moment of my life.” He could find no fault with the operation. “Our losses are light,” he noted, and “the entire command has distinguished itself.” He added: “Never have the Navy and Marines shone more brightly.”