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February 15 - February 16, 2018
In the first two weeks of savagery, much of it in nighttime close combat, United Nations forces suffered 30 percent casualties and reeled back toward Pusan.20
The number of civilian deaths—estimated at around 2 million—approximated 10 percent of the prewar population of the peninsula. The ratio of civilian deaths to total deaths in the Korean conflict was considerably higher than in World War II or Vietnam.22
Firepower such as this inflicted especially heavy casualties on the North Korean forces, which (according to later estimates) suffered 58,000 dead or wounded by early August.
Admirals were especially nervous about it, for Inchon had no natural beach—only seawalls that protected the city. Worse, the tides at Inchon were enormous, up to thirty-two feet.
Though he retired from the United States Army in 1937, he stayed on in the Philippines with the rank of field marshal.
By 1950, when the Korean War broke out, he had been in Asia, never returning to the United States, for more than thirteen years.
Eisenhower, asked if he knew MacArthur, later said, "Not only have I met him. . . . I studied dramatics under him for five years in Washington and four in the Philippines."26
At this point in late September the Truman administration made one of the most fateful decisions of the postwar era: to unify Korea under Western auspices.
Truman nonetheless decided to talk personally with MacArthur about the situation, and in mid-October he flew with top aides 14,425 miles to Wake Island in the Pacific.
Two weeks after the Wake Island conference, however, ROK units began capturing soldiers who were Chinese. Interrogation suggested that the invaders were arriving in force.
MacArthur was relatively unmoved even when the Chinese attacked in force on November 1. He was simply egotistical.
The fighting that followed for the next few weeks was among the bloodiest in the annals of American military history. Some of this carnage stemmed from faulty generalship.
The marines sustained 4,418 battle casualties, including 718 deaths, and (together with their air support) inflicted an estimated 37,500 casualties on the enemy, two-thirds of them fatal.
The sudden turnabout staggered MacArthur, whose overweening self-confidence disappeared overnight. "We face an entirely new war," he lamented.
The biographer David McCullough thinks that the months of November and December 1950 were "a dreadful passage for Truman . . . the most difficult period of his Presidency."38
McCarthy helped to engineer the defeat of Maryland's Millard Tydings, who had chaired the Senate committee that had investigated him, by circulating faked photographs showing Tydings chatting with Earl Browder, a head of the American Communist party.
Meanwhile the retreat continued. By Christmas UN forces had been pushed below the 38th parallel—a fallback of more than 300 miles in less than a month.
In writing such a letter to a partisan foe of the President—and in placing no restrictions on its publication—MacArthur sealed his doom as commander in Asia.
Instead of dwelling on these policy disputes, however, Truman fired MacArthur because he wished to preserve the important constitutional principle of civilian control over the military.
Not everyone, of course, found the speech thrilling. Truman privately pronounced it "a hundred percent bullshit." But some congressmen, including people who had wanted him fired, wept openly.
But it was remarkable how quickly MacArthur's support subsided after the initial frenzies.
Bradley delivered the line that everyone remembers when he said that MacArthur's policies "would involve us in the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy."
Beginning in July 1951 the United Nations, led by the United States, entered into peace talks with their enemies.
THE KOREAN WAR FINALLY came to a close on July 27, 1953, after the Chinese and North Koreans agreed to voluntary repatriation of prisoners of war. Why they relented after two years remains yet another debated mystery of the war.
The most likely reason was that the Chinese and North Koreans were tired.
The conflict in Korea also accelerated the process of globalization of the Cold War.
The war had a mixed impact on the American economy. Increases in defense spending boosted the GNP, accelerating the boom psychology of the American people and promoting ever-grander expectations about personal comforts in the future. At the same time, however, defense spending sparked the flame of inflation, which incited some 600,000 steel workers to strike for better wages in April 1952.
The increases in military spending—and the larger global commitments that America shouldered after the war—greatly changed the mix of federal expenditures in the United States.
The emphasis on military expenditures boosted by the Korean War, while helpful to areas engaged in defense contracting, set public priorities that did little to promote government support for a healthy peacetime economy.
THE WAR, FINALLY, LIFTED the Red Scare to high tide. Truman was powerless to stop the wave of anti-Communist and xenophobic feeling that washed over the country during and after the conflict.
In 1951 Hannah Arendt, a highly regarded political thinker and philosopher known for her hostility to fascism, published The Origins of Totalitarianism. It tended to equate Communism and fascism by showing how both systems relied on terror and unlimited political power.
Conservative religious leaders more eagerly joined the wartime drive against Communism at home.
Among the so-called subversives who found it hard to get time on the air in the early 1950s were Leonard Bernstein, Lee J. Cobb, Aaron Copland, Jose Ferrer, Gypsy Rose Lee, Edward G. Robinson, and Orson Welles.76
Another growing genre of film, science fiction, also tried to play on anti-Communist emotions during and after the war.
What one got from such themes surely varied; if we know anything from the explosion of cultural analysis in our own times it is that many individuals reach their own conclusions about what they see and read and hear.
The Justice Department's intervention in the case of Chaplin underlined the continuing importance of governmental action in feeding the flames of anti-Communism.
In 1950 he led to passage an Internal Security Act (also called the McCarran Act) that required Communists and other "subversive" groups to register with the Attorney General.
Truman vigorously opposed the legislation, calling it the "greatest danger to freedom of press, speech, and assembly since the Sedition Act of 1798."85
Still, the Democratic Congress not only approved the legislation but overrode Truman, when he vetoed it in September 1950, by votes of 286 to 48 in the House and 57 to 10 in the Senate.86
The Red Scare on Capitol Hill—and elsewhere in the United States during the Korean War—exposed a final legacy of the war: it deeply damaged the Truman administration.
Well before the 1952 elections it was clear that the Korean War had divided the nation and that the majority of the American people were ready for a change in leadership.
his own definition of an intellectual: "a man who takes more words than are necessary to tell more than he knows,"3
In the 1920s, however, he served in Panama under General Fox Conner, a literate man who encouraged Eisenhower to read more widely in military history and the classics.
Conner recommended him for the army's elite Command and General Staff School at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where Ike excelled, graduating first in a class of 275.
Eisenhower was thereafter marked as one of the ablest young o...
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Eisenhower's years in the military in fact had helped him to think and write clearly. Much of his career had involved preparing position papers and speeches, including many of MacArthur's.
The first was his normally prudent way of reaching decisions.
Second, Eisenhower had great self-confidence in his knowledge of foreign and defense policies.
Third, Eisenhower had a sincere commitment to public service.16
While he was hardly "above politics" as President, he impressed associates with his seriousness and concern for the dignity of the office.
