Truman (136 page)

As the group departed just before eleven, using the back door to avoid reporters, Truman said no one was to make any statement until he did.

It would be said of Harry Truman that without consulting Congress or the American people, he had rushed to judgment; that “as Hermann Goering, when he heard the word culture, reached for his gun, Harry Truman when he heard the word problem, reached for a decision.” But the last thing Truman wanted was a war in Korea, or anywhere, and angry as he may have been over the attack, as determined as he obviously was to do what he felt had to be done, he had nonetheless, so far, made no irrevocable move.

On Monday, as the news from Korea grew worse, he issued a statement notable only for its generalities. The widespread impression was that the United States was going to take little or no action. According to the latest communications from MacArthur, the South Koreans appeared incapable of stopping the North Korean advance: “Our estimate is that a complete collapse is imminent.”

That night, after supper alone, Truman summoned another emergency session, a second “war cabinet” meeting at Blair House, and decided to provide American air and naval support to the forces of South Korea and to press for immediate United Nations support.

No action should be taken north of the 38th parallel, he said, adding, “not yet.”

In addition, he ordered an increase of American forces in the Philippines and a speedup of military aid to Indochina.

No ground troops had yet been committed to Korea. And no one at the meeting recommended that. General Bradley would remember Acheson “dominating” the meeting, as he had the night before. Bradley, as he wrote later, was gravely concerned over the possibility of a ground war in Asia. Whatever troops were sent, MacArthur would surely ask for more. Besides, “We had no war plan for Korea.” Bradley suggested they “wait a few days.” Acheson agreed.

“I don’t want to go to war,” Truman said with a force they would all remember.

“Everything I have done in the past five years,” he remarked sadly as the meeting ended, “has been to try to avoid making a decision such as I had to make tonight.”

Headlines the next day, Tuesday, June 27, reported North Korean tanks sweeping into the South Korean capital of Seoul. The government of South Korea had fled, its president, Syngman Rhee, bitterly describing American help as “Too little, too late.” In a broadcast from Pyongyang, the capital of North Korea, Communist Premier Kim II Sung vowed to “crush” South Korea as swiftly as possible.

At the White House events moved rapidly, as the leaders of Congress, the Secretary of State, Secretary of Defense, and Joint Chiefs rolled up to the West Wing in one official car after another. More than forty people were gathered. By 11:30 the doors of the Cabinet Room were closed. Half an hour later the meeting had ended. The congressional leaders had given the President their undivided support. No one had said a word against what he had decided. Further, he had been advised to proceed on the basis of presidential authority alone and not bother to call on Congress for a war resolution. A hundred reporters stood waiting anxiously in the lobby when minutes later Charlie Ross set off a “whirlwind,” handing them the first word from Truman that he had ordered American air and naval forces to support South Korea in its hour of peril:

“The attack upon Korea makes it plain beyond all doubt that Communism has passed beyond the use of subversion to conquer independent nations and will now use armed invasion and war….”

Cheers broke out in the House and Senate when the statement was read aloud. By a vote of 315 to 4, the House promptly voted a one-year extension of the draft law. In the Senate, Republican William Knowland called for “overwhelming support” for the President from all Americans regardless of party.

At the United Nations, debate began on a resolution to back the American decision—a resolution adopted that night at 10:45, the Soviet Union being still absent. For the first time in history, a world organization had voted to use armed force to stop armed force.

The response of the American people—by mail, telegrams, phone calls to the White House and Congress—the response of the press, of nearly everyone whose opinion carried weight in Washington and in the country, was immediate, resounding approval—a point that would be very soon forgotten. Editorials praised Truman for his “bold course,” his “momentous and courageous act.”

James Reston said much the same thing in
The New York Times.
Truman, said the Washington
Post
, had given the free world the leadership it desperately needed.

The Wall Street Journal,
Walter Lippmann, Thomas E. Dewey, George Kennan, General Eisenhower, all agreed it was time to draw the line. Eisenhower believed, “We’ll have a dozen Koreas soon if we don’t take a firm stand.” Henry Morgenthau, Franklin Roosevelt, Jr., Phil Murray, Walter Reuther, and Sam Goldwyn sent telegrams in praise of Truman’s decision. Cordell Hull called.

White House mail ran strongly in favor of the President’s action. “You may be a whiskey guzzling poker playing old buzzard as some say,” wrote a Republican from Illinois, “but by damn, for the first time since old Teddy left there in March of 1909, the United States has a grass roots
American
in the White House.”

Even Taft and Henry Wallace gave their support, though Taft urged some congressional say in the matter. British Ambassador Oliver Franks reported to his government that virtually all shades of opinion backed the President. The entire mood in the capital had suddenly, dramatically changed. “I have lived and worked in and out of Washington for twenty years,” wrote Joseph Harsch of the
Christian Science Monitor
. “Never before in that time have I felt such a sense of relief and unity pass through the city.”

Appearing before a meeting of the Reserve Officers Association, an audience of a thousand people at the Mayflower Hotel, Wednesday morning, Truman received a standing ovation.

On Thursday, June 29, at his first press conference since the crisis began, he said with emphasis, “We are not at war.” Could he be quoted? “Yes,” Truman said. “We are not at war.”

Would it be correct, asked a reporter, to call this a police action under the United Nations? “Yes,” Truman replied. “That is exactly what it amounts to.”

Later this would be called another of his press conference blunders—he had allowed a reporter to put words in his mouth. But it was no mistake. A “police action under the United Nations” was precisely how he wished it to be viewed. Nor, importantly, did anyone see reason then to fault him.

It was in the middle of the night in Washington, at 3:00
A.M.
Washington time, Friday, June 30, that the Pentagon received still another report from General MacArthur, this based on his first personal inspection of the situation in Korea. “The only assurance for holding the present line and the ability to regain later lost ground,” it said, “is through introduction of United States combat forces into the Korean battle area.” Any further attempt to check the North Korean advance with air- and seapower alone would be a waste of time. So bleak were things at this stage, even an all-out U.S. effort—Army, Navy, and Air Force—might be “doomed to failure.” Time was of the essence—“a clear-cut decision without delay is imperative.”

When Frank Pace telephoned Blair House, it was still dark outside. Truman was already up and shaved. He took the call by his bedside at 4:47
A.M.
Pace relayed the grim report. MacArthur wanted two divisions of ground troops.

Truman never hesitated. It was a moment for which he had been preparing himself for days and he made his decision at once.

Later he would say that committing American troops to combat in Korea was the most difficult decision of his presidency, more so than the decision to use the atomic bomb. He did not want to start another world war, he had been heard to say privately more than once during that most crucial week. “Must be careful not to cause a general Asiatic war,” he now wrote in his diary, later that same day, Friday, June 30. What would Mao Tse-tung do? he wondered. Where would the next Russian move come?

“Now, your job as President,” Acheson would observe years later, “is to decide.
Mr. Truman decided
.”

Later, too—many years later—Acheson would make public a note he received from the President that, as Acheson said, well illustrated the quality of the man who “bound his lieutenants to him with unbreakable devotion.” It was written in longhand:

I
n the five years since the nation was last at war, the President’s office had changed very little, with one notable exception. The melodramatic, moonlit Remington, the painting called
Fired On
that had hung over the mantelpiece opposite Truman’s desk in 1945, had been replaced by a commanding, full-figured portrait of George Washington, while below, in front of the fireplace, stood Truman’s big office globe, his gift from General Eisenhower.

Thus from his desk now, Truman could look up at both the nation’s first Commander in Chief, resplendent in full uniform, and the world at large, a subject that weighed on him more now than ever—the world and the threat of global war, the world and the imperative need not to repeat past mistakes, the world and Harry Truman.

He was not one to worry about decisions, once made, he told a reporter, but with the “Korean affair” he could not help worrying about the inevitable consequences. “Appeasement leads only to further aggression and ultimately to war,” he would tell the nation in an historic radio and television broadcast the evening of July 19, still unwilling to call what was happening in Korea a war, but an “act of aggression” by the Communist leaders.

The Washington portrait, by Rembrandt Peale, was on loan from the National Gallery. The globe, which, with its heavy three-legged stand of polished mahogany, stood nearly chest high, had been Eisenhower’s when he was Allied Commander in Europe. Truman had chosen the new arrangement himself. He was acutely conscious of everything in the room, liked it all just so. Once when Charlie Ross picked up Truman’s engagement calendar from the desk to check something, then put it back down slightly askew, Truman, while chatting on, immediately lined it up again as before.

The globe especially gave the fireplace end of the room, the northern arc of the Oval Office, a weight and importance it had not had before. Photographers now, when posing the President, liked to have him stand there, particularly for portraits with his generals. He would be asked to put his right hand on the globe, as if explaining something, a natural pose, since in discussions with the Joint Chiefs—or members of the Cabinet or Congress or his own staff—Truman would frequently go to the globe to make a point. “Harry, don’t you sometimes feel overwhelmed by your job?” he had been asked by Republican Senator Tobey of New Hampshire, and Truman had stepped to the globe and turning it slowly said, “All the world is focusing on this office. The nearest thing to my heart is to do something to keep the world at peace. We must find a way to peace, or else civilization will be destroyed and the world will turn back to the year 900.”

Now, in the first weeks of the Korean crisis, he would put his finger on various spots in Europe or the Middle East—on the Elbe or the Iranian-Soviet border—then turning the globe, point to the pale gray, of the Korean peninsula, between the Sea of Japan and the Yellow Sea, a place most Americans still had trouble finding on a map.

“This is the Greece of the Far East,” Truman would say. “If we are tough enough now, there won’t be any next time.”

The whole of the Korean peninsula, north and south, was almost half again the size of Greece, roughly 84,000 square miles in total. The distance from top to bottom, from the Yalu River, which formed North Korea’s border with Manchuria, to the southernmost tip of the peninsula, was about 600 miles, while the distance across varied from 125 to 200 miles.

The Republic of South Korea—everything below the arbitrary dividing line of the 38th parallel—was slightly larger than the state of Indiana. Its population of 20 million was double that of North Korea, and its economy chiefly agricultural, whereas most Korean industry was in the north.

The demarcation line of the 38th parallel had no basis in Korean history, geography, or anything else. It had been settled on hastily in the last week of World War II, as a temporary measure to facilitate the surrender of Japanese troops—those north of the line had surrendered to the Soviets, those south, to American forces. The decision had been made late one night at the Pentagon by then Colonel Dean Rusk and another young Army officer named Charles Bonesteel, who picked the line of latitude 38 degrees north because it had the advantage of already being on most maps of Korea.

From Seoul, South Korea’s fallen capital city, to Pusan, its largest port at the southeastern end of the peninsula, was 275 miles by the main road and rail line—all extremely crucial miles just now, as news of the advancing North Korean “People’s Army,” the NKPA, grew steadily worse. July 1950 had become a wretched time in Korea and in Washington. News accounts portrayed Truman as “chipper” or “jaunty” no more, but as looking exhausted, seeming to “walk with the weary man’s heavy tread.” One Sunday, on a rare outing on the
Williamsburg
down the Potomac, he excused himself after lunch with his staff and slept the rest of the afternoon.

His press conferences were no longer held in his office but across the way in the old State Department Building, in the ornate, musty Indian Treaty Room, which offered more space for an expanding press corps. (He was also fed up with the way reporters spilled ink from their fountain pens on the rug in his office.) To repeated questions about his outlook, he maintained that “of course” he was hopeful. But as they knew from daily bulletins, and he knew better still from his morning briefings by Omar Bradley, the news from Korea was nearly all bad.

Bradley, one of the outstanding generals of World War II, was not given to exaggeration. Plain-mannered, likable, raised in Moberly, Missouri, he was Truman’s kind of man, with more inner iron than generally understood and what his deputy chief of staff at the Pentagon, General Matthew Ridgway, described as “a fine, orderly mind.” Until the Korean crisis, Bradley had reported to the President only on occasion, but he came now to the Oval Office every morning at 9:30 sharp, to unfold his map of Korea and commence his grim report in the dry, oddly high-pitched voice of a Missouri schoolteacher.

American ground forces and what was Left of the Army of the Republic of Korea, the ROKs, were being rapidly chopped to pieces. The first American ground troops—all of 256 men, two and a half companies of the 24th Infantry Division—had gone into action south of Seoul, making a brave stand near Osan, on July 5, and they had been falling back ever since, fighting desperately to keep retreat from turning to rout. Airlifted from Japan, they had been rushed into action without adequate preparation. Many were young draftees with no combat experience; nearly all were soft from garrison duty in Japan; and, like their ROK allies, they were pathetically ill-equipped in the face of a highly disciplined enemy advancing in massive numbers and with heavy Russian T-34 tanks. As the newspapers were saying, it was all tragically reminiscent of the Nazi
Blitzkrieg
in France in 1940. “The size of the attack, and the speed with which it was followed up,” Truman would tell the nation, “make it perfectly plain that it had been plotted all along.”

When at a meeting of the National Security Council on July 6, Vice President Barkley asked how many North Koreans were in the operation, Bradley said 90,000. American forces numbered about 10,000, the South Koreans 25,000.

In combat, American and ROK forces were often outnumbered three to one, or ten to one, in some places twenty to one. They had no tanks, no artillery, or any weapons capable of slowing the Russian tanks. (It had actually been American policy to keep the South Korean forces under-equipped before this, so as not to encourage aggressive action by South Korea against the North.) World War II bazookas bounced off the Russian tanks like stones. Matthew Ridgway would later say it was as if a few troops of Boy Scouts with hand weapons had tried to stop a German Panzer unit.

The retreat was fought in drenching rains and punishing heat, temperatures regularly over 100 degrees. July was the monsoon season in Korea. Weapons rusted, clothes rotted. With communications broken and mud roads clogged by tens of thousands of fleeing refugees, the chaos was overwhelming. American troops were wholly unfamiliar with the terrain. They knew nothing of the Korean people or the Korean language. They fought and fell back, fought and fell back, with little sleep or food, and in the terrible heat drank from drainage ditches by rice fields fertilized with human manure. As a consequence, violent dysentery ripped through their ranks. “Guys, sweat soaked, shitting in their pants, not even dropping them, moved like zombies,” remembered an American infantryman. “I just sensed we were going to find another hill and be attacked, then find another hill and so forth, endlessly forever.” Casualties were as high as 30 percent. “What a place to die,” a young soldier was quoted in the papers. Some Americans cut and ran, victims of “bugout fever.”

With his map propped on an easel before the President’s desk, Bradley went over the situation one morning in mid-July, pointing out various units, noting the length of the American-ROK line across the peninsula and the necessity of gradual withdrawal. The hope was to continue delaying actions—the most difficult kind of military maneuver—pulling back until a defensive, shortened line in the southeastern corner was reached and established.

American and ROK forces fell back from Osan to the Kum River, then to the temporary capital of Taejon, where a furious, house-to-house battle raged on July 19 (July 18 in Washington). With the city in flames, the commanding general of the 24th Division, William F. Dean, disappeared, reportedly last seen trying to stop an enemy tank with his Army .45 revolver.

Published accounts described suicidal enemy attacks, “waves” of North Koreans, a “Red tide.” “For every ten we killed another ten came charging over the hill to replace them,” an American soldier was quoted in the Washington
Post
. Before breakfast one morning at Blair House, Truman read on the front page of
The New York Times
of seven slaughtered American soldiers, prisoners of the North Koreans, who had been found by the roadside, their hands tied behind their backs and shot through the face.

“This is no orthodox war,” wrote Marguerite Higgins of the New York
Herald-Tribune,
the only woman covering the war thus far.

“The stragglers are still coming in—small exhausted groups of them,” reported a correspondent for the Baltimore
Sun,
a few days after the Battle of Taejon.

The retreat continued, through the steep passes of the Sobaek Mountains, to still another defensive line, on high ground behind the Naktong River. In seventeen days of savage fighting, American and ROK forces had fallen back seventy miles.

It was, in many respects, one of the darkest chapters in American military history. But MacArthur, now in overall command of the U.N. forces, was trading space for time—time to pour in men and supplies at the port of Pusan—and the wonder was the North Koreans had been kept from overrunning South Korea straightaway. Despite their suffering and humiliation, the brutal odds against them, the American and ROK units had done what they were supposed to, almost miraculously. They had held back the landslide, said Truman, who would rightly call it one of the most heroic rearguard actions on record.

On July 29, the tactical U.N. commander in the field, General Walton Walker, issued a “stand-or-die” order. There would be no more retreat, Walker said. Pusan must not fall. “There will be no Dunkirk, there will be no Bataan.” Every man must fight to the death if necessary, until help arrived.

The speech, designed no doubt for home consumption, struck the troops as uncalled for. The prospect of another Dunkirk or Bataan had I not occurred to them. “I never did like running,” a private from Philadelphia told Marguerite Higgins.

One of Truman’s important but little noted first moves in the fateful last week of June had been to recall Averell Harriman from Europe, where he had been a kind of roving ambassador, and make him a special assistant to help with war emergency problems; and one of Harriman’s first moves in his new role was to press upon the President the need for congressional support for what he was doing in Korea. He urged Truman to call for a war resolution from Congress as soon as possible, while the country was still behind him. Dean Acheson, however, disagreed, insisting that such a resolution was unnecessary and unwise. The President, said Acheson, should rest on his constitutional authority as Commander in Chief. It was true that congressional approval would do no harm, but the process of obtaining it, Acheson thought, might do great harm. In the mounting anxiety over how things were going in Korea, the timing was wrong.

Truman sided with Acheson, telling Harriman further that to appeal to Congress now would make it more difficult for future presidents to deal with emergencies.

In the first week of July MacArthur requested thirty thousand American ground troops, to bring the four divisions of his Eighth Army to full strength. Just days later, on July 9, the situation had become so “critical” that MacArthur called for a doubling of his forces. Four more divisions were urgently needed, he said in a cable that jolted Washington.