Over the Mountains: Mountains

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Douglas MacArthur has a conviction which many who have talked with him remember: "There is no security on this earth. There is only opportunity."

But in August 1945, when his transport plane Bataan wheeled out of a blue sky into the lovely land of Japan, there was perhaps in all the world no symbol of security to equal General of the Army Douglas MacArthur. As he stepped out on to Atsugi airfield and into a veteran's dream of victory, the general was smiling. Behind him lay thousands of miles of ocean, the conquered Pacific which U.S. soldiers, sailors and airmen had made an American lake. Before him lay the submission of a God-Emperor and proconsular rule over Japan. A man less wise than Douglas MacArthur might have thought that, at 65, he could relax and enjoy the fruits of hard-won victory.

In the five years that followed, the U.S., through no fault of MacArthur's, let slip in Asia opportunity after opportunity, and the illusion of security melted away. And so one morning last week, 70-year-old Douglas MacArthur drove through the rain to Haneda airfield outside Tokyo. Waiting for him there was the old Bataan, revved up and ready to go to South Korea, where U.S. and South Korean forces were clawing desperately at a bush-league army of Soviet stooges.

"We Go." The night before, the general had called four American newspapermen to his office in Tokyo's handsome Dai Ichi Building. He told them of his plans to go to Korea to "see for myself" and invited them to come along. "It will be an unarmed plane," he said seriously, "and we are not sure of getting fighter cover, not sure where we will land. If you are not at the airport I will know you have other commitments." When one of the correspondents assured him that they'd all be there, the general grinned. "I have no doubt of your courage," said he. "I just wanted to give your judgment a chance to work."

As the night wore on, Army weathermen, looking up at the rain and overcast which shrouded the Japanese capital, shook their heads. Staff officers urged the general to abandon the trip. At each objection the MacArthur jaw jutted out a little farther. "We go," said Douglas MacArthur. A little after 6 a.m. June 29, the wheels of the Bataan rolled down the wet Haneda runway, churning up a fine spray. Soon after the plane was airborne, MacArthur pulled out the corncob pipe which had been one of his World War II trademarks. "I don't smoke this back there in Tokyo," he said. "They'd think I was a farmer."

As the Bataan droned along, the weather grew better, and over southern Japan four Mustangs flew up to provide a fighter umbrella for,the general's plane. Overruling his subordinates, who wanted to land him ia safety at Korea's far southern port of Pusan, MacArthur insisted on heading for Suwon airstrip, 20 miles south of Seoul and a target of persistent North Korean bombing and strafing attacks. Over Korea, a Russian-built Yak tried to slip through the Mustangs to get at the Bataan. As a Mustang closed in on the Yak, MacArthur said hopefully, "We'll get him cold." But the Bataan's pilot, Major Anthony Storey, fled the scene as fast as possible, cheated the general of his ringside seat.

"Up There, eh Ned?" In Suwon Mac-Arthur was met by Syngman Rhee, President of the Korean Republic. Rhee, too. had come to Suwon by air; his light observation plane had eluded a North Korean fighter only by hedgehopping.

After a short conference with President Rhee, MacArthur gave his staff officers more cause for worry. "Let's go to the front and look at the troops," he said. "The only way to judge a war is to see the troops in action." What the general saw was not good.

In a black sedan accompanied by several jeeploads of American and Korean officers, MacArthur drove north toward the narrow Han River. On the south side of the Han the confused and battered South Korean army was vainly trying to form a new defense line. All along the road the general's car brushed through hundreds of South Korean soldiers and mobs of tired, frightened refugees. Many of the soldiers saluted and cheered as the American convoy passed. Even the refugees stopped and cheered. Said MacArthur's chief of staff, Major General Edward M. Almond: "The troops are ready and willing to take orders if someone is on hand to tell them what to do and how to do it." But in most of the South Korean army there seemed to be not enough of such leadership on hand.

The convoy halted once, a few miles south of the Han, within sight of enemy-held Seoul. MacArthur jabbed toward the city with his corncob pipe. To General Almond he said: "What do you say we push up there, eh Ned?" The party pushed on to a hill barely a mile from the 18th Century walls of Seoul. Clearly visible were towers of smoke from fires set by enemy shelling. Clearly audible was the crump of Communist mortars over the river. Below the hill a railroad bridge still stood intact, capable of supporting tanks and heavy trucks. Field glasses in hand, MacArthur ordered the bridge destroyed. Then he headed back for Suwon.

During the convoy's return trip several unidentified planes were sighted. The jeeps emptied in a rush as their occupants dived for the cover of roadside woods. MacArthur did not dive. He stepped sedately from the black sedan, walked away a few steps and gazed nonchalantly at the sky until the planes were gone. Then he dusted his leather jacket carefully and returned to the car.

When he took off again from Suwon airstrip, MacArthur, who had planned to spend two days in Korea, had been there only eight hours. Some read this change of plans as a bad sign. It was. Behind MacArthur lay a disintegrating South Korean army. Before him lay a battle which might, at the worst, take a place in U.S. history alongside the battle of Bataan.

"The Fatal Mistake." The descent from the triumph of V-J Day to the day of desperation at Suwon had been dizzyingly swift. Communist imperialism began its march through Asia before V-J Day. It used the most mobile of weapons, political agitation and ruthless organization. In Korea--as in China, Indo-China, Malaya and Burma--native Communists, shouting slogans of freedom and independence, were forging for their people heavier chains of slavery than even Asia had ever known.

Against the Communist drive in Asia, the U.S. had for the last five years offered no firm or intelligent opposition. The U.S. had been lulled into a false sense of security by men (some lazy-minded, some worse) who said that Asia's problems were too hard to solve and, anyway, that Asian Communists were not really Communists.

MacArthur, whose job it was to police the boundaries of chaos in Asia, was not fooled. Never for a minute did he believe the U.S. secure in the face of the Red advance. He had expressed his forebodings to scores of American visitors to Tokyo. No quotation of any particular interview was allowed, but the gist, delivered in a resonant baritone, ran something like this: "Whether you like it or not, most of the human race lives around this Pacific basin. Here in Asia there are great de mands, great dangers, great opportunities --all neglected by the United States.

"In China we have made the fatal mistake every soldier dreads: underestimating the enemy. If we had dreamed that the Communists could take China, we would have swallowed Chiang Kaishek, horns, cloven hooves and all--if that was the way we felt about him. Personally I have great respect for Chiang."

The general's views, often and eloquently expressed, were well known in Washington. But for all MacArthur's reputation as a strategist, his pleas--considered political, and hence beyond his province--were largely ignored. In 1948 the Defense Department had answered with a flat "no" the general's request for more troops to buttress Japan, which MacArthur regarded as the only firm anchor of the U.S. position in Asia. Last January the State Department had overruled MacArthur's urgent proposal that Formosa be defended. He had warned Washington that Communist capture of Formosa would break the defense line Japan-Okinawa-Formosa-Philippines and drive the U.S. back to the line Alaska-Hawaii.

Two weeks ago, however, MacArthur finally succeeded in selling a bit of his program for Asia to Secretary of Defense Louis Johnson and General Omar Bradley, head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. After a week in Tokyo, Johnson and Bradley flew back to Washington armed with a strongly worded memorandum from MacArthur, and prepared at last to argue for a great investment of U.S. strength in the Pacific. They reached Washington less than twelve hours before the Communists invaded South Korea. It was the Communists who finally won MacArthur's argument for him.

President Truman's decision to defend Korea set off a chain reaction that ran through the Far East. He announced that the U.S. would defend Formosa and step up its help to two other governments, the Philippines and Indo-China, which were fighting Communist rebellion. The immediate reaction of the Philippine government was a statement from Defense Secretary Ruperto Kangleon that if the U.S. would take care of the Communist threat from outside the country, the Filipinos would speed up their campaign against the Huks in Luzon. Three days after the Truman decision, the first U.S. planes arrived in Indo-China and were delivered to the French. With renewed assurances of U.S. aid, the anti-Communist forces in Indo-China now had an opportunity of taking the offensive against the Red-led Viet Minh rebels.

"No Comment." MacArthur, who had received little comfort from Washington, was, as usual, quite prepared to make his own decisions in his new command. During World War II he had been an aloof figure who avoided interference from his nominal superiors, worked out his problems in his own way. His independence had once prompted Franklin Roosevelt to sigh: "I wish MacArthur would tell me these things."

The general had not changed his ways. Last week this fact was driven home to his superiors in Washington when they tried to offer MacArthur some polite suggestions. The exchange began with a cautiously phrased message from the Pentagon: "If such & such were undertaken, perhaps General MacArthur would like to do so & so?"

The answer from Tokyo bounced back:

"No comment."

The Pentagon brooded for a while, then tried another approach: "Do you desire any instructions?"

The reply was terse: "No."

Douglas MacArthur was still playing Sphinx.

Overnight the sacrosanct sixth floor of MacArthur's headquarters ceased to be the home of SCAP, Japan's military super-government, and was given over to its brother organization, the Far East Command. Down the hall from MacArthur's own office appeared a huge sign bearing the legend "War Room," and underneath, in large red letters, the word "Secret." Headquarters sections concerned with the war went into round-the-clock operations. Top staff officers worked 15-hour shifts and a colonel remarked wearily, "Some tempers are getting mighty short."

MacArthur himself seemed to thrive under the new burden. Said one of his subordinates, "The added responsibility seems to have peeled ten years from his shoulders." Inside the Dai Ichi Building, once the heart of a Japanese insurance empire, bleary-eyed staff officers looked up from stacks of paper, whispered proudly, "God, the man is great." General Almond, his chief of staff, said straight out, "He's the greatest man alive."

And reverent Air Force General George E. Stratemeyer put it as strongly as it could be put (even in the Dai Ichi Building): "He's the greatest man in history."

The Heirs of Colin Kelly. It was upon the reverent Stratemeyer and his Far East Air Forces that MacArthur placed the first heavy burden of U.S. operations in Korea. FEAF's 400-odd fighters, 60-odd bombers and one troop carrier group were scattered halfway across the Pacific. From bases in southern Japan, Stratemeyer sent out jet F80 Shooting Stars and F82 Twin Mustangs to strafe North Korean trucks, locomotives and armor. From Guam he called up B-29 Superfortresses to pound Seoul's Kimpo airfield.

For most bombing missions, however, Stratemeyer relied on the famed 19th Bomb Group, Colin Kelly's old outfit, which had been trapped in the Philippines on Pearl Harbor Day. In all their operations the U.S. planes were hampered by lack of advanced bases and air-ground communication with the South Korean army. And for the first three days after they entered the fight, U.S. fliers were hamstrung by a Washington order to strike only at the airfields south of the 38th parallel. That meant that they could not get at the source of North Korean air power.

Ordered into the fighting along with the Air Force were the light cruiser Juneau and four destroyers under Vice Admiral Charles T. Joy, commander of U.S. Far Eastern naval forces, who began bombardment of Communist amphibious forces which had landed on South Korea's east coast. Assigned to Joy's command, with the mission of protecting Formosa against possible Chinese Communist attack, was the Seventh (Asiatic) Fleet under Vice Admiral Arthur Struble. At Struble's disposal were the carrier Valley Forge, one heavy cruiser, six destroyers and four submarines.

More U.S. naval strength would soon be available. Forming on the Pacific Coast was Task Group "Yoke," to be made up of the carrier Philippine Sea, two heavy cruisers and eight destroyers. And already operating under MacArthur's command were ships of the British Far Eastern Fleet commanded by Sir Patrick Brind. Sir Patrick could offer for use in the rapidly imposed naval blockade of Korea one carrier, three cruisers and seven destroyers.

The Fighting Infantry. The air and sea forces available to MacArthur were more than adequate to deal with North Korea's obsolete air force and puny navy. But the general's trip to Korea had given him firsthand evidence that air and naval support alone would not save the situation. As the defenders fell back, President Truman on June 30 gave MacArthur permission to send in U.S. ground forces.

For the previous week MacArthur's ground commander, Lieut. General Walton Harris Walker, had been preparing for such an order, working out in advance the logistics of infantry transport. Walker's Eighth Army included four divisions ready for combat--the 7th, 24th and 25th Infantry Divisions and the 1st Cavalry Division. Of these 50-55,000 combat troops, some would have to be kept in Japan, unless MacArthur were willing to rely on service and headquarters troops to maintain order.

What the U.S. Forgot. In September 1945, when General MacArthur landed in Japan, he was smiling. Koreans were smiling then, too. After 35 years of Japanese tyranny, Korea was to be free again. In their long-suffering nation, Koreans told each other, there was beginning an era more splendid than any they had known before. Last week, after five years of division and bloody dissension in the Land of the Morning Calm, what remained of Korean freedom was staggering under the savage attack of a tyranny far more complete than that of the Japanese. Douglas MacArthur had said (and the U.S. people had forgotten): "There is no security on this earth. There is only opportunity."

In the deep valleys of Korea the people had a saying which meant much the same thing: "Over the mountains, still mountains, mountains."

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