"Where Hath It Slept?"

Whenever there is a failure of information about the enemy the more literate military men, outside of G-2s, bitterly quote a passage from Shakespeare. The passage was going around Korea and Tokyo last week.

KING JOHN : How goes all in France?

MESSENGER: From France to England. Never such a power for any foreign preparation was levied in the body of a land. The copy of your speed is learn'd by them; for when you should be told they do prepare, the tidings comes that they are all arrived.

KING JOHN : O, where hath our intelligence been drunk? Where hath it slept?

The gibe was justified. MacArthur's intelligence, headed by Major General Charles A. Willoughby, had not been either drunk or asleep; nevertheless it had failed to find out what it should have found out about the enemy.

It did know (and so did all the world) that the Chinese Communists had been strengthening their forces on the Manchurian-Korean border ever since the beginning of the Korean war. Nobody knew, and MacArthur's intelligence could not be blamed for not knowing, what the Chinese Communists intended to do with these forces. A reasonable argument was that if the Chinese had intended to come in, the best time was last July when they and the North Koreans could easily have pushed the U.N. forces off the peninsula at little cost to the Chinese. That was the consensus at Washington and Lake Success as well as in Tokyo.

Where MacArthur's intelligence failed, however, was in not estimating correctly the number of Chinese that had crossed the Yalu, the fighting quality and discipline of the Chinese troops, and the heavy concentration at a point in their line against which MacArthur put his weakest forces, the Korean II Corps.

These failures led some observers last week to conclude that a failure of intelligence lost the battle of North Korea. Their argument was that if MacArthur had known what was in front of him he would not have attacked, and if he had not attacked he would not have been beaten.

This line of reasoning is not supported by the course of the battle itself. It is now abundantly clear that the Chinese Communists had enough power across the Yalu to beat MacArthur whether he had attacked or not and no matter how he disposed his forces. The essential fact is that the U.N. forces had taken from the Chinese the beating that the Chinese have had the power to administer in any week since the U.N. forces first went into Korea. All the Security Council members who voted for the U.N. police action knew at the time that they could not mobilize a force in Korea that could stand up against the Chinese Red army.

The failure of intelligence was real, blameworthy--but not crucial. What was crucial was that Communists in Asia control a far bigger army than the U.N.

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