The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War by David Halberstam Page B
Authors: David Halberstam
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ways emerge in the coming months as leading hardliners: Dean Rusk, the new assistant secretary of state for the Far East, and Paul Nitze, the head of Policy Planning. Still, for all the intensity of Dulles’s rhetoric, there was no real reason to feel that South Korea was in any great danger. Just a few days earlier both Dulles and Allison had been briefed by General Willoughby, and the subject of a potential North Korean attack had never come up.
When the North Koreans struck, Dulles and Allison had an unusually intimate view of MacArthur’s headquarters in action—the view of men ideologically sympathetic, but who were not members of MacArthur’s inner team. From the start, the news coming in was very bad, yet MacArthur and his staff seemed curiously casual about it. There was a briefing that first Sunday night, June 25, at which MacArthur seemed far too relaxed. The early reports, he told Dulles and Allison, were inconclusive. “This is probably only a reconnaissance-in-force. If Washington only will not hobble me, I can handle it with one arm tied behind my back,” he said. Then he added that President Rhee had asked for some fighter planes, and though he thought the Koreans could not use them properly, he intended to send a few along, just for morale purposes.
Dulles, Allison thought, seemed momentarily relieved by MacArthur’s aura of confidence, but he still wanted to send a cable to Acheson and Rusk, urging immediate help for the South Koreans. But the more Allison and Dulles talked to men outside MacArthur’s coterie, the more uneasy they became. That very first night, Allison had gone to dinner with an old friend, Brigadier General Crump Garvin, commander of the Port of Yokohama. Garvin startled him by confiding that there had been serious reports coming through Eighth Army Intelligence for the past two or three weeks indicating that civilians near the North Korean side of the parallel were being moved away and that the North Koreans were concentrating large numbers of troops just above the border. “Anyone who read the reports could see something was going to happen and soon. I don’t know what G-2 in Tokyo has been doing,” Garvin told Allison.
4. T HE N ORTH K OREAN I NVASION, J UNE 25–28, 1950
On Monday, the gap between reality in the field and that in MacArthur’s headquarters seemed to grow wider. Ambassador Muccio, the senior American State Department representative in Korea, had ordered the immediate evacuation of American women and children from the country. MacArthur, still on automatic pilot, suggested that it was a premature move. There was, he insisted, “no reason to panic in Korea.” Yet the news coming in was uniformly bad. That night the two high-ranking visitors separated, Allison to have dinner with some senior officials in Tokyo, Dulles to attend a private dinner with MacArthur. Allison’s dinner party was interrupted by the constant comings and goings of senior journalists and diplomats, all of them checking with their sources during the evening, all coming back with increasingly somber reports—the South Koreans were being routed. At the end of the evening, Allison decided to check in with Dulles, certain that he would know far more from his dinner. “I suppose you’ve heard the bad news from Korea,” he began. Dulles had heard nothing. “But didn’t you have dinner with the general?” Yes, Dulles answered, just the two couples, but after dinner they had watched a movie, the general’s favorite form of entertainment. No one had interrupted their evening. Dulles thereupon called MacArthur to report on what he had heard about the South Korean collapse. The general said he would look into it. “This may have been one of the few times in American history when representatives of the State Department have had to tell a high American military commander about what was happening in his own backyard,” Allison later wrote.
The next day brought yet more signs
When the North Koreans struck, Dulles and Allison had an unusually intimate view of MacArthur’s headquarters in action—the view of men ideologically sympathetic, but who were not members of MacArthur’s inner team. From the start, the news coming in was very bad, yet MacArthur and his staff seemed curiously casual about it. There was a briefing that first Sunday night, June 25, at which MacArthur seemed far too relaxed. The early reports, he told Dulles and Allison, were inconclusive. “This is probably only a reconnaissance-in-force. If Washington only will not hobble me, I can handle it with one arm tied behind my back,” he said. Then he added that President Rhee had asked for some fighter planes, and though he thought the Koreans could not use them properly, he intended to send a few along, just for morale purposes.
Dulles, Allison thought, seemed momentarily relieved by MacArthur’s aura of confidence, but he still wanted to send a cable to Acheson and Rusk, urging immediate help for the South Koreans. But the more Allison and Dulles talked to men outside MacArthur’s coterie, the more uneasy they became. That very first night, Allison had gone to dinner with an old friend, Brigadier General Crump Garvin, commander of the Port of Yokohama. Garvin startled him by confiding that there had been serious reports coming through Eighth Army Intelligence for the past two or three weeks indicating that civilians near the North Korean side of the parallel were being moved away and that the North Koreans were concentrating large numbers of troops just above the border. “Anyone who read the reports could see something was going to happen and soon. I don’t know what G-2 in Tokyo has been doing,” Garvin told Allison.
4. T HE N ORTH K OREAN I NVASION, J UNE 25–28, 1950
On Monday, the gap between reality in the field and that in MacArthur’s headquarters seemed to grow wider. Ambassador Muccio, the senior American State Department representative in Korea, had ordered the immediate evacuation of American women and children from the country. MacArthur, still on automatic pilot, suggested that it was a premature move. There was, he insisted, “no reason to panic in Korea.” Yet the news coming in was uniformly bad. That night the two high-ranking visitors separated, Allison to have dinner with some senior officials in Tokyo, Dulles to attend a private dinner with MacArthur. Allison’s dinner party was interrupted by the constant comings and goings of senior journalists and diplomats, all of them checking with their sources during the evening, all coming back with increasingly somber reports—the South Koreans were being routed. At the end of the evening, Allison decided to check in with Dulles, certain that he would know far more from his dinner. “I suppose you’ve heard the bad news from Korea,” he began. Dulles had heard nothing. “But didn’t you have dinner with the general?” Yes, Dulles answered, just the two couples, but after dinner they had watched a movie, the general’s favorite form of entertainment. No one had interrupted their evening. Dulles thereupon called MacArthur to report on what he had heard about the South Korean collapse. The general said he would look into it. “This may have been one of the few times in American history when representatives of the State Department have had to tell a high American military commander about what was happening in his own backyard,” Allison later wrote.
The next day brought yet more signs
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