D. Clayton James - Refighting the Last War: Command and Crisis in Korea 1950-1953

O THER B OOKS BY D. C LAYTON J AMES

W ITH A NNE S HARP W ELLS, A Time for Giants:
Politics of the High Command in World War II (1987)

The Years of MacArthur, volume 3,
Triumph and Disaster, 1945-1964 (1985)

The Years of MacArthur, volume 2, 1941-1945 (1975)

South to Bataan, North to Mukden: The Prison Diary of
Brigadier General W. E. Brougher [ed.] (1971)

The Years of MacArthur, volume 1, 1880-1941 (1970)

Antebellum Natchez (1968)

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Copyright 1993 by D. Clayton James

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

James, D. Clayton.

Refighting the last war: command and crisis in Korea, 1950-1953/
D. Clayton James, with Anne Sharp Wells.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN 0-02-916001-4
eISBN: 978-1-451-60237-1

1. Korean War, 1950-1953Campaigns. 2. Military art and science
Decision making. 3. Korean War, 1950-1953United States.
I. Wells, Anne Sharp. II. Title.

DS918.J36 1993

951.9042dc20 92-26986

CIP

We thank the copyright-holders of the following sources for permission
to include quotations from their work within this volume.

Excerpts in Chapter 4 from The Sea War in Korea by Malcolm W. Cagle
and Frank A. Manson. Copyright 1957, U.S. Naval Institute,
Annapolis, Maryland.

Excerpts in Chapter 5 from From the Danube to the Yalu by Mark W Clark.
Copyright 1955 by Mark W Clark. Reprinted by permission of HarperCollins
Publishers.

TO ERLENE

An Invaluable Partner in This and All Ventures

Contents

Abbreviations

CBI China-Burma-India Theater

CIA Central Intelligence Agency

CCF Chinese Communist Forces

CCS Combined Chiefs of Staff

CINCFE Commander in chief, Far East Command

CINCUNC Commander in chief, United Nations Command

CINCPAC Commander in chief, Pacific

CO Commanding officer

EUSAK Eighth United States Army, Korea

FDR President Franklin D. Roosevelt

FEAF Far East Air Forces

FECOM Far East Command

(FEC)

FRUS Foreign Relations of the United States

G-1 Personnel and administration section (or chief)

G-2 Intelligence section (or chief)

G-3 Operations and training section (or chief)

G-4 Supply section (or chief)

G-5 Military government and civil affairs section (or chief)

GHQ General headquarters

JCS Joint Chiefs of Staff

JSPOG Joint Strategic Plans and Operations Group

KATUSA Koreans Attached to United States Army (later Korean Augmentation to the United States Army)

LST Landing ship, tank

NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization

NAVFE United States Naval Forces, Far East

NSC National Security Council

RCT Regimental combat team

RG Record group

ROK Republic of Korea [South]

SAC Strategic Air Command

SCAP Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers, Japan

SHAPE Supreme Headquarters, Allied Powers in Europe

UNC United Nations Command

UNSC United Nations Security Council

Preface

This is an introduction to the five principal high-level American commanders of the Korean War and to the six most crucial command decisions of that conflict that were primarily United States responsibilities. The choices were based on the authors research and reflections of many years on the high command of this strange war of 1950-1953. The commanders herein are limited to the commander in chief, the three theater commanders, and the officer who doubled as head of naval forces and of the armistice delegation. The command decisions are restricted to the ones that the author considers to be the key turning points in the military, not diplomatic, developments of the conflict.

The term command decisions, interestingly, is not defined in the Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms of the Department of Defense (Joint Chiefs of Staff Publication no. 1, 1974). Thus, a stipulated definition will have to serve in lieu of a standard one: a decision, usually in the form of an order, by a commander to bring about a particular operation or series of related actions by military forces. In this book, the stipulated usage is further limited to decisions at the level of high command and usually involving large-scale operations. As stated, however, above these in the hierarchy of such decision-making were the shapers of policy, who, especially in the cases of the wars in Korea and Vietnam, included civilians without command authority but whose actions mightily affected military affairs, for better or worse.

Three characteristics of the Korean War will be stressed: First, the focus is on high command, but since command decisions evolved from policy formulations, the impact of the Department of State, especially of Dean G. Acheson and the Policy Planning Staff, has to be considered. Quite unlike the Second World War, Acheson and his lieutenants heavily influenced military policy, military strategy, and even their operational implementation by the armed forces.

Second, like most previous wars, the conflict of 1950-1953 was influenced by the previous major hostilities in which the United States was engaged. The Korean struggle had two distinct military phases, the first of which was the war against North Korea alone, June-October 1950, which tended toward becoming by that autumn a refighting of the Second World War, wherein American forces went for such extreme objectives as annihilation of the enemy army, total war, decisive victory, and unconditional capitulation.

Third, with the wars next phase, the entry of the Communist Chinese, however, the American military and civilian officials who assumed the chief responsibility of the United Nations, really the U.S.-dominated coalitions, strategy and operations in Korea changed to an endeavor to coordinate military and diplomatic efforts toward achieving their aims while also terminating the hostilities. Gradually there developed in both camps of belligerents unspoken and unwritten agreements, usually for wholly different reasons, to place significant restraints on their own conduct of ground, sea, and air operations.

Thus emerged the first limited war between the Cold War powers, both directly and by proxy. It was complicated by its dual nature in also being a civil war that mixed nationalism and communism in ways largely incomprehensible to either side. Yet somehow the remarkable understanding on self-imposed limits held long enough to achieve an armistice, which, however tenuous, kept the Korean peninsula and, indeed, the world from suffering the massive destruction that a refighting of the Second World War portended. The commanders and the tactics, as well as many of the troops and weapons, were largely from the global war of 1941-1945, but thanks mainly to some wise men on both sides who formulated the silent, implicit agreement on limits, the legacy of World War II was abandoned as the world was led uncertainly into a new era of limited and unconventional warfare.