Inchon Landing: MacArthur's Korean War Masterstroke, September 1950

By Gerry van Tonder

A history of this dramatic and risky amphibious invasion, with photos included.
 
In the previous two volumes in the author’s series on battles of the Korean War, North Korean ground forces, armor and artillery cross the 38th Parallel into South Korea, inflicting successive ignominious defeats on the ill-prepared US-led UN troops, pushing them ever southward into a tiny defensive enclave—the Pusan Perimeter—on the tip of the Korean Peninsula.
 
The story continues as General Douglas MacArthur, Second World War veteran of the South East Asia and Pacific theaters, meets with considerable resistance to his plans for a counteroffensive, from both Washington and his staff in South Korea and Japan: it is typhoon season, the approaches to the South Korean port city of Inch’on are not conducive to amphibious assault, and it will leave the besieged Pusan Perimeter in great danger of being overrun. However, the controversial MacArthur’s obstinate persistence prevails and, with a mere three weeks to go, the US X Corps is activated to execute the invasion on D-Day, September 15, 1950.
 
Elements of the US Marine Corps land successfully on the scheduled day, and with the element of surprise on their side, immediately strike east to Seoul, only fifteen miles away. The next day, General Walker’s Eighth US Army breaks out of Pusan to complete the southerly envelopment of the North Korean forces. Seoul falls on the 25th. MacArthur’s impulsive gamble has paid off, and the South Korean government moves back to their capital. The North Koreans have been driven north of the 38th Parallel, effectively bringing to an end their invasion of the south that started on June 25, 1950. With a timeline and photos included, this book tells the compelling story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Sep 30, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526756978

Gerry van Tonder

Born in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, historian and author Gerry van Tonder came to Britain in 1999. Specializing in military history, Gerry has authored multiple books on Rhodesia and the co-authored definitive Rhodesia Regiment 1899–1981. Gerry presented a copy to the regiment’s former colonel-in-chief, Her Majesty the Queen.

Book preview

Seoul.

INTRODUCTION

Operation planned mid-September is amphibious landing of a two division corps in rear of enemy lines for purpose of enveloping and destroying enemy forces in conjunction with attack from south by Eighth Army. I am firmly convinced that early and strong effort behind his front will sever his main lines of communication and enable us to deliver a decisive and crushing blow. The alternative is a frontal attack which can only result in a protracted and expensive campaign.

General MacArthur signal to the US Joint Chiefs of Staff,

Washington, 23 July 1950

Seated at a round table in the former Prussian Cecilienhof Palace at Potsdam in Occupied Germany in the summer of 1945, the American, Soviet and British heads of government sealed the partitioned future of the Korean peninsula.

For American President Harry S. Truman, Korea was peripheral to American strategic interests in the Far East. As a consequence, he was content to leave a token and transient US military presence south of the artificially created north/south boundary that was the 38th Parallel, pending democratic elections in a nation now liberated from decades of Japanese rule. Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, his full attention focused on financial restitution from a conquered Nazi Germany, would provide a similar caretaker military force north of the 38th. Still basking in Labour’s unprecedented landslide victory in May, the newly elected British prime minister, Clement Atlee, had been given the mandate to implement profound economic and social reform in a war-ravaged Britain. The Far East, therefore, was of very little national interest.

By the end of 1948, and with an elected government in power in South Korea, America had withdrawn most of its troops. All that remained was a 500-strong US Korean Military Advisory Group (KMAG), tasked with training what essentially amounted to little more than a South Korean home guard. Washington left its erstwhile wards bereft of tanks, heavy artillery, combat aircraft and modern firearms.

To the north, however, the Soviet legacy could not have been more different. Immediately identifying a strategic opportunity ripe for the picking, Stalin commenced grooming North Korean Kim Il-sung to become leader of the newly formed Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (North Korea). At the time a senior commander in the Communist Chinese Second Army, Kim would become the father of an autocratic family dynasty that still holds absolute sway over every single North Korean citizen.

By the spring of 1950, Stalin had created a well-armed and rigorously trained North Korean People’s Army, the In Min Gun. The force comprised fourteen infantry and mechanized divisions, including, intact, two Chinese divisions from the so-called ‘Korean Volunteer Corps’ north of the Yalu River border with Red China: activated as the 5th and 6th Korean People’s Army (KPA) divisions. In addition to the specialist training of some 10,000 young North Koreans in Soviet military academies in Siberia, Moscow provided each division with eight Soviet advisors.

Of significant and greater importance to the fledgling army, was the not insubstantial gift of war materiél and equipment: an array of infantry weapons from the ubiquitous PPSh-41 to 57mm recoilless anti-tank rifles, anti-aircraft guns, 120mm PM-43 mortars, 76mm ZiS-3 field guns and 122mm M-30 howitzers, Yakovlev Yak-9 single-engine and Lavochkin La-9 (NATO reporting name ‘Fritz’) fighter aircraft, and 150 T-34/85 medium tanks.

US President Harry S. Truman (left) and General Douglas MacArthur disagreed on how the Korean campaign should be conducted. (Photo Hall)

The aftermath of the Second World War witnessed a dramatic, internally orchestrated decimation of America’s armed capabilities, of which General George C. Marshall, US Secretary of State from 1947 to 1949, said, ‘It was no demobilization. It was a rout.’ The defence budgetary fiscus for 1950 had been slashed from $30 billion to $14.2 billion. In his tenure as Secretary of Defence from 1949 to 1950, Louis A. Johnson, an adherent of President Truman’s global defence cuts, advised the navy that the number of operating aircraft carriers would be halved, and carrier air groups reduced from fourteen to six. US Navy amphibious ships had been axed to 91, from a war-time number of 610 and 362 in 1947. In addition, eleven of the twenty-three United States Marine Corps (USMC) squadrons would be disbanded.

In the Far East, the Pentagon maintained the US Eighth Army, commanded by Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker, as an occupation force in the vanquished Japan. The four constituent divisions—the 7th, 24th, 25th Infantry and 1st Cavalry divisions— were aptly described by retired USMC Colonel Robert D. Heinl as ‘undermanned, undertrained, flabby and unmilitary’.* Each division had a strength of around 12,800, compared with the authorized establishment of 18,900.

Against this scenario, and with US intelligence wholly oblivious to the impending North Korean threat, nine KPA divisions marched across the 38th Parallel into South Korea in the early hours of 25 June 1950. In his first of six titles on the Korean War† the author describes the invasion:

In Washington and Tokyo, the Americans were caught totally by surprise, with most enjoying a leisurely weekend away from the office. Ill-prepared and poorly equipped, South Korean forces and the US troops, thrown in to execute holding-only positions, suffered humiliating defeat after defeat as the North Koreans swept down the peninsula, in an invasion reminiscent of Hitler’s blitzkrieg across a helpless Western Europe.

Within days, the South Korean capital, Seoul, had fallen to the North Korean juggernaut. Rolling back the US 24th and 25th divisions and crumbling South Korean ground forces, the KPA had a single objective: push the US forces off the Korean Peninsula and into the Sea of Japan.

Against all odds, and employing ‘mobile-combat’ tactics, Walker finally dug in on a front that ran from Masan on the south coast, then north along the Naktong River to his headquarters at Taegu, and from there to the small port of P’ohang on the peninsula’s east coast. Dubbed the Pusan Perimeter, a desperate fight to repel incessant North Korean assaults on the fragile defence line ensued from mid-July, through August, and well into September. In his second book on the Korean War,* the author summed up the successful, but costly (4,280 KIA) defence:

In partnership with indispensable naval and air support, without which the US Eighth Army would most likely have been overrun, Walker held out long enough to see his now flagging endurance finally stall the North Koreans’ offensive around 12 September. The tide began to turn in the United Nations Command’s favour.

In Tokyo, Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers (SCAP) in Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, had been pondering a counteroffensive since July that year. Apart from having formally received Japan’s unconditional instruments of surrender in Tokyo Bay, he was well known for his famous ‘I will return’ promise to the Philippines during the Second World War. The controversial, corncob pipe-toting US general had been appointed commander of United Nations forces in Korea on 8 July.

With the third highest merits score ever recorded, MacArthur had graduated from West Point Military Academy top of a class of ninety-three cadets. Following conspicuous service in First World War Europe, the highly decorated MacArthur was promoted to brigadier general, a rank which he retained when he was appointed superintendent at West Point in 1919.

Assuming command of the Military District of Manila in the Philippines in late 1922 where, on 2 May 1925, he was promoted to become the US Army’s youngest major general. Upon returning to the US, MacArthur assumed command of the US IV Corps Area, followed by the III Corps Area.

In August 1927, he was elected president of the American Olympic Committee, tasked with preparing the US team for participation in the 1928 Summer Olympics in Amsterdam. With a tally of fifty-six medals—including twenty-two gold—the Americans ended top of the medal table. Germany came a distant second with thirty-one medals (ten gold).

In November 1930, MacArthur took the oath as Chief of Staff of the US Army. Two years later, the outspoken general had an acrimonious exchange of words with the newly elected President Franklin D. Roosevelt. MacArthur was a staunch advocate of an all-powerful military, while being equally damning of any talk of pacifism. In 1935, he was retroactively decorated with two Purple Hearts for his First World War service, three years after he had personally authorized the award’s promulgation. In what was interpreted by many as unashamed vainglory, he ensured that he was the first recipient of the new medal, engraving it with ‘#1’.

At this point in his career, MacArthur, at the behest of the Commonwealth of the Philippines, accepted a post of field marshal in that country, to oversee the creation of a new army. With Roosevelt’s approval, and accompanied by General Dwight D. Eisenhower, MacArthur was also appointed military advisor to the Philippines, for which he retained his American rank of major general.

Controversy accompanied MacArthur in the Second World War Pacific theatre, not least of all that which surrounded his alleged complicity in the Far East Air Force’s (FEAF) failure to implement ‘Rainbow Five’, a hypothetical war strategy which would have facilitated pre-emptive airstrikes against Japanese bases on Formosa (Taiwan). Many believe that such actions would have prevented the Pearl Harbor catastrophe and the effective Japanese destruction of FEAF.

Early in 1942, MacArthur received an enormous legal but highly questionable stipend from President Manuel L. Quezon of the Philippines for services to the commonwealth. Later that year, in a contentious decision that flaunted the ‘strict interpretation of regulations’, MacArthur was awarded the Medal of Honor: he did not meet the fundamental criteria of acts of valour to qualify for America’s highest and most prestigious military award. He had, in fact, already been recommended for the decoration on two previous occasions.

As the war in the Pacific theatre progressed, defeats and victories were exploited by MacArthur’s well-oiled PR machine to elevate the general to the status of near immortal war hero. The publicity would peak as he dramatically waded ashore at Leyte on his promised ‘return’ to the Philippines.

General Douglas MacArthur’s ‘return’ immortalized in bronze, Leyte, Philippines. (Photo Christopher Seloterio)

Kim Il-sung, his head facing the honour guard and on Mikoyan’s right, during a visit to Moscow, March 1949. (Photo NARA)

Roosevelt had been strongly in favour of the use of Formosa as a springboard against Japan, but MacArthur obstinately pushed for the Philippines. There was also talk of him being an ideal Republican candidate for the American presidency.

In like single-mindedness, MacArthur defied military strategists and critics by insisting that a counteroffensive against the invading North Korean forces’ flank would be the only means to relieve the embattled US Eighth Army within the Pusan defence perimeter. However, few attached any credibility to MacArthur’s vision of a landing at Inch’ŏn on the Korean west coast, which would envelope the KPA to the south. A simultaneous breakout by Walker would neutralize the communist threat to his American and South Korean forces on the ground, while completing the entrapment of the remains of the North Korean divisions south of the 38th Parallel.

MacArthur’s planned amphibious mission was fraught with geographical and hydrological imponderables, but he dogmatically clung to the fervent belief that he was right in both choice and outcome.

Rear Admiral James H. Doyle’s communications officer, Commander Monroe Kelly, is quoted as having said of the tactical scenario, ‘Make up a list of amphibious don’ts and you have an exact description of the Inchon operation.’*

*Robert Debs Heinl, Victory at High Tide: The Inchon-Seoul Campaign .

†Gerry van Tonder, North Korea Invades the South: Across the 38th Parallel June 1950 (Pen and Sword Military, Barnsley, 2018).

*Gerry van Tonder, North Korean Onslaught: UN Stand at the Pusan Perimeter, August–September 1950 (Pen and Sword Military, Barnsley, 2018).