This Week in History
September 13-19, 2015
From Inchon to the Yalu - The Case of the Purloined Intelligence:
MacArthur vs. the British Empire’s
World War Threat, Part I
By Gerald H. Belsky
September 2015
Douglas MacArthur. |
On September 15, 1950 General Douglas MacArthur launched one of the greatest military flanking movements in history at Inchon during the Korean War, which totally transformed the bloody meatgrinder of the Korean War up to that point, and achieved a victory over the North Korean army, exactly as MacArthur had forecast, but which most U.S. military leaders, because of the massive obstacles faced at Inchon, had thought impossible.
Key elements of the 1st Marine division of the newly constituted X Corps on that momentous day captured the key port west of the South Korean capital Seoul, and then later joined by the Army’s 7th Division captured Kimpo airfield on the outskirts of Seoul. Within two weeks, after heavy fighting in the capital city itself, Seoul was captured, severing, as MacArthur had planned, the supply and communication lines of the North Korean army besieging the UN forces of the mostly U.S. 8th Army bottled up at the tip of South Korea.
Within eleven days, as the North Korean forces attempting to break through the Pusan Perimeter in the south defended by the 8th Army, realized that their supply lines had been cut and that they faced a powerful force in their rear, they broke and ran, allowing the 8th Army to finally break out of the perimeter and link up with the X Corps in the north, which effectively defeated the North Korean army as a fighting force in South Korea.
The Flank
Rarely has one battle so completely turned the tide of war, (Hannibal’s famous double envelopment of the Romans at Cannae comes to mind), but what MacArthur utilized was the art of the creative flank, doing not what seemed “practical”, based on past experience, but thinking creatively into the future, to do what he knew not only what his fellow military officers, but, most importantly, what he knew his enemy, thought impossible.
This is the same method of thinking which Russian President Vladinir Putin has used in setting a trap for Obama in defending Syria against ISIS and offering a policy of defeating terrorism. This is the same method of thinking which preeminent statesman and physical economist Lyndon LaRouche has used in calling for institutional forces to remove the psychotic Obama as President, as Nixon was removed, as Obama desperately and insanely attempts to reject Putin’s offer, and instead tries to escalate towards war.
The great victory at Inchon, however, has been eclipsed by what has been called MacArthur’s great “miscalculation” and defeat, in marching north to the Yalu, and being forced to retreat in the face of massive Chinese intervention two months later at the end of November, 1950. But, his march to the Yalu, after he had been ordered by the British puppet Truman administration to invade North Korea, but which wanted him to stop in the middle of North Korea, was no mistake on MacArthur’s part at all. His march to the Yalu at the North Korean border with China was another brilliant flanking maneuver to defeat his real enemy, which had set up the Chinese intervention, and the subsequent long stalemated Korean War - the British Empire!
MacArthur discovered how the British set up this stalemated “limited war”, using the famous British “triple agents” of Philby, Burgess, and Maclean, and developed a plan to defeat it, before he was finally removed by British stooge Truman, utilizing the method made famous by the American writer and patriotic counterintelligence expert Edgar Allan Poe in his short story “The Purloined Letter”. In the case of MacArthur, he referred to “purloined intelligence”. This method of discovery is otherwise known as the same method of the flank we have been discussing, getting into the mind of one’s enemy and outthinking him, both to discover his method of attack, and to create a strategic surprise to defeat him.
We shall utilize the same method in explaining our discovery of how the British Empire and its Wall Street puppets used the Korean War to mobilize for a NATO military buildup for potential nuclear war, a war MacArthur was committed to stop, and at the same time how the British betrayed their own American allies by giving simultaneously the Russians key intelligence to build up their own nuclear forces, in order to drive the U.S. and Russia right to the brink of global war.
Conception of the Inchon Landing
MacArthur conceived of the great amphibious assault at Inchon to envelop the North Korean army even before the first battle of American troops with the invading North Korean army, when he saw the capture of the South Korean capital Seoul and the collapse of the South Korean army at the end of June, 1950 in his first visit to the battle zone, only a few days after the North Korean army with almost 200 hundred Soviet tanks had invaded the south. The South Korean army was only a lightly armed constabulary force, incapable of stopping the very heavily Soviet armed and well trained North Korean army.
Truman’s very anglophile Secretary of State Dean Acheson, with especially British support, saw entering the Korean War under UN auspices in the name of “standing up to Communism”, as a way to mobilize the U.S. and its European allies for a military buildup of the recently organized NATO. Under Acheson’s direction, backed up by the British, the U.S. pushed though the UN resolutions condemning the North Korean invasion and calling for all its members to “render every assistance” to South Korea to resist the attack, as a justification for military operations there.
MacArthur in his Reminiscences was later very critical of the way the decision to enter the Korean War was made by the Truman administration, which characterized our involvement as a “police action”, with no declaration of war by Congress, pointing to the way in which all other British-inspired “limited wars” up to the present have been carried out by executive action:
“…I could not help being amazed at the manner in which this great decision was being made. With no submission to Congress, whose duty it is to declare war, and without even consulting the field commander involved, the members of the executive branch of the government agreed to enter the Korean War. All the risks inherent in this decision – including the possibility of Chinese and Russian involvement – applied then just as much as they applied later” [1]
While Truman initially ordered U.S. naval and air forces to bombard the North Koreans, MacArthur was convinced that only the immediate and piecemeal introduction of U.S. ground troops could stop all of South Korea from being overrun, and so immediately wired Washington. His plan was to introduce understrength, undertrained, and only partially armed American divisions piecemail, violating the cardinal military rule to never introduce partial forces over time into battle against a superior enemy. Doing this, of course, threatened that the limited forces he landed into Korea from Japan could be overwhelmed by the superior nine division well trained and armed North Korean army, before he could bring to bear more superior force.
But MacArthur had no alternative, since he didn’t have the shipping capability to deliver a superior military force to stop South Korea from being overrun. Furthermore, his 8th Army had been depleted in men, materiel, and training by the across the board massive budget cuts by a Truman administration which had abandoned the FDR economic policy in favor of “balancing the budget”, and had relied for its projection of military strength on the atomic monopoly it enjoyed until the Soviet Union had detonated an atomic device in August, 1949.
What MacArthur did was introduce initially small American forces to slow down the North Korean army with an “arrogant display of strength”, designed to slow down the North Koreans for ten days, until he could introduce more ground troops and build up a defense in depth, when he could then launch a massive enveloping maneuver. He had no intention of fighting a stalemated, bloody frontal assault, as he remembered the trench warfare that America’s allies had fought in World War I. [2]
Early in July, 1950, he planned an enveloping amphibious maneuver at Inchon on the west coast of Korea, but he had to abandon the plan, because he didn’t have the forces to carry out such a plan and at the same time defend against the frontal assault by the North Koreans.
Despite his “arrogant display of strength”, which initially forced the North Koreans to slow down their headlong assault down the Korean peninsula to bring up more forces and deploy across the battle front to deal with an unknown American army, MacArthur’s forces could not stop the North Koreans from pushing his army into the southernmost tip of South Korea, the Pusan Perimeter.
There, his 8th Army, led by the bulldog Walton “Johnnie Walker”, who had served as a tank commander under Gen. George Patton during World War II, was caught in bloody fighting reminiscent of the savage warfare of World War I. Nevertheless, through superior American intelligence, which could read North Korean codes and, therefore, anticipate moves by their army, Walker could deploy his limited forces to strategically fill the breach where North Korean forces would try to make a breakthrough to force the Americans into the sea.
According to the official U.S. Army history of the first year of the Korean War, “The increasingly grave turn of events on the ground strengthened MacArthur’s determination to strike amphibiously…He believed Inch’on would be the best place to strike.” He so told two members of the Joint Chiefs, General Collins, Chief of Staff of the Army, and General Vandenburg, Chief of Staff of the Air Force, According to thre Army history, “The Army Chief of Staff, aware of the tremendous tidal changes at Inch’on, questioned the wisdom of a landing there. Rear Adm James H. Doyle, assistant to Admiral Joy (MacArthur’s Naval commander- GB) and a man of much experience in naval techniques, agreed that a landing at Inch’on could be extremely difficult and would require considerable preliminary naval bombardment. But he told Collins it could be done.” [3]
On July 23, 1950,, MacArthur sent the following communication to Washington, indicating his intentions regarding how to deal with the North Korean army assault:
“I am firmly convinced that an early and strong effort behind his front will sever his main line of communication and enable us to deliver a decisive and crushing blow. Any material delay in such an operation may lose this opportunity. The alternative is a frontal attack which can only result in a protracted and expensive campaign to slowly drive the enemy north of the 38th Parallel.” (the line of demarcation between North and South Korea-GB)
Because of the deadly warfare in the Pusan Perimeter, MacArthur intended to launch his amphibious assault at Inchon as soon as possible. The next available date when the weather and tidal conditions allowed such an invasion was September 15, and MacArthur dared not wait any longer. Yet, to pull off an invasion with the 70,000 troops he needed seemed almost an impossibility, since he was told by the Joint Chiefs that the troops were not available, and how could he deplete the troops in the Pusan Perimeter fighting for their lives? Yet, he could not allow the desperate situation to continue.
According to the Official Army history:
“MacArthur planned his bold amphibious venture at Inch’on sustained only by hope, credit, and promises. At no time during his planning did he have the men and guns he would need. The Joint Chiefs of Staff, moreover frequently told MacArthur that, with the military resources of the United States at rock bottom and because of the short-fused target date on which MacArthur adamantly insisted, the needed men and guns might not arrive on time. The disagreements over time, place, and method of landing stemmed in part from this fact and were certainly of less significance. MacArthur well knew that even with the fullest support by Washington he might not have by his chosen D-day enough trained men and equipment to breach enemy defenses and so so exploit a penetration…The difficulties were appalling and to surmount them called for extraordinary energy and ingenuity.” [4]
MacArthur certainly applied that “extraordinary energy and ingenuity” in assembling a military force from around the world to allow him to carry out the Inchon landing. He wanted airborne troops, which he never received in time. For the initial landing itself, he demanded a Marine division, which he was initially told by the Joint Chiefs was impossible. But the Marine high command, which had been under the budget gun by Truman to be reduced to what Truman called “the police force of the Navy”, came to MacArthur;s aid and pressured the Joint Chiefs to allow it to assemble a full division to carry out an amphibious assault. The Joint Chiefs eventually reversed their decision, but even with that, Marine units from around the world had to be assembled and brought to Korea to fully form the 1stMarine Division, just in the nick of time for the invasion.
To exploit the breakthrough at Inchon, MacArthur knew that he needed an army division which also was not immediately available, so from July, 1950 on, he started building up the half-strength 7th Division, demanding that 20% of all replacement troops being sent from the U.S. go this division, when troops he knew were desperately needed for the defense of the Pusan Perimeter. Even with this, MacArthur had to take the extraordinary step, on the eve of the Inchon invasion, of withdrawing a key fighting force in the Pusan Perimeter, the 1st Provisional Marine Brigade, which had originally been sent to him for the planned invasion, but which he had to use to save the Pusan Perimeter. After a demand by General Walker that he could not afford to release the Marine Brigade, a compromise was reached whereby a regiment of the 7th Division headed for Inchon was held back temporarily as a floating reserve off Pusan’s coast, in case it was needed to fill the breach.
Inchon: The Execution of the Plan
Don Phau and Dean Andromidas in the EIR article “MacArthur’s Victory at Inchon: Defeating the British Empire” explain why the MacArthur chose Inchon as the point of attack, precisely because its very dangerous tides and navigational conditions meant that the North Koreans would think an assault there impossible:
The North Koreans never expected that MacArthur would get his troops near the city. Inchon was two miles inland, and only reachable through a narrow river passage connecting the city with the Yellow Sea. The passage to Inchon has the second-highest tides in the world, and its waters were only deep enough to float a boat for two hours in the morning. Except at high tide, the passage turned into two miles of mud. A boat that didn’t get in and out during high tide would be hopelessly stuck in mud.
 View full size Map of Inchon landing, showing the shoreline at high tide. To see the shoreline at low tide, view the aerial photo in this 1st Cavalry Division webpage, (scroll down 15%) and note the sea floor visible beneath the shallow water as a darker shade of gray than the channels, but with a lighter boundary. Or, perhaps the photo was taken at low tide, and what appears to be sea floor beneath shallow water is actually mud flats. A good map of the tidal boundaries and route of approach is available on koreanwaronline.com (scroll down 90%). |
Because of these dangerous conditions, and because the narrow channel could be easily mined, while the fortified city of Inchon presented a deadly obstacle for a landing force stranded after the initial assault, if the enemy was well-prepared, virtually the entire U.S. military leadership opposed MacArthur’s plan and wanted him to choose another site for an amphibious assault. As Phau and Andromidas describe the opposition, “Biographer William Manchester (American Caesar) wrote that once they heard of MacArthur’s plan, ‘Every flag and general officer in Tokyo…tried to talk him out of it.’ The Joint Chiefs dispatched from Washington the Chief of Naval Operations, Adm. Forrest Sherman, and Army Chief of Staff Lawton Collins, who told MacArthur that a successful landing at Inchon was an ‘impossibility.’”
Phau and Andromidas’ account of how MacArthur overcame the military opposition to his plans is reproduced below:
MacArthur writes that at a meeting of the nine commanders of the Pacific theater, the generals spent 80 minutes explaining why the landing was impossible. Their thinking was based on the logic of past experience. MacArthur’s reaction is an example of why LaRouche has called MacArthur a “genius.” MacArthur was able to forecast his success at Inchon, because he was undeterred by the “practical” experiences of his fellow generals. MacArthur wrote that, after the generals finished speaking, “I waited a moment or so to collect my thoughts. I could feel the tension rising in the room....If ever a silence was pregnant, this one was. I could almost hear my father’s voice telling me as he had so many years before, ‘Doug, councils of war breed timidity and defeatism.’”
MacArthur spoke for the next 30 minutes, telling the generals: “The enemy, I am convinced, has failed to prepare Inchon properly for defense. The very arguments you have made as to the impracticabilities involved will tend to ensure for me the element of surprise. For the enemy commander will reason that no one would be so brash as to make such an attempt. Surprise is the most vital element of success in war.” He said he would “cut the enemy’s supply line and seal off the entire southern peninsula.... By seizing Seoul I would completely paralyze the enemy’s supply system—coming and going.” MacArthur concluded, “ I can hear the second hand of destiny. We must act now or we will die. ... Inchon will succeed and it will save 100,000 lives” (Reminiscences).
Seemingly convinced, General Collins and Admiral Sherman wired the Joint Chiefs that they thought MacArthur’s plan for the Inchon landing was sound. But their belief in MacArthur’s plan didn’t last long. The next day, Sherman commented to a staff officer that he didn’t share MacArthur’s “optimism.”
Even up to a week before the Inchon invasion, now named “Chromite,” Collins said that he “still had reservations,” and one author added that Collins feared the enemy might be able to reinforce the Inchon-Seoul area quickly. As Arthur MacArthur had warned his son, the “councils of war breed timidity and defeatism”; the next day six of the Navy chiefs met, convinced that they needed a safer landing area at a beach south of Inchon. They sent Sherman to plead with MacArthur, but MacArthur, according to biographer James, “would not yield.”
A week before the target date, with all the details worked out, and with all the troops having arrived from Japan, MacArthur received a message from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He writes, “The message expressed doubts of the success and implied the whole movement should be abandoned,” adding, “What could have given rise to such a query at such an hour? Had someone in authority lost his nerve? Could it be the President?” MacArthur replied to the message, “I regard the chance of success of the operation as excellent,” and explained why. MacArthur waited for a reply. He writes that “a short cryptic message arrived from the Joint Chiefs.” They approved the operation. MacArthur inferred that “it had been the President who had threatened to interfere and overrule... .”
On the night of Sept. 14, 262 ships of seven nations entered the narrow inlet to land at Inchon. The landing was successful and Inchon was captured. MacArthur went on and defeated 30-40,000 North Korean troops at a cost of 536 allied killed and 2,500 wounded. Adm. William Halsey, Commander of the South Pacific fleet, called it “the most masterly and audacious strategic course in all history.” [5]
Postscript to Inchon: The Chinese Discover Plan
The necessity of MacArthur’s all out fight to ensure that the Inchon landing occur on the first possible date of September 15 is not only demonstrated by its overwhelming success, but also by the fact that the Chinese military did a study in late August, 1950 of MacArthur’s possible moves and concluded that he would carry out an amphibious assault on Korea’s west coast, with the most likely target being Inchon! Even though almost all U.S. military leaders wanted MacArthur to change the location of his landing, the Chinese figured out that even though there were other possible landing sites, given the way MacArthur had thought and acted in World War II, he would choose Inchon. They obviously knew that that was the most vulnerable spot, which is why MacArthur would choose it.
Even though the Chinese informed the North Koreans of this threat, the North Koreans didn’t take any action, because they were convinced that if they used all their forces to continue fighting the 8th Army in the South, they could finally break through the Pusan Perimeter and win. They may even have known that MacArthur was planning an amphibious landing, since there was clear evidence of a buildup for an enveloping maneuver. MacArthur made sure the Air Force and Navy bombed numerous different targets on the west coast of Korea to keep his enemy off balance as to what was going to be the exact landing site. If North Korea tried to reinforce not only Inchon, but also all other possible landing sites, they probably thought that they wouldn’t have enough troops to break the stalemate in the south. Of course, in addition, the North Koreans must have thought Inchon was the least likely spot because of its formidable obstacles.
However, had MacArthur been forced to delay his landing to the next possible date in October, besides pushing his follow up occupation of North Korea into the winter months, he may have faced massive opposition in Inchon by that date, since the Chinese and Russians may have been able to convince the North Koreans to take action by then.
According to the book, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War, which was written in 1993 based on interviews with still living insiders to the decision making in Russia and China during the Korean war:
“Meanwhile Zhou Enlai, pursuing his charge to study all contingencies, assigned Lei Yingfu, head of a section of the General Staff, to stimulate map exercises and forecast U.S. military operations. Within days, Lei relayed his judgement that a U.S. counteroffensive would come by sea at one of six Korean ports, and that MacArthur would probably choose Inchon. On the morning of August 23, Zhou handed Lei’s prediction to Mao, who immediately summoned Lei for a personal briefing. Persuaded by Lei’s findings, Mao ordered Zhou to pass the information along to Kim Il Sung. Zhou did so. Mao also told Lee Sang Jo, Kim Il Sung’s representative in Beijing, that Inchon was the most probable landing spot for a U.S. counteroffensive. The same alarm was sounded by the KPA’s (Korean People’s Army – GB) Soviet advisers, who strongly cautioned that the Americans would be fools not to attack behind enemy lines to cut the North’s communications. None of these warnings impressed Kim.” [6]
To Be Continued: Crossing the Parallel
After the great victory at Inchon, followed two and a half weeks later by the liberation of Seoul, MacArthur was ordered by the Truman administration to invade North Korea. He was backed up by a UN General Assembly resolution pushed through by the British and American governments which called for unifying North Korea, so as to give MacArthur the legal justification for entering North Korea.
Yet, after the Chinese intervened massively in the Korean War in late November, 1950, MacArthur was attacked throughout the world’s press for forcing the Chinese to intervene, supposedly because of his “reckless” action in insisting that he had to march all the way to the Yalu River, the northern border of Korea with China, in order to clear it of North Korean forces and carry out a “reconnaissance in depth” of Chinese intentions. To this day, MacArthur is attacked by most historians for his “hubris” and refusal to stop at the middle of North Korea to “wait and see what happens”.
In Part II, we shall demonstrate, that not only did MacArthur’s actions not precipitate Chinese intervention, but that it was the British Empire, in collaboration with its American Wall Street allies, and some duped American patriots in the military and intelligence community, which deliberately forced the Chinese intervention, in order to escalate an ongoing NATO military buildup for potential nuclear war.
Footnotes
[1]. General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, Reminiscences, McGraw-Hill Book Company, New York, 1964
[2]. Dean Andromidas and Don Phau, “MacArthur and America’s Two-Front War”, EIR, Vol. 42, No. 35, September 4, 2015
[3]. James F. Schnabel, Policy and Direction: The First Year, (U.S. Army in the Korean War series), Center of Military History, United States Army, Washington DC, 1992, pp. 140-142
[4]. Schabel, op. cit., p. 155
[5]. Don Phau and Dean Andromidas, “MacArthur’s Victory at Inchon: Defeating the British Empire”, EIR, Vol. 40, No. 15, April 12, 2013
[6]. Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xu Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War, Stanford University Press, Stanford, 1993, pp. 171-172
