For History & Leverage

Ex-Secretary of the Army Frank Pace: It was clearly considered judgment in October and November of 1950 that [the Korean] war would be over by December of 1950.

Senator Byrd: Whose judgment was that?

Pace: That was the judgment of General MacArthur and the judgment of those in authority in Washington.

Byrd: Did General MacArthur think the war was going to be over in 1950?

Pace: By December of 1950, yes, sir.

At the close of a Senate Armed Services Subcommittee hearing on the U.S. ammunition shortage (TIME, April 13 et seq.), Virginia's Harry Byrd clipped such excerpts of testimony and mailed them off to General Douglas MacArthur in Connecticut for comment. Last week, like a thunderclap from Olympus, came Mac-Arthur's reply.

"For the sake of historical accuracy," wrote MacArthur, "I was never consulted directly or indirectly with reference to the supply program under discussion." Brushing off Pace's testimony as "labored" and "completely fantastic," MacArthur argued that "optimistic views" had nothing to do with 1950 decisions on ammunition: "As a matter of fact . . . during those early months . . . the only predictions from Washington warned of impending military disaster . . ." At one time, he said, the U.S. defenders of the Pusan perimeter were down to "five rounds per gun."

Golden Moment. His own landing at Inchon in Sept. 1950, said MacArthur, changed pessimism to optimism: "This was the golden moment to translate military victory to a politically advantageous peace . . . The inertia of our diplomacy failed utterly to utilize the victory of Inchon and subsequent destruction of the North Korean armies as the basis for swift and dynamic political action to restore peace and unity to Korea."

It is true, he continued, that he did not expect the Chinese to attack across the

Yalu [and, indeed, after Inchon, had hoped for peace by Christmas]. His reasons were purely military: "With our largely unopposed air forces, with their atomic potential, capable of destroying at will bases of attack and lines of supply north as well as south of the Yalu River, no Chinese military commander would dare hazard the commitment of large forces upon the Korean peninsula."

What, then, made the Chinese take the risk? "By one process or another it was conjectured by, or conveyed to the Red Chinese that, even though they entered the fray in large force, it would be under the sanctuary of being relieved from any destructive action of our military forces within their own area." MacArthur's order to destroy the Yalu bridges over which the Chinese were pouring "was immediately countermanded from Washington. Such a limitation ... has no precedent either in our own history or, so far as I know, in the history of the world."

Nor, continued MacArthur, could he thereafter sell Washington his program of carrying the war to Red China by aerial bombardment, naval blockade, and the use of Chinese Nationalist troops.

No Will for Victory. Then MacArthur came to his main point: "The overriding deficiency ... in Korea was not in the shortage of ammunition . . . but in the lack of the will for victory, which has profoundly influenced both our strategic concepts in the field and our supporting action at home . . ." He repeated his belief that Russia would not be provoked into a global war by more positive U.S. action in the Far East:. if Russia is intent on "world military conquest," it will choose its own "time and place" of attack.

Finally, as a bonus, MacArthur offered Harry Byrd his own updated formula for getting a decision in Korea: "We still possess the potential to destroy Red China's flimsy industrial base and sever her tenuous supply lines from the Soviet. This would deny her the resource to support modern war . . . and threaten the Soviet's present hold upon Asia. A warning of action of this sort provides the leverage to induce the Soviet to bring the Korean struggle to an end without further bloodshed. It would dread risking the eventuality of a Red China debacle, and such a hazard might well settle the Korean war and all other pending global issues on equitable terms . . ."

MacArthur's sweeping "leverage" proposal was what caught the headlines--and it was a proposal which would demand a lot of close analysis before it could ever become policy. But far more important was General MacArthur's definition of the real reasons for the U.S. predicament--both in ammunition and in the whole Korean war. The Senate subcommittee would listen a long time before hearing a more valid analysis.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.