MacArthur Reminisces About Inchon

Seventy-five years ago, on September 15, 1950, U.S. forces under the command of Gen. Douglas MacArthur landed at Inchon, a port located near the waist of the Korean peninsula. Korea is shaped like a slightly bent and lumpy rectangle. American, U.N., and South Korean forces had been driven back by North Korean forces to a small perimeter near Pusan. The fighting was fierce, especially in the first two weeks of September 1950. At MacArthur’s request, American troop reinforcements temporarily stopped the onrushing North Korean forces. But our troops were barely hanging on to Korean territory. The Pusan Perimeter was what MacArthur’s biographer William Manchester a “narrow enclave.” Correspondents covering the fighting warned of an “American Dunkirk.”

In August, MacArthur’s enemies in Washington took umbrage at a message MacArthur sent to a veterans’ convention that the United States had a strategic interest in the defense of Formosa (Taiwan). President Truman, Manchester wrote, gave serious thought to firing MacArthur and replacing him with Gen. Omar Bradley. MacArthur was ordered to withdraw the message, and he reluctantly complied. “MacArthur nursed this new grudge,” Manchester wrote, “watched warily for more blows from Washington, and vowed to confound his enemies by unsheathing his sword in a dazzling stroke that would blind them all.” He conceived a brilliant and daring plan to relieve the pressure at Pusan and change the course of the war, initially codenamed Operation Bluehearts and later changed to Operation Chromite.

Inchon, Manchester explained, was a “great turning movement” reminiscent of Hannibal in the Punic War, Lee and Jackson at Chancellorsville, and MacArthur’s own triumphs in New Guinea in World War II. In his , MacArthur described his plan as a “turning movement deep into the flank and rear of the enemy that would sever his supply lines and encircle all his forces south of Seoul.” It would be a “great amphibious movement” launched at a port where high tides would complicate any invasion. The doubters among the U.S. military hierarchy were legion. Amphibious operations, they said, were obsolete. The tides were too high. The terrain near Inchon was too hazardous. Inchon was too far in the rear of the enemy.