Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s 52-year career was one of the most illustrious in Army history. He served with distinction in Europe in World War I, was Army chief of staff for five years, received the Medal of Honor for his actions in the Philippines in World War II, joined the elite club of five-star officers and defeated the Japanese in the Pacific. He was American proconsul in Japan when the Korean War began.
While South Korean soldiers and civilians generally hold MacArthur in high regard because of his efforts to save them from a North Korean takeover and many U.S. war veterans share that opinion, many others do not.
Gene Long was a 24th Infantry Division technical sergeant — a wartime rank equivalent today to staff sergeant — who arrived in Korea shortly after the war began. He feels MacArthur "should have been hung."
"He got a lot of men killed. He went places we were unprepared for and underequipped for," he said. "We lost 80 percent of our people the first year when MacArthur was in charge. Truman should have hung him."
Although surrounded by a superhuman aura that MacArthur himself helped create, he was as fallible as any human. But his mistakes became unforgettable, perhaps unforgivable, because they affected so many lives. His errors in Korea were both military and personal. By November 1950, he had angered Pentagon and White House officials with his propensity for violating or attempting to violate established policy.
His recommendations amounted to expanding the war outside Korea, something President Truman was adamantly against. MacArthur ridiculed a budding desire in the United States and Britain to seek a negotiated settlement for peace. "There is no substitute for victory," he said publicly, to Truman’s chagrin.
His answers to Pentagon instructions became more caustic and finally moved past the line to insubordination. Truman had ordered in December 1950 that any public statement concerning the conduct of the war in Korea be cleared with Washington before being uttered. Military historians agree that the president made a decision to replace MacArthur the following March.
Although the 8th Army had been chased from Seoul again, the command was gaining strength and morale was improving. Seoul was retaken in mid-March and the rejuvenated command was pressing north again.
MacArthur had been told Truman would announce an initiative for a negotiated peace in late March. The general beat the president to the punch with his own — unauthorized — public announcement. He also offered to negotiate, but his comments, unlike Truman’s planned statement, amounted to an ultimatum to China that unless it ceased operations in Korea, it would face the full power of the United States and its allies. That was the last straw, wrote historian Clay Blair in his book, <CF22>The Forgotten War</CF>. Truman decided a change of command was needed. He waited for one last move by MacArthur.
That came April 5. Congressman Joseph Martin had written to the general in March, saying he favored using Nationalist Chinese to fight in Korea. MacArthur answered Martin’s letter without getting Washington’s approval, saying that using Chang’s troops was "not in conflict with logic." He added that losing the war "to communism in Asia" meant "the fall of Europe is inevitable."
Martin read MacArthur’s letter on the floor of Congress on April 5, 1951. Six days later, Truman relieved him. Lt. Gen. Matthew Ridgeway was named as his successor.
MacArthur came home to a hero’s welcome from a shocked public and was invited to speak to a joint session of Congress. In that speech April 19, he defended his actions and statements. He ended the speech and his career with the comment that like "the old soldier in an old barracks ballad," he would "just fade away."
He died in 1964.
With Ridgeway commander in chief, Lt. Gen. James Van Fleet took over as 8th Army commander. On April 22, 1951, 30 Chinese and North Korean divisions opened a new offensive across the peninsula with the main thrust aimed at Seoul. Van Fleet withdrew gradually in delaying actions, and the communist force paused to resupply. The attack was renewed May 15.
The assault began to falter, though, and U.N. troops made steady gains.
In June, the Soviet U.N. delegate said his government believed the war could be settled with discussion. When the Chinese endorsed that in a radio broadcast, Ridgeway was ordered to open armistice talks with his battlefield opponent. The talks were set to begin July 10 in Kaesong, the first South Korean city to fall under communist control in June 1950.
Paik Sun-yup, a major general in command of the South Korean I Corps, was tapped to be the South Korean military’s representative to the armistice talks. He was ordered to Pusan to discuss the assignment with South Korean President Rhee. He nearly backed out.
"The president was in a really bad mood," he recalled. "He said, ‘With a million Chinese troops in Korea, the Americans want an armistice. It’s ridiculous. If there is an armistice, the peninsula still will be divided.’ He was very opposed to a truce and said our goal was unification.
"I told him I would refuse to take part in the talks, but he said I should go. He said the Americans would go through with the armistice talks whether or not I was there, so I had to be there."
The U.N. Command’s delegation was headed by Vice Adm. C. Turner Joy, Naval Forces Far East commander. The delegation included Paik; Maj. Gen. Henry I. Hodes, 8th Army chief of staff; Maj. Gen. Laurence C. Craigie, Far East Air Force vice commander; and Rear Adm. Arleigh Burke, Naval Forces Far East deputy chief of staff. Paik said the delegation consisted of about 100 people.
The North Korean-Chinese delegation consisted of Lt. Gen. Nam Il, North Korean army chief of staff and chief delegate, and two other Koreans, Maj. Gens. Lee Sang Cho and Chang Pyong San. The two Chinese delegates were Teng Hua, Chinese army deputy commander, and Chieh Fang, the Chinese army’s chief of staff and political commissar.
At the first session July 10, 1951, the delegations decided military operations would continue until an armistice agreement was signed. An agenda was decided and negotiations began.
Except for a few violent skirmishes, Paik said, battles from that point on were decidedly toned down from the first year of the war. By late July, the North Koreans and Chinese began to bog down the talks, apparently to build up their military forces.
Both sides were hung up on the thorny issues of where to draw a demarcation line and how to repatriate prisoners of war.
On the battlefield, 8th Army commander Van Fleet turned up the heat, opening successful battles at the Punchbowl, Bloody Ridge and Heartbreak Ridge, all in the vicinity of the 38th parallel.
How Hearbreak Hill got its name is related by Dan Orr, an Army reporter, in the Second Infantry Division Korea War Veterans Alliance quarterly bulletin:
"One night I rolled into headquarters to write features about heavy shelling of enemy troops on a nearby mountainside. Typewriters were clacking in the squad tent, and civilian reporters were hollering their stories into the few phones we had. … A wire service reporter loudly asked if anyone knew the name of the hill the infantry was fighting for. He got no answer, and one of our guys volunteered to find out."
After hearing of the seesaw carnage on the ridge, someone called it "heartbreaking."
"Someone in the tent said, ‘That’s good.’ Then suggested Heartbreak Ridge," Orr wrote. "We all turned back to our typewriters, using the name Heartbreak Ridge, instead of the official Army designation, whatever numbers they were using for those hills. Editors across the country and the world found the name gave the story more feeling and intensity. … I can assure you that no one today would remember if these had been reported simply as the battle for a bunch of hills."
Official Army records state the bloody fights near the 38th parallel may have had an influence on the armistice talks, which the North Koreans and Chinese agreed to reopen Oct. 25 at Panmunjom, a tiny village southeast of Kaesong.
Paik still had been part of the armistice delegation when Van Fleet began his new attacks, but he soon was ordered back to command the South Korean I Corps. The talks bogged down again.
The tempo of battle slowed, with Van Fleet taking only whatever action necessary to maintain his forces hovering around the 38th. In May 1952, the North Koreans used a new tactic to try to steer the stalled talks in their favor. It happened on a tiny island south of Pusan.
On May 7, 1952, North Korean POWs in a U.N. camp on Koje Island, off the south coast, captured the U.S. officer who commanded the camp and held him hostage. They demanded that the UNC admit to treating prisoners inhumanely and to cruel treatment of prisoners who had refused to be repatriated. Army records state that orders had been smuggled from North Korea to the prisoners to take such action to discredit the command’s armistice negotiators’ demand for voluntary repatriation of all prisoners.
The U.S. camp commander signed a statement admitting that there had been "incidents of bloodshed in which many POWs were killed or wounded by UNC forces," Army records state. The communist negotiators stalled the truce talks further by making propaganda hay out of the "incidents of bloodshed" statement.
Ridgeway was ordered to Europe to head NATO forces and was succeeded as commander in chief by Gen. Mark W. Clark. He repudiated the Koje camp commander’s statement, but arguments over repatriation of prisoners continued at Panmunjom, and the talks went into indefinite recess in October.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was elected U.S. president in November 1952 and fulfilled a campaign promise to go to Korea and attempt to bring an end to the war. He arrived in December and made it clear that he, too, was looking for an armistice rather than a military victory.
He let it be known to Moscow, Peking and Pyongyang that if the talks were not reopened and did not proceed satisfactorily toward an armistice, U.N. forces would "move decisively without inhibition in our use of weapons and would no longer be responsible for confining hostilities to the Korean Peninsula."
There was, however, no response from the communists to Eisenhower’s statement or to a proposal by Clark that the two sides exchange sick and wounded prisoners. Lt. Gen. Maxwell D. Taylor succeeded Van Fleet in February and continued to conduct skirmishes with the North Koreans and Chinese. A break in the Panmunjom deadlock came in March, some three weeks after Soviet leader Joseph Stalin died.
North Korean and Chinese delegates agreed to an exchange of sick and wounded prisoners. The armistice talks resumed in April, the exchange of sick and wounded prisoners took place shortly thereafter, and the POW issue was settled by mid-June.
The two sides agreed that each would be allowed to persuade any prisoners who refused repatriation to change their minds.
With the armistice almost a reality, battlefield action increased as Chinese and North Korean troops made a final attempt to grab more land. On July 13, communist forces drove eight miles into the central sector of the 8th Army line. Taylor counterattacked, but ended the final battle of the war July 20 because negotiators had nearly reached an accord.
The agreement was signed at 10 a.m. July 27, 1953, in a building hastily erected by the North for the ceremony.
U.S. Army Lt. Gen. William K. Harrison Jr., the UNC senior delegate, and Gen. Nam Il, his North Korean counterpart, signed 18 copies of the agreement, written in English, Korean and Chinese.
A few hours later, Gen. Mark Clark, UNC commander in chief, signed the document in Seoul and Kim Il Sung and Chinese Peoples’ Volunteer commander Peng Teh-huai signed it in Pyongyang.
It had taken 158 meetings over two years and 17 days to hammer out the agreement. All fighting was to stop at 10 p.m. July 27.
"Everyone was happy, but suspicious," said Frank Thomas, then a private first class with the 279th Infantry Regiment. "We were overcome with relief, but many of us didn’t believe the war was over. The Army wanted us to give up our live ammunition, but we hid some just in case."
"The peace talks had been going on for a while, and there was a feeling of relief that at least something was taking place," said Thomas Feltman, then a sergeant with the 4th Fighter Interceptor Wing. "No jubilation, just relief."
John Lock, then a corporal with the 151st Combat Engineer Battalion, was two or three miles south of the demarcation line when the cease fire took effect at 10 p.m.
About 10 minutes before the hour, he said, both sides began fervently lobbing shells. But it wasn’t a last-minute attempt at victory. Nobody wanted to haul their artillery shells back to their posts, he said.
"The sky just lit up like day," he recalled. "Then, there wasn’t a sound."