This Day in Military History (MacArthur Named UN Commander in Korea)

July 8, 1950— Having claimed that he knew “the Asiatic mind,” and acclaimed as the architect of Allied victory in the Pacific only five years before, Gen. Douglas MacArthur was named commander of the UN troops desperately trying to repel Communist forces from taking control of the entire Korean peninsula.

At the time, the appointment seemed logical, even inevitable, considering the general’s decades of experience, bravery, intellect, and a strategic skill manifested during WWII with an “island-hopping” campaign that minimized loss of life.

But, within a year, MacArthur’s overweening ego and hubris would imperil US troops, threaten a wider conflict, and precipitate a historic showdown concerning civilian authority over American armed forces with President Harry Truman.

Some signs, even within the first two weeks after Communist forces invaded South Korea, were already ominous for MacArthur’s leadership. Aides were initially reluctant to break the news of the attack to their boss, and even after learning of it, for the first 24 hours he downplayed its severity.

If he could get the 1st Cavalry Division into action, he told GOP foreign-policy maven (and future Secretary of State) John Foster Dulles, “Why, heavens, you’d see these fellows scuttle up to the Manchurian border so quick, you would see no more of them,” according to Bruce Cumings’ The Korean War: A History.

When he was prevailed upon at last to depart from Tokyo (where he was serving as Supreme Commander for the Allied Powers in Japan) for the first of a series of one-day flyovers over Korea, he veered sharply towards alarm, telling Truman that South Korean forces were in no position to repel the invaders without American support.

One military observer—like MacArthur, often mentioned as a Presidential candidate—Dwight Eisenhower, was skeptical but not surprised that his fellow WWII hero was not at the top of his game. Privately, he wondered if MacArthur, now 70, might be too old for command.

Eisenhower, who had noted acidly that he had “studied theatrics” under MacArthur as his aide in the Philippines in the 1930s, would have had the personal knowledge and credibility to gain immediate public approval for a decision to relieve his old boss of command. But MacArthur’s superior at the moment was Truman, who lacked the stature of the commander of US forces in Europe in the last war.

Two and a half months after his appointment, MacArthur pulled off the kind of unexpected, daring move for which he had become known by ordering an amphibious assault on Inchon, the port city of Seoul that, because of its tides and lack of beaches, was deemed by MacArthur’s subordinate Gen. Edward Almond, “the worst possible place” for such an operation.

Inchon achieved the surprise MacArthur desired, and he predicted to Truman that US troops would be home for Christmas. But instead of stopping at the 38^th Parallel, the point at which America’s allies had agreed would restore the division between North and South Korea at the start of the conflict, the commander “went ahead to the Yalu frontier and set up an enormous disaster, which clouded his reputation,” according to historian David Fromkin.

“There’s a spot where the mountains go down on a north-south basis,” Fromkin explained to C-Span’s Brian Lamb in a September 1995 interview on “Booknotes,” “and if you’re a commander going there, you don’t want to get in that position because you have to split your troops. But he [MacArthur] did and he shouldn’t have; he went all the way up to the Chinese border, although there were signs that if he did so, they’d come in against us with their limitless manpower.”

The counterattack by the Chinese forces reversed all the gains by the US at Inchon. Communist momentum was only blunted when Matthew Ridgway took over command of the US Eighth Army in Korea and re-energized the demoralized troops.

By now, MacArthur was not only violating Truman’s directive to clear any statements with the White House first, but alarming the Joint Chiefs of Staff and allies with his urging that China lay down its arms or face “a decision by the United Nations to depart from its tolerant efforts to contain the war…[that] would doom Red China to the risk of imminent military collapse.”

He provided GOP leaders eager to score points against Truman over the military stalemate with a soundbite for taking the war to China: “There is no substitute for victory.”

Truman’s decision to relieve MacArthur of command led to a firestorm of controversy back home, but it was necessary to preserve the constitutional structure of ultimate Presidential authority over the military.

Just as important, by scotching the general’s proposal to drop up to 50 nuclear bombs at air bases, depots, and supply lines to create a radioactive barrier and halt Chinese and North Korean advances, Truman prevented the direct intervention of the Soviet Union in the conflict—and the possibility of World War III.

This Day in Military History (Western Democracies Pledge Mutual Security With North American Treaty)

April 4, 1949—The countries who put their signature to the North Atlantic Treaty in Washington, DC, looked just like the Allied coalition that had recently won World War II in Europe—but with one notable exception: the Soviet Union, whose postwar threats to elected governments had alarmed its former partners.

Since the formation of this defensive pact, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) has increased from its original 12 to 32 members. Its recent growth derives from the same factor that brought it into existence: a septuagenarian dictator who, in his quest to annex neighbors and subvert republics, inspires other nations to band together in mutual support.

Back in 1949, that authoritarian ruler was Joseph Stalin, who saw the chaos and devastation in the wake of WWII as an opportunity to expand Soviet influence, including through:

*reneging on its Yalta Conference promise of free elections in Poland;

*exploiting its continued military presence in Hungary to pressure non-Communist parties into submission;

*covertly backing an overthrow of the democratically elected government of Czechoslovakia by the nation’s Communist party;

*blockading Allied-controlled West Berlin in an unsuccessful attempt to incorporate the whole city into its orbit.

In 2024, the dictator is Vladimir Putin, whose revanchist nostalgia for the return of Russian influence has led him to invade Ukraine—a move that, in turn, led to a prompt application to join NATO by Finland and Sweden.

The West’s attempts to begin new eras of cooperation with Stalin and Putin quickly foundered as perceptions grew that these dictators were intent not just on cracking down on internal dissent but on posing a threat to Eastern Europe.

American, Britain, and French leaders had hoped to include the Soviets in a postwar Council of Foreign Ministers, according to a Truman Library oral history interview with John D. Hickerson, the Assistant Secretary of State generally credited with writing the text for what became the North Atlantic Treaty.

But, after 1947 conferences in Moscow and London that went nowhere because of Soviet intransigence, the three transatlantic partners determined to go their own way.

The genesis for the new system of cooperation came from British Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, but the indispensable forces were the two American Secretaries of State when the treaty was hammered out in 1948 and early 1949, George Marshall and Dean Acheson.

The most important element of the North American Treaty may be Article 5, in which the signatories agreed that "an armed attack against one or more of them… shall be considered an attack against them all" and that following such an attack, each Ally would take "such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force" in response.

The first time that mutual-aid pledge would be invoked came not in response to a move by the USSR, but after 9/11—and it did not involve the US coming to the aid of the organization’s European members, but them supporting us in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center.

Hickerson’s oral history interview gives a strong sense of the improvisational nature of the discussions shaping the North Atlantic Treaty. 

The diplomats, he explained, were talking about “what we would do in the event of an attack, without considering anything beyond the political commitment to do that. And frankly in the back of our minds was the hope that that commitment itself would be enough to restrain any aggression.” 

It would not be until the following year, with the outbreak of the Korean War, before the “machinery” of NATO would be set up.

This brief history is worth keeping in mind in the present US. Presidential cycle, with one all-but-certain party nominee saying he would encourage Putin to do “whatever the hell they want” to any NATO member that falls behind on its defense spending guidelines.

That Presidential candidate’s complaint about failing to meet these guidelines echoes the chief  American opponent of the pact back in 1949, Robert Taft, who saw it as “arming Western Europe at American expense.”

But the deeply conservative, anti-communist Republican Senator from Ohio was under no illusions about Stalin’s intentions and never praised his “strength.”

Moreover, the national defense spending percentages on which today’s isolationists fixate are, as mentioned earlier, guidelines, not ironclad commitments.

The Cold War between the US and USSR was often conducted without nuance and sometimes risked catastrophe. But NATO created a defensive alliance based on collective security—an arrangement missing before WWII that would have eased the task of countering Nazi aggression.

That alliance resulted in 75 years of peace, encouraging international commerce—the kind of minimal-cost arrangement that one might have hoped a once and future businessman might have better appreciated.

(The photo accompanying this post shows President Harry Truman with the diplomats from the countries signing the North Atlantic Treaty.)

This Day in Presidential History (Truman Pledges ‘Fair Deal’ in State of the Union Message)

Jan. 5, 1949—Two months removed from an electrifying “whistle-stop” election victory over Thomas Dewey, Harry Truman urged the passage of legislation that the GOP-dominated Congress had ignored in the last session.

The President termed the laws proposed in his “State of the Union” message as “The Fair Deal”—a phrase meant to evoke for Americans the far-reaching progressive legislation championed by Theodore and Franklin Roosevelt as, respectively, the “Square Deal” and the “New Deal.”

Presidents tend to wax most optimistic in these annual messages to Congress after successful reelection campaigns, and Truman was no exception. He had not only succeeded in his bid to gain a full term in the White House in his own right following FDR’s death, but also now had returning Democratic majorities in the House and Senate that had been lost with the 1946 midterm election.

But the power of those majorities, while representing an improvement over the “Do Nothing Congress” that Truman derided in his campaign, was less than it seemed. 

Memories of the Great Depression that left millions out of work and devastated the economy had receded, leaving conservatives with little reason to agree with the President that “We cannot afford to float along ceaselessly on a postwar boom until it collapses….Instead, government and business must work together constantly to achieve more and more jobs and more and more production.”

Moreover, Southern Democrats had achieved seniority in Congress, giving them the leverage to block the civil-rights legislation the President advocated, such as cloture reform to reduce the number of votes necessary to end filibusters on voting rights and anti-lynching bills.

Senate Majority Leader Scott Lucas could not reconcile the liberal and conservative wings of the party. While Truman could count on the GOP's principal voice on foreign policy, Arthur Vandenberg, to back his renunciation of isolationism, Robert Taft, as chair of the Republican Policy Committee, was far less willing to cooperate on domestic affairs. He was able to maintain a tight hold on the GOP, leaving the Democrats with a majority on paper only.

Just how much leverage Taft could exert was demonstrated in the fate of the President’s housing bill, which only passed by five votes in the House of Representatives—and even then only because Taft had weakened the original proposal and his “yea” vote gave coverage to Republicans wavering on the issue.

Truman did end up winning his requested increase in the minimum wage and broader social security coverage. But the rest of his package went nowhere, with Taft even authoring an article declaring, “The Fair Deal is Creeping Socialism.”

Yet Truman’s proposals established agendas pursued by later Democratic Presidents—notably Lyndon Johnson, with his civil-rights and Medicaid legislation of the mid-1960s.

Incidentally, 36 years later, Gerald Ford recalled, in his own State of the Union message, how, as a freshman Congressman, he had heard Truman report that “The state of the union is good.” 

In contrast now, Ford said, the state of the union was not good, as he cited high unemployment, a recession and inflation, an increased national debt, plant capacity and productivity not rising fast enough, lack of energy independence, and the people questioning “their Government's ability to make hard decisions and stick with them.” 

In the end, Ford’s domestic proposals made about as much headway as Truman’s, and for the same reason: de facto majorities in both houses of Congress that effectively watered them down at least, or balked completely at worst.

This Day in Presidential History (Truman Stuns Dewey in Whistle-Stop Win)

Nov. 2, 1948—Harry Truman went to bed this night with most observers predicting he would lose the election badly to Republican challenger Thomas Dewey. 

But, in a result that astonished politicians, pundits, and pollsters who’d written him off long before, the President pulled off probably the greatest electoral upset in the 20^th century, leading Dewey to concede at 11 o’clock the following morning.

The New York governor could have been forgiven if he had started measuring the drapes in preparation for moving into the White House. 

Dewey had been a successful mob-busting Manhattan prosecutor before winning two gubernatorial races in the nation’s most populous state; had prior experience as a Presidential candidate, running a creditable campaign against the formidable Franklin Roosevelt; and headed a Republican Party far more firmly united than Truman’s Democrats, who were suffering schisms on its left wing by Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party and on the right by Strom Thurmond’s states-rights (or “Dixiecrat”) Party.

Even at the Philadelphia convention that nominated him, some cynics had carried signs parodying the Missourian’s campaign tune: “I’m just mild about Harry.”

Why, then, did Truman emerge victorious? 

Historians would later point out that he’d cobbled together, for the last truly cohesive time, the New Deal coalition of urban ethnics, union members and southern whites that had sustained Roosevelt; that he’d achieved wider margins in the Midwest and West than anyone expected; and that, in contrast to the open, frank nature that made Truman a natural on the stump, Dewey was so infuriatingly reserved that tart-tongued Alice Roosevelt Longworth had dubbed him “the man on the wedding cake.”

All of that, to one degree or another, is true. 

But I have another theory why he won.

Faced with adversity, Truman displayed an intelligence, equanimity, and unwillingness to buckle under pressure that had served him well at key moments in adulthood, such as when he led his battery under fire in the Meuse-Argonne campaign in WWI and won his reelection campaign as U.S. senator from Missouri in 1940 against the state’s popular governor. 

He had made one tough decision in the Oval Office after the death of FDR: dropping the atomic bomb, launching the Berlin Airlift, recognizing the new state of Israel, and desegregating the armed forces.

No wonder his future Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, came to think of him as “the captain with the mighty heart.”

Perhaps nothing epitomized his battling, never-say-die spirit better than his famous “whistle-stop campaign” in 1948. 

From July to October, the President launched three major tours totaling 31 days through much of the country, delivering a series of brief, peppery broadsides from the back of his train against the “do-nothing Congress” controlled by the GOP that had stymied much of his domestic “Fair Deal” legislation.

During his initial difficult months taking over from FDR, Republicans had joked “To err is Truman.” Three years later, and to the end of his Presidency, they would gripe that he was hyperpartisan. 

Yet, as a student of history, he believed that the duties of his office required him to refrain from pandering to people’s worst instincts. Voters, seeing the man up front, identified with his plain speaking and unpretentious nature. 

In the crucial run-up to the election, ordinary citizens came to respect and admire this veteran politician who refused to be counted out.

To their deep subsequent regret, the one group that did not suspect Truman was shifting the electorate his way were the major pollsters, George Gallup and Elmo Roper.

Polling had advanced since 1936, they insisted, when Liberty Digest, working from an inadequate sample size, had wrongly predicted a victory for Alf Landon over FDR. (The Kansas governor lost in a landslide.) 

But, despite Truman’s gain of seven percentage points against Dewey from August to October, Gallup was so certain the President would lose that he stopped taking surveys two weeks before the election.

 As for Roper, in visiting journalism students at Columbia University, he had even “explained the infallibility of the sampling process” used for the 1948 campaign, recalled student Patricia Christiansen in a retrospective for the Fall 2008 issue of Columbia Magazine. 

All of that lulled an overconfident Dewey to conduct a platitude-laden, content-free campaign in the crucial closing weeks.

All of them were wrong—spectacularly so, to the delight of Truman, who, in the famous image accompanying this post, let them know it, in unmistakable fashion.

Quote of the Day (Harry Truman, With a Historic Call for Civil-Rights Protections)

“We shall not…finally achieve the ideals for which this Nation was rounded so long as any American suffers discrimination as a result of his race, or religion, or color, or the land of origin of his forefathers.

“Unfortunately, there still are examples—flagrant examples—of discrimination which are utterly contrary to our ideals. Not all groups of our population are free from the fear of violence. Not all groups are free to live and work where they please or to improve their conditions of life by their own efforts. Not all groups enjoy the full privileges of citizenship and participation in the government under which they live.

“We cannot be satisfied until all our people have equal opportunities for jobs, for homes, for education, for health, and for political expression, and until all our people have equal protection under the law.”—Harry S. Truman, 33^rd President of the United States (1884-1972), “Special Message to the Congress on Civil Rights,” Feb. 2, 1948

Seventy-five years ago today, Harry Truman called on Congress to pass 10 civil-rights measures. Only one was passed during his Presidency: the Japanese American Evacuation Claims Act, a flawed piece of legislation that did not come close to fulfilling its aim of redressing the wrongs suffered by Japanese Americans forced to evacuate their homes because of wartime hysteria.

But a few months later, Truman overrode stiff opposition within his own administration to issue an executive order integrating America’s armed forces, and he lived to see Lyndon Johnson push through legislation guaranteeing the rights long denied African-Americans.

Nevertheless, we forget, at our peril, how strenuously some in this country tried to perpetuate denial of “the full privileges of citizenship and participation in the government.” So long as that history is neglected, the fierce struggle it took to win those rights will have to be fought anew.

Quote of the Day (Harry Truman, on How ‘The People Are Responsible for the Government’)

“The country has to awaken every now and then to the fact that the people are responsible for the government they get. And when they elect a man to the presidency who doesn’t take care of the job, they’ve got nobody to blame but themselves.”—U.S. President Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), in Where the Buck Stops: The Personal and Private Writings of Harry S. Truman, edited by ‎Margaret Truman (1989)

Quote of the Day (Harry Truman, on Why ‘The People Are Responsible for the Government They Get’)

“The country has to awaken every now and then to the fact that the people are responsible for the government they get. And when they elect a man to the presidency who doesn’t take care of the job, they’ve got nobody to blame but themselves.”—U.S. President Harry S. Truman (1884-1972), in Where the Buck Stops: The Personal and Private Writings of Harry S. Truman, edited by ‎Margaret Truman (2015)

This Day in Cold War History (Storms Produce ‘Black Friday’ of Berlin Airlift)

August 13, 1948-- A month and a half into its effort to sustain West Berlin from the Soviet Union’s attempt to cut off its access to the outside world, the U.S. and its Western allies encountered such stormy conditions that daily runs were threatened in their ongoing Berlin Airlift. 

The day, nicknamed “Black Friday” by pilots, became one of the pivotal moments in the Cold War, requiring unparalleled logistical coordination and reassuring the people of West Berlin that they would not be left to their own devices in the confrontation with the U.S.S.R.

In the three years since the end of WWII, the Allies divided over administering the nations of Eastern and Central Europe, with Germany as a particular flash point. 

Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin balked at proposals by the U.S., Great Britain and France concerning currency and free elections. The U.S.S.R. quickly sought to install a puppet regime in its occupation zone in the eastern half of Germany. That would normally have included Berlin, except that each of the Allies had been given its own occupation zone in the Third Reich’s capital. 

When the Soviets escalated its campaign of isolation against free West Berlin from harassment to outright blocking of ground travel arteries, U.S. President Harry Truman insisted that the city would not be allowed to fall.

I wrote about the airlift in a prior post, but these particular 24 hours deserve an intensive treatment all their own. Had the problems highlighted in this period turned out to be insoluble, the outcome of this early standoff might have been far different. In fact, so might the entire Cold War.

When he arrived on July 28 in Berlin, at the behest of Germany’s military governor, General Lucius Clay, to head up the American component of the airlift, Major General William Tunner (pictured) might well have questioned whether he really could make this herculean effort operate in "rhythm, on a beat as constant as a jungle drum." Three days before, a C-47 had crashed into an apartment in Berlin, killing two peoples—and conditions were about to become more harrowing.

For one thing, the Soviets began to apply their harassment techniques from the ground to the air as well. Soviet planes couldn’t outright fire on planes—that would have been an act of war—but they did the next best thing, including buzzing planes; close flying; shooting near (but not at) airlift planes; releasing balloons in the air corridor; and using radio interference and searchlights in the pilots' eyes.

But in another sense, the West’s efforts were becoming complicated by their success. On August 12, the U.S. Air Force and Britain’s Royal Air Force managed to deliver 4,742 tons of supplies, the first time the airlift had surpassed the 4,500 daily threshold deemed necessary to keep Berlin alive. But that required more than 700 flights, and planes were inevitably stacking up.

Matters came to a head on August 13, and it involved no less than General Tunner himself. Flying into Berlin that day to grant an award to Lt. Paul O. Lykins, who had made the most flights into Berlin up until that time, Tunner discovered the following conditions: 

·         *Clouds had descended to building tops;

·         *Radar disrupted by heavy rain;

·         *In one sequence: one C-54 had crashed and burned on a runway; a second blew its tires, trying to avoid it; a third ground looped on the auxiliary runway;

·       *  Planes stacking up over the recently built runway at Tempelhof airport;

·         *More planes stacking up because of no-visibility conditions.

Watching this, Tunner phoned the tower, instructing the personnel to tell the pilots to return to their bases and “let me know when it’s safe to come down.”

From that point forward, he instituted a new policy: any aircraft missing its approach had to circle back on the outgoing center corridor; loaded aircraft would get a fresh crew; and all pilots would fly by instrument rules in order to keep a uniform speed, interval and altitude.

"The actual operation of a successful airlift is about as glamorous as drops of water on stone,” Tunner once said, memorably. “There's no frenzy, no flap, just the inexorable process of getting the job done."

So it proved here. The general (nicknamed “Willy the Whip” behind his back) managed to eliminate the problem with stacking, helped in no small part by the new procedures mentioned above, as well as the civilian air traffic controllers he requested and received.

By the time it was all over in September 1949, American and British pilots had combined to deliver 2.3 million tons from 277,569 total flights to Berlin.  It was an extraordinary feat of logistics planning and sheer heroism.

Quote of the Day (Harry Truman, on History)

“The only thing new in the world is the history you don't know.” – President Harry S Truman, as quoted by Merle Miller, Plain Speaking: An Oral Biography of Harry S Truman (1974)