HARPER: A BOLD PROPOSAL FOR DURABLE PEACE

Cognitive Change versus Fixed-Position Posturing
One of the greatest —and least appreciated—gifts that President Franklin Delano Roosevelt gave to the American people, the Japanese people, and the people of the world more broadly, was the reorganization of the U.S. military command structure in the Pacific Theater of War that he mandated on April 3, 1945, only nine days before his untimely death. Knowing that his own death was imminent, FDR dissolved all preexisting theaters of war in the Pacific and declared General MacArthur to be the head of all ground forces in the Pacific, as the U.S. was preparing to invade the Japanese home islands and end the war. MacArthur’s new command responsibilities meant that he, rather than Admiral Nimitz or any other U.S. Army or Marine commander, would likely become the Supreme Commander of the victorious Allied Powers that would be overseeing the occupation and reconstruction of Japan after the war ended.
The decision to place General MacArthur in such an extraordinarily powerful position, represented quite a change in thinking on FDR’s part, considering how tempestuous relations between himself and MacArthur had been at various times over the preceding 13 years. In fact, on July 29, 1932, just weeks after winning the Democratic Party’s Presidential nomination, FDR told his advisor and confidante Rex Tugwell, after having concluded an exasperating discussion with Huey Long, the mercurial Democratic Governor of Louisiana, “It’s all very well for us to laugh over Huey, but we have to remember all the time, that he’s one of the two most dangerous men in the country.” Later, when queried about his characterization of Long, FDR replied, “You heard it right…Huey is only second. The first (most dangerous man) is Douglas MacArthur.” (The Most Dangerous Man in America – Mark Perry pg. xi)
FDR had made it clear to Winston Churchill, according to FDR’s son Eliot, that he intended to rid the world of “British colonial methods” after the war. As FDR approached his own death in April 1945, he came to realize that the man he had formerly considered to be “the most dangerous man in America” in 1932, was in fact the one man who could be relied upon to implement the post-war anti-British colonialist perspective that Roosevelt envisioned as his legacy to the world. What a remarkable contrast that the transformation of FDR’s attitude toward MacArthur constituted, relative to the rigidified, unchanging, mind-deadening twin practices of “fixed- position posturing” and “demonization / dehumanization” of an alleged enemy, whether domestic or foreign, that characterizes the conduct of all too much of today’s political, military, and foreign policy establishments!
Not surprisingly, General MacArthur embodied the same quality of commitment to making principled changes in policy making and thinking in military affairs, that Roosevelt personified in his changed relationship to MacArthur, personally. This was most dramatically evident in MacArthur’s change in thinking with respect to the use of nuclear weapons. Whereas in 1951, MacArthur had called for the broad use of nuclear weapons against the Communist Chinese during the Korean War, in 1956 he was insisting upon the renunciation of their use altogether.
Returning to MacArthur’s famous speech to the Los Angeles American Legion, he declared:
“I recall so vividly this problem when it faced the Japanese in their new Constitution. They are realists; and they are the only ones that know by dread experience the fearful effect of mass annihilation. They realize in their limited geographical area, caught up as a sort of no-man’s land between two great ideologies, that to engage in another war, whether on the winning or the losing side, would spell the probable doom of their country. And their wise old Prime Minister, Shidehara, came to me and urged that they should abolish war as an international instrument. When I agreed, he turned to me and said, ‘The world will laugh and mock us as impractical visionaries, but a hundred years from now we will be called prophets.’
“Sooner or later, the world, if it is to survive, must reach this decision. The only question is, When? Must we fight again before we learn? When will some great figure have sufficient imagination and moral courage to translate this universal wish — which is rapidly becoming a universal necessity — into actuality? (emphasis added) We are in a new era. The old methods and solutions no longer suffice. We must have new thoughts, new ideas, new concepts, just as did our venerated forefathers when they faced a New World. We must break out of the straitjacket of the past. There must always be one to lead, and we should be that one. We should now proclaim our readiness to abolish war in concert with the great powers of the world. The result would be magical.” (pg. 310 – A solder speaks)
The Japanese did indeed “renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation” in their new constitution, as Prime Minister Shidehara had said they would. Article 9 of Chapter 11 of the new Constitution read: “Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes. In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.” (pp 258-259 – MacArthur – His Rendezvous with History – Major General Courtney Whitney)
President Dwight D Eisenhower addressed this issue, albeit from a slightly different vantage point, when he warned the American people about the growing power of the “military-industrial complex” in the United States, in his famous farewell address of Jan. 17, 1961 when he said:
“Now the conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence —economic, political, even spiritual —is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the need for this development. Yet, we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. (emphasis added) Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved. So is the very structure of our society.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence whether sought or unsought, of the military-industrial complex. (emphasis added) The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together.” (Eisenhower Farewell Address to Nation – Jan. 17, 1961)

Ulysses S. Grant, the MacArthur family, and the Development of Pacific Nations
It is totally lawful that the families of America’s two greatest military leaders/statesmen of the 19th and 20th centuries were as closely related to one another, as indeed they were. Judge Arthur MacArthur, the grandfather of Douglas MacArthur, was a close personal friend of President Ulysses S. Grant. In 1872, he introduced Grant to his son Arthur, a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor in recognition of his heroic conduct at the Battle of Missionary Ridge in Tennessee in 1863. By the 1880s, Captain Arthur MacArthur was seeking to be redeployed away from America’s quiescent western frontier. So, Judge MacArthur arranged for a meeting with (retired) President Grant, to discuss prospects for other assignments for his son. Grant recommended that Captain MacArthur seek a posting to China, as U.S. military attaché. The Captain had read extensively about the Far East and was thrilled with the idea. Grant had considerable personal knowledge of the region, as a consequence of the world tour that he took in 1877, 1878, and 1879, after leaving the White House. He was appalled at the ravages of the colonial policy of the British Empire that he witnessed around the globe:
“As I was traveling through the East, I tried hard to find something in the policy of the English government to approve. But I could not…England’s policy in the East is hard, reactionary, and selfish. No one can visit these wonderful lands…without seeing what they might be, under a
good government…As I understand the Eastern Question, the great obstacle to the good government of these countries is England…(I) have seen things that made my blood boil, in the way the European powers attempt to degrade the Asiatic nations…Rights which at home we regard as essential to our independence and to our national existence, are denied to China and Japan. Among these rights, there is none so important as the right to control commerce…. WE HAVE GREAT INTERESTS IN THE PACIFIC, BUT WE HAVE NONE THAT ARE INCONSISTENT WITH THE INDEPENDENCE OF THESE NATIONS.” (Emphasis added) (from Around the World with General Grant by John Russell Young). Grant’s anti-colonial outlook was shared wholeheartedly by Arthur MacArthur, just as it was later embraced by Arthur’s son, Douglas.
At Grant’s urging, Arthur drafted a 44-page “Chinese Memorandum” on U.S. industrial policy and its proper policy toward China, reflecting the foregoing outlook. Grant, in turn, personally submitted it to the President. The Memorandum did not secure MacArthur the post as military attache to China, but it did contribute to the deliberations on how the U.S. could counteract British imperialism in Asia.
When the Spanish-American War erupted in 1898, Arthur MacArthur was deployed to the Philippine Islands theater of conflict. In 1900, the newly promoted General MacArthur became military commander and governor of the Philippines, which on Dec. 10, 1898, had become a U.S. possession. The bitter conflict that MacArthur waged against the aggressively Anglophile imperialist William Howard Taft, the President of the Second Philippine Commission, was a harbinger of the conflict that his son Douglas was to wage against President Harry Truman and his Anglophile advisors in the U.S. State Department, in the context of the Korean War.
In 1905, that same Taft, acting in his new capacity as U.S. Secretary of War, deployed Arthur MacArthur on an eight-month, 19,949- mile tour of Asia, in order to keep him out of the hotly contested Philippines. Ironically, it was this Taft-directed “trip in temporary exile,” that Arthur’s son Douglas subsequently referred to as, “without doubt, the most important factor of preparation for my entire life.” Because Douglas, who had graduated from West Point in 1903, accompanied his father, as his aide-de-camp, during the journey. Arthur, whose personal library exceeded 4,000 volumes, insisted that Douglas acquire and read every book possible, to learn about the countries that they were visiting. In the evenings during their trip, they read, conferred, and analyzed their experiences. By the conclusion of their odyssey, they had read dozens of books about the countries whose leaders they had just met.
Years later, Douglas elaborated on the significance of the trip:
“We saw the strength and the weakness of the colonial system, how it brought law and order, but failed to develop the masses along the essential lines of education and political economy…
“The true historic significance and the sense of destiny that these lands of the western Pacific and Indian Ocean now assumed, became part of me. They were to color and influence all the days of my life…. It was crystal clear to me that the future and, indeed, the very existence of America, were irrevocably entwined within Asia, and its island outposts.” (MacArthur Reminiscences)
MacArthur as Supreme Commander of Allied Powers in Post-War Japan
The thinking that guided Douglas MacArthur in his fight to secure a durable peace in Japan, from Day One of the Occupation on Set. 2, 1945, until the formal signing of the peace treaty in 1951, was succinctly summarized in a message which MacArthur directed to the War Department on Feb.20,1947. During the prior months, the general had diverted, on an emergency basis, large quantities of U.S. Army food which had been stockpiled in the Pacific for consumption by U.S. military personnel, for immediate use by the starving Japanese people. Some members of Congress complained about the utilization of U.S. military food supplies, to feed former enemies. MacArthur addressed their complaints, in part, as follows:
“There is a popular misconception that the achievement of victory in modern war, wherein a clash of ideologies is involved, is solely dependent upon victory in the field. History itself clearly refutes this concept. It offers unmistakable proof that the human impulses which generated the will to war, no less than the material sinews of war, must be destroyed. Nor is it sufficient that such human impulses merely yield to the temporary shock of military defeat. There must be a complete spiritual reformation, such as will not only control the defeated generation but will exert a dominant influence upon the generation to follow as well. Unless this is done, victory is but partially complete and offers hope for little more than an armistice between one campaign and the next. …”
MacArthur added: “My professional military knowledge was no longer a major factor. I had to be an economist, a political scientist, and engineer, a manufacturing executive, a teacher, even a theologian of sorts. I had to rebuild a nation that had been almost completely destroyed by the war…. IT WAS CLEAR THAT THE EXPERIMENT IN JAPAN MUST GO FAR BEYOND THE PRIMARY PURPOSE OF THE ALLIES—[WHICH HAD INITIALLY BEEN DEFINED AS] THE DESTRUCTION OF JAPAN’S ABIILITY TO WAGE ANOTHER WAR AND PUNISHMENT OF WAR CRIMINALS.” (Emphasis added)
In articulating this perspective, MacArthur was echoing precisely the nation- building orientation that was the hallmark of Abraham Lincoln’s and Ulysses S Grant’s shared outlook. That is, what all three of them shared, along with other great American generals and statesmen including George Washington and Dwight Eisenhower, was a perspective for promoting scientifically grounded, strategically vectored economic development as the engine for the growth and harmonious relations of the nations and populations for which they were responsible. The contrast between their “peace through development” outlook, and the “destroy through the use of ever more murderous weapons of mass destruction” outlook of the acolytes and apostles of the military-industrial complex, could not have been starker. Consider, for example, the leading roles that Lincoln and Grant played in the construction of the Transcontinental Railroad in the United States between 1862 and its completion on May 10, 1869. They oversaw the successful construction of the largest development project in the history of mankind, while the nation was being ripped asunder by a Civil War, that was fueled by British and French support for the Confederacy! Moreover, President Lincoln told a group on Congressmen in 1864, while the outcome of the War was still in doubt, that what he was most proud of in his first four years in office was the ongoing construction of the Transcontinental Railroad! He saw it as a strategic economic undertaking that would bind the vast expanses of North America together in such a way, that it could never be ravaged by foreign-backed sectional threats of dissolution again. And he was particularly proud of the fact that federal government-backed credit financed the project at a time when, given the record budgetary outlays the government was already making to pay for the war effort as such, many small-minded people had claimed that such a large project was impossible on strictly budgetary grounds!
And, of course, President Washington acted with a similar nation-building perspective, as he supported the establishment of the First National Bank that Alexander Hamilton proposed.
The chief source of difficulty and opposition which MacArthur confronted, as he presided over the reconstruction and transformation of Japan, emanated not from Japan, nor from Moscow, not from Peking, nor even from London. Rather, it came from Washington, D.C. –President Harry Truman, to be most specific. It was Truman’s abandonment of President Roosevelt’s perspective and intent to rid the world of the British, Dutch, Portuguese, and French colonial empires, by building nation-states around the world, through the application of American System economic principles and methods, which was the ultimate source of MacArthur’s problems as Supreme Commander of Allied Powers (SCAP).
Notwithstanding his nominal appreciation for the military accomplishments of MacArthur, President Truman harbored a visceral aversion for the general. Truman confided to his diary in 1945 that, MacArthur (whom he had never met) was “Mr. Prima Donna, Brass Hat, Five Star MacArthur, …play actor and bunco man.” This attitude pervaded all to President Truman’s relations with MacArthur, right up until he relieved him of his command in April 1951.

Reform and Reconstruction of Japan-Sparta
MacArthur found Japan to be “more nearly akin to ancient Sparta than to any modern nation.” Consulting Plato, who had written much about how to overcome the evil that was Spartan society, MacArthur embarked upon a series of great reforms that profoundly altered Japanese political, spiritual, and economic life. He consulted two other advisors, as well. He said at the time, that “My major advisors, now have boiled down to almost two men—George Washington and Abraham Lincoln. One founded the United States, and the other saved it. If you go back in their lives, you can find almost all the answers.”
MacArthur was unrelenting in his insistence, from the first day that he assumed responsibility as SCAP, that the Japanese government continue to govern in uninterrupted fashion, always operating on the idea that his most fundamental mission was to help Japan to change itself from within, not simply acquiesce to demands made from without, by SCAP. MacArthur was hampered in his efforts, by the original directive from Washington which delineated his responsibilities as SCAP, wherein it was specified that he should not “Assume any responsibility for the economic rehabilitation or the strengthening of the Japanese economy”!
That prohibition, along with the fact that MacArthur received less than one-fourth the amount of aid, per capita, for Japan, relative to that which was allocated by the U.S. to reconstruction efforts in West Germany, during the first three years after the war, represented major constraints that the General had to overcome. Moreover, MacArthur constantly had to combat insane recommendations, like the 1946 Pauley Commission Report on Reparations, which was heartily endorsed by President Truman. Pauley insisted that Japan’s heavy industry should not be allowed to develop beyond 10% of the level that it was in 1935! MacArthur undertook several initiatives and reforms, during the early period of the occupation that were to have a lasting impact on Japanese life.
• Public Health. The massive emergency sanitation and immunization program which MacArthur mandated, that was overseen by U.S. Army physician Dr. Crawford Sans, achieved extraordinary results. Within two years, cholera was wiped out, tuberculosis deaths were down by 88%, diphtheria by 86%, and typhoid by 90%. Sans estimated that during this first two-year period, the control of communicable diseases alone, had saved 2.1 million lives. The life expectancy of men had been increased by eight years, and of women by nearly fourteen years, a phenomenon, in San’s words, that was ‘unequaled in any country in the world in medical history in a comparable period of time.”
• Land Reform. Regarding the agricultural domain, MacArthur found that “Japan’s feudalistic regime was most evident in the matter of landholding … a system of virtual slavery that went back to ancient times was still in existence. Most farmers in Japan were either out-and-out serfs, or they worked under an arrangement through which the landowners extorted a high percentage of each year’s crops.” A rural oligarchy of 160,000 absentee landlords, each of whom, on the average, owned 36 farms, controlled the countryside and all its produce.
With MacArthur’s prodding, the Diet (parliament) passed a law which compelled all absentee landlords to sell their holdings to the government, at extremely low, non-inflation adjusted prices. Each acre sold for the equivalent of a black-market carton of cigarettes! The government then offered purchase options to the tenant-farmers, at the same price. The tenant-farmers were granted thirty-year lines of credit, at 3.2% interest, to facilitate the purchases. The buyers were required, by law, to farm their land themselves. Farm sizes ranged from 7.5 to 30 acres. By this process, tenants acquired over 5 million acres from the former absentee landowners. As a result, proclaimed a proud MacArthur, 89% of the country’s farmland finally belonged to the people who were farming it.
MacArthur historically situated his effort in this realm, by stating, “I don’t think that since the Gracchi effort of land reform in the days of the Roman Empire, there has been anything so successful of that nature.”
• Religion. MacArthur insisted on strict separation of Church and State, along with absolute freedom of religion. On Dec. 15, 1945, a directive was issued which prohibited the use of state funding to promulgate Shinto teachings, support any of the 110,000 pre-war Shinto shrines, or promote Shinto activities. Shinto had been at the heart of the Japanese militarist world outlook. MacArthur encouraged the activities of Christian Missionaries in Japan. The Pocket Testament League, for example, distributed ten million Bibles in Japanese translation, at the General’s invitation. But Christian education was not mandatory. MacArthur sought to uplift, inspire, and transform the Japanese people by example, beginning with his own conduct.
• Labor. MacArthur encouraged the growth of labor unions, which grew rapidly. The Trade Union Law of December 1945 guaranteed the rights of workers to organize trade unions. While only 100,000 Japanese workers were unionized in “company-type” unions in 1941, and only 707 workers were members of unions in October 1945, fully 6.3 million—48% of the non-agricultural workforce—were unionized by December 1947. MacArthur’s confrontation with these same unions over a threatened general strike in January 1947, was part and parcel of the tumultuous reformation process which the General navigated during his reconstruction journey.
• Constitutional Reform. The new constitution, which went into effect in the spring of 1947, was referred to by MacArthur, 17 years later, as “probably the single most important accomplishment of the Occupation.” It included a bill of rights, modeled upon that of the U.S. Constitution, executive, legislative, and judicial branches of government; severely delimited the powers of the Emperor and his family; eliminated titles of nobility and peerage, with the exception of the Emperor’s family; and included a prohibition on offensive war, along with many other landmark reforms and changes in Japanese political life. Its guarantee of the right to vote for women, dramatically altered the political landscape in Japan. Whereas in elections in 1928, only 12.4 million males were eligible to vote; in 1946, 36.9 million men and women over the age of 20 were eligible to cast their ballots. MacArthur referred to this change in the legal status of women, as the ‘most heartwarming” of all the changes brought about by the Occupation.
• Economic Reform. A central included feature of MacArthur’s reconstruction program was his plan to break up the immense financial power that was concentrated in the hands of ten of Japan’s most powerful families—the Zaibatsu (literally, financial cliques or combines). MacArthur characterized these families as practicing a form of “private socialism.” A postwar study determined that “through 67 holding companies and over 4,000 operating subsidiaries and affiliates, the Zaibatsu families at the end of the war asserted effective control over 75% of Japan’s financial, industrial, and commercial activities.”
While MacArthur made some progress in this direction, his effort was ultimately aborted by various U.S. Eastern Establishment families, operating through their agents in the State Department, Newsweek magazine, and elsewhere. Undersecretary of the Army William draper, who had been a long-time investment banker with the New York firm of Dillon Reed, and George Kennan, a “policy planner” at the State Department and the architect of the “containment” doctrine against the Soviet Union, collaborated with Newsweek international affairs editor Harry R. Kern, to plant a sensational article against MacArthur on Dec. 1, 1947 entitled, “Lawyer’s Report Attacks Plans to Run Occupation….Far to Left of Anything Now Tolerated in America.” Kern’s article quoted extensively from the classified FEC-230 document, which mandated the economic “deconcentration” or breakup of the Zaibatsu. Senator William F Knowland of California led the charge in the Senate against FEC-230 and demanded “a full-scale investigation of American Policy in Japan,” The uproar created by Newsweek and Knowland, proved to be enough to derail MacArthur’s policy in this realm.

The Korean War
On June 25, 1950, units of the North Korean Armed Forces streamed across the 38th Parallel and attacked the Republic of Korea (See map). They had, in effect, been invited to do so, by the U.S. Secretary of state Dean Acheson six months earlier. In a speech that he made at the National Press Club on Jan. 12, 1950, Acheson had conspicuously neglected to include either South Korea or Taiwan as territories in Asia that the United States was prepared to defend, in the aftermath of Mao Zedong’s consolidation of power on the Chinese mainland. With the outbreak of the Korean War, the proverbial “other shoe” was dropped. The “first shoe” was dropped in August 1945, in the form of the two atomic bombs that President Truman ordered dropped on Japan. This militarily unnecessary act defined the advent of a postwar, international era of nuclear terror, in which nation-states could be terrorized into surrendering their sovereignty to a supranational “one-world government” apparatus, in return for assurances that they could avoid the devastating effects of these new weapons. The Korean War, in that strategic context, represented the first step into the hell of British “cabinet-warfare” methods, for the American military, as it was misled and misdeployed by President Harry Truman. General MacArthur’s refusal to embrace this anti-nation-state cabinet-warfare doctrine, was one of the major reasons that President Truman relieved him of his command, in April 1951.
What will be presented here, in this concluding section of this report, is a review of General MacArthur’s Inchon landing and campaign, one of the greatest “flanking operations” in military history. It provides today’s military and political leaders an excellent road map for the types of victories that must be won both off and on the field of battle, such as. In actuality, MacArthur had to conduct three “Battles of Inchon.”
The first, was waged against the unanimous opposition of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, beginning with its chairman, Gen. Omar Bradley, who had definitively declared to a Congressional Committee Hearing on Oct.19, 1949, that amphibious warfare was outdated, and for that reason, would not be utilized in the future.
The second Battle of Inchon, was waged against the North Koreans.
The third was fought against the U.S. State Department. The battle which MacArthur had to conduct against the Joint Chiefs, in order to secure their grudging and belated authorization for his Inchon design, is paradigmatic of what the distilled essence of warfare actually is— combat in the realm of ideas. No shots were fired in the course of MacArthur’s fight with the Joint Chiefs over Inchon, yet it was in that conflict where the Battle of Inchon— and the attendant potential for ending the war— was essentially won. The performance of the land, sea, and air components of MacArthur’s assault force on the day of the landing was incontestably brilliant. But it was MacArthur’s victory over the Joint Chiefs, which secured the basis for triumph of U.N./U.S. arms on the battlefield. The “third” battle of Inchon- the one MacArthur fought against the U.S. State Department – was the one he lost. In the immediate aftermath of the stunning battlefield successes at Inchon and Seoul, the State Department adamantly refused to offer terms of surrender to North Korea, not withstanding MacArthur’s insistence that it do so. It is through the aperture of this critical moment of the Korean conflict that one can see most clearly the nature of the indispensable relationship between victory on the battlefield and a timely, viable “exit strategy”/peace offer as the necessary components of the process, by means of which peace can be secured. Otherwise, brilliant victories won on the fields of war, are condemned to be squandered as “lost victories”. Regarding the crucial period immediately after Inchon, MacArthur stated:
“Unquestionably the failure… of our diplomacy to utilize the victory of Inchon as the basis for swift and dynamic action to restore peace and unity to Korea, was one of the greatest contributing causes to the subsequent war initiated by Red China.”
General Whitney reports further, that MacArthur expressed his sense of foreboding to General Walker, during the days after the Inchon victory as the State Department continued to maintain its deafening silence:
“The whole purpose of combat and war is to create a situation in which victory on the battlefield can be promptly translated into a politically advantageous peace…. But I am beginning to fear a tremendous political failure to grasp the glittering possibilities of ending the war and moving decisively toward a more enduring peace in the Pacific.”
What MacArthur failed to understand, was that the Anglophile Washington, D.C. policy-making establishment did not want to “grasp the glittering possibilities of enduring peace in the Pacific.” They wanted a protracted, no-win war, through which they could establish the principles of cabinet warfare that were to be wielded against the nation-state, on behalf of a “one-world government” empire, during the post war period. MacArthur’s unexpected victory at Inchon took the U.S. State Department and its Anglophile cohorts as much by surprise, as it did the General’s North Korean military adversaries! The State Department could not stop MacArthur from winning at Inchon; but it could, through diplomatic sabotage, prevent the victory form ending the war, as indeed, it did. In the absence of State Department peace initiatives, MacArthur himself made a peace offer to the commander-in-chief in North Korea, on Oct. 1. But without the full backing of the U.S. government, MacArthur’s overture fell on deaf ears.
As to the particulars of MacArthur’s brilliant Inchon operation…

The Inchon Flank
The situation which MacArthur confronted in mid-July 1950 was extremely bleak. General Walker’s Eighth Army troops had been pushed back into what amounted to an extended beachhead perimeter around the port city of Pusan, on the southeastern coast to the Republic of Korea. Notwithstanding Allied air and naval superiority, over 13 divisions of North Korean troops, heavily armed with Soviet tanks and artillery, stood poised to break through against the thin defense perimeter around Pusan. MacArthur recognized that the beachhead could not be maintained indefinitely—politically or militarily—under these circumstances. He decided to remedy the situation with a bold counterstroke that called for a surprise landing at Inchon, hundreds of miles behind the enemy’s front lines. It was conceptualized as a blow which would relieve the pressure on Pusan, and secure victory in the war, in its totality. He cable Washington on July 23 with his proposal, to that effect.
For three full weeks, the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff said nothing. Finally, they cabled to inform him that Gen. J. Lawton Collins, Army Chief of Staff and Admiral
Forrest Sherman, Chief of Naval Operations were coming to Tokyo, to “discuss” the matter with him. So it was, that on August 23, a strategy summit was convened, involving MacArthur, Collins, Sherman, General Lemuel Shepherd, Chief of the Marine Corps, and a host of additional admirals and generals and their chiefs of staff, to discuss the pros and cons of MacArthur’s proposed Inchon operation. Summing up the Navy’s extensive initial presentation, Admiral Sherman said, “If every possible geographical and naval handicap were listed—Inchon has ‘em all.” His staff had delineated a number of them:
**The horrible tides at Inchon: On the projected date of the landing, the tides would rise and fall 30 feet! At low tide, quicksand-like mud flats stretched out two miles into the harbor, away from the landing beaches. Whatever troops could land in the two-hour window around high tide in the morning, would be “on their own” for the day. The landing craft which brought them in would be stuck in the mud, helplessly exposed, until the next high tide came in 12 hours, to float them out.
**The main approach to the port of Inchon, “the Flying Fish Channel,” was a narrow, winding channel, with treacherous currents of up to six knots. Any ship sunk at a particularly vulnerable point in the channel, could block access to the port for all other ships.
**The formidable Wolmi-Do Island fortress, which rose 350 feet above the water at the mouth of the harbor, could not be “softened up” by preinvasion bombardment and bombing, because to do so would forfeit the element of surprise in the landing, which was the key to its success.
**The landings would have to be made in the heart of the city, itself. This meant that the enemy would have a series of excellent strong points, from which to wage resistance against the first wave of marine assault troops.
Following these and other objections raised by the Navy, Army Chief of Staff Collins weighed in with an even longer litany of objections. Among his contentions:
**Inchon was too far removed from Pusan, to have an immediate effect on that battle area. It was so far away, that the Inchon forces and those of Walker’s
Eighth Army would not be able to complement one another, as pincers, in a joint action.
**MacArthur’s plan called for extracting the First Marine Brigade from Pusan and attaching it to his landing force at Inchon. This would so weaken the already tenuous defenses at Pusan, that it could collapse the entire defense perimeter.
**MacArthur’s troops moving out from Inchon, would likely encounter heavy enemy resistance around Seoul, and could suffer an overwhelming defeat.
**Collins propounded an alternative to Inchon—a landing at the west coast port of Kunsan. This city was within 100 miles of the Pusan perimeter, had better landing beaches, and few of Inchon’s imposing physical obstacles, otherwise. Admiral Sherman immediately endorsed Collins’ proposal, whereupon Collins concluded his presentation.
The silence that gripped the room, thereafter, was matched only by the tension generated by the attendees’ anxious anticipation of MacArthur’s response. MacArthur began his remarks by noting that, the enemy had committed the bulk of his troops in deployment against General Walker’s defense perimeter.
“The very arguments that you have made as to the impractabilities 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 for success in modern war.”
MacArthur then went on to describe how, using the element of surprise, just as he intended to do, Gen. James Wolfe was able to defeat the Marquis de Montcalm at Quebec in 1759. The Marquis had believed that the steep riverbanks south of that city were impregnable, and so, left them undefended. Wolfe’s forces did the “impossible,” scaled those heights, surprised and defeated Montcalm, captured Quebec, and effectively ended the French and Indian War with that victory. As Wolfe had defeated Montcalm with surprise, so MacArthur would best the North Koreans.
Turning to Admiral Sherman, MacArthur acknowledged the validity of his expressed concerns. He added, however, that he had developed a deep respect and appreciation for the exceptional capabilities of the U.S. Navy during World
War II. He was, therefore, confident that it was entirely capable of overcoming all of the formidable obstacles, which Sherman had so compellingly enumerated.
As for the proposal to land at Kunsan, MacArthur admitted that it would be less risky than landing at Inchon. But, at the same time, he noted, it would accomplish nothing of any strategic consequence: the key to the seizure of Inchon and nearby Seoul, was that it would cut the enemy’s supply lines, and seal off the entire southern peninsula. Without supplies, the North Korean troops that were besieging Pusan would become weakened and have to abandon their positions. MacArthur’s troops at Inchon would become the anvil, against which the hammer of General Walker’s advancing Eighth Army would be wielded. Macarthur intoned:
“The only alternative to a stroke such as I propose, would be the continuation of the savage sacrifice we are making at Pusan, with no hope of relief in sight. Are you content to let our troops stay in that bloody perimeter like beef cattle in a slaughterhouse? Who would take responsibility for such a tragedy? Certainly, I will not.” After pausing for a moment, in a move that was reminiscent of his bold “reconnaissance-in-force” landing on the Admiralty Islands, MacArthur reassured the assembled leaders: “If my estimate is inaccurate, and should I run into a defense with which I cannot cope, I will be there personally and will immediately withdraw our forces before they are committed to a bloody setback. The only loss then, will be my professional reputation.”
“But” he concluded in an earnest whisper, “Inchon will not fail, and it will save 100,000 lives!” The deferential silence that filled the room was punctuated only by Admiral Sherman, murmuring in admiration, “A great voice in a great cause.”
It was only on Aug. 29, that the Joint Chiefs of Staff finally notified MacArthur of their approval for the landing at Inchon. Had he waited until then to commence his preparations, he never would have been ready for the Sept.15 landing date. Moreover, on Sept. 8, only seven days before the target date, the Joint Chiefs sent MacArthur still another message of misgiving, expressing their apprehension about the entire enterprise!
After MacArthur recapitulated his reasoning about Inchon, yet again, he finally received a message that stated simply, “Approved…so informed the President.”
Such was the fight which MacArthur had to wage within his own ranks, in order to gain clearance for his flanking/envelopment maneuver at Inchon. It proved to be consderably more difficult than the landing, itself, on Sept. 15. The first assault wave did not suffer a single fatality, as the element of surprise was complete. Within three days, General Walker was reporting palpable dislocations of the enemy forces around Pusan, as the effects of the disruption of their supplies began to make themselves felt. By Sept. 28, Seoul was liberated. In the two weeks after Inchon, over 130,000 North Korean soldiers were taken prisoner, as the gigantic pincer movement between Inchon and Pusan was completed, just as MacArthur had conceptualized it. The General immediately hastened to reinstall the government of President Syngman Rhee, as the civilian authority in Seoul. But for the aforementioned sabotage of the U.S. State Department, peace was within reach.

Think Like MacArthur
It was the quality of MacArthur’s mind, which was his greatest weapon, in both war and peace. The “flanks” that MacArthur exploited against his enemies in wartime, were flaws in their thinking, not geographic locations on the battlefield. It was not by virtue of the application of the most advanced weaponry in the world, but by virtue of the application of the most advanced thinking in the world, that MacArthur was able to win one engagement after another, with minimum loss of life. All his tactical undertakings in any particular military theater, were always subsumed by a strategy for winning the entire war, which, in turn, was embedded in a strategic orientation, that was designed to secure a durable peace.

A BOLD PROPOSAL FOR A DURABLE PEACE:
A TREATY FOR ‘THE BENEFIT OF THE OTHER’
A long overdue response to the groundbreaking speech entitled “War is No Longer a Medium of Practical Settlement of International Differences” which General Douglas MacArthur delivered to an American Legion assembly in Los Angeles, California on January 26, 1955.
The spirit which animates this Proposal is one that flows from the history-making Treaty of Westphalia that was concluded on October 24, 1648. That Treaty ended 30 years of bloodshed in Europe, that took the lives of over 8 million people. Fully 10% of the 78 million people that were living in Western Europe in 1600 were killed in the waves of religious and sectarian warfare that swept like a plague across Europe through 1648. That Treaty, which was enacted to stop the worst bloodletting in human history, gave rise to the concept of national sovereignty and the birth of the nation-state. It was based on the most “utopian” or “impractical” concept of “the benefit of the other.”
Article II of that Treaty reads like it was written to address the ever more bellicose protagonists that threaten one another with annihilation today. To wit:
“On both sides, all should be forgotten and forgiven—what has from the beginning of the unrest, no matter how or where, from one side or the other, happened in terms of hostility—so that neither because of that, nor for any other reason or pretext, should anyone commit, or allow to happen, any hostility, unfriendliness, difficulty, or obstacle in respect to persons, their status, goods, or security itself, or through others, secretly or openly, directly or indirectly, under the pretense of the authority of the law, or by way of violence, within the kingdom, or anywhere outside of it, and any other earlier treaties should not stand against this.
“Instead, (the fact that) each and every one, from one side and the other, both before and during the war, committed insults, violent acts, hostilities, damages, and injuries, without regard of persons or outcomes, should be completely put aside, so that everything, whatever one could demand from another under his name, will be forgotten to eternity.”
In that spirit, China, Russia, and all other nations of the world are invited to join the United States in signing an Agreement which commits its signatories to the following courses of action:
1) No use of nuclear weapons of any type, under any conditions, for the next five years.
2) The immediate establishment of a working group, under the auspices of the UN Security Council, to discuss concrete steps that can be taken in the quest to end all forms of military conflict between nations, as per the challenge that General MacArthur posed to the world in his January 1956 Los Angeles American Legion speech.
3) Each signatory to this agreement pledges to cut its national defense/military budget by 5% in the first year, and 10% more in each of the following four years. Furthermore, each signatory pledges to reinvest that money, which would have gone into arms spending, into civilian infrastructure projects, such as water projects, road building, port construction, high speed rail, etc., instead. The UN Security Council will be called upon to devote one week of its schedule each year to celebrating and reporting on the progress of these infrastructure projects, and the benefits that they have brought to the peoples of the world.
4) The UN Security Council is being called upon to initiate the establishment of an international infrastructure development bank, with an initial capitalization of $500 billion, that can finance large scale, nation-building infrastructure projects. Large scale projects, such as the construction of an African Transcontinental Railroad, should be prioritized. The name of this new bank, in recognition of the importance of the Treaty of Westphalia for today, should be the “For the Benefit of the Other” International Development Bank.
This bank will function to aggressively promote large scale, high quality infrastructure projects—in the same way that FDR’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation financed huge projects in the U.S. in the 1930’s and 1940’s, or the way the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative does throughout the world today. It will not be a bean counting, restrictive IMF conditiona lity-type’ institution of the old mode, that actually discouraged large scale, nation-building projects and perspectives.
5) The United States intends to renew the anti-nuclear war initiative that President Ronald Reagan launched on March 23, 1983, when he invited the former Soviet Union to join the United States in developing space-based directed energy beam weapons that could destroy nuclear missiles in flight. The United States will be inviting China, as well as Russia, to join it in this anti-nuclear war scientific enterprise. The technological spinoffs which will flow from this anti-nuclear-war undertaking, will be enormously beneficial for all the countries of the world. The trust and mutual respect that this project will engender among the participating nations will be priceless.
With the embrace of these 5 points, let us have peace! Those were the immortal words with which Ulysses S Grant launched his 1868 Presidential campaign. May we wage an effective fight for this Treaty for the ‘Benefit of the Other’ today with the same sense of vision, tenacity, and purposefulness that General Grant brought to his campaign. Let us have peace!