Stephen R. Taaffe, Macarthur's Korean War Generals. Manhattan
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Book Reviews they were couched. In reality, CND did fall under Communist Party influence, and its pro-Soviet tendencies help to explain why, when the peace movement revived in the 1980s, the British Left’s leading nuclear disarmer, E. P. Thompson, created an alternative organization, European Nuclear Disarmament, of which Hogg makes no mention. Even so, for all its shortcomings, Hogg’s book deserves praise for its valuable historical survey of cultural allusions to nuclear power and nuclear weapons over the decades. Of particular interest in this regard, and worthy of elaboration, are its final remarks on the significantly changed climate of opinion since the end of the Cold War, when terrorism came to be conceived as the major threat and “nuclear kitsch [was] mobilized to recreate a lost and harmless past” (p. 172). ✣✣✣ Stephen R. Taaffe, MacArthur’s Korean War Generals. Manhattan, KS: University of Kansas Press, 2016. 216 pp. $34.95. Reviewed by Allan R. Millett, University of New Orleans Having written two books on the U.S. Army’s senior officers in World War II, Stephen R. Taaffe extends his investigation of ground forces’ senior leadership to the Korean War. His latest book evaluates the generals of the United Nations Command (UNC), the U.S. Eighth Army, and the U.S. X Corps. His work extends the analysis in D. Clayton James, Refighting the Last War: Command and Crisis in Korea, 1950–1953. Taaffe’s focus on the uneven operational performance of Army generals is a welcome corrective to the traditional criticism of the rank and file in Korea. Nevertheless, MacArthur’s Korean War Generals, no matter how admirable in intent and breadth of research, has some shortcomings. Apart from the theater staff, the generals with one exception were not Douglas MacArthur’s. The only real MacArthur choice for a command in the UNC was Major General Edward M. Almond, who came to Tokyo for a staff billet (G-1) in 1948 and left Korea in 1951 as former theater chief-of-staff, X Corps commander, and a lieutenant general. MacArthur’s personal attachment to Almond may explain some of the X Corps commander’s high-risk generalship. The rest of “MacArthur’s Generals” were not “his” at all. Instead, they owed their assignments to the confidence of Generals Omar N. Bradley and J. Lawton Collins, former and serving chiefs of staff of the U.S. Army, 1947–1953. Bradley did not stop judging generals for promotion and assignments when he became chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) in 1949. Senior commanders also had to pass muster with Secretary of the Army Frank Pace and the Army Staff. Taaffe sees much of this convergence of influence but may ignore another source of opinion, General Mark W. Clark, commanding general of the U.S. Army Field Forces (USAFF), whose inspection teams roamed the Korean battlefields to evaluate the Army’s performance. Another source of opinion on Army generalship, not sufficiently discussed by Taaffe, was Major 236 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_r_00729 by guest on 29 September 2021 Book Reviews General Frank E. Lowe, U.S. Army Reserve, who went to Korea (1950–1951) as the personal observer of President Harry S. Truman. Lowe’s voluminous correspondence with Truman covers the “MacArthur year” as theater commander and contains telling reports on the Eighth Army’s generals. The most convincing part of Taaffe’s analysis is his extended treatment of the MacArthur-Almond relationship with Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker, the Eighth Army commander until his accidental death in December 1950. Because Walker did not leave a large collection of papers on his Korean War experience, Taaffe depends on third-party observations of the tension between the three generals who shaped the Eighth Army’s employment in 1950. Continually harassed by MacArthur and Almond, Walker had his champions: Secretary Pace and Generals Collins and Bradley, as well as two key Far East Command staff officers, Doyle O. Hickey and Edwin K. Wright, whose influence Taaffe ignores. The pro-Walker faction in the Army helped Walker cope with MacArthur, Almond, and a hostile press by sending Major General Leven C. Allen to Korea to serve as the Eighth Army’s chief of staff. Although Allen and Walker had a good personal relationship from World War II, the more significant factor was Bradley’s complete confidence in Allen, who had served as Bradley’s chief of staff in the U.S. First Army and 12th Army Group (1944–1945). Taaffe inaccurately claims that Walker “had little contact or backing from the army’s top leadership” (pp. 209–210). The relative inattention to commander and chief-of-staff relations in MacArthur’s Korean War Generals raises a more important question: Who is competent to evaluate generalship, either during an ongoing war or in the history of that war. The U.S. armed forces since World War I have had one answer: professional peers (i.e., other generals and admirals) who submit fitness reports and sit on promotion boards. This process, however, includes further screening by service secretaries, the JCS, the secretary of defense, the White House National Security Council staff, the president, and the U.S. Senate, which confirms promotions. Rank above major general/rear admiral goes with a specific assignment and is not permanent unless approved by Congress upon retirement. Taaffe, to his credit, relies most heavily on peer opinion, the bulk of it from the Army’s oral history collections at the Army Heritage and Education Center, as well as interviews made by serious historians of the Korean War: D. Clayton James, Clay Blair, Roy Appleman, and Uzal Ent. This approach, exploited by Blair in Korea: The Forgotten War (1987), does offer valuable, compelling insights, but it also suffers from conscious or unconscious memory manipulation. From my own exposure to Army and Marine Corps generals since the 1970s as a historian and Marine field grade officer, I found generals keenly interested in how their professional reputations are preserved as history. None was more ambitious for power and historical immortality than Matthew B. Ridgway—as Blair learned. Ridgway could play “simple soldier,” which he most cer- tainly was not, and he could “spin” a story with a deftness that made MacArthur look like a tyro in public relations. Ridgway’s assignment as the Eighth Army’s contingent 237 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/JCWS_r_00729 by guest on 29 September 2021 Book Reviews replacement commander was made in August 1950, and Ridgway could have replaced Walker then (as Averill Harriman urged) if Pace and Collins had not dissented. Ridg- way’s Army Staff position in 1950 (third in Pentagon hierarchy) would have made his self-interest and influence too obvious, so he accepted the “Leven Allen solution.” Despite a supposed rapport with MacArthur, which Taaffe accepts, Ridgway managed to persuade Bradley and Collins to call Lieutenant Colonel James T. Quirk, U.S. Army Reserve, who was media mogul Walter Annenberg’s prize proteg´ e,´ to active duty as the Eighth Army’s press officer. Quirk’s papers, now in the Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, show he not only imposed new censorship on Eighth Army “news” but con- ducted a campaign to diminish MacArthur’s media influence and enhance Ridgway’s reputation for combat leadership. Quirk had done similar media magic for Bradley in Europe in 1944–1945. Peer evaluation of generalship counts, but such judgments require an analysis of fitness reports, private general-to-general evaluations (available in the Ridgway, Collins, and James Van Fleet papers), and contemporaneous, clear- eyed observation by non-disciples—in Ridgway’s case, Generals James A. Gavin and Maxwell D. Taylor. An issue Taaffe ignores is the contention that the Officer Personnel Act of 1947 doomed the field forces of 1950 to be commanded by generals and field grade officers who lacked World War II combat experience. The legislation favored officers who had “missed” the war of 1941–1945 by mandating that the services give all career officers the opportunity to command units in their specialties, insofar as successful command was an essential requirement for promotion. The result, as trumpeted by journalists then and now, was an Eighth Army short of proven battlefield leaders. Taaffe implies that there is no merit to this attack on the congressional lust for equity in promotion policy. I tend to agree with him. When wading through the 1947 act, which is more than 100 pages long and focuses principally on the Navy, I found nary a word on command assignment policy. If service secretaries directed boards to give preference to candidates on assignment criteria, that is self-inflicted discrimination based on criteria not included in law. The U.S. Army and Marine Corps gave non-combat veterans a chance to command operational units as an organizational choice. Of course, no one anticipated that by December 1950 the Army and Marine Corps would have seven divisions fighting in Korea. One aspect of 1950s generalship in Korea that Taaffe does treat is the physical condition of senior officers. However, he does not pursue this issue in enough detail. My impression is that many 1950s generals could not pass a medical examination of the sort used today. Too many found energy in a whisky bottle or pack of cigarettes. Ridgway had back pain so severe (but not from parachuting) that he often wore a back brace, which explains his military posture. MacArthur was a gastrointestinal nightmare as was John Church. William Kean, James Van Fleet, and Almond were high-energy, clean-living paragons.