On 11 April 1951, U.S. president Harry S. Truman relieved General of the Army Douglas MacArthur of his commands after MacArthur made public statements that contradicted the administration's policies. MacArthur was a popular hero of World War II who then was commander of United Nations Command forces fighting in the Korean War, and his relief remains a controversial topic in the field of civil–military relations.
MacArthur led the Allied forces in the Southwest Pacific during World War II, and after the war was in charge of the occupation of Japan. In the latter role, MacArthur was able to accumulate considerable power over the civil administration of Japan.
After North Korea invaded South Korea in June 1950, starting the Korean War, MacArthur was designated commander of the United Nations forces defending South Korea. He conceived and executed the amphibious assault at Inchon on 15 September 1950, but when he followed up his victory with a full-scale invasion of North Korea, China inflicted a series of defeats, compelling him to withdraw from North Korea. By April 1951, the military situation had stabilized, but MacArthur publicly criticized the administration's policies, leading Truman to have MacArthur relieved of his command.
An apolitical military was an American tradition. The principle of civilian control of the military was also ingrained. Civilian control was an issue considering the constitutional division of powers between the president as commander-in-chief, and Congress with its power to raise armies, maintain a navy, and declare war. This was also an era when the rising complexity of military technology led to the creation of a professional military force, and American troops were employed overseas in large numbers.
The Armed Services Committee and the Foreign Relations Committee of the U.S. Senate held a joint inquiry into the military situation and the circumstances surrounding MacArthur's relief, and concluded that "the removal of General MacArthur was within the constitutional powers of the President but the circumstances were a shock to national pride". In having MacArthur relieved for failing to "respect the authority of the President" by privately communicating with Congress, Truman upheld the president's role as preeminent.
Background
Harry Truman
Harry S. Truman, then the vice president of the United States, became president of the United States on the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt in 1945, and won an unexpected victory to a full term in the 1948 presidential election. He is the only president who has served after 1897 without a college degree. Although not highly educated, Truman was well read. When his high school friends went off to the state university in 1901, he enrolled in a local business school, but only lasted a semester. He later took night courses at the Kansas City Law School, but dropped out. Truman attempted to gain admission to the United States Military Academy at West Point, but was rejected for his poor eyesight. He was proud of his military service in the artillery during World War I, and continued to hold a reserve commission, eventually achieving the rank of colonel.
Instead of professional soldiers, Truman selected two National Guardsmen, Harry H. Vaughan and Louis H. Renfrow, as his military aides. Truman once remarked that he did not understand how the US Army could "produce men such as Robert E. Lee, John J. Pershing, Eisenhower, and Bradley and at the same time produce Custers, Pattons, and MacArthur".
During the 1949 Revolt of the Admirals, several naval officers publicly disagreed with the administration's policy over cuts to naval aviation and amphibious warfare capability, resulting in the relief of the Chief of Naval Operations, Admiral Louis Denfeld, and his replacement by Admiral Forrest Sherman. In testimony before the House Armed Services Committee investigation into the affair in October 1949, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar Bradley, doubted that there would ever be another large-scale amphibious operation.
Douglas MacArthur
In stature and seniority, General of the Army Douglas MacArthur was the Army's foremost general. The son of Lieutenant General Arthur MacArthur Jr., a recipient of the Medal of Honor for action during the American Civil War, he had graduated at the top of his West Point class of 1903, but never attended an advanced service school except for the engineer course in 1908. He had a distinguished combat record in World War I, and had served as Chief of Staff of the United States Army from 1930 to 1935, working closely with Presidents Herbert Hoover and Franklin Roosevelt, despite occasional clashes over the military budget. He later compared Roosevelt's "extraordinary self-control" with Truman's "violent temper and paroxysms of ungovernable rage".
Apart from his World War I–era service in Mexico and Europe, his overseas postings were in Asia and the Pacific. During World War II, he became a national hero and was awarded the Medal of Honor for the unsuccessful defense of the Philippines in the Battle of Bataan. He commanded the Allied armies in the New Guinea Campaign and Philippines Campaign, fulfilling his famous promise to return to the Philippines. In 1944 and 1948, he was considered a possible Republican candidate for president. After the war, as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, he oversaw the occupation of Japan and played an important part in the post-war political and social transformation of that country.
By 1950, the occupation of Japan was winding down, but MacArthur remained in the country as Commander-in-Chief Far East, a post to which he had been appointed by Truman in 1945. MacArthur had to deal with deep cuts in the defense budget that saw his troop numbers decline from 300,000 in 1947 to 142,000 in 1948. Despite his protests, further reductions followed and, by June 1950, there were only 108,000 troops in his Far East Command. Cuts in funds and personnel produced shortages of serviceable equipment. Of the Far East Command's 18,000 jeeps, 10,000 were unserviceable; of its 13,780 2+1⁄2-ton 6x6 trucks, only 4,441 were serviceable. On the positive side, Far East Command initiated a program of reclaiming and refurbishing war materiel from abandoned stocks throughout the Pacific. This had not only recovered a great deal of valuable stores and equipment, it had also generated a useful repair and rebuilding industry in Japan. Meanwhile, the shift away from occupation duties had permitted a greater focus on training for combat.
Events leading up to the relief
Korean War
North Korea invaded South Korea on 25 June 1950, starting the Korean War. In response to an urgent request from the Korean Military Advisory Group for more ammunition, MacArthur, on his own initiative, ordered the transport ship MSTS Sgt. George D Keathley, then in harbor in Yokohama, to be loaded with ammunition and to sail for Pusan. President Truman met with the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other advisors that day at Blair House, his temporary residence during the White House Reconstruction, and approved the actions already taken by MacArthur and Secretary of State Dean Acheson. At another meeting at Blair House held on the evening of 26 June, amid reports of a rapidly deteriorating situation in South Korea, Truman approved the use of air and naval forces against military targets south of the 38th parallel north.
Subsequently, on 27 June, the United Nations Security Council passed Resolution 83, which recommended that "members of the United Nations furnish such assistance to the Republic of Korea as may be necessary to repel the armed attack and to restore international peace and security in the area". The South Korean capital of Seoul fell on 28 June. The next day, Truman authorized air and naval operations north of the 38th parallel, which MacArthur had already ordered. However it was not until 30 June, following a sobering report on the military situation from MacArthur, that Truman finally authorized the use of ground forces.
On 8 July, on the advice of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Truman appointed MacArthur commander of United Nations Command in South Korea. He remained Commander-in-Chief Far East and Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers. MacArthur was forced to commit his forces in Japan to what he later described as a "desperate rearguard action". In July, Truman sent the Chief of Staff of the Army, General J. Lawton Collins, and the Chief of Staff of the Air Force, General Hoyt S. Vandenberg, to report on the situation. They met with MacArthur and his chief of staff, Major General Edward Almond, in Tokyo on 13 July. MacArthur impressed on them the danger of underestimating the North Koreans, whom he characterized as "well-equipped, well-led, and battle-trained, and which have at times out-numbered our troops by as much as twenty to one". He proposed to first halt the North Korean advance and then counterattack, enveloping the North Koreans with an amphibious operation, but the timing was dependent on the arrival of reinforcements from the United States.
Bradley raised the possibility of using nuclear weapons in Korea at a Joint Chiefs of Staff meeting on 9 July 1950 at Eisenhower's instigation, but there was no support for the idea. The Army staff sent a cable to Collins in Tokyo suggesting that he seek out MacArthur's opinion. In a teleconference on 13 July, Major General Charles L. Bolte proposed sending nuclear weapons. MacArthur had already turned down Air Force proposals to firebomb North Korean cities, and suggested that atomic bombs could be used to isolate North Korea by taking out bridges and tunnels. The Army staff considered this impractical. On 28 July, the Joint Chiefs decided to send ten nuclear-capable B-29 bombers of the 9th Bombardment Wing to Guam as a deterrent to Chinese action against Taiwan. Truman publicly denied that he was considering the use of nuclear weapons in Korea, but authorized the transfer to Guam of atomic bombs without their fissile cores. The deployment did not go well; one of the bombers crashed on takeoff from Fairfield-Suisun Air Force Base in California on 5 August, killing the mission commander, Brigadier General Robert F. Travis, and 18 others. The remaining nine bombers remained in Guam until 13 September, when they returned to the United States. The bomb assemblies stayed behind.
At a press conference on 13 July, Truman was asked if United States forces would cross the 38th parallel into North Korea, and he replied that he would "make that decision when it becomes necessary to do it". Some of his advisors, including the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, Dean Rusk, and the director of the Office of Northeast Asian Affairs, John M. Allison, argued that Security Council Resolution 83 provided a legal basis for the invasion of North Korea. Others, such as George F. Kennan and Paul Nitze, disagreed. Along with the legality, the administration also had to consider the danger of intervention by the Soviet Union or the People's Republic of China if United Nations forces approached their borders.
Battle of Inchon
MacArthur's early ambitions for an amphibious operation against North Korea had to be shelved due to the deteriorating situation in the south, which compelled him to commit the formation earmarked for the assault, the 1st Cavalry Division, to the defense of the Pusan Perimeter, to which the Eighth Army retreated in August. MacArthur then resumed his planning for an amphibious operation, which he tentatively scheduled for 15 September 1950. Navy and Marine Corps officers including Rear Admiral James H. Doyle, the commander of Amphibious Group One, and Major General Oliver P. Smith, the commander of the 1st Marine Division, were appalled by the proposed landing beaches at Inchon, which featured huge tides, broad mudflats, narrow and treacherous channels, and high seawalls. Omar Bradley called it "the worst possible place ever selected for an amphibious landing". Although the Inchon-Seoul area was a key communications center, the risks of the landing were daunting. Collins and Sherman flew to Tokyo to be briefed on the plans by MacArthur, who declared: "We shall land at Inchon, and I shall crush them."
MacArthur was invited to speak at the 51st National Encampment of the Veterans of Foreign Wars in Chicago on 26 August 1950. He declined the invitation, but instead sent a statement to be read aloud, in which he contradicted Truman's policy towards the island of Formosa, saying: "Nothing could be more fallacious than the threadbare argument by those who advocate appeasement and defeatism in the Pacific that if we defend Formosa we alienate continental Asia." Truman was infuriated by the word "appeasement", and discussed the possibility of relieving MacArthur with Secretary of Defense Louis A. Johnson. Johnson responded that MacArthur was "one of the greatest, if not the greatest generals of our generation". Truman told Johnson to send MacArthur an order withdrawing his statement, which he did; but it had already been read into the Congressional Record. As it turned out, it was not MacArthur who was relieved, but Johnson. Truman had become irritated with Johnson's conflict with Secretary of State Acheson, and although he had said that Johnson would remain his Secretary of Defense for "as long as I am President," he asked Johnson for his resignation. Publicly, Johnson received much of the blame for the defense cuts that had led to the lack of preparedness and consequent early defeats in Korea. He was replaced by General of the Army George Marshall.