On October 19, American-led United Nations forces brought the Korean War to a swift and successful conclusion by taking Pyongyang, the capital of the communistcontrolled northern section of the country. As North Korean troops fled helter-skelter from their more numerous and better-armed opponents, a buoyant Gen. Douglas MacArthur declared, “The war definitely is coming to an end shortly,” predicting that American troops would be out of Korea by Christmas. Gen. Charles Willoughby, MacArthur’s intelligence chief, reported that “organized resistance on any large scale has ceased to be an enemy capability.” Back home, under the headline HARD-HITTING U.M. FORCES WIND UP WAR, Life magazine wrote, “The end of the war loomed as plain as the mustache on Stalin’s face.” With resistance continuing to crumble, the magazine wrote, all that remained was to put a few final touches on “the mop-up stage of the war.”
And so it truly seemed, for once the initial shock of the communists’ June 25 invasion was past, a multifront offensive had liberated Seoul, the southern capital, and forced the overmatched North Korean troops into headlong flight. After beginning their counterattack in mid-September, UN forces crossed the 38th parallel, which marked the border between North and South Korea, on October 7. From there they bloodily but relentlessly pursued the communists through North Korea toward the YaIu River, which formed the boundary with China. Logistical snafus slowed the advance, but as the North Koreans continued to fall back, it was not too soon to imagine MacArthur’s replacing Dwight Eisenhower, then toiling in obscurity as president of Columbia University, as the war-hero favorite in the 1952 presidential election.
The UN troops did not have long to savor their victory. Late in October UN units encountered surprisingly strong resistance from troops they had thought were in disarray. As the UN advance was checked, then repulsed, commanders wondered what had gotten into the North Koreans. The answer became clear when occasional groups of captured prisoners turned out to be Chinese. The Chinese Communists, alarmed at the incursion into a friendly neighboring country and fearful that the invaders would not stop at the YaIu, had sent some 300,000 men into Korea.
This massive force did not stop the UN troops dead in their tracks. An early-November offensive went off as planned, and by mid-November they were closing in on the banks of the YaIu. Then the Chinese launched a withering counteroffensive. By midDecember they had crossed the border into South Korea, and by early January they had retaken Seoul. UN troops dug in for a bone-chilling winter in Korea’s windswept mountains, during which shortages of food, ammunition, equipment, and reinforcements would make them bitterly curse their commanders’ early overconfidence.
1925 Seventy-five Years Ago
The Court-martial of Billy Mitchell
On October 28, in Washington, D.C., the Army began proceedings in the court-martial of Gen. William ("Billy") Mitchell. For the last six years, as the Army’s assistant chief of air service, Mitchell had tirelessly evangelized military officers, government officials, and anyone else who would listen about the coming importance of airpower in warfare. Although he had many good points to make, his disregard for protocol, which some saw as more of a thirst for self-promotion, earned him a host of enemies. Their number increased as his hectoring turned into outright insubordination. At Mitchell’s trial, as at the Scopes evolution trial a few months earlier, the formal charges were uncontested, and the defense instead used the proceedings as a forum to propound its views.
A dozen years before, on the eve of World War I, Mitchell had argued that flying was primarily for reconnaissance and thus should stay under the control of his Army branch, the Signal Corps. But his war experience had shown him the much greater role that aviation could play. In Europe he became the Army’s air-combat commander, sometimes flying battle missions himself. He learned how valuable airpower could be not only in supporting maneuvers on the ground—the tactical role—but also in destroying enemy infrastructure behind the lines—the strategic role.
After the war, as Congress slashed military budgets, Mitchell spoke out increasingly boldly about the obsolescence of surface ships; the need for a single, unified air service; the military threat from Japan; the necessity of establishing air bases in Alaska, where he had served with the Signal Corps at the beginning of the century; and the potential of strategic bombardment. While many of his predictions sounded absurd with the technology then available, Mitchell knew what airplanes would be capable of when they got faster and increased their range.
In a series of tests that Mitchell made sure were widely publicized, his bombers sank surplus battleships with little difficulty. Navy men are said to have cried at this demonstration of how vulnerable their capital ships were, despite their fearsome guns and heavy armor. Faced with the reluctance of some (but far from all) military commanders to consider his innovations, Mitchell continued the barrage with a series of increasingly strident public statements and newspaper and magazine articles.
As the oldest of nine children and the son and grandson of congressmen, Mitchell was accustomed to speaking his mind and getting his way. He also suffered from the delusion, common to zealots of all stripes, that mocking and browbeating an opponent will make him more likely to agree with you. Eventually Mitchell’s superiors, most notably President Calvin Coolidge, lost patience with their brilliant but erratic airpower prophet, and in the spring of 1925 they reduced his rank to lieutenant colonel and assigned him to an obscure job in San Antonio, Texas. Instead of resigning, Mitchell provoked a trial by publicly accusing the War and Navy Departments of “incompetency, criminal negligence, and almost treasonable administration of the national defense” in early September after a Navy flying boat en route to Hawaii ran out of fuel and the naval airship Shenandoah crashed in Ohio a few days later.
The court-martial, one of whose members was Gen. Douglas MacArthur, found Mitchell guilty of “conduct of a nature to bring discredit upon the military service,” among other charges. He was suspended without pay (later changed to half-pay), whereupon he resigned and spent the rest of his life, up to his death in 1936, promoting his vision of the importance of airpower. Although Mitchell was an Army officer, the results of his crusade are most visible today in the Air Force, which was finally established as a separate service in 1947, and the Navy, which before and during World War II adapted to the new age of warfare by shifting its emphasis from battleships to aircraft carriers.
1775 Two Hundred and Twenty-five Years Ago
Author, Doctor, Soldier, Spy
On October 4, Dr. Benjamin Church, the chief medical officer of the Continental Army, was convicted by court-martial of “holding criminal correspondence with the enemy.” Church had supported the colonial cause ever since the Stamp Act, but all the while he had secretly backed the royal government, first with anonymous articles and then with valuable confidential information. He was exposed in late September when a letter he had written found its way into Gen. George Washington’s hands. When decoded, it proved to contain a summary of the recent Continental Congress’s acts and data on Continental troop strength, dispositions, matériel, and campaign plans. Church was thrown in jail and kept confined until 1778, when he was allowed to sail for the West Indies. His ship disappeared, and he was never heard from again.
On October 10, four months after the debacle at Bunker Hill, Gen. Thomas Gage was replaced as commander in chief of His Majesty’s troops in Massachusetts. Gage’s good points have been charitably summed up by the American historian Mark Boatner: “He was an honorable man in a day when this quality was not common; he was more than competent as a military administrator.” The nineteenth-century British historian George Otto Trevelyan characterized Gage more harshly: “He played, for a very small man, a material and prominent part in the preparation of an immense catastrophe.”
His replacement, Gen. William Howe, was a much better soldier than Gage, despite having led the redcoats at Bunker Hill. Unfortunately, he suffered from the fatal defect of halfheartedness. Besides being a general, Howe was a member of Parliament, and during the 1774 campaign he had predicted that the American colonies would never be subdued by force. Unlike Robert E. Lee, a similarly reluctant general in a later war, Howe was plagued by timidity and a disinclination to kill his countrymen, faults that would be aggravated by his appetite for high living in the Tory strongholds of New York City and Philadelphia.
On October 18, a pair of military actions took place, with one win for each side. At Chambly, Quebec, a force of 50 American invaders and 300 Canadian sympathizers overran a British fort. They took possession of 169 prisoners (81 of them women and children) as well as the Continental Army’s first enemy colors of the war. They also captured large amounts of food, powder, arms, and ammunition, which would serve them well in the successful attack on nearby St. John’s two weeks later.
Meanwhile, the Royal Navy, frustrated by the depredations of American rebels (especially the seizure of the sloop Margaretta in June), decided to punish coastal towns with a series of raids. On October 7, a British fleet had fired on Bristol, Rhode Island, for an hour and a half until the inhabitants agreed to provide them with 40 sheep. On October 18, the British made a much more terrible example of Falmouth (now Portland), Maine, by shelling it heavily from 9:00 A.M. until 6:00 P.M. Landing parties set fires to make sure the destruction was as complete as possible. The residents had been warned in advance to evacuate, so no lives were lost, but 417 buildings were destroyed, 4 ships taken, and 11 others burned.
Six days later, British forces were less successful in trying to give the same treatment to Hampton, Virginia. In September the British sloop Otter had taken shelter there during a storm, and local patriots had stolen her guns and burned one of her boats. On October 24, Capt. Mathew Squires, bent on revenge, returned and sent six armed tenders into Hampton Creek to fire on the town. Colonial riflemen drove them off and repulsed a landing party. The next morning, when the British renewed the attack, they encountered 100 militiamen who had ridden all night from Culpeper County, in the northern part of the state. The British losses were 2 men killed, 2 wounded, and 8 vessels lost. The rebels suffered no casualties.
