Inchon in September 1950 and the Landing Everyone Said Could Not Work

Ask any naval officer to design the worst possible place for an amphibious landing. He will give you a harbor with one of the most extreme tides in the world, a narrow channel that fast currents run through, mud flats that appear when the water leaves, high seawalls where the landing craft come in, and an island fortress sitting in the middle of the approach. Then tell him that you have found such a place, that it is about twenty-five miles from a major enemy-held city, and that you propose to land an army corps there.

That is Inchon, and the man who proposed it was General Douglas MacArthur. His own staff, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Navy's amphibious experts all told him it could not be done, or should not be. On September 15, 1950, he did it. The landing is one of the boldest operations in American military history, and it also carries a warning that is as important as the triumph. I will tell the story in order, give the other side its due, and then say what I think it teaches a republic about generals, war and the Constitution.

June 25, 1950: the invasion

Start with the beginning, because it is often forgotten that the United States was not looking for this war.

On June 25, 1950, the army of North Korea crossed the 38th Parallel in force and invaded the South. It was a conventional invasion with tanks and artillery, planned with Soviet help and Stalin's approval, and it caught the South Korean army and the American forces in the region unprepared. Seoul fell within three days. The United Nations Security Council, with the Soviet delegate boycotting the meetings for reasons of its own, condemned the invasion and called on member states to assist South Korea. President Truman ordered American air and naval forces into action and then ground troops.

The first American ground units, rushed in from Japan, were undertrained, under-equipped and badly outnumbered. They fought delaying actions through July, and they lost ground, a great deal of it. By August the United Nations command held only a small corner of the southeast of the peninsula, a pocket around the port of Pusan.

The Pusan Perimeter

This was the Pusan Perimeter, and for six weeks its defense was the whole of the war. Lieutenant General Walton Walker, commanding the Eighth Army, held it with American, South Korean and arriving United Nations units, by shifting reserves from one threatened sector to another on interior lines. The North Koreans attacked at several points, and each time the line bent and held.

Here is the strategic problem. The Perimeter could be held for the time being, but it could not be used to win the war. Breaking out of it by a frontal attack would have meant a long fight through mountains against a force with the advantage of the defense. The North Korean army, meanwhile, had stretched its supply lines the whole length of the peninsula, and that was the weakness. If the UN forces could land far to the north, behind the enemy, they could cut the supply line, trap the army in the south and retake the capital, which was also the hub of the road and rail net.

MacArthur saw it before almost anyone. He had been planning an amphibious operation since the first weeks of the war, and he settled on Inchon, the port of Seoul.

Why everyone said no

The objections were real. They were not the product of timid minds.

1. The tides. Inchon's tidal range is among the largest in the world, and the channel leading to the port empties out at low tide. Mud flats are nature's way of telling the Navy it is not welcome. Landing craft can approach only for a few hours around high tide, and there are only a few days a month when the tide is high enough to get the large ships and their landing craft close. In September 1950, the date was the middle of the month.
2. The channel and the fortress. The approach was a narrow channel, Flying Fish Channel, that ships had to run in single file, past a small fortified island called Wolmi-do, which commanded the harbor. A mine or a block in the channel could trap the whole force.
3. The seawalls. At the quays the Marines would have to climb ladders against seawalls from landing craft, in the open, under fire.
4. The timing. There was no room for error. If the landing slipped by a day, the tide would be wrong, and the next suitable window was a month away.
5. The risk to the whole operation. The Perimeter was barely holding. Pulling the Marines and other units out of Korea's southeast to make the landing was a serious risk if it failed.

The people who raised these objections were senior and experienced. At a famous briefing in Tokyo on August 23, 1950, Army Chief of Staff General J. Lawton Collins and Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Forrest Sherman, who had flown out from Washington, listened to the Navy's amphibious commander, Rear Admiral James Doyle, deliver an assessment of the difficulties. Doyle's assessment was a sober catalog of the difficulties, and I will not put a quotation in his mouth that I cannot source. The Navy and Marine planners preferred other sites, such as the port of Kunsan, farther south, where the tides were gentler and the landing would be nearer to the Perimeter.

I want to be fair to them. A careful commander does not choose the hardest landing site on the coast because a theory of the case says it will pay. Their objections were serious, and had the operation failed, the history books would have blamed MacArthur and not them.

MacArthur's answer

MacArthur did not argue that the objections were wrong. He argued that they were the reason it would work.

His answer at the briefing, which has been reported in many accounts, was that the very difficulty of Inchon would mean that the enemy had not prepared for an attack there. Surprise was the great weapon. The North Koreans had not mined the harbor thoroughly or reinforced it heavily, because no one would expect a landing in such a place. The risk of the landing, he said, was less than the risk of continuing to bleed in the Perimeter. I am paraphrasing a long and eloquent presentation here, and I will not invent his words.

He was right. He was also lucky in some respects, and a candid account says so. But the history of war is full of men who gambled and lost, and the gamblers who win are the ones who understood the odds better than their critics. MacArthur had seen the enemy's weakness behind the line, and he believed the weakness was there to be struck.

September 15

The landing force was X Corps, commanded by Major General Edward Almond, with the 1st Marine Division, under Major General Oliver P. Smith, and the Army's 7th Infantry Division, with attached Korean units. For days before the landing the Navy and the Air Force bombarded Wolmi-do and the harbor defenses.

The assault came in two parts, timed to the two high tides of the day.

The morning. At dawn on September 15, the 3rd Battalion of the 5th Marines landed on Wolmi-do, the fortified island, on a narrow beach called Green Beach, supported by naval gunfire and by Marine and Navy aircraft. It was a small island, and the Marines took it in a matter of hours, with few casualties. That was the first step, and it was a critical one. It meant that the channel was now under American control.

The evening. Then the tide went out, and for hours the Marines on Wolmi-do waited, cut off from the main force by mud flats. At the evening high tide, the main landings went in, on the Inchon waterfront itself, with the 5th Marines on one beach and the 1st Marines on others, climbing seawalls with scaling ladders under fire from the defenders in the city. By nightfall the beachhead was secure, and the cost had been far lighter than anyone had feared.

I would call attention to the tidal window. The whole operation rested on a fact of astronomy, the date on which the water would rise high enough. It had a fixed deadline, and the Navy hit it. That is the kind of planning performance that we ought to be able to take for granted, and that we should be grateful for when it happens.

Seoul

The rest followed quickly. The Marines drove inland toward Kimpo airfield, which was taken within days, and then toward Seoul itself. The North Koreans, having lost their supply line, began to collapse in the south, and the Eighth Army broke out of the Pusan Perimeter and drove north to link up with X Corps.

The fight for Seoul was hard, a street-by-street battle that lasted more than a week. The city was recaptured in the last days of September, and on September 29, in a ceremony in the damaged capital, MacArthur formally handed it back to President Syngman Rhee of South Korea. It was a restoration, and for a moment it looked as if the war was over.

The enemy army, deprived of its supply line, was broken, and thousands of its soldiers were captured or scattered. A war that had looked lost in August had been reversed in a month.

The overreach

Now the part that a straight account must not leave out.

After the victory, the question was what to do next. The original purpose of the UN action had been to repel the invasion and restore South Korea. With the enemy broken, there was a temptation to go further, to cross the 38th Parallel, destroy the North Korean state and unify the peninsula under the South. The UN General Assembly gave its blessing in early October, and UN forces crossed the Parallel. In mid-October, at a meeting on Wake Island, President Truman met MacArthur, and by most accounts MacArthur played down the chance of Chinese intervention. The advance toward the Yalu River, the border with China, went on.

The Chinese warned that they would intervene, and in the last days of October and in November they did, in great numbers, in secret, and in the mountains of the north. The result was the Chosin campaign, told in The Chosin Reservoir and the Marines Who Attacked in Another Direction, and the long retreat that followed. The brilliant victory of September was followed by the sharp reversal of November, and the war went on for another two and a half years.

I would not call the later disaster an inevitable result of the Inchon victory. But it was an expression of the same temperament. The boldness that saw what the Navy could not at Inchon was the same boldness that failed to see what the Chinese would do. A commander who takes his own judgment as the measure of the risk will be right at Inchon and wrong at the Yalu, and a republic must plan for both.

The strongest objection

Here is the objection, as a defender of the cautious school would put it. Inchon succeeded by luck, and the lesson of success is exaggerated. The Joint Chiefs were right to doubt it, the Navy was right to doubt it, and a general who overrode them did so by force of personality, not by better analysis. If it had failed, the war would have been lost, the Marines destroyed, and the Perimeter overrun. To praise the gambler is to encourage the next one, and the next one may not be right.

I will answer in four points.

1. Boldness is not a synonym for luck. The reasoning that supported Inchon was sound: the enemy's strength was committed at Pusan, his supply line was long, and surprise was possible precisely because the site was hard. The execution depended on the Navy's skill and on the Marines' training. It was a calculated risk, with a stated rationale, and the rationale proved correct.
2. The cautious school also had its failures. Armies that refuse every risk lose in other ways, by attrition and delay. The Perimeter was not a safe alternative. It was a slow bleed.
3. The critics were right to raise the objections, and the process worked. A commander listened to the doubts, answered them and went ahead, and the planners made the operation succeed. That is how it ought to work. The failure, if there was one, was not in the debate before Inchon but in the lack of one before the Yalu.
4. The lesson is not that gamblers are right. It is that a free country needs both: commanders willing to take risks and a system of review that stops one commander's confidence from becoming the nation's policy.

What the Constitution says

Now the constitutional part of the argument, and I want to be exact. The Constitution gives Congress the power "To declare War" (Article I, Section 8, Clause 11) and makes the President "Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States" (Article II, Section 2). In June 1950, President Truman committed the country to a major war without asking Congress for a declaration, relying on his authority as Commander in Chief and on the Security Council's resolutions, and describing it as a police action. Congress funded the war but never declared it.

I believe that was a constitutional mistake, and it is worth saying so in a post that otherwise honors the men who fought. It set a precedent. The Founders gave the power to take the country to war to the legislature because they wanted the decision to be made slowly, openly and by the people's representatives. A war made by executive decision, under the authority of an international body, is what they were trying to prevent. The fact that the cause was just and the action brave does not change what the text says.

The related principle is civilian control. When MacArthur publicly contradicted the President's policy in the winter and spring of 1951, Truman relieved him of command on April 11, 1951. Whatever one thinks of the policy, the principle was right. The general serves the President, and the President serves the people. The story of the first American to teach that lesson is in George Washington Gave Up Power Twice and Changed What Leaders Could Be.

What Inchon asks of us

Three things.

First, it asks us to respect the planning and the nerve that made it work, the Navy's navigation, the Marines' training and the general's decision. A country that cannot do hard things is a country that will not be safe.

Second, it asks us to remember that victory is not the same as wisdom. The man who found the right answer at Inchon found the wrong answer six weeks later, and neither fact cancels the other. We should read the history for both.

Third, it asks us to ask the constitutional question before the shooting starts, not afterward. If the nation is going to fight, it should decide to, in the place the Constitution names.

For a comparison with the other winter campaigns Americans have survived, see Valley Forge, Bastogne and Chosin as Three Winters That Tested Americans.

The case in brief

1. After North Korea invaded on June 25, 1950, UN forces were bottled up in the Pusan Perimeter, and MacArthur proposed a landing far behind the enemy at Inchon.
2. The objections of the Joint Chiefs and the Navy were serious: the tides, the narrow channel, the seawalls, the fortress of Wolmi-do and the tight timing.
3. MacArthur argued that the difficulty guaranteed surprise, and on September 15, 1950, the landing succeeded, Seoul was retaken and the North Korean army was broken.
4. The same boldness led to the advance to the Yalu and the Chinese intervention, so the case is both a triumph and a warning.
5. The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war and makes the President Commander in Chief, and a free country should ask who decides before it fights.

What you can do: read Article I, Section 8 and Article II, Section 2 of the Constitution, then write to your member of Congress about its role in authorizing the use of force.