A Slight Correction

On his first day on the stand, Army Chief of Staff J. Lawton Collins hurled in a grenade. Grey, prow-jawed "Lightning Joe" was asked whether MacArthur had ever disobeyed a directive. Bradley and Marshall had said no. Said General Collins: "There was one specific incident that did occur . . . one of the instructions that the Joint Chiefs had issued to General MacArthur was that he would not use anything but Korean troops on the [Yalu] frontier, and he did not comply with that. He sent American forces directly to the frontier without advising us ahead of time on it, and when we asked him, challenging his doing this, he said that he did it because of military necessity . . ."

From MacArthur's headquarters at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel came a sharp rebuttal from Major General Courtney Whitney: "It had been the original policy agreed upon by everyone that, if possible, Korean troops should be utilized to occupy the area immediately south of the Yalu once that area was secured by our forces. As the ferocity of the campaign increased, however, it became impossible to accomplish the objective of clearing North Korea of enemy forces without the maximum employment of all our forces. The comparatively light South Koreans who first reached the Yalu area were destroyed, and it became necessary to utilize all units of the command . . . The Joint Chiefs were fully informed . . ."

Next day, Collins himself was a little sheepish about his remarks. Senator Harry Cain of Washington confronted him: "I think you unintentionally, and I emphasize that word, unintentionally, did a first-rate hatchet job on General MacArthur, and certainly you led the nation to believe that General MacArthur violated a field directive." By then, Joe Collins had already retreated to a safer position. It was not a "directive" that MacArthur had violated, but a "policy clearly enunciated ... I did not state it was a disobedience or an insubordination."

But the fact that MacArthur had disregarded policy in some cases without consulting the J.C.S., Collins said, led them to fear that "perhaps the thing might be done in some other instance of a more serious nature." He himself had thought that MacArthur might have to be dismissed, but did not recommend it "because I did not know that the Commander in Chief had apparently reached the point where he was fed up."

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