Education of a General

(See Cover)

A squadron of the British fleet, entrusted to Commodore Martin, suddenly appeared in the Bay of Naples [m 1742], and threatened an immediate bombardment unless the King would engage in writing to withdraw his troops from the Spanish army, and to observe in future a strict neutrality. The Neapolitan court, wholly unprepared for the defense of the city, endeavored to elude the demand by prolonging the negotiation. But the gallant Englishman...laid his watch upon the table in his cabin, and told the negotiators that their answer must be given within the space of an hour, or that the bombardment should begin. This proceeding, however railed at by the diplomatists as contrary to all form and etiquette, produced a result such as they had seldom attained by protocols. Within the hour [the King] acquiesced in the required terms.

--Lord Mahon, History of England.

In Tokyo the U.S. has a four-star general who--like most of his countrymen--would like nothing better than to lay his watch on the table and tell the Communists at Panmunjom to sign an armistice, or else. The man is General Mark Wayne Clark, 56, U.S. Far East commander, U.N. commander in Korea, commander of the U.S. security forces in newly sovereign Japan. But despite obvious parallels, Clark's situation is somewhat different from that of the intrepid British commodore of 1742. In 1952, the Communists have already drawn out the negotiations so long that in North Korea, at least, they are well prepared to resist attack. And in this age of instant communications, the "diplomatists" can easily restrain Clark from any move that, to them, seems too audacious.

Yet someone has to do something. On this Grand & Glorious Fourth, when orators traditionally remind the nation of the dream of freedom, the fighting spirit, the hatred of tyranny and the sense of purpose that gave it birth, the U.S. is engaged in a frustrating, distant war that seems to have lost its meaning. It has been called a "police action," but the police are sitting in a tent arguing with the criminals.

The Korean war has been going on for two years (as of June 25), the truce talks for a year (as of July 10). The war has pinned down the flower of the U.S. fighting forces and is costing $5 billion a year. Only one-tenth of a nation (the fighting men, their families and friends) pay much attention to it.

To conduct this war, and if possible to end it on favorable terms, the U.S. has need of a new species of general, to parry a kind of enemy that was not described in the textbooks at West Point in 1917, and whose trucemaking tactics are not to be found in Army Field Manual 27-10 under "Intercourse Between Belligerents" or "Capitulations and Armistices." The U.S. has not grown such a general yet, but a good many generals, late in life, are going through elementary classes. Now that Eisenhower, MacArthur, Marshall and Clay are in mufti, Mark Wayne Clark has probably had more such political experience than any U.S. general on active duty.

Holding Attack. Last April, Mark Clark was head of the Army Field Forces, a job which required him to supervise the state of training of U.S. troops at bases in the U.S. One morning while he was on tour and taking a shower at Camp Roberts in California, an orderly came to report an incoming telephone call. "Who is it?" Clark yelled through the rush of running water. Cried the orderly: "Somebody who says his name's Bradley." On the phone, Omar N. Bradley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Clark that he was ticketed for the Tokyo job, to succeed Matt Ridgway.

Clark flew back to Washington, conferred long and hard with top military and civilian policymakers, and visited the U.N. in New York, where he talked with Trygve Lie and Warren Austin. He took off for Japan with a briefcase stuffed with reports, which he read en route.

With half an eye Mark Clark, who has studied Communist strategy before, could see what the Communists' year-long truce operation really was. It was not "negotiating" at all; it was a Communist holding attack--that is, an action by which your enemy pins you down on one sector while he builds up preponderant force on another sector. Breaking up this attack was soon to engage Clark's major attention, but when he landed at Tokyo's Haneda airport he had to deal at once with an urgent crisis--the Dodd-Colson coup engineered by the Red prisoners on Koje Island.

Mark Clark moved promptly to clean up the mess; although he cleared all his moves with Washington, he initiated most of them himself. He published the disgraceful messages that led. to Dodd's release--lest the Communists strengthen their propaganda barrage by publishing them first. He reversed the verdict of an Army inquiry board which cleared Colson and Dodd of blame, and persuaded Washington to bust them to colonels. He detached the now celebrated Haydon L. Boatner from a combat job and sent him to Koje with orders to regain control of the prison camp. Boatner did.

Clark sized up the rest of his domain. To run the Eighth Army, he has a tried and proven combat man in General James Van Fleet. U.S. relations with the troublesome Syngman Rhee government are handled through the embassy in Pusan (although, in the ambassador's absence, Van Fleet in person recently admonished Rhee). U.S. business with the Japanese government, sensitive and proud of its new sovereignty, is transacted through the embassy in Tokyo, where Mark Clark's old friend from North Africa days, Robert Murphy, is ambassador.

Buddy System. Whereas relations between Ambassador Bob Murphy and Matt Ridgway used to be on the stiff and formal side, Clark and Murphy soon began to settle things with friendly chats on the telephone.

In an age when the line between political and military affairs is blurred or nonexistent, Clark believes in what he calls the "buddy system"--a political man and a military man working together. "I've seen too many places," he says, "where the political and the military spent most of their time fighting each other, despite the fact that they were on the same side. In the past, many American generals were inclined to say of politics: 'To hell with it, let's talk politics later.' But you can't do it this way any more."

As a graceful gesture to the Japanese, the Far East headquarters have now been moved out of the Dai Ichi Building, seven year symbol of U.S. prestige and domination, to a group of long, buff-colored buildings on Tokyo's outskirts, which once housed the Japanese War Ministry.

Having appraised his command and ticked off what changes he wanted made, Clark turned to the Korean dilemma. His 8:30 a.m. briefers gave him the figures on the enemy buildup--some 1,800 planes, 1,000,000 men, vast piles of war material. The general could see that the enemy, by his holding attack at the truce table, had greatly improved his position since a year ago. How had this come about?

Toe the Line. When Lieut. General Nam II and his partners in crime came to the truce table at Kaesong last July 10, the Communist armies were in bad shape. From their last two spring offensives, they had reeled back with losses of probably 250,000 men. Epidemics of some sort were raging in North Korea, and presumably further crippling the Red fighting forces. Moreover, the Eighth Army, which Matt Ridgway had turned into a first-class fighting machine, had proved by its "meat-grinder" counteroffensives that it could grind some 90 miles farther north to the line where the peninsula widens out, swallowing up Pyongyang (the North Koreans' capital, which they had lost once before) and some 15,000 more square miles of Red territory.

The U.N. generals and admirals understood perfectly well that it was desperation that brought the Chinese and North Koreans to the conference table. Some on the U.N. side suspected from the first that the enemy did not intend to make peace, but only to win a breathing spell. The U.N. made it plain to the Communists that the fighting would go on until the armistice was signed and sealed. The U.N. morale was high; the prevalent attitude was that the enemy would have to toe the line if he wanted a truce. The State Department thought the truce talks might last as long as four weeks. In the year that has followed, the Washington masterminds have allowed the high morale, the healthy pugnacity, to be frittered away. That year is a profitable lesson in the education of a general.

When Vice Admiral Charles Turner Joy and his team reached Kaesong for the first session, they found the city taken over by armed Communists. By propaganda and picture, the Reds represented themselves as victors. Ridgway squelched that with an ultimatum; neutralize Kaesong or no more truce talks. The Reds succumbed. After some further jockeying for face, which Ridgway won hands down, the delegates got on to formulate an agenda.

Breakoff & Backfire. This was the substance and order of the agenda that emerged: 1) first adopt the agenda; 2) locate the cease-fire line; 3) provide safeguards for the truce; 4) arrange exchange of prisoners; 5) and finally, agree on recommendations (not binding) to the belligerent governments. In putting the cease-fire line at the top of the substantive items, the wily Reds had laid a trap which the U.N. woke up to, later on.

The first trouble came when the U.N. made its demand for a cease-fire line along the battlefront. Enemy negotiators seemed to be taken aback; Dean Acheson, Trygve Lie and even Matt Ridgway had indicated that peace might be made on the 38th parallel. The Reds stood fast for the 38th parallel (which the U.N. regarded as "indefensible"); deadlock ensued. Meanwhile, fighting on the battlefronts had slacked off, although the Reds were already piling up fresh manpower and supplies in a new buildup. The enemy could not help but see that he might get what he wanted--relief from pressure--if he could stall for time. The Communists charged a U.N. air violation of the Kaesong site, laid out some clumsily faked "evidence" and broke off the talks for two months.

This Red maneuver backfired. Worried over the prospect of another enemy offensive, the U.N. commanders began a series of "limited offensives," designed to kill Communists, knock the enemy off strategic parcels of high ground and disrupt his buildup. This was the period of Bloody Ridge, Heartbreak Ridge, the Punchbowl and the siege of Kumsong. These actions cost the U.N. some casualties, but they cost the Reds a great many more. Matt Ridgway added to the pressure by warning the Reds that the farther the battlefront moved into North Korea, the farther north the eventual cease-fire line would be.

In October the Reds gave up Kaesong as a truce site, came back to the table at Panmunjom, and agreed to the U.N. demand for a cease-fire line along the battlefront. Optimism burgeoned; to the U.N., somewhat chastened by the long delay, peace seemed just around the corner.

Impeccable Logic. At this point, however, the U.N. delegates woke up to the Communist trap. If a cease-fire line were fixed ahead of the other three items, then the U.N. would find it psychologically difficult to fight for territory that would have to be given back when the truce was signed. But if there were no hard fighting, the enemy would be relieved of pressure, and he could stall endlessly over the remainder of the agenda. The admirals and generals at Panmunjom saw that quite clearly--and so, presumably, did Matt Ridgway. Admiral Joy had a sarcastic phrase for what the enemy was trying to get without paying for it: Joy called it a "de facto cease-fire." The U.N. delegates proposed that the cease-fire line be left to drift with the fighting line, and be fixed as the last order of business before the truce was signed. With impeccable courtroom logic, the Reds pointed out that this would be upsetting the order of the agenda. Nevertheless, the U.N. admirals and generals were dead set against giving the Reds their de facto cease-fire--and to hell with the order of the agenda.

But the Reds got the de facto cease-fire anyhow. For at this point, Washington intervened with a big plan; fix a tentative line now, along the battlefront, and if the remaining agenda items can be thrashed out in 30 days, the tentative line becomes the permanent one for the armistice. Otherwise, the tentative agreement on the line would expire, and North Korean territory would again be--theoretically--up for grabs. The U.N. delegates offered this plan to the enemy, and the Reds accepted.

Adroit Timing. When the 30-day trial went into effect, a great quiet descended on the battlefront. At Panmunjom the negotiators took up the problems of safeguarding the truce--with inspection and exchange of prisoners. The delegates were heavily embroiled with these matters when the 30-day deadline passed.

Here the Red timing was adroit. A few days before the 30-day agreement expired, the enemy released the names of some 12,000 U.N. prisoners, including 3,000 Americans. The U.S. public was naturally excited over this; where were the other 8,000 U.S. soldiers reported missing in action? In the excitement, the failure of the U.N. strategists to resume the war went almost unnoticed.

Broken only by occasional small actions which altered the battle line hardly at all, the lull in the fighting has continued up to this week. The enemy, so shattered and bloody last July, had the upper hand now, and he kept it. There was no pressure on him except from the air, which he countered with his jets and hard-hitting anti-aircraft defenses. The U.N. had no policy except to try beating down the Red negotiators "with verbal maneuvers and high-flown rhetoric--which had no more effect than so much birdshot against a tank.

In February, under the label "Operation Quagmire," Matt Ridgway put out a bitter analysis of the Communist truce tactics: "The Communist plan...has called for a temporary show of progress following each period of complete delay. The Communists have known that, at certain times throughout the talks, they must inject a certain modicum of achievement as the price for their main program of bargaining inertia. This is part of the Communist war of nerves. Hope must be raised and dashed .according to schedule" (TIME, Feb. 18). This analysis seemed correct at the time; it still seems so today.

Principles of War. A startling fact emerges from this unhappy story. Although Ridgway, Joy & Co. were outmaneuvered on occasion, they came off, on the whole, with a much better score than the Metternichs and Talleyrands of Washington. It now appears that the military men were right about the truce talks--military pressure should have been kept up against the Communists to dissuade them from stalling.

Military men are supposed to be political innocents, and some of them undoubtedly are. But the top policy group in Washington, including the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the civilian secretaries and the State Department, are pulled one way by the misgivings of allies, tugged another by election-year politics; they keep ever in mind (as they certainly should) the possibility of war in Europe or over Detroit--but are apt to dismiss as "localitis" any forthright attempt to settle the war in Korea. Any shavetail out of West Point could have put his finger on the Kaesong-Panmunjom fallacy by quoting Clausewitz: "If our opponent is to do our will, we must put him in a position more disadvantageous to him than the sacrifice...we demand." In Korea, the U.N. had the Communists at a disadvantage but let them get away.

The Isolated. Such situations as Panmunjom could hardly have been imagined, either by cadets or by their most experienced instructors, when Clark graduated from the Point. The nation then was fighting Wilhelm II's Germans, who were supposed to be barbarians but who at least fought a traditional kind of war.

Mark Clark is a product of the military environment since early childhood. Son of a career officer, he was born on an Army post--at Madison Barracks, N.Y. He was wounded in France; after World War I he began his slow climb up the rungs. He was a captain for 13 years. It was a period when career officers were almost wholly isolated from civilian affairs and political life. They lived with their families in little colonies at scattered garrisons or foreign posts, or were buried in the depths of the Washington bureaucracy. The public was disillusioned with World War I, indignant at the munitions makers, and it associated the professional soldiers with the "Merchants of Death." The military were expected to stay away from politics. Most of them were glad to.

This was the environment that produced George Patton, a fine, slashing tactician but who thought the struggle between Nazis and anti-Nazis was just like a lot of Democrats and Republicans. Yet a clutch of wiser men rose from this ruck and were ready when World War II demanded them. These were men who, in the between-the-wars years, improved their hours at staff and command schools; while junior officers, they were spotted and ticketed for bigger jobs. The Army school system produced a gifted and acute coalition leader, Ike Eisenhower; it produced Bradley, MacArthur, and other strategists and tacticians who helped win the war. It produced a Secretary of State, a Secretary of Defense, an Ambassador to Moscow, proconsuls in Berlin, Vienna, Tokyo.

Standard Model. In many ways Clark is a standard assembly-line model. U.S. generals are supposed to avoid such dreamy and imprecise stuff as highbrow art, music and books; Clark fishes and reads the Satevepost. Card games are okay; in the last two weeks Clark has had time for just one go at canasta with his wife (he won). U.S. generals are not supposed to get fat, lest they look bad in uniform; Clark is lean, tall (6 ft. 2 in.) and rangy. When they are afoot, U.S. generals are expected to stride, not amble; Clark strides. In the European theater, fraternization with troops was a vogue; Clark went swimming and played baseball with soldiers. He takes care always to ask his jeep driver's name, and to shake his hand. Accessibility was another vogue; Clark had the inevitable sign on his door that read: "Enter, don't knock."

Mark Clark is a proud and ambitious man; almost all good generals are. His enemies and critics say also that he is impulsive and overfond of publicity. In part these opinions are a recollection of the brash young general, enamored with cloak & dagger stuff, that Clark was ten years ago but is no longer; in part these opinions reflect the nervousness of Europeans, especially the British, when the U.S. puts any forceful man in the Far East. It so happens that the U.S. needs an aggressive, clearheaded and self-confident man in Tokyo--and Mark Clark is just that.

The important way in which Clark differs from the run-of-mine general is in an unusual flexibility, adaptability, capacity for growth and for new ideas. An officer in Tokyo who knew Clark in Italy says that he was then "brash and hotheaded," but now is a "slick, well-balanced article who seldom zigs when he ought to zag." Soon after World War II, Clark realized that U.S. military men were not going to enjoy (or suffer) the same isolation from civilian life and political affairs that they had after World War I.

His political education began in 1942, when he was assigned to deal with the slippery French in Africa. In dealing with Darlan and Giraud, two men of differing temperament and loyalty, he sometimes solved his problems by clamping one or the other under house arrest. At that time he was addicted to table-pounding. It was probably well that Bob Murphy was there to keep Clark under control.

But it was a beginning. After World War II, he studied the Russians in action at two of the four-nation Councils of Foreign Ministers. As U.S. occupation commander for Austria (1945-47), he was a little unsure of himself at first, but covered it up well and soon learned to fence with, and often to outwit, his Soviet opposite number, Marshal I. S. Konev. Clark recalls that Konev once presented ten demands, all of which the American found unsuitable. "Marshal Konev," said Clark, "what would you do if I accepted all these demands?" In that case, the Russian answered candidly, he would be back with ten more demands the next day.

Clark soon perceived that the Russians were not in the least interested in rebuilding Austria but only in capturing or ruining it. From that vantage point, he saw that the Communists had the same intentions toward the whole non-Communist world. The Russian methods were new-- propaganda, intimidation, infiltration, blockade, camouflage, political feints, political power plays, small proxy wars, and all the rest--but such methods all had their analogues in traditional war, and the goal was the same old goal: destruction of the enemy. So the new methods did not dislodge the base of the military man's thinking. They added to his curriculum.

In Tokyo, after Mark Clark had had a chance to appraise the Panmunjom deadlock, he said: "The more you deal with these fellows [the Communists], whether at Vienna, London, Moscow or Panmunjom, the more you realize that their goal is the same simple, unchanging one of world domination. My experience has been that when you meet them with a show of force and with determination, they stop, look and listen."

Vulnerable Spots. After two years of war, one year of truce talks, the Korean question is still: Win, lose or draw? Mark Clark cannot be wholly, or even largely, responsible for the outcome. Washington makes policy; Clark is the executive. Yet there is much that he can do and is doing.

He appraised as urgent the need for resuming pressure on the enemy. He advised his senior delegate at Panmunjom, Major General William Harrison, to take three-day recesses when the Communists started repeating themselves, and these little walkouts have caused the enemy some obvious pain, perhaps some misgivings. The last time Harrison, taking his four teammates with him, started to walk out, North Korea's Nam II rose and stretched out his arm, as if pleading. When it became clear that Nam had nothing new to say, Harrison walked out.

This was pressure with a toothpick. For pressure with a sledgehammer, Clark looked over the air target data and spotted the enemy's great power plants on the Yalu. He reported to Washington that the plants were supplying current for munitions factories, which were feeding arms into North Korea, and asked for the go-ahead to bomb them. Washington gave it. U.N. bombers smashed the plants last fortnight (TIME, June 30) and again last week. The value of the raids, lessened though they have been by the failure to forewarn the U.N. allies (see FOREIGN NEWS), has already been registered in the form of shrill Red complaints at the truce table.

If Clark can find more vulnerable spots, and get the necessary green lights for more pressure, he may get an improvement in the situation from which further improvements can be planned. If the enemy again finds himself at a Clausewitzian disadvantage. Mark Clark might even, just possibly, force a truce.

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