'Great Betrayal'
No United Kingdom representative was present when General MacArthur was buried, with pharaonic splendour, in a Napoleonic sarco- phagus, at Norfolk, Virginia. I thought the stir caused by the posthumous publication of MacArthur's wild attack on Britain was rather unnecessary. His remarks were to the effect that in Korea he was the victim of 'a great betrayal,' engineered by the British and the Truman- Acheson-Marshall cabal of Europe-firsters. In his long, biography of MacArthur published in 1956, General Courtney Whitney, his long-time ADC and 'Secretary of State' in Tokyo, played all possible variations on this theme of a great conspiracy against MacArthur to prevent him winning the Korean war. Whitney told us also in some detail of MacArthur's plan in 1951 to seal off Korea with a belt of radioactive cobalt waste along the Yalu. and to destroy the Chinese
Communist forces in a super-Inchon using half a million UN and Kuomintang troops. The pur- pose of all this, of course, was to prove that MacArthur was always right, and the arch- antagonist, Harry Truman, always wrong.
It is worth remembering, I think, that two points made by MacArthur's domestic opponents are as valid now as in 1951. In the first place, MacArthur's Intelligence never found out that a third of a million Red Chinese troops crossed the Yalu until it was too late. And, secondly, MacArthur's over-extended dispositions during the hubristic gamble of his drive to the Yalu in autumn, 1950, gave the Chinese their chance of winning a decisive victory over the US Eighth Army on the Chongchon River—so reconquering North Korea. MacArthur's strategy on this occa- sion has been questioned in several US service histories of the war. Is it significant that the US Army history of the Chongchon has still not been published?
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