Five Thousand to One

The tide at Inchon is one of the largest in the world, and on the morning of 15 September 1950 it carried an invasion fleet over the mudflats, up to a seawall, and into the back of a war everyone thought was already lost. Marines went up scaling ladders in the fading light. Within two weeks they were fighting in the streets of Seoul; within a month a broken army was streaming north. It was audacious, it worked, and it belongs to the small class of battles that genuinely changed a war. It is also the foundation of one of the great self-authored legends of the twentieth century — and those two facts are not in tension. They are the whole story.

General Douglas MacArthur planned the Inchon landing, championed it against real doubt, and was vindicated by its success. All true. But the version that survives — the lone strategic genius who saw what no one else could, overruled a roomful of frightened admirals, and won the war at a stroke by sheer force of vision — is less a history than a monument, and MacArthur was its architect long before any historian arrived. He was, among his many talents, the most gifted self-promoter the U.S. Army ever produced. The battle was a triumph. The story of the battle is something he built.

This is the same move the magazine keeps finding — the true case that comes barnacled with invention, the real fire whose warmth gets sold and resold. Inchon is only the grandest example, because the stakes were highest and the myth-maker was a professional. So we did the ungracious thing and held the legend against the record.

Here is where the self-mythology stops being charming. A man who has just been proven a genius against 5,000-to-1 odds is a dangerous man to argue with, and MacArthur had made sure everyone knew the number. Flushed with Inchon, he drove his armies north past the 38th parallel toward the Chinese border, waving away every warning that China would not tolerate it, because the warnings were coming from the same sort of cautious men who had doubted him before — and he had been right and they had been wrong, hadn’t he? He had the receipt. Then China came across the Yalu in overwhelming force, and the triumphant advance became one of the longest retreats in American military history.

The infallibility that made Inchon possible is the same infallibility that made the catastrophe past it possible. You cannot fully separate them; they were the same trait, pointed first at a harbour and then at a border. Within months President Truman relieved him of command. The legend, by then, was too large to relieve — it outranked the man, and it survived him.

Strip away the scale and the medals and Inchon runs on the engine this magazine keeps taking apart. A brush with greatness gets converted into currency: the cabbie banks a fare, a Havana bar banks a dead novelist, and a general banks a tide. Each rounds up. Each is believed because the story is better than the check-able truth, and because we want it to be. MacArthur simply had a continent for a barroom and a press corps for an audience, and he was the rare teller who was also, genuinely, the man in the story.

Which is the part the audit has to hold with both hands. The landing was real. The landing was also, by the arithmetic of war, cheap — a couple of hundred Marine casualties in the first days. The retaking of Seoul that followed was street by bloody street, and cost many times more; the men who went north after that, and came back through the snow, paid most of all — for a confidence they did not author. So we audit the counting, not the counted. The legend is the general’s. The cost was everyone else’s. That is usually how the warmest stories are financed — but rarely is the bill this large, or this far from the man who wrote the story that ran it up.