Inchon: Ladders For The Seawall

On July 10th, 1950, General Douglas MacArthur stood at the wall map in his Tokyo headquarters, touched the stem of his corncob pipe to the port of Inchon, and told the commander of the Fleet Marine Force in the Pacific that if he had the 1st Marine Division he would land it there and cut the North Korean army off from everything behind it. The division barely existed. Its best regiment was about to sail for Pusan as the brigade, and about 3,400 Marines were left at Camp Pendleton. General Shepherd promised MacArthur the division anyway, ready to land by September 15th, without telling the Commandant.

This episode covers the sixty-seven days between that promise and the landing. The Joint Chiefs called Inchon the riskiest proposal they had ever heard and refused the division, then gave in five days later when MacArthur said he would land with or without it. Thirteen thousand Marines reached Camp Pendleton in a week, most of them reservists who had been civilians a month before, and sailed in nineteen ships with weapons that had sat in storage since 1945. In Tokyo the Navy's planners laid out the tides, the mud, and the seawalls and told MacArthur the best they could say was that Inchon was not impossible. He answered that the North Koreans would think the same thing, and that was why it would work. Fifteen miles from the port, a Navy lieutenant went ashore on an island with a radio and two South Korean officers, recruited 150 island teenagers as scouts, and sent Tokyo the answers the photographs could not give.

The episode ends on September 8th. The Marines were already filing aboard their ships. They had one week.

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