The NKPA was purpose-built and bountifully equipped by the Soviet Union for the sole mission of presenting the West with a fait accompli. An armored shock attack was expected to quickly overwhelm the fledgling ROK army, followed by a drive to the southern tip of Korea. The NKPA’s spearhead consisted of a brigade of T-34/85 tanks and massed artillery led by experienced Korean veterans of World War II Red Army campaigns. The NKPA was designed to carry out an inflexible plan with a limited objective and was generally successful until it lost the initiative outside Pusan. By late July, the NKPA was concentrated around the Pusan Perimeter, fully engaged in desperate combat with Lt. Gen. Walton H. Walker’s Eighth Army. Never having planned to fight a protracted conflict, the NKPA was handicapped by a logistical tail that stretched all the way back to Manchuria, under regular U.N. air interdiction.

Subscribe Today

• Did you enjoy our article?
• Read more in Military History magazine
• Subscribe online and save nearly 40%!!!
 

General MacArthur conceived of a bold amphibious envelopment through the western coastal port of Inchon in the first days after the North Korean invasion — even while his staff and Washington gloomily confronted the prospect of defeat. From the beginning he visualized a Marine assault force with a follow-on Army division, and by early July he was requesting the specialized forces required from the Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) in Washington. The first hastily drafted Inchon plan, Operation Blueheart, was developed by the ad hoc Joint Strategic Plans and Operations Group (JSPOG) under Colonel Donald Galloway in Tokyo, but it was canceled on July 12 due to deteriorating conditions outside Pusan. MacArthur remained intent on the concept, however, and on August 15 he directed newly arrived Maj. Gen. Clark Ruffner to take charge of JSPOG planning for an invasion to occur in mid-September. The date was determined by the prediction of acceptable tides at Inchon.

As forces were identified to take part in the landing, they were hastily trained where possible. The Army’s 7th Infantry Division was given rudimentary amphibious training, while in Japan, the land force headquarters, the instantly created X Corps conducted an intense three-day command-post exercise of the invasion and breakout just days before embarking for Korea. Marines assembling from around the world or engaged in combat in Pusan had little or no opportunity for specific training for the new operation.

Marshaling capable forces, particularly amphibious assault elements, was perhaps the most challenging aspect of Chromite. At the time, the entire Marine Corps strength was only 74,279 men on duty around the world, and while there were officially two Marine divisions, it required a herculean effort for the corps to muster even a partial one for Chromite. On July 2, MacArthur asked the JCS for a Marine regimental combat team (RCT). The next day he requested 1,200 landing craft operators, and on the 5th he requested an engineer amphibious special brigade. That same day the 1st Marine Provisional Brigade was formed around the 5th Marine Regiment at Camp Pendleton, Calif., which sailed for Japan on the 14th. During intense negotiations with Washington, MacArthur finally obtained commitments for the two regiments then available from the 1st Marine Division, with the addition of the 1st Marine Regiment and supporting arms. A full division was eventually authorized by stripping Marine security guards from American embassies and a battalion from the Mediterranean, and by calling up the entire Marine Reserves. Despite such efforts, the 1st Division’s third regiment, the 7th Marines, arrived too late for Chromite.

Initially the Army’s 1st Cavalry Division was designated for Blueheart, but after that plan was scrapped the division was rushed into Pusan. The 2nd Infantry Division was later pegged for Chromite before it too was thrown into Pusan. That left only the theater reserve, the 7th Infantry Division in Japan, which itself was denuded of officers, NCOs and specialists to fill out understrength divisions in Korea. After August 1, however, all Army combat replacements arriving from the United States were ordered diverted to the 7th, and these included highly qualified training cadre from the infantry and artillery schools with significant World War II experience. As a measure of the desperate need for manpower in 1950, though, MacArthur ordered on August 1 that the division be filled out with 8,000 untrained Koreans pressed into service from among thousands of refugees crowded into the Pusan Perimeter.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to