Korean War: Operation Chromite

 | Military History  | 0 comments  |  Print This Post  |  Email This Post

Two decisive and interrelated factors shaped the operation’s outcome. The first was MacArthur’s faith, persistence and talent in selling the concept, not only to Washington but also to the doubters within his own command. The second was the United States’ ability to quickly marshal appropriate forces in a highly constrained environment. By 1950, a single U.S. Army division defended all of Europe from more than 100 Soviet divisions. The Marine Corps had to scour the world to come up with an ad hoc division for its primary mission, a strategic amphibious assault on a defended shore. The Navy was forced to hastily pull LSTs from mothballs and man them with Japanese crews, while the U.S. Air Force stripped the Air National Guard of World War II veteran North American F-51D Mustang fighters and pilots in order to provide basic close air support.

Underlying those two factors in Chromite’s ultimate success was the less glamorous phenomenon of superb staff work behind the scenes at Far East Command, in JSPOG, within the scratch-built X Corps and particularly the dedicated Navy and Marine staffs of Admiral Doyle and General Smith. Finally, as with most successful military endeavors, there was a great deal of luck involved.

For the North Koreans, Inchon was emblematic of the weakness behind its whole scheme to unify Korea. All their hopes of quick success were dashed on the jury-rigged U.N. defense outside Pusan. Inchon sealed their fate. Nonetheless, North Korea had nearly succeeded. It bargained on a lack of will, interest and capability on the part of the United States. Given the signals emanating from Washington, and considering the state of the U.S. military at the time, its analysis was justified. But North Korea underestimated U.S. prospects for mounting so determined a reaction, and it could not have predicted a U.N.-sponsored Allied effort that ultimately involved forces from 16 nations. North Korea gambled and lost.

Operation Chromite did not introduce any fundamentally new aspects to the art of war. Rather, the operation served to reinforce traditional lessons, such as the importance of maintaining trained and ready forces to deter aggression or confront a contingency, the priceless value of sure-footed staff work, and the tangible benefits of innovation, flexibility and individual resourcefulness — all qualities on which Americans pride themselves.

MacArthur identified a strategic opportunity, managed to cobble together forces to execute a plan and then permitted his commanders and troops to pull it off. The Inchon invasion was undoubtedly the right course of action at that juncture in the fighting and it opened up numerous options for how, when and where to actually end the war. That MacArthur and the administration in Washington subsequently failed to secure the hard-won victory illustrates the danger of military actions out of sync with broader political realities.

This article was written by Jim Dorschner and originally published in the September 2005 issue of Military History magazine. For more great articles be sure to subscribe to Military History magazine today!

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to

Tags: 20th - 21st Century, Amphibious Operations, Historical Conflicts, Korean War

You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.