Soldiers of the U.S. Army 5th Regimental Combat Team engage North Korean troops along the Naktong River in 1950. (National Archives)

‘There will be no Dunkirk, there will be no Bataan. A retreat to Pusan would be one of the greatest butcheries in history. We must fight until the end’

A short, fat, heavy drinker with a pugnacious scowl that led his troops to call him “Bulldog,” Lieutenant General Walton H. Walker would not pass muster in today’s appearance-conscious U.S. Army. Yet in 1950, his skill as a combat commander enabled him to win one of the most brilliantly fought defensive battles in all of military history. That victory—the defense of the Pusan Perimeter in the first months of the Korean War—gave United Nations forces time to muster the men, equipment and political will necessary to blunt the first communist military onslaught of the Cold War.

Subscribe Today

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

Texas-born and schooled at West Point, Walton Walker first went to war during the 1914 Vera Cruz Expedition. He went on to fight in World Wars I and II, and in the latter conflict he was General George S. Patton’s most aggressive corps commander. Indeed, Walker’s XX Corps earned the nickname “Ghost Corps,” a reference to the lightning armored thrusts he spearheaded across Europe.

Walker’s professional star only began to dim when he headed up the U.S. Eighth Army in postwar occupied Japan. He arrived in September 1948 to assume command of the army forces under General of the Army Douglas MacArthur’s Far East Command (FEC). Since the end of World War II, the Eighth Army’s four divisions had been the backbone of the occupation force, serving in an essentially constabulary role. During its time in Japan, the Eighth Army had degraded into a hollow force. Most regiments had shrunk from three to two battalions and lost their tank companies; light tanks substituted for medium tanks in the divisional armored battalions; few of the divisional artilleries claimed full complements of guns; most of the men were poorly trained and out of shape; and despite the relatively recent end of World War II, only about 10 percent of Walker’s troops were combat veterans.

Walker started an immediate rebuilding program to return his command to combat readiness, but he faced even greater challenges. Congress had eliminated the Eighth Army’s subordinate corps headquarters and corps artillery units in a misguided budgetary move, effectively making Walker a field commander, directly controlling divisions without the standard support structures. The command architecture above Walker was no better. A joint command, FEC was supposed to incorporate subordinate commands from each of the services, each with its own reporting and support channels leading to the Pentagon. While the Air Force and Navy both had such commands within FEC, the Army did not. As an Army officer, MacArthur insisted on micromanaging all Army-specific issues in his theater.

Given MacArthur’s near Olympian status as conqueror of Japan and the only five-star general still on active duty in 1949, he pretty much got his way on everything. Unfortunately for Walker, MacArthur was an aloof and almost inaccessible commander. As a corps commander in World War II, Walker had enjoyed unrestricted access to his army commander, Patton, and frequent contact with the army group commander, General Omar Bradley. Walker even dealt with the theater commander, General Dwight Eisenhower, a personal friend. But in Japan and later Korea, Walker was forced to channel all communications with MacArthur almost exclusively through FEC’s chief of staff, Maj. Gen. Edward Almond.

Known to some on the FEC staff as “Iago”—Shakespeare’s personification of duplicity and deceit—Almond was widely disliked and distrusted by his peers and subordinates and remains one of the most controversial figures in modern American military history. A failure as commander of the 92nd Infantry Division in World War II, Almond was deeply jealous of Walker’s outstanding record as a corps commander and kept him walled off from MacArthur, who meanwhile did everything he could to help Almond burnish his record and position himself for an eventual third star.

Help HistoryNet by bookmarking to