But one of the strongest arguments in Walker’s defense is that while fighting the enemy, he still had to negotiate the bizarre command-and-control system. By any measure of sound military management, X Corps should have come under Eighth Army’s control as soon as the forces linked up. That didn’t happen. X Corps continued to report directly to FEC. Worse yet, MacArthur had put Almond in command of X Corps and retained him as FEC chief of staff. Thus, Almond had direct access to MacArthur, but Walker had to go through the X Corps commander (in his FEC chief hat) to reach MacArthur. There was no precedent for such an arrangement in all of military history, and it was a fiasco.

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Despite this absurd command architecture, the Joint Chiefs of Staff were mulling Walker’s relief when he was killed in a traffic accident on Dec. 23, 1950. In his hands-on style, the Eighth Army commander had been racing his jeep over icy roads to inspect forward battlefield positions. Captain Sam S. Walker (who retired from the Army as a full general in 1978) escorted his father’s body back to the United States.

Whatever else MacArthur may have accomplished in Korea, he managed to secure a third star for his controversial chief of staff/X Corps commander. (Almond retired as a lieutenant general in 1953 after serving as commandant of the Army War College.) But justice sometimes prevails. When Eugene Landrum retired from the Army in February 1951, he was allowed to do so in his former rank of major general.

At Pusan, Walker had proved that a mobile defense was doable and demonstrated how to do it. As a result, the Army finally included the concept in the 1954 edition of FM 100-5, its primary operations field manual. Despite being under a cloud at the time of his death, Walker was promoted posthumously to four-star rank in January 1951. He may not have been a perfect general officer, but he was certainly one of America’s greatest field commanders.

For additional reading, David Zabecki recommends: The Forgotten War, by Clay Blair, and South to the Naktong, North to the Yalu, by Roy E. Appleman.

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