re Inchon: you may not believe this, but the whole Inchon thing is a fascinating question and one to which I've given a lot of thought over the years.
Why? Because almost anybody sensible looking at the plans for Inchon thought it was an incredibly risky, incredibly irresponsible undertaking. Everything had to go just right for it to work--and in the real world, almost never does everything go right. And it was a huge operation, with potentially devastating consequences if it went south. So--going ahead with Inchon was like going to the craps table in a casino and dumping all your money on snake eyes. The only way it ever got approved was because MacArthur was dead set on it, and had such charisma, authority, and pig-headedness that he managed to get everybody to agree against their better judgment.
So, was the Inchon landing a sensible thing to try? This is the fascinating part of the question. I say no--just like I would say one shouldn't take one's entire stake and bet on snake eyes, or go buy lottery tickets with it. But hey, sometimes snake eyes hits, and sometimes people win the lottery. Everything went right, and Inchon turned out to be a breathtaking success. (Probably too much of one, but that's another story.)
So now we all want to say Inchon was a great idea, but that's only because we know that it worked. The proper way to judge a policy, IMHO, is on the basis of what the decisionmaker in question could have reasonably been expected to know at the time the decision was made. By that logic, one can make a strong case that the Joint Chiefs were right and MacArthur wrong--it was a risky gamble that was not worth taking. Trying saying that in public, however, and you'll get some mighty strange looks, I tell you...
tb@thinkstoomuch.com |
