Lack of Intelligence

In the words of its editors, the recent issue of Cosmopolitan contains one of the most explosive documents ever published. Major General Charles Willoughby wrote the article and directed it against newspapermen who criticized General MacArthur's Yalu River campaign last fall. But in blasting "the ragpickers of modern journalism" General Willoughby lets slip some interesting revelations about his own management of military intelligence.

The General heaps invective on the personalities of various itinerant scribes but he concentrates on the charge that these writers gave aid to the enemy by criticizing the accuracy and evaluation of the intelligence information supplied by Willoughby to MacArthur. In answering this criticism, Willoughby claims that he expected to encounter "the full force of Communist China at the end of the trail" but that restrictions on acrial reconnaisance flights prevented him from getting accurate estimates of Chinese forces until the Eighth Army first met the Chinese on November 24th. So our army was shoved into the ring like a blindfolded boxer. But British and Chinese Nationalist Intelligence had both acquired and passed on information on the Chinese forces by early September, so the implication is that Willoughby's intelligence service was incompetent and that he either ignored or failed to evaluate correctly information given him by more able services.

As a result of this inadequate information, our armies, were wide open for the massive Chinese counter-thrust that rolled them back below the thirty-eighth parallel. General MacArthur suddenly revised his estimate of the Chinese forces upward from sixty to two hundred thousand troops and admitted his hopes of facing only a token volunteer force of Chinese were shattered. This revelation that his estimate of enemy force was based on hope and publicly announced Chinese policy spotlights the failure of his military intelligence service. And the man responsible for this failure, General Willoughby, cannot explain it away merely by exploding against his critics.