In War There Is No Substitute for Victory

In War There Is No Substitute for Victory. General Douglas MacArthur. During the first year of the Korean War, President Harry Truman and General Douglas MacArthur, the man Truman put in charge, started to have fundamental disagreements about the methods and overall purpose of the war. MacArthur came to believe that Truman was forcing him to fight without allowing him to win. After the Chinese entered the war on the side of the North Koreans in November 1950, the General called for the bombing of Chinese bases, a blockade of China, and possible nuclear strikes on the Chinese. Truman, however, saw the conflict in Korea as a limited war with limited goals. He did not want to see the Korean conflict escalate into an all-out war on the Asian mainland, a place that Truman saw as only a small theater of the Cold War. For Truman, Europe and the Soviet Union were the main stage and fighting a full-scale war with the Chinese would be in the words of Truman's Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, General Omar Bradley, “the wrong war, at the wrong place, at the wrong time, and with the wrong enemy."

When General MacArthur publicly criticized Truman and his handling of the war, the President fired him on April 11, 1951. Eight days after his firing, MacArthur gave a rousing speech before a joint session of Congress in which he uttered the quote above. In essence, the General was criticizing the policy of containment because he believed that it asked military commanders to lead men into battle without giving them all necessary means to win total victory. For world war two veterans like MacArthur, there was no substitute for victory in war, but for politicians like Truman and many of the presidents who followed him during the Cold War, containment of communism became a legitimate substitute-albeit, a very unsatisfactory one at times. When a much longer, costlier, and less successful war of containment began to drag on in Vietnam in the 1960s, many Americans, not just soldiers, marines, seamen, and airmen, began to question whether or not the containment policy was fundamentally sound in the first place.