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were not seen in Beijing in the same period, reappearing for the funeral of Jen Pi-shih on October 27. 26 But the Americans resumed their advance, as did the North Korean–Chinese strategy of luring them deep into the interior of North Korea, thus to stretch their supply lines, wait for winter, and gain time for a dramatic reversal on the battlefield.
    MacArthur and his G-2 chief, Charles Willoughby, trusted onlythemselves, and had an intuitive approach to intelligence that mingled the hard facts of enemy capability with hunches about the enemy’s presumed ethnic and racial qualities (“Chinamen can’t fight”). This combined with MacArthur’s “personal infallibility theory of intelligence,” in which he “created his own intelligence organization, interpreted its results and acted upon his own analysis.” 27 When the CIA was formed it threatened MacArthur’s exclusive intelligence theater in the Pacific and J. Edgar Hoover’s in Latin America. MacArthur and Willoughby thus continued the “interdiction” that they practiced against the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in the Pacific War. Although the CIA did function in Japan and Korea before June 1950, operatives had to either get permission from Willoughby or hide themselves from MacArthur’s G-2 (as well as the enemy target). Effective liaison in the handling of information barely existed. At the late date of March 1950 some minimal cooperation ensued when Gen. J. Lawton Collins of the JCS asked that MacArthur share with them Willoughby’s reports on China and areas near to it.
    On Thanksgiving Day (November 23) the troops in the field had turkey dinners with all the trimmings—shrimp cocktail, mashed potatoes, dressing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin pie. They did not know that thousands of Chinese soldiers surrounded them, carrying “a bag of millet meal” and wearing tennis shoes at 30°F below zero. (The North Koreans and Chinese had “one man back to support one man forward,” Thompson wrote; the Americans had nine back and one forward—and “scores of tins, of candy, Coca-cola, and toilet supplies.”) 28 The next day MacArthur launched his euphemistically titled “reconnaissance in force,” a general offensive all along the battle line. He described it as a “massive compression and envelopment,” a “pincer” movement to trap remaining KPA forces. Once again American and South Korean forces were able to run north unimpeded. The offensive rolled forward for three days against little or no resistance, with ROK units succeeding in entering the northeastern industrial city of Chongjin. MacArthur launched the marines toward the Changjin Reservoir (known by its Japanese name, Chosin, in the American literature) and sent the 7th Division north of the Unggi River, in spite of temperatures as low as 22 degrees below zero. Within a week the 7th Division had secured Kim Il Sung’s heartland of Kapsan, and reached Hyesan on the Yalu River against no resistance.

     
    Gen. Douglas MacArthur surveys Korea from
The Bataan
on the eve of the “reconnaissance in force.”
U.S. National Archives
     
    Finally CIA daily reports caught the pattern of enemy rearward displacement, arguing that such withdrawals had in the past preceded offensive action, and noting warily that there were “large, coordinated and well-organized guerrilla forces in the rear area” behind the Allied forces, along with guerrilla occupation of “substantial areas in southwest Korea.” But as late as November 20 the estimates were still mixed, with some arguing that the Communists were simply withdrawing to better defensive points, and others that the pattern of “giving ground invariably in face of UN units moving northward” merely meant “a delaying action,” not preparation for all-out assault. Lost amid the hoopla of victory by Christmas were reports from reconnaissance pilots that long columns of enemy troops were “swarming all over the countryside”—not to mention