The end of World War II left America with enormous new riches to enjoy, her people launched upon a frenzied consumer boom to compensate for four years of what had passed as austerity. Nothing remotely similar took place in Europe. For both the late victors and the late vanquished, there was only a struggle for survival. Germany and Austria expected nothing else. But for the British, who had exulted in their triumph in 1945, the pain of shortages, food rationing, and the deep economic and industrial difficulties that persisted into the fifties ran very deep. Clement Attlee’s Labour government, in some respects a distinguished administration, was never a truly popular one. After its landslide electoral victory in 1945, it was reelected in February 1950 only by the narrowest of majorities. Its only audible messages to the British people were cries for yet more austerity, yet further sacrifices. Many Labour MPs were instinctively anti-American. They were compelled to accept the supreme irony that Britain’s Welfare State, the richest jewel of socialism, was launched entirely with money borrowed from capitalist America. The war had cost Britain £7,000 million – a quarter of her national wealth. Post-war Britain needed at least £1,100 million a year of imports to sustain wartime standards of personal consumption. Yet her exports amounted to only £400 million. The only possible means of bridging this gap was by American loans. Yet Anglo-American relations were under considerable strain at the end of 1945, not least over the British conduct of their mandate in Palestine. When the Americans offered £3.75 billion on the tough terms of 2 per cent, the Labour left – Foot, Callaghan, Castle, Jennie Lee prominent among them – voted to reject the money.
The realists prevailed. The loans went through, and were followed by the extraordinary American gesture of Marshall Aid – $12 billion divided among the Western Allies of Europe. But one consequence of the dollar lifeline was to preserve the delusions of the British people through the late forties about their ability to
continue to pay the costs of a Great Power. In 1946, Britain was still spending £1,736 million – one-fifth of her Gross National Product – on defence. There were still one and a half million men and women in the services and their supply industries. By 1948, defence spending had fallen to £700 million. But it then began to rise again: to £780 million in 1949–50; to a projected £1,112 million in 1950–51. If India and Burma had gone, vast areas of the maps in Africa and the Middle East were still painted imperial red, or remained under more discreet British control. Clement Attlee personally insisted that Britain should develop its own atomic bomb, for fear that America might suddenly isolate her leak-prone ally from nuclear secrets. His fiercely anti-communist Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, overruled the objections of the economists.
The British had been dismayed, in the last two years of World War II, by the apparent naïveté of the Roosevelt Administration about the benevolent intentions of Stalin. With an instinctive distaste for excess, they were equally uneasy in March 1947, when the proclamation of the Truman Doctrine committed the United States to resist the spread of communism throughout the world. Yet the Cold War bonded the Atlantic Allies in a fashion hitherto unknown. In 1948, US B-29 bombers were deployed in East Anglia. The descent of the Iron Curtain; the 1949 Soviet blockade of Berlin; the communists’ struggle for dominance in Greece; the perceived threat to British interests in the Middle East, combined to convince all but the extreme left of the Labour Party of the menace of Moscow, the vital need for the American alliance. Ernest Bevin has been called the most activist British Foreign Secretary since Palmerston.
Difficult as it may be to recall, half a lifetime later, in 1950 the status of Britain as a world force, as one of the ‘Big Three’, entitled to a seat at the top table with the United States and the Soviet Union, was not in question. Post-war life for most of the British people was still grey, cold, and bleak: it offered most of the discomforts of war, without any compensating sense of purpose in sacrifice. Yet ‘Britain’s standing as a great power’, as a leading
British historian of the Attlee administration has written, ‘so damagingly questioned, with self-fulfilling effect, after the Suez débâcle in 1956, was not in doubt in the 1945–51 period.’
18
From the first Cabinet discussion about Korea on 27 June, the British demonstrated an anxiety which grew in the weeks that followed: they were unhappy about American proposals publicly to attribute responsibility for Pyongyang’s act of aggression to ‘centrally directed Communist imperialism’, and to project it as a strand in Moscow’s web of conspiracy across Asia.
It had not been proved [record the Cabinet Minutes] that, in carrying out this aggression on South Korea, the North Koreans had been acting on instructions from Moscow; and it was suggested that there might have been advantage in seeking to isolate this incident and to deal with it as an act of aggression committed by the North Koreans on their own initative. This would have enabled the Soviet Government to withdraw, without loss of prestige, any encouragement or support which they might have been giving to the North Koreans. The announcement which the United States Government was proposing to make, by linking this up with communist threats in other parts of Asia, would present a major challenge to the Soviet Government; it would bring into controversy other issues which had not yet been brought before the Security Council; and its reference to Formosa might embarrass the United Kingdom Government in their relations with the Communist government of China, and might even provoke that government to attack Hong Kong or to foment disorder there.
19
Here was the root of a difference of interpretation between London and Washington which was to persist throughout the Korean War. The Americans, still profoundly wounded by the ‘loss’ of China, regarded the Peking regime as an evil and sinister force, capable of infinite mischief, acting in close concert with Moscow. To the British, on the other hand, ‘the communist Chinese were a fact of life,’ in the words of the Washington Ambassador, Oliver
Franks: ‘not a good fact of life, but a fact of life’.
20
The British had considerable doubts about the extent to which Peking and Moscow pursued a joint global strategy. Britain possessed no desire whatever to embark upon a confrontation with Peking. Yet when all the reservations had been entered, the risks assessed, the British government remained in no doubt of the necessity of supporting the United States, and the United Nations, in its resistance to North Korea’s act of aggression: ‘The Minister of Defence should arrange for the Chiefs of Staff to report to the Defence Committee what practical steps the United Kingdom could take to assist the Republic of Korea, in pursuance of the resolution which was being brought before the Security Council.’
21
To the enormous relief of Washington, Britain immediately dispatched her Far East fleet – a light fleet carrier, two cruisers and five escorts – to join America’s warships in operations against North Korea. The Ministry of Defence cabled to Air Marshal Lord Tedder, then leading a British delegation in Washington: ‘We consider such demonstrations of solidarity are more important than the actual strength of the forces deployed, and we hope other members of the United Nations will quickly follow suit.’ Public and press reaction in Britain was overwhelmingly supportive of the Americans. In the House of Commons only a handful of the Labour left – Sydney Silverman, Tom Driberg, S. O. Davies, Emrys Hughes – protested British involvement in Korea.
The Times
itself could scarcely have put the case for intervention more eloquently than the prominent left-winger Michael Foot, in the weekly
Tribune
. For Britain to decline to participate in United Nations action, he declared, would be an act of appeasement: ‘The aggression of the North Koreans was, and remains, an international crime of the first order.’
By far the gravest uncertainty, in those first days, concerned the role of Moscow. Had Stalin directly instigated the invasion of South Korea? How far were the Soviets now prepared to press the issue in Korea: were they, for instance, even willing to risk global war? The British Ambassador in Moscow, Sir David Kelly, submitted a long appreciation on 30 June.
a) Attack was certainly launched with Soviet knowledge and almost certainly at Soviet instigation.
b) Campaign began well, and Soviet Government probably hoped for a walkover.
c) Security Council acted with unexpected speed, and prompt United States reaction had not been foreseen.
d) To judge from press presentation and comment, Soviet Government, although happy to exploit ‘evidence’ of US aggressiveness, is in no hurry to commit itself to North Korean cause.
e) Official statements . . . although uncompromising, have not so far been provocative by Soviet standards.
I think we can conclude that . . . North Korean attack was intended to exploit a favourable
local
situation, not to provoke a general conflict.
. . . Military intervention by United States was not expected, and Soviet Government either has no policy ready to deal with new situation, or has decided to sit on the fence until military situation is clearer.
. . . I would judge that Soviet Government are extremely anxious not to find themselves engaged directly with the United States.
22
Subsequent events suggest that Kelly’s assessment was remarkably shrewd. He presented three alternative scenarios for the next phase: either the Soviets or Chinese might increase tension by starting another incident elsewhere – in Berlin, Yugoslavia, or Persia; or the communists might climb down, and order a North Korean withdrawal; or the Soviets might offer the United States a North Korean climbdown, as a
quid pro quo
for allowing the Chinese back into the United Nations.
Even in these first days of the struggle, other diplomats and soldiers foresaw dilemmas which would become increasingly acute as the war progressed. On 30 June, Britain’s Ambassador to the United Nations, Gladwyn Jebb, cabled to the Foreign Office:
The Americans appear to be endeavouring to achieve at the same time two separate and probably irreconcilable objectives. In the first place the delegation here . . . is much concerned to correct any impression that the American people are fighting a lone battle in the struggle which is now going on between the two factions in Korea. It is very desirable therefore to make out that the United States is only one of a band of brothers who are all participating in the struggle, so far as their resources permit, under the banner of the United Nations. On the other hand, some Americans – and more particularly I believe the State Department – are much concerned with the reactions on Capitol Hill to any suggestion that the American troops are being forced into battle at the behest of some outside body, and notably of the Security Council, and that once so engaged they will not be under exclusively American command.
This problem was partly resolved, in the event, by the lesser powers of the United Nations forces in Korea deferring, on almost every occasion, to American command and policy. In these first days, the Foreign Office assumed – in a cable to the Washington Embassy – ‘that the American intention is to clear the territory up to the 38th Parallel’. But from the outset, the British Chiefs of Staff foresaw one notably difficult issue.
It might be suggested by the Americans [they minuted at a meeting on 28 June] that in the event of their participation being insufficient to restore the situation in Korea, an atom bomb should be dropped in North Korea. If the proposal should be made, ministers would wish to know the views of the Chiefs of Staff. There was general agreement from the military point of view that the dropping of an atomic bomb in North Korea would be unsound. The effects of such action would be worldwide, and might well be very damaging. Moreover it would probably provoke a global war.
These remarks must rank among the more notable exercises of military understatement in history. But the Chiefs of Staff were almost as unhappy about the prospect of being asked to commit British troops to the struggle. Anticipating an American request
for ground support, they registered ‘strong military objections to sending land and air forces’. Like their American counterparts, they were in no doubt that Kim Il Sung’s onslaught represented a calculated play by Moscow. ‘It may be assumed,’ they concluded at a meeting on 5 July, ‘that the invasion of Korea is another example of the Soviet technique of “a war by proxy”, and we consider that this action is a deliberate move in the cold war on the part of the Russians . . .’ But they feared that Korea was planned by Moscow as a diversion at the very extremities of Western interests; that another and much more deadly thrust might be imminent, closer to home. It was for this reason that they were so reluctant to commit British air or ground forces to Korea. Even when the political pressure from the Americans became irresistible, for the deployment of at least a token force, the British Chiefs of Staff found it difficult to see where the men might come from.
Two generations later, looking back on the British order of battle of those days, their heart-searchings may appear absurd. In July 1950, the Royal Air Force still possessed 120 squadrons of aircraft. The army deployed two infantry brigades and one airborne brigade in the United Kingdom; one infantry and one armoured division in Germany, together with seven armoured regiments, one artillery regiment and two infantry battalions; there was an under-strength infantry division in the Middle East, plus three artillery and two armoured regiments; a Gurkha division, a British infantry brigade and a commando brigade in Malaya; an infantry division and supporting armoured and artillery regiments in Hong Kong; an infantry brigade in Austria; two infantry battalions and an antitank regiment in Trieste.