The most interesting feature of the discussions was the clarity with which they emphasised the differing British and American attitudes to communist China. The British pressed their view that all-out war with China must be avoided at all costs. They remained convinced that communist access to China’s UN seat must be held out as a possible negotiating card with Peking. This the Americans strenuously resisted. Acheson asserted that ‘in his view, the central moving factor in this situation was not China but Russia. Some promise of support must certainly have been given by them before the Chinese intervened. There would not be many who would advise the President to embark upon an all-out war with China on land, sea, and air. But on the possibility of negotiations, they were far less optimistic . . . This was the very worst moment at which we could seek to negotiate with the communist forces in the world.’ Acheson, traditionally the Europeanist, sharply reminded the British at the Washington meetings of the United States’ global responsibilities, and made plain his belief that the British position towards China was founded upon self-centred political and commercial considerations. If the US gave up now in the Far East, ‘we are through. The Russians and the Chinese are coming in, and other Far Eastern peoples would make their best terms with them.’
The Americans agreed that it was doubtful whether MacArthur’s army could hold on in Korea. They would willingly settle for a ceasefire based upon the restoration of the pre-war position, but saw no real prospect of attaining this. Truman said that he wished it to be on record that he could not agree to voluntary withdrawal from Korea: ‘We must fight it out. If we failed, we should at least fail honourably.’
Attlee replied sturdily that the British would stand shoulder to
shoulder with the Americans in the bridgehead. But he then turned to the much more contentious issue of China. He believed that Britain and the United States had different appreciations of the new China. It was a mistake to think Peking the pawn of Moscow. Western policy should be to detach the Chinese from the Russians. The West could look with considerable satisfaction upon other societies whose nationalist aspirations had been indulged – India, Pakistan, Burma. Acheson declared that he agreed with Attlee’s overview, but could not see how it helped to determine an immediate policy. When the British expressed their concern for the risk to their interests in Hong Kong, Malaya and Singapore if the Chinese mainland was attacked, Bradley inquired sarcastically whether a Chinese attack on Hong Kong would mean war, when it was not considered war for the Chinese to attack American troops in Korea. Field-Marshal Slim asked whether a limited war against China would be likely to provoke the invocation of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty. Marshall said that it would, and Truman acknowledged his concern about this possibility. Slim remarked that if the Soviet Air Force intervened in the war, ‘we should have to say goodbye.’
At a session following dinner at the British Embassy on 7 December, the vexed question of MacArthur was raised, and Attlee voiced British anxieties. Truman agreed that some of the Supreme Commander’s statements had been unfortunate. Acheson said there were two questions: ‘First, whether any Government had any control over General MacArthur, a point on which he desired to express no view; and secondly, the question of what arrangements should be made for consultation in future.’ Marshall declared that wars cannot be run by committee. Yet the British were determined to emphasise their grave misgivings about direct military action against China. Their greatest cause for concern when they left Washington after the summit was that they seemed ‘not to have convinced the Americans of the need to make a serious effort to reach a political settlement with the Chinese, and not to have
shaken them in their intention to undertake some form of “limited war” against China’.
38
As from the beginning of the war, the chief British motive for supporting America in Korea continued to be fear that if she did not do so, America’s sense of betrayal by her Western allies might have disastrous political and strategic consequences for Europe. It was not that the British did not sincerely share Washington’s dismay at North Korean aggression: merely that they feared that the political and military costs of preserving Syngman Rhee’s shoddy dictatorship in South Korea were in danger of exceeding any possible gains. This apprehension would persist to the very end of the war.
On the American side, President Truman and his advisers clearly perceived, as much of the American public did not, that the legitimacy of US policy in the Far East rested heavily upon maintaining the concept that a wider cause and greater principles than mere US national interest were being contested in Korea, and were being upheld by a family of nations. If Attlee and his delegation failed to gain many explicit assurances in Washington, certain implicit understandings were achieved: above all, that Britain and other major allies would be consulted before any major step was taken to expand the war. This concession to British sensitivities, as it became known in the upper reaches of the US military, caused disgust at the Dai Ichi and among other officers who believed the moment had come for a showdown with communism. It was knowledge or suspicion of what had been said between the British and American governments in Washington in December 1950 that sowed the seeds of belief in an Anglo-American conspiracy against the Supreme Commander in the MacArthur camp during the crisis of the following spring.
The British delegation might have returned to London in less tranquil spirits had they been aware that, even if the President did not lie to them, he certainly did not disclose the extent of American nuclear contingency planning. Since mid-November, the Army
Plans and Operations Division and the Joint Strategic Survey Committee had been conducting studies about the possible use of nuclear weapons in Korea. On 28 November, Plans and Ops recommended that the armed forces should ensure their readiness to make ‘prompt use of the atomic bomb . . . as, if and when, directed by the President’. On 7 December, Acheson correctly predicted that the British would demand consultation on any planned American use of nuclear weapons. He recorded that he would promise to move ‘in step with the British . . . but will agree nothing that will restrict his freedom of action’.
39
As the Chinese entered Pyongyang, the Joint Chiefs dispatched a memorandum to all commands giving their view ‘that the current situation in Korea has greatly increased the possibility of general war. Commanders addressed should take such action as is feasible to increase readiness, without creating an atmosphere of panic.’
40
Throughout December and into the New Year, a groundswell of opinion within the United States demanded that the country’s armed forces should no longer be compelled to endure punishment at the hands of the communists if this could be prevented by the ultimate expression of American technology, the atomic bomb. The national commanders of the four largest veterans’ organisations petitioned the President to use ‘such means as may be necessary’ to check the communists.
41
On 24 December, MacArthur submitted a list of ‘retaliation targets’ in China and North Korea, requiring twenty-six atomic bombs in all. He requested four bombs for use against communist forces in North Korea, and four on ‘critical concentrations of enemy air power’; the remainder were destined for enemy installations and industrial concentrations.
42
Such politicians as Senator Owen Brewster and Congressman Mendel Rivers pointed out publicly how effectively the atomic bomb had been used against the Japanese.
Yet if Truman and his advisers talked very toughly to the British about their refusal to concede defeat as the price of a ceasefire with the Chinese, they also underlined the extraordinary change in American objectives in Korea brought about overnight by the Chinese intervention. In a few short days of battle and
retreat, Washington had tacitly renounced any prospect of presiding over a unified, non-communist Korean state. The Administration was now willing to consider a peace proposal based upon restoring the prewar status of Korea, divided at the 38th Parallel. This was a momentous change of heart, and one which proved entirely unwelcome when it became known at the Dai Ichi.
And if the Americans were often impatient of what they considered crude displays of self-interest by the British, in the aftermath of Attlee’s visit, they brooded to considerable effect about what the British delegation had said. First, the British had cast some penetrating doubts upon the likely effectiveness of limited war with China. Nothing could be worse for the United States than to launch a blockade of the Chinese coast, or even a bombing offensive against industrial targets, only to find that these made no impact upon Peking’s behaviour. Acheson also declared at the National Security Council meeting of 12 December that the Anglo-American talks had emphasised how important a close relationship with Britain remained, ‘since we can bring US power into play only with the cooperation of the British’.
In the weeks following the departure of the British delegation, the domestic debate about policy in Korea raged with increasing bitterness in the United States, in both public and private forums. The Administration’s standing with the electorate fell to unprecedented depths. An 8 December Gallup poll found 49 per cent of respondents disapproving of Truman’s leadership, and only 20 per cent of those who had heard of Acheson thinking well of him. It was a paradox of the period that right-wing Republicans alternated between demands for all-out war with China, and immediate withdrawal from Korea. A January opinion poll found 49 per cent of Americans believed that US entry into Korea had been mistaken, and 66 per cent considered that the US should now abandon the peninsula. These confused responses would become wretchedly familiar a generation later, in the midst of another Asian war. In 1950, they represented the impotent political thrashings of a public opinion unaccustomed to frustration of its will at home or
abroad; to military defeat – least of all at the hands of a primitive people; or to the exercise of patience. Grassroots America had only the dimmest perception of what was taking place in Korea, but it understood with disagreeable clarity that little glory or happiness was being won there. It was incomparably easier to understand the rhetoric of Republicanism, demanding that America’s full might should be employed to bring the Asians to heel, than the uncertain pleading for restraint from the Administration. Why should the United States be called upon to exercise restraint, when the enemy was plainly displaying none?
It was in the hope of focusing public understanding on the importance and seriousness of what was taking place in Korea that Truman declared a state of national emergency on 16 December. The Administration now believed that Korea could be held – following the return of General Collins from a fresh visit on 8 December – and should be held. Kennan and Rusk recalled the defiant example of the British in 1940: to abandon South Korea now ‘would set a poor example of what it means to be a friend of the United States’. Truman and his advisers had determined to resist the calls of the Allies for an immediate ceasefire, and to resist any such a resolution in the United Nations. They were determined that MacArthur’s army must improve its military position, regain some lost ground, to be able to negotiate from reasonable strength. To appease world opinion, Washington felt obliged to take a desperate diplomatic gamble, supporting a United Nations resolution calling for an immediate ceasefire in Korea proposed by a clutch of Asian states on 11 December. The Americans, who wanted no such thing, counted upon the Chinese rejecting it.
Fortunately for the Administration’s hopes, the Chinese indeed dismissed the resolution, since it included no call for the removal of all foreign troops, or for the withdrawal of the Seventh Fleet from Taiwan, or for the recognition of Peking at the UN. Washington now forced through its own resolution, against the deepest misgivings of Britain and the other allies, branding China an
aggressor. Even such a moderate man as Bradley believed that, if the United States suffered the humiliation of military expulsion from Korea, she should retaliate with air attacks upon the Chinese mainland.
As the military position in Korea continued to deteriorate into the New Year, a growing divide became apparent between America’s political and military leaders about possible responses. Admiral Sherman, consistently the most bellicose of the Joint Chiefs, demanded early in the New Year that America should stop equivocating and recognise a full state of war with China. On 12 January, the Joint Chiefs recommended hitting China with ‘damaging naval and air attacks’ if the communists attacked American forces outside the Korean peninsula. They also favoured sponsoring guerrilla action in China, allowing the Nationalists to invade the mainland, and ‘aerial reconnaissance’ of Manchuria and the Chinese coast. If the UN did not agree, said Admiral Sherman, ‘the time has come for unilateral action by the United States’. When Acheson and the National Security Council proved unenthusiastic, Bradley emphasised that the JCS were not advocating a large-scale invasion of the Chinese mainland. But he remarked that there was ‘heavy popular pressure for the United States to do something’, unilaterally if necessary. Marshall took the point, but suggested that the United Nations would deteriorate into a mere forum for debate if the United States acted alone in Korea. Truman postponed any decision by referring back the whole subject of direct action against China for further study.
Then, through the last days of January and early into February, imperceptibly the mood began to shift in Washington. As it became evident that military disaster was no longer imminent in Korea, as the choices before the Administration became less stark, so passions cooled and the more dramatic options receded. State Department analysts argued strongly against the view that the Chinese intervention in Korea represented a Soviet build-up to a new world war. Washington was at last beginning to look much more closely at narrower, more nationalistic reasons for Chinese
behaviour. In the eyes of the ‘hawks’, MacArthur notable among them, the change of mood in Washington represented a weakening of the American position, influenced by the feeble fears of the Allies, and above all the British. Yet the British might legitimately claim that events increasingly supported their interpretation of Chinese behaviour. Acheson told Bradley: ‘We are fighting the wrong nation. We are fighting the second team, whereas the real enemy is the Soviet Union.’
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Increasingly, senior members of the Truman Administration and the State Department began to develop the view that would become dominant in the months that followed: that the United States was fighting the wrong war against the wrong communist power in Korea. On 30 January, Peking attempted to get a letter through to the US government, a gesture Marshall declared should be treated with ‘the utmost seriousness’. CIA estimates of Chinese casualties suggested cause for growing concern in Peking. Washington began to adopt a more attentive attitude to straws in the wind that suggested possible Chinese interest in a ceasefire. On 12 February, C. B. Marshall of the Policy Planning Staff suggested to Paul Nitze that stabilisation in Korea would save ‘two sets of faces.’
44
Acheson, more than any other man, may claim credit for having discouraged the President’s most bellicose advisers, arguing constantly for further discussion and delay. A 23 February paper from the State Department summarised his arguments against any escalation or change of policy in the Far East: