Foreign News: Exasperated Onlooker

In a London restaurant, a tweedy Englishman remarked to his dinner companion: “It’s a peculiar thing about Americans, they are always letting off machine guns by mistake . . . They used to in Chicago, they did when I was with them in France, and now in Koje. Trigger-happy, I believe they call it.”

In remarks such as these, and in some that were made more formally, Britons showed their heightening exasperation last

week over the Korean situation, an exasperation which most often took the form of blaming it all on the U.S. Like the run of the U.S. press, British papers took a dim view of Syngman Rhee’s antics and of the Koje mess. “Rarely, if ever,” said London’s News Chronicle of Koje, “can American Army authorities have suffered so great a humiliation.” Sedater journals, as they usually do, got in their licks by gently reminding their readers that the British, alas, need their impulsive U.S. friends. The leader of Britain’s Socialists felt a like impulse. “There is a lot of loose talk about the U.S. from people who refer to American imperialism and similar phrases,” said Clement Attlee, “but no country in history has ever made greater efforts to help other countries than the U.S. has done in the last six years.”

Mixed Mind. In the House of Commons, Winston Churchill also found it necessary to point out that in Korea the U.S. is providing nine-tenths of the blood, sweat & tears. “. . . There is a great volume of opinion in this country that we should complete a withdrawal from Korea,” cried Bevanite M.P. Emrys Hughes, a bellicose pacifist, “because the war there [is] one of the most cruel and futile in history.” Since the Americans had made a mess of the P.W. situation and the Syngman Rhee affair, some Britons implied, they probably have balled up the truce negotiations just as badly.

Britain’s discomfiture reflected its own mixed mind on the Far East. In abandoning its $840 million investment in China (TIME, June 2), the British had shown a new realism about Communist China. Hong Kong itself, precarious though its position is, has recently shown more resistance to Peking pressure. Yet the British still held out the hand of diplomatic recognition to the Chinese Communists, even though their ambassador was spurned, and their Peking chargéd’affaires is treated contemptuously, referred to only as “Mr. Lamb” and given no diplomatic status.

In Copenhagen last week, Labor’s ex-Foreign Secretary Herbert Morrison told Danish Socialists: “You cannot hold recognition from a government simply because you do not like it. I do admit that we have not profited from our recognition gesture . . . but it has not made me change my mind. I still think Mao should have Chiang’s seat at the U.N., and when we get back into power, we are going to bring pressure to bear to that end . . .” Conservative London newspapers clucked over his indiscretion, but dissented only to the extent that Red China should not really be admitted to U.N. “while she is fighting U.N. troops in Korea.”

Hurried Visit. No. 10 Downing Street itself was not immune to the discontent over Korea. Finding the military posture there “very grave,” Winston Churchill decided to hurry up Defense Minister Lord Alexander’s fact-finding mission to Korea (TIME, June 9). Alexander canceled an inspection tour of West Germany to make the flight this week. Churchill added two

Foreign Office men to the mission, Minister .of State Selwyn Lloyd and the ministry’s top China hand, Robert H. Scott. Alexander will talk to the generals, Lloyd to Rhee and the politicos.

Alexander’s visit will be the first to Korea by any British minister since the war began. Armed with Alexander’s report, Churchill plans to demand a far bigger voice for Britain in plans which up to now, although they affect all 17 countries fighting under the U.N. flag in Korea, have been directed solely by the U.S. Pentagon and State Department.