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Dean Acheson was in England to receive an Oxford degree and attend a Big Three Foreign Ministers' conference. Hearing the furor, he lunched with Anthony Eden, quickly agreed to a proposal by Lord Alexander (made before the fuss began) that Britain should have a deputy on the high command in Korea. Then he stepped before a special meeting of some 300 M.P.s in the grand committee room of ancient Westminster Hall. The bombing, he said, was a military undertaking, not a political move, and the U.S. was not obliged to notify Britain in advance. He expressed regret, however, that Washington had not informed London; it was all, he said, an administrative mixup. Reporters in London, briefed on the private session, all wrote of Acheson's "apology"; when Congressmen back home set up a howl, the State Department announced that Acheson had made an explanation, not an apology.
Complaints & Exasperations. There was little doubt that one top Briton had a complaint: the U.S. should have passed the word to a soldier it implicitly trusts, Field Marshal Alexander, who was touring the battlefront and visiting his old friend Mark Clark just before the bomb bays were loaded. But Alexander himself, though surprised by the raid, said he approved of it. That set off Bevanite demands for Alexander's head.
Through the uproar, the U.S., long ago used to a standard British label—"the irresponsible Americans"—kept its composure, though there was ample reason for exasperation at Britain's reaction. Too many Britons are too ready to believe that Washington is aching to plunge into World War III. Britain's government—Labor or Tory—has been lax about telling Britons the facts of life in Korea, has kept alive the notion that the best way to peace is to be nice to Mao Tse-tung. Britain's newspapers have treated the Korean fighting as a dull, disagreeable affair worth only a few sticks of type. The House of Commons debate was marked by ignorant assertions that went unchallenged—such as that the U.S. is training Chiang Kaishek's troops in Korea itself. Some Britons actually seemed to believe that a truce had been in operation in Korea until the U.S. bombers dropped their payloads last week, and seemed shocked when Acheson told them the "lull" had cost the U.N. 30,000 casualties.
London's Sunday Observer was set to add its voice to the critical clamor until the cold facts sunk in. Instead, the Observer confessed: "Everything . . . turns on the question; Was there, prior to the Yalu raids, a lull, a tacit cease-fire or near-cease-fire in Korea?" The Observer had done a little quick homework and was startled by its findings: "The plain fact—continuous and hence unreported—is that there has been a long-drawn battle which has been in progress almost since the start of the armistice talks." In this light, the Observer was alarmed at the way Britons were talking. "It is still possible to criticize the raids because they indirectly affect Manchuria and Siberia as well as Korea," it added, "but this, compared with the charge that the raids were a deliberate resumption of a discontinued war, is almost a quibble."
That was more to the point. As allies, the U.S. could at least ask that its critics know what they were talking about.