In the course of explaining London's dealings with Washington and characterizing trans-Atlantic negotiations, Peter Lowe also argues that the Korean War marked ‘an important watershed’ in the Anglo–American relationship. Where in the summer of 1950 His Majesty's Ambassador in Washington, Oliver Franks, could convince himself that commitment of its forces would confirm Britain's global strength and influence in American circles, three years of conflict in practice ‘demonstrated a gradual decline’ in its role, driving it to the periphery of Washington's vision. As Lowe puts it: ‘Fundamentally it was a matter of power: the Americans had plenty of it and the British did not.’ This interpretation illuminates one paradox in the British stance: while both Prime Minister Clement Attlee and Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin had long been keen to have the United States take on ‘full responsibility for containing communism’ (an objective which Lowe believes was realized during the Korean War), they were less eager to have Washington exercise the authority such responsibilities bestowed. The resolution entertained by British leaders – that the United States would be responsible, in Lowe's words, for providing the ‘muscle and energy’ while Britain furnished ‘sagacious guidance, gained from experience’ – perhaps offered London some imaginative consolation; if so, however, it was not for the first time. In need of college essay editing help? Our college essay editors are reliable! Get college essay editing service at our site! Plagiarism-free editing! More importantly, it may also have served to deaden the real pains attendant upon the British commitment to the American-led campaign: in spite of the short-term gains in public popularity at home, the Attlee government would suffer serious internal divisions as an indirect result, while the economic costs of the associated, US-sponsored rearmament programme may have delayed post-war economic recovery.Whatever political or economic pain afflicted the British was, of course, as nothing compared to the suffering experienced by Koreans in the course of a devastating conflict in which the savagery characteristic of civil wars was compounded by ruthless political vendettas and the mass destruction inherent in the application of advanced weaponry. It is to some of the most painful aspects of perhaps the least studied, and to outsiders least understood, phases of the conflict – the UN occupation of the North between October and December 1950 – that Bruce Cumings devotes his contribution to this volume. As Cumings points out, the occupation of the North has been largely lost, if not to Korean memory then certainly to those official and orthodox histories of the war which have, in Jon Halliday's words, sustained ‘one silence’ about the subject. Here Cumings adds to his prodigious work on the origins of the conflict a detailed account of the occupation, documenting and confirming Daily Telegraph journalist Reginald Thompson's first-hand assessment: that ‘few people can have suffered so terrible a liberation’.
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