Roughstuff's Korean War Archive
book reviews and summaries, comments, analysis
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McDonald, Callum Britain and the Korean war
DS 919.3 M33 1990

Wow!!! I thought i would never see the day. After slogging through Hoyt's dense text reviewed above, I despaired of ever reading a book which states the post WWII geo-political situation concisely and in the words people alive then would have used. Feast your eyes on the following paragraph from McDonalds text.
Britain went to war in 1950 to consolidate the Anglo-American allaince and to resist communist aggression, goals which were inextricably linked in the minds of the men who made policy. Their decision owed nothing to the direct importance of Korea itself to British interests. For the next three years Britain was to fight in but not for Korea, often displaying scant regard for Korean wishes and interests as it pursued these larger goals.
emphasis is authors'


This book is one of the shortest ones I have reviewed on this site, 112 pages. In fact i read it in its entirety while I was taking a shit (which says something about how quickly I read, or how slowly I shit, or both...). This book is easier to read than Hoyt's book, above. In fact it is a good prerequisite. McDonald says it was the British--Churchill in particular but also Attlee and Bevin, who distrusted the Russians and played a key role in the construction of Nato and the Marshall plan.
In contrast, in Asia the British were openly critical of US policy on China. England wished to use India as a strong bond to China, and felt, as Hoyt did, that postwar China was more nationalist than communist. They hoped engagement would promote more moderate policies and a break with the Russians, as Yugoslavia did in 1947. This was not the case, as Hoyt describes in detail in his book.
The book is objective about the behavior and motives of all parties. MacDonald does not hesistate to cite examples of ROK atrocities both north and south of the DMZ. He makes it quite clear that England played the 'loyal ally' in Asia for the sake of support in Europe. The British played a delicate game supporting the Americans in public while attempting to restrain them in private. They saw little value to quibbles over prisoner repatriation, which prolonged the negotiations for months. In the end it was the death of Stalin, and the pressure (read: threat of assassination) applied to Syngman Rhee to accept the Armistice terms, which finally brought the War to an end.
The last chapter of the book summarizes the political, economic, and diplomatic challenges presented by the Korean War better than any book I have reviewed so far.



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