751G.00/4–554
Memorandum by the Counselor (MacArthur) to the Secretary of State
eyes only
With reference to the Top Secret Memorandum of Conversation1 which I sent you earlier today covering my talk with Sir Roger Makins this morning about Indochina, I left out one important point covered in our discussion.
During the course of our talk I told Sir Roger that you had had a meeting with a small bipartisan group of Congressional leaders on Saturday morning.2 I said that I could tell him in confidence that as a result of this meeting we felt that if there were really united action taken by the countries that were directly threatened, the United States would be able to play its full part. On the other hand, if the UK and Australia and New Zealand, whose vital interests would be directly threatened if Indochina fell, were not enough concerned to do anything about it or join in any effective form of united action, there would be opposition on the part of the US Congress and people to having the US pick up the burden on a unilateral basis. In other words, we would not be disposed to commit our forces to defend British and Commonwealth interests in Malaya, Australia, and New Zealand when the British, Australians, and New Zealanders simply sat on their hands. If, indeed, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand were unwilling to undertake any effective joint action, it would raise very great doubts in [Page 1245] the minds of many Congressional leaders and others as to the utility of the US supporting collective and cooperative endeavors with our friends and allies. This in turn could certainly have a most serious impact on the support we were contributing to collective arrangements in areas other than Southeast Asia. Sir Roger said he could understand this and assumed that one of the passages in the President’s letter which he had just read referred to this.
He then said that the question of what the British military commitments would be with respect to united action in Indochina was important. At the present time, he said, the British have no reserve of ground forces that they could send to Indochina. The only reserve they had was tied up in the Egyptian Canal Zone. If an agreement were reached with the Egyptians covering the Suez Canal Base, there would be some ground forces which could be deployed to other areas, but whether HMG would consider deploying any of them to Indochina, he did not know. He indicated clearly that at the present time the only contribution HMG could make in Indochina was naval power.