Word: rearmaments
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...tradition of "splendid isolation" from the Continent. The U.S. firmly offered to keep an American army in Europe so long as Europe is threatened. Both offers were made to reassure France, finicky with ancient fears which history was rendering obsolete. France responded by agreeing to Germany's rearmament and admission into the North Atlantic alliance...
...Conference was also a test of Clement Attlee's leadership of the Labor Party. Attlee and the National Executive were pledged to some form of German rearmament, while the Bevanites in the party choose this issue to make a test of Executive strength. Attlee returned from Peking to Scarborough to find a Conference agenda packed with resolutions against rearmament, the constituency parties solidly backing these resolutions, and even some of the Trade Unions, the traditional source of Attlee's strength, siding with Bevan on the issue. On the eve of the rearmament vote, the London Times, noting this Trade Union...
...politicians, it had a clear effect on Labor support for an Armed Federal Republic. "Mr. Attlee was given an ovation," continued the Times. "There is no doubt that his speech has placed him in an even better position than before to make his appeal to the delegates on German rearmament...
...next day, when Attlee did make this appeal and advanced the Executive's emergency resolution for rearmament, he was at the height of his personal prestige. The Bevanites, speaking against the resolution, raised the spectre of an armed Germany turning East to precipitate another war. Attlee, on the other hand, asked the delegates not to tie the hands of some future Labor foreign secretary with the negatives of the Bevanite resolution. By stressing the need of executive freedom he asked, in effect, for a vote of confidence in the present leadership. The Attlee motion passed, but by the slim majority...
Attlee was more concerned with the annual Labor Party Congress opening this week at Scarborough. There, Attlee and his moderates would be engaged in a fight with the left-wing rebels of Aneurin Bevan over German rearmament...