File No. 656.119/662
The Secretary of State to the Ambassador in Great Britain ( Page )
754. For Sheldon [from War Trade Board]:
No. 1030. Your 1161, Embassy 831, August 3, 7 p.m.1 We are greatly disappointed that it has been impossible to secure British Foreign Office adherence to our policy with reference to Dutch situation, which policy we have been so continuously urging for upwards of two months. You are authorized to express to the Foreign Office the disappointment which we feel and discreetly to intimate to them that we fail to understand the reasons which have led to their apparent preference to conduct negotiations privately through special emissaries. In transferring the negotiations to London it was never our intention that this would mean that negotiations would be conducted purely as British negotiations to the exclusion of full participation therein by all of the Associated Governments.
The British handling of this matter has produced a very unfavorable impression upon us and also apparently upon Garrett and the French Government. It is difficult to avoid the impression that the British in London have been conducting negotiations not purely from an Allied standpoint but that they have allowed special considerations of peculiar interest to Great Britain to divert them from that course of action which would have been for the greatest benefit of the Allies’ cause generally.
- Not printed.↩