500.A15a3/197: Telegram
The Ambassador in Great Britain (Dawes) to the Secretary of State
281. I received the following letter from the Prime Minister this morning. He has been at Chequers during the week end and my last interview with him was September 19th.
“23rd September, 1929.
My dear General Dawes: What I take as a personal letter from your President to myself has given me the greatest pleasure. Its candor is a proof of that trust which we must have in each other if we are to overcome the difficulties which face us. Moreover, its line of thought and its subject matter have been giving me concern and he may have comfort in knowing that before his note came I had addressed inquiries to my advisers on some of the points he discusses. Further, it is just that line of country which I hope to go over with [Page 254] the President when I see him. I want no bargaining and that sort of thing, but primarily a political talk on the world situation so that our hands may be strengthened by an understanding of each other’s problems and purposes.
But it will be helpful to both of us if I make a few comments with a view to carrying the President’s letter a further stage.
The minds of our European neighbors who will be invited to the Five-Power Conference is not tranquil but is suspicious that we are making some bargain with the United States against them. We have to walk warily lest we upset them, and they may decline to attend a Conference. Upon that I am now making private and unofficial inquiries, but their press is illuminating. The President is free of that troublesome part of my problems. It has been increased by the leakages which have come from Washington and which forced my hand and compelled me to prevent a stampede of the British press by seeing journalists much against my will.
When I found the contents of my notes appearing here within two days of their receipt in Washington, it was like a net about my feet. I knew my statement might give trouble but on thinking it over concluded that it would be a puff of bad weather that would soon pass over us.
This parity business is of Satan himself. I am sure it has struck the President as it has me as being an attempt to clothe unreality in the garb of mathematical reality. Opinion in the United States demands it and the Senate will accept nothing which does not look like it. On my side I am not interested in it at all. I give it to you with both hands heaped and running down. When I am forced to scrutinize your program which you say embodies it, I turn from you altogether and have to think of things which, but for my importunities, you would not think much about, viz, the fleets of other nations. Therefore, although in our talks with each other, we assume that the discussion takes place between us two, that is really not the case. There are shadowy entities behind me. A spirit photograph would show you unaccompanied, but round me would be the ghosts of the other nations. In its ultimate, the parity we are trying to devise is one between you and the rest of the world in relation to the British position in it. If the appearance of parity is to be obtained, neither of us can get away from the fact that the standard must be fixed by British needs. The tides of events swelling upwards and downwards, backwards and forwards, change our defense problems every year and with that the figures change.
Now what am I trying to do? First and foremost, I am trying to stop the daily swell so that we may fix levels which cannot be exceeded and then create a confidence which will permit those levels to be steadily lowered. I want to substitute the security of peace for that of military preparation. But if in the lowering we act impatiently there will be a break back. That psychological fact fixes my present limits. Stabilization downwards is the only road by which Europe will move to disarmament.
In consequence to [of] this the nearer our two countries come to an agreement the larger in my mind becomes the Five-Power Conference and its results. Let me illustrate by referring to what the President says about three categories.
[Page 255]A. The first class battleships:
Our Admiralty, I believe, would be willing to agree to reduce the replacement ships from 35,000 tons to, say, 25,000; to reduce the caliber of their guns; to increase their age and to propose that at the Conference. But I am warned that the offer will be rejected. Therefore, it will not be the fault of Great Britain if that reduction is not made.
B and C. Destroyers and submarines:
I believe I should have no difficulty in closing at once with figures in the region of the President’s proposals. But the tonnage in destroyers depends largely on the tonnage put by other powers into submarines. I am warned that certain other powers will not agree to a limitation in submarines. I might be willing to support something like the President’s figures, but what can I do if the Five-Power Conference were to reject them?
Under the geographical and political conditions of the British Empire, the cruiser category is that upon which public opinion can be most easily stampeded, and is also the chief concern of the Admiralty. When we came into office, we found a program of considerable expansion being built on the ground that in view of the building of other powers we were too weak. Three 8-inch cruisers were to be added at once, making eighteen. We stopped it and that must be counted as a reduction. We have stopped other expansions. The whole of my resistance to your proposal of twenty-one is that its effect upon other powers will compel me to expand whether I like it or not. The Admiralty view is that it is not parity; the political view is that it inevitably means expansion. The narrow margin which divides us does not really lie between you and us but between both of us and the rest of the world. If by hook or by crook the United States could say regarding something like 30,000 tons ‘we shall not use them’ or ‘we shall use them in such a way as not to have world repercussions’ our agreement would be pretty complete.
Involved in this is a valuation of the relative efficiency of the 8-inch and 6-inch cruiser. I find so far as I can lay my hands on discussions on the subject that in actual battle the relation is almost infinity; in the general operations of war the relation is at least 4 to 1. I have had the relation implied in the President’s figures worked out for my guidance and I find that they vary, but that his latest proposal is 10 to 3 in individual ships irrespective of guns and gross tonnage. Here there might be found a way of coming still nearer and critics could be silenced by naval opinion itself on the relative value of the two classes of ships.
The major difficulty is indeed with the 8-inch cruiser. If the three biggest naval powers would agree first of all to a ratio of 6.5.4 (18.15.12) that, as I am advised, would be a world equilibrium unless some of the other powers disturbed it But Japan wishes instead of two-thirds of the largest cruiser fleet, 70 percent, though, on an American force of eighteen, it might be induced to build no more than twelve. It would certainly want more than twelve on twenty-one and then we should have to move up our figure of fifteen by four or five and the whole plan would fall to the ground.
This is so important that I must emphasize it. If I had the shadow of dread that the United States and ourselves would ever be at war, it would be impossible for me to agree to parity being expressed by [Page 256] any number of 8-inch cruisers beyond our own, e. g., 15. I should be willing to refer the inclosures [issue?] to any body of able and impartial authorities on sea warfare to decide between us and I should be assured of their verdict. But that is not in my mind at all. Everybody here is anxious to accommodate themselves to an agreement with you on the assumption that there will be no war and no interference in which our fleets are involved. But I am not justified in making the same assumption as regards the rest of the world, and Mr. Kellogg himself used language which justifies that.71
He referred to the possibilities of wars of defense. I may regret it, but he did it, and if I am to get Parliament to agree to our programs I cannot at the moment overlook that fact.
As I am most anxious that the President should be fully aware of the facts as I have to look at them, let me refer to guns—a very important consideration so soon as our people examine the agreement in cold blood. On its 8-inch ships (assuming twenty-one) the United States will carry a superiority of 75 guns and on our 6-inch ships our superiority would be 47 only—a very hard bit of mathematics for me to prove to be parity. Even on our proposals my task will not be easy for they give the United States a superiority of forty-eight 8-inch guns to ours of twenty-three in 6-inch guns, but the numbers are substantially diminished.
I have spent every spare moment at Chequers this week end trying to see daylight through this entanglement and the only conclusion I can come to is that, if the United States insists upon more than eighteen 8-inch cruisers, British expansion is inevitable, especially in view of the hostile reception which the twenty-one figure has received in both the French and Japanese press.
Another point which the President has overlooked when he writes that on present proposals we shall have actually increased warship tonnage by 236,000 is that of that total 145,000 is new construction by the United States, whereas our addition of 91,000 is offset by 115,000 scrapped. This unsatisfactory result arises from the fact that your ships actually built must be increased if you now put the parity agreement on the seas and do not accept it as something you can build up to if you think it is necessary. Again and again, I had been driven back upon this fundamental difficulty. It is the insuperable problem and we must get round it somehow. I shall continue to work away at it but the peace of Chequers has yielded barren results. I am however, looking forward with hope to continuing my ponderings with the President himself in the intervals of the all too generous hospitality which, according to the President [press?] he is preparing for me.
Believe me to be, yours very sincerely, J. Ramsay MacDonald.”
- Telegram in five sections.↩
- Frank B. Kellogg, Secretary of State March 5, 1925–March 28, 1929. On several occasions Mr. Kellogg stated his position on the question of national self-defense under the Treaty for the Renunciation of War, e. g., “Every nation is free at all times and regardless of treaty provisions to defend its territory from attack or invasion and it alone is competent to decide whether circumstances require recourse to war in self-defense.”—Excerpt from an address entitled The French Draft of the Multilateral Treaty for the Renunciation of War, delivered before the American Society of International Law, Washington, April 28, 1928, and published in pamphlet form by the Government Printing Office, Washington, D. C., 1928.↩