500.A15a3/1562
Memorandum by the Assistant Chief of the Division of Western European Affairs (Boal)21
Mr. Campbell said that he had been instructed by his Government to come in and see the Secretary again22 regarding the present difficulties [Page 415] between France, Great Britain and Italy on the naval question. The British Government was anxious that the Secretary should appreciate their position in the matter and would like to feel that it met with sympathy.
The Secretary assured Mr. Campbell that we understood that the British Government had constantly been in favor of reduction of armaments and that he felt the deepest sympathy for their object and wished to be quite clear that he had the most profound interest in what was going on and the greatest desire to be of help. It was this desire and interest which motivated his inquiries. He had made some study of the question already and expected to get more light on it when Senator Morrow arrived in Washington.
What he had gotten from the French proposal and the British reply to it was that while the French still kept their hand on their 66,000 tons they eventually wished to build, they had advanced somewhat in the direction of compromise, that on the other hand the British Government’s reply was not only refusing to consider the 66,000 tons now, but a refusal to admit their being laid down at all before December 31, 1936 unless in the meantime Great Britain and Italy changed their minds on the subject.
The Secretary pointed out the need for a conciliatory attitude. It seemed to him that it would be better to have three-fourths of a loaf than no loaf at all, and that the agreement with France until, say, 1935 might be better than no agreement at all, as, between now and 1935, events might change and the tendency would be toward a facilitation of the negotiations at that time. The Secretary felt that most of the trouble was due to the stiffness of Admiralties. This had certainly been the case in France, where a temporary set-back for Briand in the Customs Union development23 had resulted in some gain in the obstructionist power of the Ministry of Marine.
Mr. Campbell intervened to say that he thought the Customs Union was probably responsible for the French change of attitude with regard to the basis of agreement.
The Secretary went on to say that after all, this naval question was merely one of a series which stood in the way of the General Disarmament Conference in 1932. If it was not solved very soon, it looked as though the 1932 conference would probably not take place. These questions were like logs in a jam, and each one had to be dislodged in turn in order to obtain progress toward disarmament. The key log which was under attack at the moment was the Franco-Italian question. The important thing was to get it moving so that general progress would no longer be stemmed. They could then reach the other questions in the way of the conference and it was to be hoped that the [Page 416] general trend would advance so far in the direction of disarmament that there would be no temptation for France to embark on a frenzied building program several years hence.
Mr. Campbell explained that the British did not want to have to meet French building in a period of four and one-half years instead of six. They were quite willing to have the French spread their building, exclusive of the 66,000 tons, over six years, but were not at all willing that the French should compress that building into four and one-half years. In the first instance, the French would build at the average rate of 27,000 tons a year. In the second instance, they would be building at an average rate of about 41,000 tons a year.
At this moment, I intervened to point out that it seemed probable that France, which was not forbidden from laying down as much as it pleased in the early years of the agreement, would lay down at least 136,000 tons of its program and possibly a little more in the first four and one-half years anyway, since, under the British view and even under the basis of agreement, some slight hope was held out to the French that they might be allowed to lay down 66,000 tons in the last one and one-half years of the agreement. Accordingly, the French probably want to have all of their building, which was to be completed by 1936, under construction or perhaps wholly completed by the middle of 1935. Furthermore, this would be more in accordance with their Statut Naval24 than would a stretching out of construction over all the years of the agreement. It is evident anyway that ships to be completed by the end of 1936 would, for the greater part, have to be laid down before the middle of 1935, so that the proposal of the French that they should do this would not seem at all extraordinary. So far as laying down was concerned, there did not seem to be much to choose between the French proposal and the basis of agreement if you left the laying down of the 66,000 tons out of consideration.
Mr. Campbell said that his Government had had some anxiety when General Dawes made his inquiry on this point for fear the Secretary was inclined to sympathize with the French on this subject. The Secretary pointed out that the purpose of this inquiry had merely been to discover whether this feature of the question had been considered, as that was the point on which we were not informed. He added that the British Government could be assured of our warm sympathy in their effort to solve this question, and that this Government will be very sorry to see any increase in naval construction; that nothing had been said to the French with respect to these figures and no encouragement given them on the subject of the French proposal. The French themselves, he said, to some extent probably [Page 417] realized that they were being very obdurate. His whole point of view was that anything possible should be done to bring about an agreement which would remove the present obstacle to the progress of disarmament. He would like to encourage Great Britain, France and Italy toward an adjustment of their present difficulty so that we could go on with the next difficulty and preserve what gains had already been made.
Mr. Castle referred to a publication in the French newspapers of a report that the President and the Secretary of State were favorably inclined toward the French position in the naval question. Mr. Castle and the Secretary both pointed out that there was no ground for any such statement, which had been made entirely gratuitously by the newspaper in question. The Secretary, and of course the President, had never given the French grounds for any such belief.