500.A15a4/305
The Chargé in France (Howell) to the Acting Secretary of State
[Received August 4.]
Sir: I have the honor to forward for the Department’s information and record an original French text and an English text in duplicate of the memorandum on disarmament published by the French Foreign Office on Wednesday, July 22, 1931,18 in reply to the request of the League of Nations to all Governments for information on the present status of their armed forces.
The document, which has been in preparation since January, was drafted in final form and approved at a meeting of the French Cabinet on July 7. It is of epic length—the French text comprises 22 pages—including three parts (the second, that dealing specifically with military forces being subdivided into four Chapters: Land Forces Stationed in the Home Country; Overseas Army, Navy and Air Forces) and was originally intended for release on Friday, July 17 (See my telegram No. 439 of July 13, 4 p.m.19). However, according to the official explanation, its publication was held up “so as to enable Foreign Minister Arthur Henderson of Great Britain to study the text during his visit to Paris.”
Aside from the purely technical aspects the memorandum is most interesting on account of its unmistakable indication that France will refuse to accept any further reduction of her military, naval and air forces unless her security and the status quo in Europe are guaranteed. France, it is pointed out, considers that her present armaments are at the lowest point consistent with security and therefore she cannot further reduce unless a system is generally adopted whereby “the necessity of security (is) guaranteed to every state by assistance which would be mutual, effective and prompt.” (Part III, sub-section four, last paragraph, line one). This is the keynote of the French document which in Section I bases a detailed argument against such plans of general disarmament as the Soviet or of armament parity as the German on Article 8 of the Covenant of the League of Nations “which clearly lays down the principle that, as regards the reduction and limitation of armaments, there can be no hard and fast rules; the armaments of each state constitute an aggregate which must necessarily be adapted to its own particular case; the notion of diversity governs the work to be undertaken. Any levelling or automatic equalisation of forces is, for this very reason, excluded a priori, for [Page 507] equality of armaments as between two states would only be justifiable in the unlikely event of their geographical situation and circumstances being identical.”
Security—and the interdependence of the three great categories of armament—of course form a chapter apart in the French armaments brief. Geographical, colonial and other factors are adduced to prove that France “must have at her disposal land forces sufficient to protect her as surely and as promptly as their sea forces protect the Naval Powers.” And to cover the land forces she “requires the cooperation of a navy sufficiently powerful to dispense the Government of the Republic from the necessity of maintaining in every part of their Empire forces sufficient to cope alone with domestic disturbances which might conceivably coincide with a foreign aggression.” Also air forces!
The memorandum also gives preliminary figures showing how France has reduced its military effectives and armaments during the last 10 years in proportion to the progressive organization of peace through such accords as the Locarno agreements for a status quo in Western Europe.20 Discussing the reductions under the headings of Land Forces, Overseas Army, Naval and Air Forces, the document intimates that should Europe be organized through further international accords modelled on Locarno France would be able to make still further armaments slashes, but clearly not before.
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In conclusion, the French memorandum, considering under what conditions further reductions would be possible, stresses that the reduction of armaments implied confidence and that therefore the General Disarmament Conference would give more attention to the political factors restoring confidence than to any plan for systematic armaments reduction. Among the factors which the memorandum suggests are the organization of mutual assistance along the lines of the proposed Geneva Protocol, the local application of a system “coordinating arbitration, mutual assistance and reduction of armaments”, the extension of the scope of the Locarno accords and the assurance of security by multi-power or universal accords.
Although in releasing the memorandum, the Foreign Office Press Section intimated to correspondents that it was to be the signal for a concerted propaganda drive to justify the French position on armaments to be followed shortly by similar documents, to date there has been only a casual sprinkling of articles due undoubtedly to the fact that the average Foreign Editor has been preoccupied with the [Page 508] developments at the London Conference.21 However, the Temps in supporting the memorandum in its edition dated July 23 protested against the tendency in German and American newspapers to compare the French and German armies with a view to bringing about military parity between them and defended France “which has cut its army by 50 per cent” against the charge of imperialism. Similarly Saint-Brice in Le Journal by using the “professional soldier” figures contended that the French army had been cut from 400,672 to 163,000 men and therefore could not be accused of inordinate militarism. Both stressed that a mutual security pact must precede further armaments reduction.
Respectfully yours,