793.94/2547
Memorandum by the Secretary of State of a Conversation With the French Ambassador (Claudel), November 6, 1931
The French Ambassador came in to read to me a memorandum which he had received from Monsieur Briand. His translation is annexed hereto. He will send me a formal translation later to take the place of this one.68
[Page 386]He wanted to know what had happened to our representations to Tokyo and I read to him the telegram No. 209 of November 6, which I had received from Forbes.69 He thought that the last paragraph presented a very serious situation. He said that hitherto he had been hopeful that Shidehara and the peace party would keep in control but now he feels that the military party are following out a plan which they have had in their minds from the beginning and that no one can tell where it will lead. He asked me whether we were going to send any ships, saying that the lives of foreigners might be endangered in cities on the Yangtze and other places. I told him that we already had an Asiatic squadron there sufficient to deal with any trouble and in my opinion sending any further ships out there would only result in adding flame to the fire. He expressed fear that now that the Japanese merchants have been boycotted and they stand to lose everything, they would join with the military party to seek to get all they could by war. I told him that I thought that, while we could not see our steps in detail, the principal objective was clear, that is, that we should preserve a united front among the other nations of the world and he agreed to that. I asked him what he thought it would do to the disarmament conference. He laughed and said that he had never thought there was any show for the conference but this made it doubly impossible and he thought, as his own personal opinion and not the opinion of his Government, that the best thing to do would be to postpone it until a later date.
He then told me that he had talked with General Petain and Petain had told him that plans were on foot in France to completely change the organization of the French Army in such a way as to be more agreeable to Germany; that their present system was both expensive and ineffective. The new plan would be to create a professional army, supplemented as in the case of America (he said) by a militia. This made it less expensive than the old system but he thought it would be more effective and more like the English system. I made no comment.