862.24/124
Memorandum by the Under Secretary of State (Phillips)
The German Ambassador spoke to me at length this morning regarding the recent French note to the British Government on disarmament and said that to him it was wholly incomprehensible; the Ambassador then went on to develop the following points:
- 1.
- The naval program provided in the budget was purely and simply a replacement program; there was nothing contemplated which conflicted in any way with the Versailles Treaty.
- 2.
- The budget contemplated for the army was in pursuance of the so-called British plan of changing the present army of 100,000 to the new system which had already been approved by the British and Italian Governments and in principle by the French Government itself; as a large number of men were contemplated under the new army program, it was necessary not only to provide for their new equipment, but also new quarters; he insisted that there were no new types of armament contemplated.
- 3.
- The budget for aerial development was limited to the construction of defense guns and a few aviation fields; the program of defense material had been held in abeyance for years, in the hope that the neighbors of Germany would reduce their combat planes, but now that the contrary was the case, it was necessary to reassure the people of Germany that their safety was being cared for by the provision of such defensive measures as anti-aircraft guns.
The Ambassador was completely at sea with regard to the French objections to airdrome construction in the demilitarized zone; already there were several airports in this region; he mentioned a number of them with which he was personally familiar—at Coblenz and at Dusseldorf, etc.; they were used for purely civil flights and had been in use for a long time; with the development of passenger flights it was necessary to add to the numbers of landing fields—a construction which was being carried out on a broad scale in the United States and most other countries; there was no provision in the budget for [Page 56] the development of new planes or for the bringing up to date of old planes, for example, by substituting a three-motor plane for a one-motor plane; this remodeling and bringing up to date planes for commercial purposes and for defensive purposes was something which the German Government had in mind, but which, according to my understanding of the Ambassador’s conversation, had not been provided for in the budget to which the French were taking such exception.
I thanked the Ambassador for giving me his view point on the French note and said that I would be glad to have whatever figures he cared to give me in writing on the points which he had just stressed, which he said he would gladly do.