711.41/378: Telegram
The Chargé in the United Kingdom (Johnson) to the Secretary of State
[Received February 5—9:28 a.m.]
101. Your 50, February 2, 7 p.m., was taken up informally and confidentially with an appropriate official of the Foreign Office on February 3. When I saw Mr. Eden yesterday I mentioned the matter to him and he said that he would have a message to send to you today. This morning I was requested to call at the Foreign Office and an official gave me the following message:
“I am authorized by the Secretary of State to ask you to convey to Mr. Hull his personal assurance that neither in Parliament nor elsewhere has he made any statement that could lead any one to understand that the United States and Great Britain had a working alliance or working relationship with reference to the Far Eastern question and that it was of such nature that it must be kept a secret.
“On the other hand, the fact that Mr. Borah’s allegation is unfounded does not mean, as the Secretary of State pointed out in the course of his speech in the House of Commons on the 21st December last, to which the Senator perhaps alludes, that the existing situation in the Far East has not necessitated constant and close consultation between the Governments of the United States and Great Britain. Such consultation, which is natural in view of the similarity of the interests of the two countries in that part of the world, is of course perfectly consistent with the pursuit of an independent policy by the two governments, but Mr. Eden, as he endeavored to make plain in his above mentioned speech, rejoices, like all men of good will of both sides of the Atlantic, at the fact that during a period of international anxiety our two countries are moving on parallel lines”.
The following paragraph appears in the Times this morning in a despatch from its correspondent in Washington:
“It is upon the revelation some time ago that Captain Ingersoll4 had been despatched to London, and that President Roosevelt’s rearmament programme had not been sent to Congress until he had returned and made his report, that the opposition bases its allegation that what Senator Borah calls ‘a tacit alliance’ exists between the United States and Britain”.5
- Royal E. Ingersoll, U. S. N., director of War Plans Division, Naval Operations, Navy Department; technical assistant to the American delegation at the London Naval Conference, 1935.↩
- For a letter from the Secretary of State in reply to the Chairman of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations on February 8, see Foreign Relations, Japan, 1931–1941, vol. i, p. 449.↩