751G.94/321
Memorandum of Conversation, by the Under Secretary of State (Welles)
The French Ambassador called to see me at his request. The Ambassador spoke in the most dejected way and was evidently suffering from the impact of information which he had received regarding the [Page 56] recent developments in Vichy. The Ambassador brought up again the question of Indochina and attempted to prove that the reason why the French Government had given in to the Japanese demands and to the Japanese offer of mediation between Indochina and Thailand was the fact that the United States had not permitted the sending of munitions to Indochina. I told the Ambassador that I could not accept this contention; that, as I had frequently said to the Ambassador, the sending of aviation matériel to Indochina was contingent upon the willingness or ability of the French Government to transfer perfectly good modern combat planes now in Martinique to Indochina. I said that the Ambassador had informed me that the German Government had refused to agree to such transfer and that I did not see how the United States could be held responsible in the slightest degree for this decision. I said further that with regard to the shipment of other kinds of munitions, the Ambassador was fully aware of our own rearmament problem and of our policy with regard to assisting the British. I said that if, within the limitations of these requirements, other munitions had been shipped to Indochina, it would have been on such a very small scale as to render no material assistance whatever to the authorities in Indochina and might, of course, in view of the situation now, have fallen into the hands of the Japanese.
The Ambassador then seemed to change his argument to the complaint that the British had not permitted four transports of Senegalese troops to proceed by way of the Red Sea to increase the garrison in Indochina and that the United States could have brought pressure to bear upon the British to bring about the release of these transports, I stated that as the Ambassador well knew, I had brought the Ambassador’s requests in this regard upon two occasions to the attention of the British Embassy in Washington and that these requests had been referred to London. I said that, of course, the United States could not decide for the British what their decision in matters of war policy of this character should be.