851R.50/28
Memorandum by the Assistant Secretary of State (Berle) to the Secretary of State
Mr. Secretary: There was a meeting this afternoon of the committee which has been working on the economic agreement with North Africa. Prior to it, Mr. Murray showed me the memorandum of conversation he had yesterday with General Hull.60 General Hull had criticized the failure of the Department to get off the two French ships which were designed to be sent to Casablanca, and had said that in his view the failure of those ships to get to Casablanca might have added to the loss of life in that operation.
Murray asked me whether I would state this to the meeting today.
I thereupon at the Committee read the apposite parts of the memorandum of conversation with General Hull.
I said that in reviewing the entire operation, in the main it had been successful, at least to the extent of seventy-five per cent, but that it had failed to some extent of maximum efficiency, by reason of this delay. For that reason, I thought that it might be good for all of us to review the entire proceedings with a view to seeing whether in future the speed of operations could not be increased.
I said that unhappily the argument which would have been convincing, namely, a disclosure of the North African military plans, could not be made. The military directive for secrecy had been very stringent. Further, I was advised that in future operations the War Department proposed to limit still further the number of men to whom information of a plan might be given. Under these circumstances we all of us had to realize that in a good many cases we might be asked to do things all of whose implications we did not understand, because of the military necessities of the situation.
I then suggested that it might be well to review the procedure, and expressed the hope that in view of the criticism made we might derive some benefit from reviewing the operation to date.
[Page 435]There was some discussion afterwards, and a tendency by a Mr. Fagan, of the BEW,61 to regard this as a direct criticism of BEW. I answered that so far as I could see the delays had resulted not from any one agency, but from a combination of a great many; and that since the criticism was general, I thought we all of us had to take it to heart equally, and go at it on that basis.