President Roosevelt to the British Prime Minister (Churchill)17
I appreciate your message of November 23 [22]. No point would be served by discussing past history such as the suggestion that an understanding on November 17 was rejected and a new proposal made by our Delegation. Our people believed that they had substantial assent from your Delegation to a draft which their and our experts interpreted one way and which Lord Swinton has interpreted in another; but all of us recognize that these situations do occur and they are not important. It is better to have this occur before rather than after an agreement is signed.
The important thing is that the draft of November 17, as interpreted by your people, does not set up the conditions for operable routes which pass through any considerable number of countries, and particularly which go to distant countries, for instance, a route from the United States to South Africa. It would make a round-the-world route almost impossible. All these routes, yours as well as ours, depend for their existence on a reasonable amount of pick-up traffic between points. We could not have pioneered South America, or maintained our present routes, nor could you maintain an economic route from London to India by depending merely on the traffic from London to each terminal point. A reasonable amount of intermediate traffic is necessary between the Panama Canal and Lima on the West Coast South American route, or between say, Rome and Cairo on your Indian route, to make it even remotely possible economically. Of [Page 588] course, each of us could subsidize indefinitely one plane a week but this is an occasional visit rather than a trade route. Our experts were also worried by the fact that this limitation (homeland to each intermediate point and exclusion of point-to-point traffic) would make it difficult, if not impossible, for any small nation to have extensive routes because small nations do not have great reservoirs of terminal traffic. You and we could survive by liberal subsidies but we both want to get away from that. The Dutch and possibly the French would find great difficulty in surviving.
We know perfectly well that we ought not to set up a situation in which our operators could wreck the local establishments between nearby countries, or so fill the air on long routes that nobody else could get in and survive. We are quite prepared to discuss limitations of pick-up traffic to assure that this does not happen. What we do want is sufficient play so that the establishment and maintenance of the long routes on a reasonably economic basis is possible. For your information, the Canadians are tackling the situation on that basis. A real difficulty in the situation is that Lord Swinton feels he is so bound by instructions that he can make no suggestion.
- Copy of telegram obtained from the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, N.Y.↩