800.796/11–3044: Telegram
The Acting Secretary of State to the Ambassador in the United Kingdom (Winant)
10024. We assume you have seen the further message which the President sent last night to the Prime Minister. In case you have not, the essence of it was that we could not agree that the solution was for the British to hold everyone else back in the development of aviation because they were temporarily in a poor competitive position but that the answer was rather for the two countries to go forward together and that we were prepared to help them to do so by making transport aircraft available to them on the same terms as to our own people if an agreement could be reached which would permit aviation freely to develop. This was in reply to the Prime Minister’s message of November 28 in which he stressed the fact that the British were being asked to make British fields available all over the world and the handicap under which British aviation was laboring as a result of the agreement that they concentrate on fighter planes while we concentrated on transports.
We are deeply concerned at reports reaching us from British and Commonwealth sources in Chicago and elsewhere that the persons in London responsible for decisions in this matter, primarily Beaverbrook, do not want any aviation agreement to be reached at Chicago [Page 596] although many persons in the British Government and in the Dominion Governments favor an agreement substantially along the lines we propose. If these reports are true it appears that compromise on our part would be useless. Swinton apparently has no latitude whatsoever. The foregoing is for your secret information as a basis for anything you may be able to do to help.
Our delegation reports that all the other Delegations who had spoken this week have supported either the American position or the Canadian compromise except the French and the Australians, who supported the British, and New Zealanders who supported neither. South Africa and India declined to speak. The French told Berle privately that they were acting under orders which they hoped eventually to reverse. The Dutch and Swedes strongly opposed the British position.
We are also deeply disturbed at the repercussions which failure of the Conference would have both upon the future conclusion of an air agreement and in the wider fields of Anglo-American relations. As the President has said and as is beginning to be hinted in the press our people will wonder about the chances of international cooperation to keep the peace if not even the British and ourselves can reach agreement on such a subject as aviation.