800.85 Lend Lease/8–2945
Memorandum by the Assistant Secretary of State (Clayton) to the Secretary of State
[Washington,] September 3,
1945.
Referring to the attached18 from Admiral Land:
- 1.
- Naturally we all favor transporting in American bottoms on a competitive basis as much as possible of our imports and exports. We do not favor buying the right to do this by the use of excessive subsidies.
- 2.
- From the point of view of costs, the United States, of all the maritime nations, is the most inefficient operator of ships.
- 3.
- We can buy shipping services cheaper than we can perform them ourselves, and the dollars that we pay for such services will be immediately spent in the United States for goods which we can produce more efficiently than other nations.
- 4.
- Even if we should force the carriage of all American imports and exports in American ships, it would reduce rather than increase employment in the United States because it would deprive other maritime nations of the dollars which they ordinarily earn by shipping services, and thus greatly curtail their purchases of goods in the United States.
- 5.
- Admiral Land’s memorandum does not mention the one thing which stands out above all others as necessary to be done in the present shipping situation. I refer to the necessity of amending the present law19 which prevents the sale of our ships to foreign countries.20 As Admiral Land says, we own over 50,000,000 deadweight tons of ocean-going ships. We may be able to usefully employ 10–12 million deadweight tons of these ships in domestic and foreign service. In addition, we may wish to lay up another 10–12 million tons as a war reserve. The remaining 25–30 million tons should be offered for sale on such reasonable prices and terms that the other maritime nations of the world will buy their ships from us instead of building new ones and thus adding to the present burdensome world surplus of ships. In any case, we will be compelled to lay up many of these ships in our rivers and harbors, but we should sell every single ship that the market will take and do it promptly.
W[illiam] L. C[layton]