No. 764

Secretary’s Memoranda, lot 53D444

Memorandum by Lucius D. Battle, Special Assistant to the Secretary of State 1

top secret

The Secretary mentioned to me that he was very much interested in Moscow’s telegram no. 1457 of February 42 concerning possible limitation of North Atlantic Treaty forces. He said that he had been thinking that we might make some sort of offer to the Russians to keep in being the same number of troops as the USSR and her satellites had east of the Bug River. If the Russians came back and said that they had no control over their satellites and were therefore unable to control what they had in the way of armed forces, the statements could then be made that it was not necessary for the total figure to be controlled as the Russians could adjust their own forces accordingly.

The Secretary mentioned that Mr. Bohlen had told him of an offer made by Mr. Byrnes in New York in 1946 which offered to confine US, French and British occupation forces in Germany to 3 hundred thousand. The total USSR occupation forces were to be 2 [Page 1532] hundred thousand. This would have given the Russians a two to one advantage over any one of her allies. The Secretary said that he understood the Russians came back and refused to accept this ratio but had made a counter offer.3 The Secretary said that he thought we might seriously consider this whole matter as he thought it might give us a tremendous propaganda advantage. He had in mind that we could make some sort of offer which the Russians would find difficult to turn down without losing considerable propaganda benefits.

He said that if the Russians raised the question of the men which Greece, Turkey and Yugoslavia had under arms, we could simply reply to the effect that this was not the threat which the USSR was concerned about; that the threat with which the USSR was most concerned was the North Atlantic Treaty countries and that the other troops were completely outside this group and an entirely different problem.

The Secretary wants Mr. Bohlen and Mr. Nitze to look at the telegram referred to and consider the matter throughly prior to discussing it with him.4

L[ucius] D. B[attle]
  1. Directed to Jessup for action and copies sent to Matthews, Nitze, and Bohlen.
  2. Supra.
  3. The reference here presumably is to the U.S. proposal made during the Third Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers in New York in December 1946; see Foreign Relations, 1946, vol. ii, pp. 14661467 and 1528. The withdrawal of occupation forces from Germany, including the counterproposal referred to here by Secretary Acheson, was discussed further at the final meeting of the Fourth Session of the Council of Foreign Ministers in Moscow, April 24, 1947, and in the Allied Control Council for Germany and its Coordinating Committee on May 29 and May 31, 1947; see ibid., 1947, vol. ii, pp. 389, 870871.
  4. No record of any further discussion of this matter has been found in Department of State files.