500.A15a3/92: Telegram
The Ambassador in Great Britain (Dawes) to the Secretary of State
[Received July 30—12:47 p.m.]
211. This morning received the following letter from the Prime Minister which I forward with much satisfaction and which should be read in connection with my telegram No. 209, July 29, 5 p.m.:
“My dear General: I have been studying the agreement which we came to yesterday and decided to send to our Governments, and the more I think of it the more satisfactory it seems. There are two small points however which we overlooked. The first is in paragraph 5. It is provided that the yardstick shall be adopted to find out comparative values of ships within each cruiser category. Later on, paragraph (e), it is assumed that the yardstick will only be required for cruisers because we have already come to an agreement on tonnage as regards destroyers and submarines. The latter decision I am sure, is the best for both of us because if we were to go to the Five-Power Conference and say to France and Italy ‘You can get for destroyers and submarines tonnage which you can save from the other categories’, we shall get into endless bother and will create a new menace which will be peculiarly embarrassing for me and will give the Admiralty here a strong case for an increase in our small cruisers. As I am out for reduction all along the line I should like to avoid this without doing any other nation a real injustice.
The second point is the paragraph relating to lengthening the lives of first class battleships. We would like to do this by some arrangement which would not mean that we should have to discharge the whole of our staff by a revolutionary stroke of the pen but would enable us to keep on a sort of nucleus. This means that we should have to spread the lengthening of the life over a series of years. It is only a matter of arrangement and not of principle or object. From a businessman’s point of view you will appreciate this point.
I should also like to let you know that although I agreed yesterday to the figures of 15 and 45 as my program of cruiser building I am going now to work to find out whether I cannot reduce both these figures but certainly the second one if we can get an agreement with Japan, France and Italy. So if there is any objection from America that the total reduction involved in our agreement of yesterday is a little disappointing please let it remain where it is because I think if we can extend our agreement to other powers I can offer you a still better arrangement.
With kindest regards. Yours very sincerely, J. Ramsay MacDonald.”