500.A15A4/1037: Telegram
The Acting Chairman of the American Delegation (Gibson) to the Secretary of State
[Received May 17—11:05 a.m.]
189. Our 169, May 13, 4 p.m., from London was necessarily dictated hurriedly as we were leaving for Paris and questions raised in your 104 are due to imperfections in our message.
We informed Mr. Baldwin fully as regards the three points in your telegram but omitted reporting our part of the conversation in the interest of brevity and because we felt your chief concern would be in what Baldwin and Simon had to say.
In formulating his plan Baldwin was under no misapprehension as to your position on capital ships. He prefaced his remarks with the statement that the idea of abolishing the capital ship would be [Page 131] shocking to us as it would be to many people in Great Britain, After this we again clearly brought out your position on the subject. He replied that he thoroughly understood these and other arguments in favor of retaining the capital ship. He did not endeavor to contest the soundness of your position but said that in spite of all the arguments he still felt that we must be prepared to make this contribution if we were to get other people to make corresponding sacrifices and, while he recognized that with the present situation in the Far East no immediate change should be made, he was thinking more of the exaction and laying stress upon the fact that any changes were to be relative and proportional.
Mr. Baldwin did very definitely include submarines in his program immediately after the abolition of the capital ship and our failure to include them was due to an oversight either in dictation or copying. In fact his first argument for the abolition of the capital ship was that this, and this alone, might be expected to overcome the opposition of other states to the abolition of the submarine as other naval powers have consistently maintained that so long as the great naval powers continue to possess these “formidable weapons” they would not agree to forego the use of the submarine. Furthermore, he was very insistent on the fact that the program was to be accepted or rejected as a whole.
Another point which was not brought out with sufficient clarity in our 169 is the status of Baldwin’s program. He did not describe it to us as a program adopted by the Government. He said it was a plan he had himself worked out; that he had just discussed it in the Cabinet and before laying it before us he requested Simon’s acquiescence in so doing. Simon was present through the interview and while he maintained silence he did not dissent from any of the views expressed. Baldwin did not tell us what reception his idea had met in the Cabinet but we gathered that it had not been before that body long enough to have received full discussion. As you will remember Baldwin said to us that the whole plan was so revolutionary that he did not expect us even to express an opinion but merely wanted to describe it to us so that we could pass it along to you so that you might have time to consider it. He did, however, express the firm belief that if our two Governments could agree upon a comprehensive plan along these lines our joint influence would be so formidable as to make it possible for us to render a great service toward world recovery.