500.A15A4 Land Armaments/91: Telegram
The Acting Chairman of the American Delegation (Gibson) to the Secretary of State
[Received May 31—8:50 p.m.]
225. In a meeting this afternoon the Land Commission discussed a reply from the Technical Committee to the questionnaire (see my 210, May 25, 6 p.m.25) which had been submitted to them by the Land Commission. The reply was verbose, indeterminate and inconclusive and in particular had failed to make any workable distinction between tanks and armored cars, grouping them together in such a way that any treatment applied to one must necessarily apply to the other. Colonel Strong, who sat in the Technical Committee, reports that the failure to reach technical agreement on definitions of tanks and armored cars was caused by the political preoccupations of the [Page 151] technical representatives; in the case of the defeated powers by the desire to insist on the abolition of all arms of which they are deprived by the peace commission treaties; in the case of France a disinclination to accept any restriction upon the development or use of any form of mechanized means of warfare; in the case of Great Britain a fear of the application of restrictions to combatant mechanized means below a certain tonnage and a fear of restriction in the use of non-combatant mechanized instruments such as supply and ammunition vehicles; in the case of Poland and Bulgaria a fear of the deprivation of means of defense against possible Soviet aggression.
In the apprehension that the coupling of tanks and armored cars may render more difficult any efficacious action by the General Commission towards the abolition of tanks Wilson spoke early in the debate and criticized vigorously the failure of the Technical Committee to make technical replies to the question submitted and expressed the belief that the attitude of the technical men had been influenced by political considerations rather than by recognized technical facts. He stated that in the event that the Land Commission made a report to General Commission which did not provide specific definitions for tanks and armored cars the American delegation would add a reservation in its own words such a definition for the purpose of making effective whatever steps might be taken toward qualitative disarmament.
The British delegation proposed that the Land Commission report that all armed and armored vehicles of over 25 tons should be considered as specifically offensive and falling within the terms of the General Commission resolution of April 22nd. The French delegation declined to agree to the foregoing thesis and stated that inasmuch as tanks of about 70 tons were the only ones which could be used against permanent fortifications only such tanks could be considered as falling within the resolution of April 22nd (Aubert’s remarks seem to have been at variance with what we know of the French thesis, namely that medium size tanks may be considered offensive but that very heavy tanks can be considered only as defensive because of their small radius of action).
The Belgian, Brazilian and German delegations specifically supported what Wilson had stated while the French and Spanish delegations maintained the impossibility of differentiation between tanks and armored cars.
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