500.A15A4 General Committee/625: Telegram
The Chairman of the American Delegation (Davis) to the Secretary of State
733. 1. As we have proceeded recently in our consideration of the critical and possibly determining material problem it has been borne in on us more and more that article 16 of the British draft convention designed to change the German armed forces from the present long term professional army of 100,000 to a short term conscript militia of 200,000 means not only the revamping of the Reichswehr but the reorganization of all continental European armies on a uniform basis. Furthermore, that the logical and indeed inevitable consequence of this entirely new basis for these armies will and should involve the corollary of eventual uniformization of types and categories of equipment, that is, of material.
2. We feel that the normal consequences of these basic alterations in the military structure of the European continental states make possible a compromise settlement of the acute differences now existing between France and German opinion with regard to material. We believe that any such compromise would constitute a fair, just and workable arrangement under the MacDonald plan which would:
- (a)
- Satisfy the reasonable demands of the French and the Germans in according to each reasonable provision for their defense with special reference to that of France during the transition period.
- (b)
- Be a reasonable method of meeting the German position with respect to eventual equality of rights which we all accepted in principle in the agreement of December 11th last, and perhaps most important of all
- (c)
- Establish thereby a yardstick for the supervised acquisition of future material based on equipment requirements per 1,000 treaty [Page 249] effectives to prevent a race in permitted but numerically unlimited arms when Germany is freed from the Versailles Treaty restrictions.
3. The fact that the draft convention we are working under provides that part 5 of the Versailles Treaty is superseded on its ratification leads to a belief generally accepted that Germany will have to be admitted upon a voluntary equality basis as to type before the termination of the Disarmament Treaty. In this way, assuming the establishment of the personnel of continental European armies to be as specified numerically in the tables attached to the British plan or approximately the same, the equipment of these armies should have a specified fixed ratio based on composite requirements for this personnel which could be estimated, it is believed, from the composite experience of the great powers.
4. This would permit full freedom of action on the part of each state for reorganization within the prescribed quotas and likewise full freedom for choice or development of the material of the permitted types. In accordance with the ratios thus fixed the signatories would be allowed to acquire by stages a permissible amount of required material pari passu with the progress of the reorganization of their forces and to conform to the standardization determined upon.
5. Such a solution would temporarily at least help toward avoiding the thorny question of material in stock and obviate the necessity for the inclusion in the treaty of a “good conduct” trial period, so-called, for Germany which we believe could be provided for in substance by delaying the completion of first stages of the transformation of the Reichswehr for a 3- or 4-year period.
6. We will telegraph you further on this subject as our conversations with other delegations proceed and our own thoughts crystallize. These ideas have come up in our discussions with some of the British and French who appear to regard them sympathetically.
- Telegram in two sections.↩