For, as has been said, it is utopian indeed to hope to establish international disarmament if one country looks upon the armaments of its neighbors more critically than it looks at its own. And that was the story of the disarmament efforts of the later 1920’s and the 1930’s. On the one hand the charter of the League of Nations, to which most of the naval powers belonged, provided for a reduction of armaments, “taking into account the geographical position and the particular problems of each State.” On the other hand the United States was not a member of the League of Nations, so the naval powers which were signatories to the Washington Treaty were obliged to hold separate discussions on the only question which interested the Americans: that of naval armaments considered independently from land and air armaments.
In 1924 the “Preparatory Commission” which the League of Nations had established met at Geneva to study questions relating to disarmament. The English advocated limitation by specific categories—heavy cruisers, light cruisers, destroyers, etc.—which would automatically have insured control of the seas for the British by establishing their supremacy in each class. The French, on the contrary, advocated global limitation, which would permit complete freedom of action and leave the door wide open for “surprises.”22
By “surprises” is meant new inventions, new ship designs, or development of entirely new classes which would outmode existing ships possessed in superior numbers by another power.
The discussions were deadlocked for three years. The French Navy offered a compromise plan, but the British refused to budge.
Then the United States intervened with an invitation to a naval conference with the view of extending the ratios of the Washington Treaty to all categories of ships. The French refused to be caught twice in the same trap, and Italy also declined the invitation. In 1927 the three remaining powers—Japan, Britain, and the United States—met, but could arrive at no agreement. The United States Navy, which had a greater need than Great Britain for heavy cruisers, refused the proposal of Britain in that category, where-upon the British began to veer around to the French point of view. In March, 1928, a British-French compromise plan began to take shape, which, however, required the acquiesence of all the powers. The United States not only rejected it, but to emphasize the rejection the U.S. Congress passed a building program providing for fifteen 10,000-ton cruisers. The whole attempt at arms limitation ended with the utopian but impractical Briand-Kellogg Pact, signed at Paris, by which all the great powers “renounced war”—but without any of them renouncing the right to arm.
The next conference of the five major naval powers assembled at London, in 1930. Again the Americans, though having no part in the League of Nations, wished to extend the ratios of the Washington Treaty to all navies and to all types of ships. Even if the French had been willing to discuss such a ratio in relation to the United States and British Navies, her interests in the Mediterranean were such that she could never have accepted parity with the still greatly inferior Italian Navy. The new construction program had now been in effect for eight years, and public opinion and the Government were behind the growing French Navy.
In 1932 the scene shifted to Geneva, where the General Disarmament Conference of the League of Nations met after eight years of preparation. The conference was dominated by the question of what rights were to be accorded Germany. That nation, noting that the victorious powers had not yet disarmed, as prescribed in the Versailles Treaty, asked for either disarmament all around or equality of armament for Germany. When this was refused, Hitler promptly withdrew from the conference. Later he decreed universal military service in Germany without anyone contesting it, since it was naval armaments alone that interested Great Britain at that time. The final result of the Geneva Conference was that the League of Nations no longer engaged itself with matters of naval armaments.
However, behind the scenes, the French and Italian naval experts carried on their own negotiations. It was to the interest of both countries to reduce expenditures. Unofficially they agreed on a formula of limited scope which would preserve the existing naval ratios of the two countries, without any commitment for the future. The French Minister of Foreign Affairs reluctantly accepted the Navy’s recommendation, but the British, informed of the unofficial agreement, still pressed for parity for the Italian Navy with the French Navy. Encouraged, in 1934 Mussolini announced the laying of the keels of two 35,000-ton battleships in the near future. The French Navy, which had only the Dunkerque under construction, immediately obtained funds for the construction of the Strasbourg as a makeweight.
In 1934 Japan gave the required two-year notice that she would not renew the Washington Treaty, which, as a matter of fact, she had already been secretly violating. France sent out a similar notice in order to emphasize once and for all that she would not accept naval parity with Italy. Though the diametrically opposed points of view of the various nations had been recognized for a long time, nevertheless a call was sent out for a new conference to be held in 1936 to work out some sort of substitute for the Washington Treaty.
While France was preparing for the new conference with the hope that the threatening German rearmaments might also be taken under consideration, the British Government took the initiative by negotiating directly with Hitler. In June, 1935, following a visit to Berlin by Anthony Eden, she conceded to Germany the right to a Navy thirty-five per cent the strength of the Royal Navy, and the possibility of increasing this ratio to forty-five per cent in the case of submarines.
France was thus confronted with a fait accompli. The German Navy, which had already laid down two capital ships of 26,000 tons each, plus 12 heavy cruisers, 16 destroyers, and 28 submarines, would now be in a position to build up a global tonnage of 420,000 tons instead of the mere 100,000 tons she was permitted under the Treaty of Versailles.
Looking back after the intervening years, one can understand the cold logic of Great Britain in officially recognizing German naval rearmament and agreeing to a limit, even a very large one, rather than having no agreed limit at all. It would have been commonsense if the French too had been just as realistic and had jettisoned the ineffectual legalisms of the Versailles Treaty to which she still clung. At that time, however, the French Navy could not avoid the feeling of being abandoned—left alone and misunderstood in a world of increasing menace. Accordingly the French Navy that year obtained authorization for the construction of two more battleships, to be named respectively the Richelieu and the Jean Bart. With such additions the Navy was confident that, even without the British Navy as an ally, it could cope successfully with the combined German and Italian Navies.
And international peace in Europe was becoming steadily more precarious. More exasperated than hurt by the sanctions imposed on her for the Abyssinian campaign, Italy intensified her rapprochement with the German Reich. Germany reoccupied the left bank of the Rhine without the slightest reaction to this flagrant violation of one of the most important clauses of the Treaty of Versailles. And an ideological civil war broke out in Spain, where the German-Italian fascists on one side faced the democrats, anarchists, and Soviet communists on the other.
Part of the French naval forces were called upon to cruise for many months off the Spanish coasts in order to protect or evacuate French nationals. In 1937, French ships escorted an average of 500 merchantmen each month around the Iberian Peninsula. In the harbors, the Navy saved the lives of many nationals, even Spanish. It had no part, however, in delivering the shipments of arms which the Socialist-dominated government of France was sending to Republican Spain at the expense of the French Army’s own stockpile. Convinced from their contacts with the officers of other navies that another European war was inevitable, the French Navy vigorously prepared for it.
For the London Conference of 1936 had been a complete fiasco. Japan had appeared merely to announce that she would no longer participate, and that she reserved complete freedom of action in the future. Neither Germany nor Russia was represented at all. Italy sent word that she would not know how to negotiate with nations which had just