288 Cranborne to Curtin

My telegram No. 664 of 16th September. [1]

On re-reading your telegram No. 201 of 4th August [2], we think that we may have misread your wishes. We had understood you to mean that you had no objection to preliminary discussion with United States and Russia of proposals as to Austria as set out in D. No. 439 [3] but wished to emphasize that Austria was part of the problem of the future of Germany, and that you would naturally wish to be fully consulted on this larger question before we formulated proposals for discussion with the major Allies.

We hope that you will read our telegram D. No. 664 in the light of this explanation and we are very sorry if, in fact, there has been any misunderstanding.

Position now is that as you will see from my telegram D. No. 709 [4] we expect that question of Austria will come up for discussion at the forthcoming meeting of Foreign Ministers at Moscow. You will since have received my despatch of 8th August D. No. 67, containing a memorandum which sets out in full our reasons for our proposed line in regard to Austria [5] and we hope that we may now feel the Commonwealth Government are in general agreement with our taking this line in preliminary discussions at Moscow. [6]