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into another car; after which followed another argument even more voluble. Next, he struck a man riding a bicycle. We then left the car and hired a taxi to convey us to the Air Ministry. The Air Minister uttered many polite words and, after an appropriate exchange of amenities on both sides, designated his assistant to conduct negotiations with us. 

We proceeded to the assistant's office where we were introduced to three or four other assistants of lesser rank. We were soon informed that the French had done a tremendous amount of work to get ready for our arrival, but, since the subject was so broad and so complicated, they could of course discuss but one subject per day and that subject must be agreed upon the previous day in order that they might properly prepare for their discussion of it. We indicated that the items necessary to the making of an Air Force were so numerous that, if we took up but one item per day we would spend the rest of our lives discussing what were were going to do - in fact, the war would have been terminated and others fought before we could be prepared to start to get ready to fight. This seemed to make no difference to the French who determined that the discussion of the next morning would be upon airplanes. So the following morning, Bolling and I met the French to discuss airplanes. After a full day of discussion, the French elected to discuss engines the following day, so it went, one item per day and each day resulting in a mass of talk and everybody getting nowhere rapidly.

There were endless conferences all of which arrived at no results. One complication overlapped another. The personal equation of the individual Frenchmen had, at all times, to be taken into account. During fourteen days, we had many conferences with the French Ministry. Practically speaking, all these conferences were fruitless. Previous to our arrival in Paris, the French Air Ministry had made up their French minds as to what they were going to force America to do for its aeronautical program. We were in France attempting to find out what we should buy in Europe and what we should build in this country. Things proceeded very slowly because the French concentrated all their thought and schemes upon trying to force us to place a contract in France for approximately 20,000 airplanes and 30,000 engines and to sign that contract immediately without giving further thought to the value of British or Italian aircraft and without

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