of US troops with the B.E.F.), and the pooling of allied supplies. Allied pessimism prevailed at this meeting. French divisions were down to 50% strength, and the British were not faring much better. The British, French and Italian Prime Ministers signed a letter to President Wilson that said, "there is a great danger of the war being lost ... owing to the allied reserves being exhausted before those of the enemy", and that the United States would have to raise 100 divisions, requiring the call up of 300,000 conscripts a month, to raise an army of 4 million men. General Pershing also cabled Washington D.C., saying, "It should be most fully realized at home that the time has come for us to take up the brunt of the war and that France and England are not going to be able to keep their armies at present strength very much longer." Also, "If the Allies had seen this a year or even six months earlier and had given us assistance in shipping"..."they could have assisted in the formation of a powerful American Army". Instead, "the number of training infantrymen in America will be practically exhausted by the middle of July, they [the allies] still insisted on a program of infantry personnel", and, "The Prime Ministers and General Foch appeal most urgently for trained or even untrained men." In his memoirs, Pershing says about raising the army, "In its execution as a whole, the achievement stands out as a lasting monument to our War Department, marred only by the lack of foresight that made it necessary to send over untrained men and units in precipitate haste." Lord Milner had commented at a meeting of the X Committee on 17 May that some of the troops "hardly knew how to handle a rifle". Originally planned for an army of 500,000 men, the US draft had to be expanded four times before a 4 million man army could be raised. At the meeting, amidst concerns that—following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk three months earlier—the Germans were about to requisition the Russian Black Sea Fleet, Lloyd George proposed the creation of a new post of Allied Supreme Naval Commander in the Mediterranean, suggesting Admiral Jellicoe, former commander of the British Grand Fleet art the Battle of Jutland, for the position. The French were in favour of a combined Allied naval command, but the Italians were not,