Office of the Historian

740.0011 Pacific War/2476

Memorandum by the Adviser on Political Relations (Hornbeck)81

[Washington,] May 7, 1942.

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In the view recorded on the first paragraph of page two that cessation of Chinese resistance is “out of the question”, I do not entirely concur. Notwithstanding Chiang Kai-shek’s will and intention to continue resistance, the will and capacity of China as a whole to continue resistance is going to depend in no small measure on the success or failure of the United States to maintain communication with China and deliver munitions, et cetera, to the Chinese Government; also, on the trend of events in the operations of war between the United States and Japan.

But, in the view that “the Chinese might very well not fight their armies but simply sit”, I concur—except that in my opinion Mrs. Luce fails to realize that, as matters stand today, there may come a time when, if the United States fails to deliver as above indicated, the Chinese armies will not have the option of “sitting”: those armies may be compelled either to give up to the Japanese or to retreat into China’s farthest west. The situation has reached a point where Chiang Kai-shek—having observed British and American inability to send adequate support to their own fighting forces in the Far East (conspicuously in the Philippines and in the Singapore area and Burma) and inability to deliver to him materials promised—might decide to “sulk in his tent” and let his armies “sit” until the United States and Great Britain give evidence of a capacity and a definite intention to deliver to him at least a substantial part of what has been promised him or an amount of materials in reasonable proportion to the amounts that are being delivered by the United States to the British and to the Russians, and by the British to the Russians.

S[tanley] K. H[ornbeck]
  1. Mr. Hornbeck herein comments upon a memorandum of May 5, 1942, by Assistant Secretary of State Berle in which the latter recorded the observations of Mrs. Clare Boothe Luce concerning her visit with Madame Chiang Kai-shek at Chungking (740.0011 Pacific War/2476¼).↩