761.93/1728

Memorandum of Conversation, by Mr. Robert S. Ward of the Division of Commercial Policy and Agreements

Last night at a small informal dinner at the Statler Hotel, I sat next to Major General P. T. Mow.96 In the course of the evening Mow told a story from Chinese history of one of the great states taking advantage of a war between two smaller countries to allow them to exhaust themselves, whereafter the great state was able to take them both over. He had spent a year, he said, in Russia in 1925–26 studying military science there, and speaks Russian. Russia, he asserted, was to blame for the present war.* If she had not made a non-aggression pact with Germany, Germany would not have dared to fight in Europe and she was, he felt, to blame for Pearl Harbor also, because she had made a non-aggression pact with Japan prior to the latter’s attack. Japan would never have struck at the United States “if she had had to leave her back door open”.

Of lend-lease shipments to Russia by boat, he alleged that about two out of five go ultimately to Japan. Japan was supplying Russia with rubber in return.

General Mow went on to say that he was in Chungking when Willkie97 was there; when one of the guests interrupted to ask him if it was true that China was receiving as much aid from Russia as Willkie said—there was supposed to have been a line of trucks fender to fender on the road through Hsinkiang bringing supplies to China—Mow replied, “I don’t think so. I don’t think there was a single truck. On the contrary,” he said, “Russia is getting stuff from China. She wants Chinese wool.”

When Mow was last in China he went one morning to see H. H. Kung. Mr. Kung was sick in bed and very angry. The Russian Ambassador98 had just left, having insisted on seeing Kung about a very important matter which turned out to be the arrangement for payment for wool purchases. The Russians were determined, Mow claimed, on paying for these shipments at the New York price, i. e., the lowest one, and at the official rate for Chinese currency, while they themselves bought this Chinese currency on the black market in China. Meanwhile, Mow claimed, for the gasoline which the Chinese were [Page 272] purchasing from the Russians they had to pay the current price in Chungking.

In 1938, Mow alleged, Russia had sent emissaries to Hsinkiang, where they forced Sheng Shih-tsai to sign an agreement giving to Russia all the tin in Hsinkiang province. Again last fall when Baku was threatened and Russia thought that she was losing her oil supply, she forced Sheng to sign another agreement leasing all the oil. In the negotiations for this agreement Sheng wired the Generalissimo and was told that China wanted to keep on friendly terms with Russia. Thereafter, however, two Russian tanks crossed the Hsinkiang border, according to Mow, and Sheng, after having reported the matter to Chungking, threatened to close all Russian offices in Urumchi. The Russians thereafter became conciliatory and a settlement was reached, Mow indicated, on a basis of a 50–50 division of the oil between Russia and China.

Asked by one of the guests if he believed Russia would lend her territory to the United Nations for use as air bases against Japan he replied that he felt certain that she would not do so, that she had no interest in helping America against Japan.

To another question as to whether he believed Russia would attempt to seize Chinese territory when she was free to do so, he replied, “Sure she will.” He then drew a rough sketch map of China locating the province of Hsinkiang on it, and asserted that Russia planned (or was engaged in?) building air fields in southern Hsinkiang from which she intended, he claimed, to attack India.

He then went on to say that what Russia wanted was an outlet through the Persian Gulf—that if she went through the Baltic to the English Channel she would just be going through the English Channel (by which he meant that the channel would always be controlled by England) and that by going out through Vladivostok she would just be going through the Sea of Japan. At the Bosporus there was Turkey (barring the way). But the Persian Gulf was relatively more open, and (according to Mow) until she was attacked by Germany “Russia hoped that an Axis victory would give her the Persian Gulf.”

General Mow also said that Russia had shown her hand in her attack on Finland and Poland, and if she had just been able to restrain herself in Bessarabia her plans would have worked out, but she moved too rapidly.

Russia’s real object, according to Mow, was the spread of the doctrines of Communism. She wanted to make, he said, all other countries Communistic. The dissolution of the Comintern meant nothing; Russia no longer needed it: “The glass was already cracked.”

General Mow claimed that a ranking American officer who had recently returned from Chungking had predicted that Russia would [Page 273] show a definite interest in Northern Manchuria at the close of the war, and he recalled that when Matsuoka left Moscow after signing a nonaggression pact with Russia, Stalin saw him off at the station. That was, he said, a very rare thing and indicated how Russia felt toward Japan.

In comment on these observations three things may be noted—first, General Mow comes from Fenghua, General Chiang Kai-shek’s home town. He attended the Whampoa Academy in Canton when Chiang was its president, and after Chiang came back from Moscow he went there. These associations with the Generalissimo are sufficiently close to suggest that Mow probably reflects the point of view of an influential group in the Chinese Army if not in fact that of the Generalissimo himself.

A second point of importance is the fact that all through the evening General Mow talked as if he considered Russia China’s enemy rather than Japan. An outsider, listening to the conversation, would not have imagined that the guests were all of them nationals of countries at war with Japan; he would have concluded that Russia was the antagonist.

The third point of almost equal significance was the sympathy with which General Mow’s remarks were received by the other guests. Everyone present except myself expressed at one point or another the heartiest approval of the General’s statements. As an instance of this feeling, another of the guests, a high ranking officer of a wartime agency in Washington, expressed relief that a shortage of shipping would delay some of the lend-lease supplies which were going to Russia.

  1. Of the Chinese Purchasing Commission.
  2. This and other statements made by the General are quoted here not because they are believed to be true—the General himself must suspect the accuracy of some of them—but because of their importance as the reflection of an attitude of mind.—rsw [Footnote in the original.]
  3. Wendell Willkie, Republican nominee for President in 1940, who visited China and other countries in behalf of the war effort in 1942.
  4. Alexander Semenovich Panyushkin.