893.00/10–2348: Telegram
The Acting Secretary of State to the Ambassador in France (Caffery)
Telmar 95. For the Secretary.90 Nanking’s tel no. 1971 Oct 22, sent Paris as Telmar 94 Oct 23, together with Nanking’s 1983 Oct 23 sent Paris as Nanking’s 6 in which Amb Stuart personally associates himself with first tel, should by now have come to your attention. We have carefully reviewed appraisal and recommendations set forth these tels and are submitting in immediately following message our comments in form suggested reply to Amb.91
Embtel 1971 appears to contradict in many ways views previously expressed by Amb in his tels and despatches and in a sense offers its own answer when he states: “our military advisers feel that the Nationalist military establishment has very likely already suffered too great losses in manpower, matériel and morale to make any such effort successful. There is just no will to fight left in Nationalist forces and we can find no effective way to change the situation. A moral resurgence of Chinese will to resist Communist aggression is required and [Page 512] the requisite leadership just is not available”. Our comments in the suggested reply are indicative of the extent to which we have been guided in our thinking on this problem by reports submitted to Dept over a period of several months by Amb and various consular offices in China. While our suggested reply is somewhat lengthy, it is our opinion that matter is sufficiently important to warrant detailed exposition of our thinking on this problem and background for our conclusions drawn from number of interchanges between Dept and Emb which is recorded therein.