Monday, 28 June

In the afternoon, the Swedish Minister visited me and Military Attaché Guo and I talked with him for a long time. He said the Canadian Minister, Wilgress, was just back from Moscow. Wilgress said as follows.1) Molotov told the American Ambassador Admiral Standley that Satō came to Moscow solely because of the investigation and impoundment of the Russian ships. The American Ambassador envoy asked if that was all, and Molotov said yes. 2) Recently, the Soviet attitude towards Britain and America has changed a lot. It responded actively to them, and the Diplomatic Corps in Moscow felt strange about this. They speculated that the Soviet attitude towards European politics has changed so that it seemed to be not wanting to turn them “Red”. The Swedish Minister said that according to the Swedish Military Attaché in Berlin, in February the Germans seemed to have given up attacking Russia and turned to defence tactics instead. But by April the Germans had changed again and were now taking the offensive. According to the Japanese Embassy’s news, the German offensive was probably scheduled to be after June (next month). The Swedish Military Attaché said that more that 60% of the German armies reckoned that they could still defend, or achieve a big strike against the Soviet Union, so that the German side could have equal status during peace talks. I reported this to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs.

I received Bingkun’s letter of 14 April. Zhouxian cabled mother to invite her to Guilin to live with Kitty, but mother still wants to stay in Liuzhou. I cabled a reply that if mother wants to stay in Liuzhou, just let her stay because in Guilin Kitty and Zhaoxian did many things that mother might not want to see.