Tuesday, 17 October

Fine

I studied Russian from 11.00 to 1.30 in the afternoon.

Daichu said the American Embassy Secretary, L.S. Thompson has been transferred to work in the European Advisory Commission in London. He will leave Moscow soon. He came to say goodbye to me. He has been here for four years and is proficient in Russian and knows the situation in the Soviet Union well. He is also an expert in the American Embassy. He still was not optimistic about Soviet-American cooperation, reckoning that the Soviet Union still worked on its own way as before, disrespecting the benefits and opinions of other countries, and in the future it might still be possible that the world may group together to oppose it. He also said that with regard to the meeting between Churchill and Stalin, it focused mostly on Poland, Germany and the Balkans, but not on the Far East. The Soviet Union did not give way over the Polish Incident, so one can see it is difficult to cooperate with it. As for the Soviet Union giving up Communism, and no longer trying to push forward towards world revolution, he thought that this was perhaps too optimistic. The Soviet Union would never give up what it advocated. With regard to Stalin, as he acted as the translator he had met him many times. When Stalin is happy he is humorous but when he is angry one can see his cruelty. He is a very difficult person to get along with. Regarding the Pacific War, he personally thought that the American army would land on Taiwan first and delay the attack to the Philippines. He was quite mature and handled matters with great delicacy. What he said was representative of the average viewpoint of the General Staff of the British and American Embassies. As a matter of fact, there are still many obstacles in the way of Soviet – American cooperation. Recently, Churchill’s policy has been more on the division of Europe between Britain and the Soviet Union. Britain will try to seize Western Europe and the Mediterranean and the Soviet Union Eastern and Northern Europe. If this is really the case, there will certainly be no peace in the world and the future of our country will be even more worrying. Our people must try to wake up and advance, otherwise we will be unable to cope with future strong powers.

Yesterday the Japanese announced that they had sunk two American battle ships and ten American aircraft carriers, which was their biggest victory since Pearl Harbor.  The whole of Japan celebrated it. But today, the American naval Commander-in- Chief Nimitz said what the Japanese said was a real joke. He said whenever the Japanese navy encountered the American fleet in the Philippine seas, they would turn and flee. Once they used 190 airplanes to bombard the American convoy, but 95 of their planes were destroyed. The Americans only lost 5 planes. None of the American battle ships or aircraft carriers has been sunk. Some of the Americans were slightly wounded. It was pitiful that the enemy had to use this kind of propaganda. They probably tried to cheat their own people to give them some temporary consolation.