Tuesday, 21 September

The Swedish Minister invited me to lunch. His First-Class Secretary is the wife of Earl (name unclear). Every morning she has to go to shop to buy food. It took about two hours to do it. It is so nice that even though she is the wife of the Earl is young and rich, she is willing to queue up in the street for one to two hours to buy food. This also illustrates the difficulty of getting food during wartime. The Soviet Union is quite mean to diplomats, which is a big contrast to China who always treat diplomats very well.

Today the British Prime Minister Churchill made a report to parliament, (He was back from the United States yesterday.) he reported the overall picture that he appointed Mountbatten as Commander to lead the South Asia combined forces in the war against Japan. He also said the Generalissimo welcomed the appointment. He also mentioned the Italian incident, saying that Badoglio and the King of Italy have already sent representatives to negotiate with the Allies. The Allies originally wanted to occupy Rome. But Rome airport was suddenly occupied by the Germans, therefore that couldn’t materialise. He also said that the North Africa war couldn’t be counted as the second war zone. It was only preparation for it. As for the second war zone, it depended entirely on military plans and then it would be able to materialise.  He would definitely not sacrifice the military for politics. His words implied that the second war zone couldn’t be opened immediately, and I thought the Soviet Union would be displeased.

In the evening, Chongqing broadcast that Spain had received news from Germany that the German army wanted to retreat to the Polish border.