Tuesday, 25 April

In the morning, I studied Russian. For the last 10 days I have been studying Russian for two to three hours per day. Although I have found it quite hard, I have made significant advancement. It is just like anything in the world, if one doesn’t work hard, one will gain nothing.

Yesterday the American army landed on Hollandia in New Guinea and cut off the retreating line of 6,000 Japanese soldiers. This time the Japanese developed too quickly, and over-stretched their strength. They felt they were too weak to cope with the situation. This is the result of over-estimating of one’s strength, and their defeat must come from this.

Attaché Hu reported the British and American reporters’ reflections after visiting the Front line in South Russia. 1) Lack of manpower and air force will be the reasons behind the defeat of Germany. 2) The quality of the Romanian army is not good, and its organisation corrupt. It also did not cooperate with the German army. 3) The German army has changed its commander several times and they are not allowed to review the situation freely. What they can do is retreat. Therefore they are usually surrounded by the Red Army and when they retreated hastily they lost a lot of material resources.

The Soviet newspapers published the reasons why the Soviet Union did not take part in the International Labour Conference, and they advocated the reorganisation of the committee, because that committee had cancelled its representative system in 1930. As the representatives were dismissed, it was not easy to ask them to come, and Hungary, Bulgaria and Finland had their representatives. Therefore, the Soviet Union advocated that 1) the committee should be reorganised as an institution of the United Nations with 2) added labour representatives that should be equal in numbers with those of governments and employers. (The current system is as follows. Two for government, while labour and employers each have one.)

This morning, Committee member Hu went to Iran for recuperation as he is suffering from the first stage of tuberculosis. In the Diplomatic Corps quite a few have had this disease here. This is caused by the environment.