Wednesday, 10 March

Fifth day of the second lunar month

At 4.00 in the afternoon we went to the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs to meet Dekanozov, the Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs. I asked him about the latest wwar situation. He said Germany has recently transferred 25 divisions from the French Western Front to the Soviet Union to take part in the war in the Southern Front. Therefore, the Soviet Union had no option but to abandon several important strongholds. Britain and the United States have not yet opened the second war zone. The Soviet Union is having a hard time resisting Germany alone. Last winter when the German army was defeated in Moscow, Britain and the United States did not open a second war zone in the West and they missed a golden opportunity. This time, the German army has been defeated in Stalingrad. Britain and the United States again, did not manage to open a second war zone to cope with the situation, and kept missing good opportunities so Germany had time to recoup and again to organise a main offensive. This put the Soviet Union in a disadvantageous situation. Recently the general mobilisation in Germany has been a big success, and this has placed the Soviet Union in a dilemma. From his words I could feel his discontent towards Britain and the United States.

We also went to see the Acting Secretary General Zakin. He could speak English and was easy going. At 6.00 I went to see the American Ambassador Admiral William Standley. We talked as follows:

With regard to his recent talk with American journalists saying that the Soviet Union did not announce the United State’s subsidy, and this made the Soviet Union public assume the United States did not help with the war effort and that the Soviet Union had to bear the blunt alone. This was not a fair comment. If the Soviet Union did not need help from the United States, and the Lend-Lease Act was still in discussion in the Senate, the United States could consider a new policy of helping the Soviet Union. I asked him why he had spoken like this and he said he did not do it deliberately. It happened that several American journalists talked to him about a matter with regard to donation in a certain place in the United States, then touched on this issue and he said a few words about it. He didn’t expect they would leak it out, but he didn’t care, as he would be back in the United States soon and might not return to the Soviet Union again. I told him that recently on the Soviet side they were dissatisfied over procrastination regarding opening the second war zone. Ambassador Standley said the Soviet Union was always like this, and even so the Americans and British had opened a war zone in North Africa to divert quite a portion of the German armies moving to the West to lessen the pressure on the Soviet side. All these things were known by everyone. Instead, the Soviet Union insisted that since a war zone operated in North Africa, Germany calculated that Britain and the United States would be unable to open another one in France, so Germany could relocate German armies from the French war zone to the Soviet Union battlefield. All this was merely Soviet propaganda, and we didn’t need to worry too much about that. And again, Roosevelt and Churchill’s conference, Stalin was also invited beforehand. As Stalin was unwilling to go, President Roosevelt expressed willingness to go to meet Stalin at Cairo. But still Stalin did not want to go, and did not send important personnel to take part in the conference either. The Soviet way of doing things was that they did not want people to come, and yet did not want to go there themselves, therefore trying to cooperate with them was very difficult. With regard to the situation after the defeat of Germany, Ambassador Standley’s personal view was that the Soviet Union would definitely take part in the war against Japan. They did it not out of humanity. It was because if the war in the Far East did not end, then demobilisation could not materialise, thus retarding the progress of construction. I asked him when he would be back to Kuibyshev. He said he would return after two or three weeks, and would be back soon. He would then spend more time in Moscow.

At 7.15 I went to see the British Ambassador Sir Archibald Clark Kerr. I had known him a long time, and we were very happy to see each other again. He started the conversation by asking me why I was here. I laughed and said that I didn’t know and may be the same as you. We both laughed. We talked about Germany relocating 25 divisions from the West line to enter the Soviet Union’s South war zone, and he said this was Soviet propaganda towards their own people, we didn’t need to attend to it. As to when and where the second war zone would be opened, Stalin already knew the details. He said his work here was very difficult, because it was both hard to get Britain to understand the situation in the Soviet Union, and vice versa. But recently he had been able to make progress. He also reckoned that after the German defeat, the Soviet Union would definitely enter into the war against Japan as the Soviet Union also wanted to end the war quickly, so as to free the soldiers for reconstruction. At the end he personally thought that the Soviet Union’s attitude towards China was much better than to Britain and the United States. As for my request to stay in Moscow, he said he declined to return to Kuibyshev and insisted on living in Moscow which was against the wish of the Soviet Union. But since Prime Minister Churchill’s visit to the Soviet Union, there were many direct contacts between Britain and the Soviet Union, and he always needed to see Stalin on behalf of Churchill for sorting things out, the Soviet Union had no choice but to accept it. The United States’ Ambassador was also trying to move between Kuibyshev and Moscow, therefore he urged me to be a bit more patient, and wait a while. He went back to Kuibyshev first, returned to Moscow later on, and stayed longer (in Moscow) every time. He also said that he heard that the Soviet Union also wanted to move the diplomatic corps back to Moscow in June. He thought that Gu Shaochuan is not suited to the post in Britain and using George K.C. Yeh (葉公超)[1] to handle public relations was also no good. He thought it was much better to dispatch John C.H.Wu (吳經熊).[2]

In the evening, I went to a ballet.

[1] George K.C. Yeh (1904-1981) was a graduate of Cambridge University. He was a renowned scholar of English Literature and a diplomat.

[2] John C.H. Wu (1899-1986) was a law expert. He had studied at Michigan University. He translated holy odes into Chinese.