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From Last Chance in China by Freda Utley, 1947
The apparent discrepancy between tributes to the Communist exploits against Japan on the one hand, and the charges on the other side that they did not fight Japan, is partly to be explained by a confusion of dates. Men like Congressman Judd, who himself lived for
a time in the Communist areas as a medical missionary, testify that the Communists were all out against Japan for the first two years of the war, but not after 1939. Snow�s personal knowledge also relates to this early period and this gives greater weight to he admission in his earlier books that they are real Communists under Moscow�s orders than to his recent attempts to represent them as independent Chinese liberal reformers. Agnes Smedley last visited the Communist area eight or nine years ago, during the period when Japan was Public Enemy Number One to the Communists throughout the world, and repeated Russo-Japanese clashes along the frontier of Manchuria were occurring.
Most of the foreign correspondents who visited Yenan during the war had no means of ascertaining the truth of the statements made to them. Few of them spoke Chinese and few, if any, had the necessary experience of totalitarian techniques to understand the setup there. Anyone who has seen how foreign correspondents in Moscow are deceived need not have been surprised . . . . [by] glowing accounts of [the] Chinese Communist . . .
It was not the Japanese, but the Chinese, who suffered wherever the Communist guerrillas operated. The Japanese retaliated for Communist depredations by burning whole villages, and the Communists killed all those not willing to help them and labeled them �collaborators.� The Communist forces could not defend the people against the Japanese, and the Japanese had no particular interest in defending them against the Communists. Caught between two fires the Chinese people often had no choice but that of who was to be their executioner.
One of the few Christian missionaries who remained in the Northern occupied areas from 1937 to 1942, the Reverend Wallace C. Merwin, wrote in the Christian Century that the Chinese Communists had undoubtedly killed far more Chinese than they had Japanese. He said :
The Common method of dealing with a traitor was burial alive, and a traitor was anyone who remained in occupied territory or was caught coming out of a town with Japanese-sponsored puppet money on his person, even so little as ten cents.
Another missionary, the Reverend Reinbold, wrote in 1940 that in the province of Shensi :
. . . the Japanese invasion was short and the population did not suffer much, but many have been killed since by the Communists for not having evacuated the place.
The testimony of this Norwegian is particularly valuable since he was highly praised in Twin Stars Over China by the late Colonel Evans Carlson of the United States Marine Corps, who was a warm admirer of the Chinese Communists.
The great advantage of the Communists, both during the war and following J-J Day, consisted in their irresponsibility for the fate of the Chinese people. The National Government was trying, however ineffectually, to defend what was left of Free China. The Communists were engaged simply in raiding into Japanese-occupied or Kuomintang-controlled areas.
There were no Chinese Communists fighting in any of the major engagements of the Sino-Japanese or World War ; neither at shanghai in 1937, or at Taierchwang in the north in 1938, nor defending the Wuhan cities, nor in the four battles of Changhsha, nor at the Tungting Lake, nor in the battles on the Salween and Burma fronts.
According to the testimony even of those kindly disposed toward the Chinese Communists, they could not and did not challenge any important Japanese garrison post or Japan�s control of the North China railway system. Theodore White says that Communists fought only �when they had an opportunity to surprise a very small group of the enemy. . . . During the significant campaigns it was the wary soldiers of the Central Government who took the shock, gnawed at the enemy and died.�
The many engagements the Communists boast of having fought against Japan were in reality minor guerrilla skirmishes. They fought only when they came across small isolated Japanese detachments, and many of their �victories� were won against Chinese puppet forces who never wanted to fight their countrymen but were just earning a living as Japanese mercenaries.
Communist �victories� were often won against small nationalist forces already weakened by fighting the Japanese. The Communists
adhered to the line laid down by Mao ; seventy percent of their efforts were expended in extending the area of Communist control. They took over regions abandoned by the Japanese when the latter withdrew their forces to launch attacks on the National Government armies. Since the main efforts of the Japanese were always directed against the Chinese National armies, the Chinese Communists could wait and attack one side or the other when it was exhausted. Lin Yutang, who was sympathetic to the Communists in the early years of the war, has written ; �For every Japanese they claim to have killed, the Communists have killed at least five Chinese. For every town they have captured from the Japanese they have captured fifty towns from other Chinese. Of the hundreds of �clashes� per year they claim to their credit, a fair percentage must include those with the Chinese �enemy�—half of their weapons have been robbed from other Chinese guerrillas and regular units.*�
Perhaps this is an exaggeration. We may never know the truth of what went on in North China during the war. One cannot deny the bravery of the Chinese Red Army and partisans, or their readiness to fight, to starve, to march in the cold of winter and heat of summer, to sacrifice and to die. The tragedy is that all their courage and conquests were not utilized in China�s interests or to advance the ideals the rank and file of the Communists believe in. Knowingly or unknowingly they were but pawns in Stalin�s game of power politics. . . .
There is little doubt that the prevailing sentiment in America encouraged the Chinese Communists to direct their main war effort against the National Government during the last year of the war with Japan. The Comintern�s democratic masquerade was more successful in China than anywhere else. . . .
* The Vigil of a Nation, p. 125. Many instances with names and dates are given by Lin Yutang to prove the truth of this assertion.
Indianapolis, New York :
Bobbs-Merrill, 1947, pages 200 - 203.
From Autobiography, George Samuel Schuyler 1966
During 1947 I wrote two pamphlets for the Catholic Information Society, an anti-Communist group (as distinct from the Catholic collectivists) that put out a whole series of fifteen or twenty-page publications with lurid red covers with an illustration on each. The ones I wrote were number nineteen, The Red Drive in the Colonies, and number four, The Communist Conspiracy Against the Negroes. They sold in a set of 26 for one dollar, and they had a wide circulation. Among the authors published were Eugene Lyons, Wm. H. Chamberlin, Rev. Richard Ginder, Dr. Hermann Borchard, Oliver Carlson, Alice Leone-Moats, Liston M. Oak, Archbishop Aloysius Stepinac, Isaac Don Levine, Ralph de Toledano, Freda Utley, and Suzanne LaFollette.
New Rochelle, N. Y. : Arlington House, 1966, page 273.
http://www.fredautley.com/
Selected bibliographic
Utley, Freda, 1898-
Title Odyssey of a liberal; memoirs.
Publisher Washington, Washington National Press [1970]
Description vi, 319 p. 25 cm.
Language English
Note Includes bibliographical references.
Utley, Freda, 1898-
Title The China story / by Freda Utley
Publisher Chicago : H. Regnery, c1951 [i.e. 1962]
Description xiii, 274 p. ; 21 cm
Series A Great debate book
Language English
Note Includes bibliographical references
Utley, Freda, 1898-
Title Will the Middle East go West!
Publisher Chicago : H. Regnery Co., 1957.
Description 198 p. 22 cm.
Language English
Utley, Freda, 1898-
Title El relato de la China. Traducido por Olga Dominici y Jocelyne Caballero.
Publisher [Ciudad Trujillo : Editora del Caribe, cover, 1951?]
Description 228 p. 23 cm.
Language Spanish
Utley, Freda, 1898-
Title The China story.
Publisher Chicago, H. Regnery Co., 1951.
Description xiii, 274 p. 22 cm.
Language English
Utley, Freda, 1898-
Title Lost illusion
Publisher London, G. Allen & Unwin [1949]
Description viii, 237 p. 23 cm
Language English
Utley, Freda. 1898-
Title Lost illusion.
Publisher Philadelphia, Fireside Press [1948]
Description xi, 288 p. 21 cm.
Language English
Note A revision of the author's The dream we lost.
Utley, Freda, 1898-
Title Last chance in China.
Publisher Indianapolis : Bobbs-Merrill Co., [1947]
Description 408 p. map (on lining-papers) 23 cm.
Language English
Utley, Freda, 1898-
Title The dream we lost; soviet Russia, then and now, by Freda Utley.
Publisher New York, The John Day Company, [c1940]
Description ix, 371 p. 22 cm.
Language English
Utley, Freda, 1898-
Title China at war, by Freda Utley.
Publisher New York : John Day co., 1939.
Description xv, 318 p. incl. front. (port.) plates, ports., fold. map. 23 cm.
Language English
Note "First published in June MCMXXXIX."
Utley, Freda, 1898-
Title China at war,
Publisher London, Faber and Faber ltd. [1939]
Description xv, 306 p. incl. front. (port.) plates, ports., fold. map. 23 cm.
Language English
Utley, Freda.
Title Japan's gamble in China / Freda Utley.
Publisher London : Secker and Warburg, 1938.
Description x, 302 p. : map. ; 19 cm.
Language English
Note "First published 1938."
Note Bibliography: p. 301-302.
Subject Eastern question (Far East)
China -- History -- 1937-1945.
Utley, Freda, 1898-
Title Lancashire and the Far East, by Freda Utley
Publisher London, G. Allen & Unwin ltd. [1931]
Description 395 p. 22 cm
Language English
Title An Illustrated history of the Russian revolution ...
Publisher London : M. Lawrence, [1928-
Description v. illus. (incl. ports., map, facsims.) 29 cm.
Language English
Note "Editors: W. Astrov, A. Slepkov, J. Thomas."
"The translation was made by Freda Utley, M.A., and the first English edition was published in March 1928."
Appeared first in German in 1927.
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