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The other main Communist argument for foreign consumption is that they are doing the bulk of the fighting against
Japan and therefore we should support them, just as we supported Tito rather than Mihailovich, because Tito was allegedly doing most of the fighting against Germany. Mihailovich was said to be a collaborationist, and therefore we should not support him. But no one can accuse Chiang of being a collaborationist. As a matter of painful fact, we were the collaborationists with Japan—for four and a half years; and I fear might still be today if Japan had not been so stupid as to attack us. Chiang is the one political leader among the Big Four who has not been a collaborationist, whose record is completely clear on that point.
What are the facts on this matter of fighting the Japanese? There have been hundreds of skirmishes between the Communists and the Japanese, especially when the latter sent out expeditions to seize or destroy the crops. But no neutral observer has seen anything that could be called a battle between the Communists and the Japanese since September 1937. On the other hand, they have witnessed a dozen terrific battles between Chiang's troops and the Japanese, several in the last year.
The Japanese have made no serious effort to destroy the bases of the Communists who are alleged to be the real anti-Japanese elements, but the Japanese have launched repeated campaigns to destroy Chiang Kai-shek's bases and his armies, which are said not to be fighting the Japanese. Is that not odd?
Japan's Secret Weapon. The definite answer to this argument that the Communists are doing most of the fighting can readily be determined from observing the behavior of the Japanese. Let me make it concrete. I was working in our hospital in Fenchow, Shansi Province, when the Japanese finally captured the city on Feb. 17, 1938. In the next two weeks they pushed on west 75 miles to the Yellow River, which separates us from the Communist province of Shensi. There the Japanese have been within 100 miles of the Communist capital, Yenan, for just over seven years, and have not made a single major effort to get that Communist capital. I wish somebody would explain that. Have the Japanese ever allowed grass to grow under their feet when there was a real threat to them? When we got air bases in south China last summer that threatened the Japanese, they drove down a thousand miles at terrific cost and captured those bases. No reasonable person can come to any other conclusion than that the Japanese have been shrewd enough to see that since it had proved most difficult to knock the Chinese out by direct assault, then the best way to weaken China is to allow the Communists to continue their work of disrupting and disunifying and discrediting the Government of China, breaking it down from within. The real "secret weapon" of the Japanese against China, and therefore against us, has been the Communists of China, ably assisted by some of our own people, sincere, but in my judgment grievously misguided.
What I want to ask is, whom do such Americans think they are hurting by their propaganda for the Communists? Surely our own country most of all. That means it involves the life of