Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945

by Rana Mitter

In January 1944 John Paton Davies Jr., a US Foreign Service officer, had made the case that the US would be wise to make formal contacts with the Communist headquarters at Yan’an. “Only one official American observer has ever visited the ‘Communist’ area,” he noted. “That was six years ago.” Yet even from the secondhand information that the Americans had gleaned since then, Davies argued, certain points about the CCP seemed quite clear. The Communists had a major base near important Japanese military and industrial centers, and they possessed valuable intelligence on Japan. If the USSR were to enter the war, it would have to attack through areas held by the CCP. He declared that they were “the greatest single challenge in China to the Chiang Kai-shek government.” More contentiously, he suggested that they ran the “most cohesive, disciplined, and aggressively anti-Japanese regime in China” (with the implication that more active fighting was being done by the CCP than by the Nationalists), and that they might form the “foundation for a rapprochement between a new China and the Soviet Union.”