"On the spot reporting about China after Japan's attack. Details of Japanese atrocities, Nanking massacre, China's efforts to modernize, descriptions of battlefront."

Preface:

This book does not attempt an adequate analysis of China’s social and political structure, nor does it give an account of her economic problems.  My visit to China was too short, and the horrors of the war too close, for any cold appraisal of the ills of China.  I have endeavoured to describe, as truthfully as possible , what I saw in China; and to make others see the tragedy now being enacted in the Far East.

That life in China in war-time was not all sadness and horror, but had its gay and pleasant side, these pages will show.  Something of the serenity and good humour of the Chinese people, something of their friendliness, cheerfulness, and philosophical acceptance of the good and the ill which life brings, infected all the members of the ‘Hankow gang’ of war correspondents, among whom I lived for a few months, with whom I visited the Chinese fronts, and with whom I ‘tired the sun with talking’ through a long Chinese summer.

The city states of ancient Greece saw only the conflict of democratic Athens against that prototype of the Fascist State, Sparta.  They were oblivious to the growing might of Rome and Carthage, whose eventual conflict was to decide the fate of the Mediterranean world.  It may well be that the future of the world is now being decided on the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers, rather than on the Rhine or the Vistula, or in the conference halls of Europe.

The most ancient civilization in existence, and the most pacific of all civilizaitons, that of China, is struggling not to be overwhelmed by the ‘dwarf robbers from the Eastern Isles’, who have learnt from the West all the arts of modern war, but have rejected our political conceptions and the humanism which has slightly tempered the ferocity with which we have waged our wars.

Japan aims at world conquest, and her rulers have the singleness of purpose to accomplish it, but neither the requisite man power nor the material resources, unless they can incorporate China into their empire.

If China’s millions should ever be militarized, either by Japan or in a long struggle to resist her, the world would be faced by a military menace besides which the might of Germany would pale to insignificance.  As General Smuts once said: ‘It may well be that Western civilization will stand or fall in this matter of its contacts with the immense human masses of the East.’

Should the Chinese despair of the Western democracies who continue to supply Japan with the sinews of war, and should they decide to submit to the Japanese yoke, Japan might become the strongest power in the world.

For nearly two years now the Chinese people have continued to fight – ill-armed, often poorly led, handicapped not only by their primitive economy, but also by having as yet created only the embryo of a modern government and a modern social organization.  No one who has seen China at war can doubt the reality of the Chinese renaissance, and, although it would be foolish to be optimistic, it is still possible to believe that Japan will not conquer in the end.  But the sufferings of the Chinese people are beyond the capacity of our imagination to realize, and some little encouragement must be given to them, if they are to continue to bear them.

I have dared in this book to criticize China.  In spite of my strong desire that she should win this war, I can see her faults and I have been horrified at the neglect of the common people,  and especially of the wounded soldiers; and feel strongly that to hide China’s weaknesses, or to be over-optimistic, is not to do her a service.  China will survive, in spite of the superior armaments of Japan, if ancient injustices, ancient social and financial tyrannies, and ancient ways of thought and methods of administration give way to reforms consonant with the spirit of Young China.

Few people who have lived in China and have been received by the Chinese as friends fail to love them and to admire them.  I learnt also in China that no criticism which a friendly foreigner could make equalled the criticisms of the best men and women in the country, who are giving all their strength, and many of whom have sacrificed their lives for the New China which they believe is being created in the agony of this war.

Any one who has read the details of America’s war of Independence against England will remember how the incompetence of Congress, the greed of those who saw the war as an opportunity to make their fortune, and the failure adequately to arm and feed the soldiers and militia, nearly lost the war, and nearly gave back to England her dominion over her American colonies.  The spirit of the men who fought overcame all these handicaps, and it may be that in China the same thing will happened.

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek is as great a man as General Washington, the Chinese guerrillas are not inferior to the militia of New England, and China is more united than was the American union of thirteen states in the eighteenth century.

My thanks are doe to the many Chinese friends I made last year, who gave me some slight understanding of the problems of their country, as well as an appreciation of the devotion of those who are working and fighting to save it.

My thanks are also due to the ‘bamboo’ Americans mentioned in this book, who have lived for years in China, who speak her language, and have not feared to risk their lives at the front and in air-raided towns, nor to incur the enmity of the Japanese in their exposure of the Japanese terror in China to the all-too-indifferent public of the West.

From these men I, an amateur war correspondent, received help, friendship, and the courage to bear the sight of suffering.

Lastly, I would express my gratitude to Mr. Walter Bosshard, Captain Evans Carlson of the U.S. Marines, Mr. A.T. Steele of the Chicago Daily News, and Mr. Leslie Smith of Reuter’s, for permission to reproduce some of the photographs they took in China, while journeying with me to the front, on in Hankow.

Freda Utley
London, May 1939

Download China at War (1938) by Freda Utley

PDF format (SCANNED), 20.5MB, 345Pages.

Contents
1. Paradise to Purgatory : Hong Kong and Canton page 1
    I. Hong Kong 1
    II. The Miracle Railway I7
    III. Canton 21
2. The Wuhan Cities 31
3. First Visit to the Front from Hankow 86
4. The Chinese Red Cross and Army Medical Service 119
5. Second Visit to the Yangtze Front 154
6. Hankow before the Fall 187
7. The Political Situation in China 229
8. Can China Survive? 258
9. Japan’s War Aims 281
Index 297

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Winifred (Freda) Utley (January 23, 1898 London, England – January 21, 1978 Washington, DC) was a British scholar and author.

A card-carrying British Communist by age 28, Winifred Utley had begun to reverse her stance on the worldwide Communist movement by the time her husband was arrested in 1936 in Moscow, where the couple lived and worked. Her conversion to an outspoken anti-Communist with worldwide influence was complete by 1939, when she took up permanent residence in the United States. She never saw her husband again.

Utley was educated at a boarding school in Switzerland, after which she returned to her native Britain to earn a B.A. degree followed by an M.A. degree in history (with first class honours) at King's College London. The 1926 General Strike in Britain confirmed her communist-leaning viewpoints, and she joined the British Communist Party in 1928, also the year in which she married Russian Arcadi Berdichevsky.

From 1926 to 1928, she was a research fellow at the London School of Economics. During this period, in common with many of the political persuasion she held at that time, she focussed on labor and production issues in manufacturing, in her case, the textile industries of Lancashire, then beginning to face competition from operators in India and Japan. Her first book, Lancashire and the Far East, though tinged with anti-employer and anti-imperial sentiments, established her as an authority on the subject of international competition in the cotton trades.

After a visit to the Soviet Union in 1928, she travelled through Siberia and China to Japan, where she studied the Japanese textile industries, which led to her second book, Japan's Feet of Clay.

She moved to the Soviet Union and lived in Moscow with her husband from 1930 to 1936, there pursuing a career that culminated in two years as a senior scientific worker at the Academy of Sciences's Institute of World Economy and Politics. It was in Moscow that she wrote Japan's Feet of Clay. This book was an international bestseller, being translated into five languages, including Chinese. It and its author were banned in Japan.

Her focus shifted at this time to China, whose Communist movement she initially regarded with distinct favor, but this pro-Communist sentiment also faded as she gained greater familiarity with its object. Her next book, Japan's Gamble in China, however, was written before her public conversion to anti-Communism, as was China at War.

Books:

• Lancashire and the Far East (1931)
• Japan's Feet of Clay (1937)
• Japan's Gamble in China (1938)
• China at War (1938)
• The Dream We Lost: The Soviet Union Then and Now (1940)
• The High Cost of Vengeance (1948) (translated to German as Kostspielige Rache)
• Last Chance in China (1948)
• Lost Illusion (1948) (revision of The Dream We Lost)
• The China Story (1951)
• Will the Middle East Go West? (1956)
• Odyssey of a Liberal (1970)

(From wikipedia, the free encyclopedia)

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