About how Washington's policies led to communist victories, details and dates, the national best-seller used in Congressional hearings when Gen. MacArthur was recalled during the Korean war.  It's data was later also used by Senator Joseph McCarthy and recommended by Gen. MacArthur. 

The book was a milestone in showing how 3rd World victories of the communists were helped and facilitated in Washington.  It inspired hope in many foreign lands that communist takeovers were not indigenous nor "inevitable" as they claimed in the 1940's.

The Mistake of a Century (TIME Article, 1951)

Before his congressional questioners Douglas Mac Arthur said: "The greatest political mistake we have made in a hundred years in the Pacific was in allowing the Communists to grow to power in China ... I believe we will pay for it, for a century." MacArthur did not explore in detail the how & why of the great error.

Too Little, Too Late. In its white paper of 1949, the U.S. State Department sidestepped responsibility for the fall of China; nothing the U.S. did or might have done, said the State Department, could have altered the outcome. Author Utley sweeps aside this contention.

U.S. diplomacy, she says, helped the Communists mightily with two blows: 1) the Yalta secret deal (1945) whereby President Roosevelt agreed to Russian rights in Manchuria (naval base at Port Arthur, use of Dairen harbor, operating controls over railways); and 2) the Marshall Mission (1946) in which General Marshall tried to force the National Government into a coalition with the Communists (see THE MACARTHUR HEARING). ...

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Introduction:

IN KOREA, in 1950, the first payment in American lives was I demanded for the blunders of our policy makers in the Far East. Five years after the total defeat of Japan and Germany a third world war looms on the horizon. How did it come to pass that after so great a victory American security is today in greater jeopardy than at any time since the founding of the Republic? How and why were the fruits of victory thrown away?

These are the questions which the American people are beginning to ask as the casualty lists mount and American boys fight against overwhelming odds in a country thousands of miles away which most of them had barely heard of when they were called on to defend it.

Deluded for years by dreams of “one world” to be established by collaborating with Stalin in the United Nations, the American people now face a bitter awakening. Surveying the frustration of their hopes, we see that all and more of the European nations that won independence in World War 1 lost it, together with all vestiges of freedom, in World War II. Turning our eyes to the Far East, the picture is yet blacker. China before World War II had retained a part of her territory in spite of Japanese aggression. Today, she is wholly in the camp of Soviet Russia. And all Asia trembles at the prospect of Communist domination.

What combination of circumstances and influences accounts for this tragic denouement of military victory?

The historian sees that the basic mistake we made was our failure to remember that in international affairs, as in physics, nature abhors a vacuum. President Roosevelt’s demand for the unconditional surrender of Japan and Germany left power vacuums in Europe and Asia which Soviet Russia was bound to fill unless we determined to take positive action.

In Europe, we endeavored at least to build up England and France and sustain Italy and Greece to compensate for the elimination of Germany. In Asia, however, we were not concerned with creating a balance of power of any kind. We had the alternative of reconstituting Japan or backing a government in China that would be a reliable ally of the United States and a counterbalance to Soviet influences and machinations in the Far East, including Korea. We chose neither way -utterly ignoring straight and logical thinking in the realm of higher politics.

The moralist and the political philosopher will argue that it was the decay of our faith in the values which made us great and strong and free which has led the Western World close to the brink of disaster. If we had stuck by the principles of the Atlantic Charter and offered just terms of peace to the vanquished provided they overthrew their totalitarian dictators and ideology, the barriers against Communism would not have been destroyed....

Visit Freda Utley's Web Site

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.

Anti-Communist Period

The Dream We Lost was Utley's opening broadside against the regime and system that had taken the fondest dreams of her youth along with her husband. She pursued the theme of anti-Communism with increasing emphasis for the rest of her life. She served as a war correspondent in China 1945-1946, from which she wrote Last Chance in China the following year, explaining how Western policies favored a Communist victory there, which she considered a disaster. In 1948, she was posted to Germany as a correspondent, and produced a scathing criticism of Allied occupation policies that she described as a vicious, destructive cruelty of the victors to the vanquished. Possibly her most courageous book, it was titled The High Cost of Vengeance.

The last of her many studies of the Far East was published in 1951, The China Story. It was followed by a diversion to the Middle East in the wake of the Suez Canal Crisis of 1956, Will the Middle East Go West? in which she compared the Arab countries with China and expressed the fear that America’s support of Israel would drive the Arab countries into the waiting arms of the Communists.

Odyssey of a Liberal recorded for posterity her own account of a long and active life that was characterized by high adventure, not only physical and intellectual, but moral as well.

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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