We know that Mao suppressed this cable because he told Chou En-lai, his liaison with Chiang, on 13 January, nine days and many deaths later: “I have sent you the cable of the 4th from … Xiang to Chiang. Its wording is inappropriate, so if you haven’t passed it on, please don’t.” The fact that Mao felt he still had time to withdraw the cable indicates he had only just recently sent it to Chou.
Chou told the Russians that radio links between N4A HQ and Yenan had been broken from the afternoon of
Another thing Currie did which was to Mao’s great advantage was to thwart Chiang’s attempt to establish a sympathetic channel to Roosevelt. Chiang requested Currie to ask Roosevelt to send him a political adviser who had access to the president. Chiang named his own choice, William Bullitt, the first US ambassador to the Soviet Union, whom Chiang knew personally, and knew to be anti-Communist. Currie rejected Chiang’s request outright, off his own bat, and there is no sign he even told Roosevelt that Chiang wanted Bullitt. When Currie got back to America, he recommended an academic, Owen Lattimore, who had not even met Roosevelt, much less had the sort of access to the President that Chiang had specified. The upshot was that Currie had a tight grip on communications between Chiang and Roosevelt.
ON 22 JUNE 1941 Germany invaded the Soviet Union. This event radically altered Mao’s calculus. Soviet Russia was his sponsor and his hope; a seriously weakened — or diverted — Russia was unlikely to offer much help. Mao could not sleep for days.
To start with, there was absolutely no chance now that Russia would step in and bail him out if fighting with Chiang’s troops turned perilous. Mao immediately halted attacks. “Stop any assaults on all Nationalist units,” he ordered his armies.
Self-preservation dominated his relationship with newly weakened Russia. As a result of the German invasion, Moscow wanted the CCP to commit to engage militarily with Japanese troops if Japan should attack the Soviet Union. Stalin’s nightmare was a giant pincer assault by Japan from the east coordinated with Hitler’s attack from the west. How many Japanese troops could the CCP “divert” if that happened? Moscow asked Mao. To encourage Mao to act, Dimitrov cabled on 7 July that he was sending US$1 million in installments. Two days later, the Comintern told the CCP to draw up “concrete steps.”
Most of Mao’s colleagues thought they should take some action if Tokyo invaded the Soviet Union. The normally circumspect Liu Shao-chi wrote to Mao that if Japan attacked Russia, the CCP must launch offensives to tie up Japanese forces. Mao, however, was determined not to risk troops under any circumstances. On 18 July he told Liu that if Japan attacked Russia (which Mao had said on 2 July was “extremely likely”): “It is not a good idea … to undertake large-scale action … our armies are weak. Action will inevitably do irreparable damage.” His approach was to let the Russians do the fighting: “Everything depends on victory by the Soviet Union.”
Mao spelled this out to Peng De-huai, the acting commander of the 8th Route Army. Any coordination with the Russians was to be purely “strategic [i.e., in name only] and long-term — not in battles.” To his troops Mao repeatedly cautioned: “Do not excessively upset the [Japanese] enemy.”
To Moscow, Mao protested that his forces were too weak to be counted on: “our human and material resources [are diminishing], regions of operation [are contracting], ammunition is running out — and the situation is becoming more difficult by the day.” If his army acted, Mao argued, “there is a possibility that we will be defeated and will not be able to defend our partisan bases for long … Such an action will not be good for either of us …” He told Moscow not to expect much: “if Japan attacks the Soviet Union, our abilities in terms of coordinating military operations will not be great.”
Mao virtually admitted that his army had not been fighting the Japanese and would not start now. Only recently he had been telling Moscow he had a huge army, with 329,899 men in the 8RA alone; now he was saying his troops could hardly fire a shot.
