793.94/2856: Telegram
The Ambassador in Japan (Forbes) to the Secretary of State
[Received November 24—11:45 a.m.]
234. With reference to the telegrams of the Department.71 At 6 o’clock this evening I conveyed the purport of your messages to Baron Shidehara. The attitude of the Foreign Minister was wholly conciliatory and cordial. He made the statement that the Premier, the Secretary of War, the Chief of Staff, and he are agreed that towards Chinchow there shall be no hostile operations, and orders have been issued to that effect. The clause in the draft prohibiting hostilities he agrees to, but is insistent that Japanese citizens must be protected by Japanese troops against marauding bandits which infest the country. In this respect the situation is extremely difficult as these men who are actually members of marauding bands claim to be soldiers one day and appear in citizens clothes the next. There will be no objection on the part of Japan, he states, if hostilities were defined as operations between national armies. The exact wording I have not undertaken to quote. The retention of troops at Tsitsihar he states has no political significance; and its purpose is purely for picking up the dead, collecting the frostbitten and wounded, and effecting evacuation. With the thermometer 30 degrees below zero, troops have operated over an extended area with great suffering. The necessity for collection and caring for the sufferers—a matter of days—is the reason for the delay; when pressed he could not give me the number of days but says he is also in complete agreement with the officers of the War Department in the policy of this evacuation; he claims that the fighting reported in progress today is not near Chinchow and is merely to drive off a force of bandits, not exceeding 2,000, threatening to cut the South Manchuria Railway.
- See telegrams Nos. 240 and 241, Nov. 23, 1981, to the Ambassador in Japan, supra.↩