Foreign Relations of the United States Diplomatic Papers, 1941, The Far East, Volume V

893.24/1122

Mr. Lauchlin Currie, Administrative Assistant to President Roosevelt, to the President of the Chinese Executive Yum (Chiang Kai-shek)⁶⁰

[Washington,] May 2, 1941.

Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek:

I greatly appreciate your expression of confidence.⁶¹ My thoughts are with you and Madame Chiang constantly.

The following message is from the President.

In reply to your personal message of April 25, let me be perfectly frank in outlining the situation as I see it. We here are confronted with a tremendous number of urgent demands and at the moment our production capacity has not reached the point where we can meet them all fully. Our defense program is developing rapidly, but many of our new plants for aircraft and ordnance will not come into production until late this summer and fall. We have undertaken to supply both Britain and China. We are keeping for ourselves the barest practicable minimum of aircraft and guns. For the balance of this year there will have to be rationing of supplies on the basis of meeting the most urgent needs. I will make every effort to have released to you the items of ordnance and aircraft you request, but it will probably be possible to meet your needs for those items only in part this year. The situation will be much easier next year.

There is another difficulty of a technical nature standing in the way of an immediate approval of the whole Chinese program, extending over the next eighteen months. Congress allocated the appropriation for lease lend aid among various categories and the amount allotted to some crucial categories is insufficient to permit me to approve long range programs. More money for these categories will, I am sure, be made available later by Congress.

You have already been informed of my approval of a first list of items amounting to 45 million dollars. As money not already earmarked for other purposes becomes available and as materials are produced, I expect to approve additional individual items as rapidly as they are cleared by technical committees. I hope that it may even prove possible, in collaboration with the British, to divert some items to China from goods which have been promised to the British.

I understand fully and I share your solicitude regarding Chinese morale. I might make a strong statement couched in general terms, but while considering such a step, I think that we should give thought to the possible effect outside of China. A strong statement implying that we are on the point of sending to China a huge amount of materials might cause Japan to move faster and more intensively than would otherwise be the case. We are refraining, for military reasons, from making public the amounts and the types of aid that we are sending to Great Britain.

I assure you that we intend and expect to give to China as rapidly as is humanly possible substantial amounts of what China needs. The conclusion of the Russo-Japanese pact adds to our determination.

Lauchlin Currie

60. In telegram No. 99, May 5, noon, the Department requested the Ambassador in China to forward to Generalissimo Chiang this message, which was delivered at the Embassy in China for the Naval Attaché (893.24/1056). See also Mr. Currie’s memorandum of May 3, infra.
61. See Generalissimo Chiang’s telegram dated April 25, p. 635.