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one as for as I could see. We had a great deal of sympathy and interest in the Chinese, and hoped they'd come out all right. The Panay was up there to help them, you know, not to shoot but to be sort of on guard. Of course that was a very serious moment, but we were striving to avoid any rumpus with Japan, hoping that this all would blow over.

So China was discussed, more or less, from time to time, and the Chinese situation was discussed a little. How much we could reasonably give the Chinese was discussed--never in terms of “Shall we give them a hundred million or ten million?” I mean, not in terms as concrete as that, but there was discussion as to how far this could go on, this supporting of the Chinese in the war. They weren't doing to well, you see, at times, and they were handicapped by lack of everything, and by the terrific terrain.

I remember plainly the President's talking about how promising the future looked in China. They did have hidden resources that had never been exploited. And I remember him saying, and other people contributing to this line of conversation, that the most important thing that we could give to China, at the end of the war, was electrical equipment and electrical know-how. He felt that what Americans had to be prepared to do for China--a backward country that had been deprived of the means of modern civilization--was to move in and