I could have taken one of the American courier planes which were then still flying to the Communist capital at Yenan, but that cave village had become kind of a tourist center with every foreign correspondent in China hopping over to have a quick look at Mao Tze-tung and Chu Teh, leaders of the Communist party and army, and I had no desire to get mixed up in that circus, fearing it might be very difficult for me to get in close contact with the people, the war or their revolution.

　　I also might have gone to Manchuria, but the northeast was outside the mainstream of traditional Chinese life; there was no violent struggle against feudalism there, no great land problem and hence no particularly revolutionary situation, and besides, Manchuria, contrary to popular opinion, was not the decisive theater of war in China. I think it was this last that decided me to go elsewhere in the country.

　　At the moment, the most decisive theater of war lay on the North China Plain, a vast flat pavement, filled with ninety million people, that lay between Chiang Kai-shek's capital in Nanking and his troops in Peiping, Tientsin, North China and Manchuria. Unless the generalissimo could beat his way across this plain and link up his capital with his isolated troops in the north, he could not hope to unify China. Opposing the march of the generalissimo from the south and lying between both his southern and northern forces were two Communist generals, named Chen Yi and Liu Po-cheng. The first of these generals made his head-quarters in the seaboard province of Shantung, north of Shanghai and south of Peiping. The second, one-eyed General Liu Po-cheng, roamed far and wide over the four-province border region of Shansi, Hopei, Shantung and Honan, (2) sometimes operating on the plain and sometimes retiring into the mountains of Shansi Province which dominated the plain on the west. I decided to beard this latter general in his mountain lair, if he was available.

　　To get to Liu's headquarters near Hantan, three hundred miles away across the plain from Peiping, I would have to go at least two-thirds of the way by cart, around a few Kuomintang-held cities and by myself, without an interpreter. However, as I spoke quite a bit of Chinese and as I would thus have an opportunity to observe the Communist rear areas without being overseen by a Chinese translator, I did not object to these conditions too strenuously.

　　Although to get to Liu's headquarters was not so hard, to get into the Liberated Areas in the first place was another matter. To solve this difficulty, some Communists in Peiping had persuaded UNRRA to drop me over the lines by means of one of their ambulances which were about to run supplies into Red areas.

　　I spent several revealing days with UNRRA people in Tientsin and later during the course of a year, here and there, I came to know a number of these men and women quite well. As I look back over a long series of fouled-up situations that I have seen in ten years of war, I am inclined to say that UNRRA's work in China was tops on my snafu list. There were Americans, British, Australians, Canadians, Yugoslavs, Frenchmen, Austrians; in fact, the nationals of a score of different countries working for UNRRA in China and I never found one who was not amazed at the foul and corrupt use made of UNRRA supplies by the Chiang Kai-shek government. What seemed even worse, however, to many of my UNRRA friends was the way the American government toadied to Chiang Kai-shek and let him get away with a monstrous misuse of supplies that had been contributed by the people of fifty-two nations to alleviate the suffering of people made needy and destitute by the war.

　　To begin with, there was outright discrimination against the suffering people of North China because they happened to be in Communist territories. This was in direct violation of an UNRRA resolution which provided that "at no time shall relief and rehabilitation supplies be used as a political weapon and no discrimination should be made in the distribution of supplies because of race, creed or political belief." In China, however, it was quite obvious that discrimination was being practiced, and deliberately. Of the estimated 266 million Chinese people who had suffered under Japanese occupation, 120 million (150 million, if Manchuria were included) lived in the Communist-led Liberated Areas. If UNRRA supplies were to have been distributed on a fair basis, at least half of the 2,700,000 tons shipped to China would have gone to the Liberated Areas. Actually, 2 per cent went to the people living under the Communists and 98 per cent went to Chiang Kai-shek.

　　Every device from passive blockade to outright military attack was used to keep UNRRA supplies out of Communist areas. Far worse than this, however, was the way officials became wealthy by means of supplies meant for their own people.

　　These practices had a demoralizing effect on UNRRA workers. Many of them had volunteered out of idealistic motives for the work, some of them had been sent out under church auspices and received only thirty dollars a month, so it was doubly disillusioning to them to see trainloads of food that were meant to go to China's starving peasants go one thousand miles into the interior and then come one thousand miles back again by truck and boat to be sold by the military on the black market. I shall never forget the American girl who had volunteered to take care of some orphans. UNRRA had sent her supplies to feed her orphans, but Chiang's officers prevented her from getting the food. Many of the children had died while the food that would have saved them was being sold out of a warehouse just around the corner. "This is enough to make a Communist out of me," she had written in a letter to her superiors in Shanghai, who had filed the usual protest, knowing full well that nothing would come of it.

　　I was surprised, too, at the depth of the feeling of some of the youthful UNRRA workers. Many of them had been in the American Army and some had been members of the European underground against Hitler. They knew what they had fought for; and they were against the way Chiang Kai-shek horned in on an international project and stopped relief supplies from going into North China; that is, to the very people who had suffered most in the war against Japan.

　　Just now, Tientsin UNRRA was trying to find a route to send medicines and hospital beds across the lines to Communist areas. This was a rather tricky business. The boundaries between the two forces were constantly changing, there were no roads, and soldiers of both sides, sometimes took pot shots at UNRRA trucks. Nevertheless, this remained the best way of crossing the lines until Chiang Kai-shek eventually put a halt to all UNRRA traffic and one had to sneak across by oneself.

　　After a few mild adventures, I made my way down to Tsanghsien, last Kuomintang-held city in this part of North China. There, I ran into George Barkley, a young American, who was just in the process of taking three truckloads of cheap beds over to the Communists. Such a cargo was more than worthless, but Barkley was very conscientious in his duties, taking risks which I am sure were appreciated neither by his superiors, the Communists, nor, of course, by the officials of Chiang Kai-shek.

　　I told Barkley that I would like to go along with him; that I had to go. He got the idea that I should pose as an UNRRA representative.

　　"Just ride along beside me and keep quiet," he said.