Owen Lattimore - World War II

World War II

Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941, President Franklin D. Roosevelt appointed Lattimore US advisor to Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. In 1944, Lattimore was placed in charge of the Pacific area for the Office of War Information. By this time, Lattimore's political activities and associations had been under scrutiny for the last two years by the FBI, which recommended for Lattimore to be put under "Custodial Detention in case of National Emergency". At President Roosevelt's request, he accompanied US Vice-President Henry A. Wallace on a mission to Siberia and to China and Mongolia in 1944 for the US Office of War Information. The trip had been arranged by Lauchlin Currie, who recommended to FDR for Lattimore to accompany Wallace.

During this visit, which overlapped the D-Day landings, Wallace and his delegates stayed 25 days in Siberia and were given a tour of the Soviet Union's Magadan concentration camp at Kolyma. In a travelogue for National Geographic, Lattimore described what little he saw as a combination of the Hudson's Bay Company and the TVA, remarking on how strong and well-fed the inmates were and ascribing to camp commandant Ivan Nikishov 'a trained and sensitive interest in art and music and also a deep sense of civic responsibility'. In a letter written to the New Statesman in 1968, Lattimore justified himself by arguing his role had not been one to "snoop on his hosts."

During the 1940s, Lattimore came into increasing conflict with another member of the IPR's board, Alfred Kohlberg, a manufacturer with long experience in the China trade whose visit to China in 1943 convinced him that stories of Chiang Kai-shek's corruption were false. He accused Lattimore of being hostile to Chiang and too sympathetic towards the Communist Party of China. In 1944, relations between Kohlberg and Lattimore became so bad that Kohlberg left the IPR and founded a journal Plain Talk intended to rebut the claims made in Pacific Affairs By the late 1940s, Lattimore had become a particular target of Kohlberg and other members of the China Lobby. Kohlberg was later to became an advisor to Senator Joseph McCarthy, and it is possible that McCarthy first learned of Lattimore through Kohlberg.