Initially, they reported that the Chinese Communists might be a useful wartime and postwar ally and that the atmosphere in Yan'an was more energetic and less corrupt than in Nationalist-held areas.

Davies, a Foreign Service Officer who was serving in the China Burma India Theater (CBI), called for the establishment of an observers' mission in Communist territory.

Davies argued that the Communists offered attractive strategic benefits in the fight against Japan and that the more the US ignored them, the closer that Yan'an, the capital of Communist-held China, would move to Moscow.

[1] With the support of Davies' superior, General Joseph Stilwell, the memorandum successfully convinced the administration of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt to put the plan into motion.

[2] The Roosevelt administration asked Chinese Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek for permission to send US observers to visit the Communists.

[3] Chiang agreed after American Vice-president Henry A. Wallace made a state visit to Chongqing, the Nationalists' capital, in late June 1944.

John Carter Vincent, an experienced State Department China expert, assisted Wallace in persuading Chiang to allow the US to visit the Communists in Yan'an without Nationalist supervision.

[6] Service credited the Communists for a clean and superior society, in stark contrast to the corruption and chaos that he saw in the Nationalist areas, which were controlled by Chiang.

However, due to subsequent retaliatory measures by the Japanese, the Communists avoided further large campaigns and restricted their activities to guerrilla warfare.

Hurley approached the Communists and the Nationalists without knowledge of either political group, and he believed that their differences were no greater than those between the Republican and Democratic Parties in the United States.

[13] The first postwar peace negotiation was attended by both Chiang and Mao in Chongqing from 28 August 1945 and concluded on 10 October 1945 with the signing of the Double Tenth Agreement.

In December 1945, US President Harry S. Truman sent General George C. Marshall to China to negotiate a ceasefire and to form a unified government between the Communists and the Nationalists.

[17] Dixie Mission participants such as John Service were criticized for viewing the Communist leadership as socialist agrarian reformers, who claimed that China under their rule would not follow the violent path of the Soviet Union under the Bolsheviks.

[18]After the Dixie Mission, Colonel Barrett reflected upon this position and wrote in his memoir: In addition, I had fallen to some extent, not as much perhaps as did some other foreigners, for the "agrarian reformer" guff.

[20] After the same number of years, John Davies, in his memoir, Dragon by the Tail, defended his belief that the Communist would have been a better Chinese ally for the US than the Kuomintang.

Both were subjected to multiple congressional investigations, which consistently found that they were not Communist Party members, agents of foreign powers, or disloyal to the United States.

[28] In 2013, the story of the Dixie Mission served as the historical basis for a new World War II novel, Two Sons of China, by Andrew Lam.