USS Panay incident

• 1. Introduction

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  The USS Panay incident began on the 12th of December 1937, when Japanese warplanes attacked an American gunboat anchored on the Yangtze River near Nanjing. Japan and the United States were not at war at the time. By that afternoon, the Panay had sunk. Japanese officials in Tokyo were already drafting an explanation. They would insist their pilots never saw the ship, an account some American survivors found hard to accept. What was an American gunboat doing on a Chinese river in the middle of a war between Japan and China? And who else was aboard it that day? How would two nations not yet at war settle the sinking of a warship without the matter spiraling into something larger? And why, decades later, would historians still argue over whether the attack had truly been a mistake?

• 2. The Yangtze Patrol

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  Shipyards in Shanghai built the Panay specifically for river duty, a flat-bottomed craft suited to the shallow currents of the Yangtze. As part of the US Navy's Asiatic Fleet, its job was to protect American lives and property in China.

  That patrol arrangement traced back to the Second Opium War, launched after a joint victory by British, French, and American forces.

  Japan invaded China in the summer of 1937, and by early December its forces had fought their way to Nanjing. That assault would soon become a massacre of hundreds of thousands of civilians and prisoners of war.

  Since November, the Panay had been evacuating American citizens from the fighting around Nanjing. On the 11th of December, it took aboard the last Americans still in the city. That brought the total aboard to five officers, 54 enlisted men, four embassy staff, and ten civilians. Those ten civilians included Universal Newsreel cameraman Norman Alley, Fox Movietone News cameraman Eric Mayell, and New York Times correspondent Norman Soong. Also aboard were Collier's Weekly's Jim Marshall, La Stampa's Sandro Sandri, and Corriere della Sera's Luigi Barzini Jr.

  The Panay was also escorting three Standard Oil tankers, the Mei Ping, the Mei An, and the Mei Hsia. Together they carried roughly 800 Chinese employees of Standard Vacuum Oil and their families away from the fighting.

  By the next morning, the gunboat and its three tanker consorts lay anchored roughly 28 miles upstream from Nanjing. They were waiting out the war a little further from the fighting.

• 3. The Attack

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  On the morning of the 12th, Japanese air forces stationed near Nanjing received reports of fleeing Chinese forces nearby. Ten large steamers and numerous junks were said to be somewhere in a 12-25 mile stretch upstream.

  Leading the naval aircraft were Lieutenant Okumiya Masatake and Lieutenant Shigeharu Murata, both of whom departed from Changzhou. Murata would go on to lead torpedo bombers over Pearl Harbor four years later.

  The Panay was clearly marked, with two large American flags painted onto its canvas awnings. Three Yokosuka B4Y Type-96 bombers, flying at high altitude, dropped eighteen 132 lb bombs, two of which struck the Panay directly. Nine Nakajima A4N Type-95 fighters then strafed the ship at low altitude. The first bomb split the Panay's foremast and disabled its forward gun, while shrapnel tore into the hull and wounded crew on deck. Several Americans manned a .30 caliber machine gun and fired back, though they never hit any of the aircraft.

  At 2 pm, Lieutenant Arthur Anders gave the order to abandon ship, facing damage beyond repair and grievous injuries among the crew. Most evacuees were wounded as they climbed into two motorboats, which Japanese planes then machine-gunned as well. Lieutenant J. W. Geist, an officer aboard, later said, "the day before we told the Japanese army in the area who we were." Three US flags were plainly visible on the ship. Times correspondent Colin MacDonald, also aboard the Panay, watched a Japanese army boat machine-gun the sinking vessel despite its painted American flag. As Japanese planes kept circling overhead, survivors huddled knee-deep in mud in a nearby swamp. Colonel Kingoro Hashimoto, positioned nearby, ordered his artillery to fire on the Panay as it sank.

  At 3:54 pm, the Panay sank. Storekeeper First Class Charles Lee Ensminger, tanker captain Carl H. Carlson, and Italian reporter Sandro Sandri were killed in the attack. Coxswain Edgar C. Hulsebus died later that night. Forty-three sailors and five civilians were wounded. The three Standard Oil tankers were bombed and destroyed too, killing the captain of the Mei An and an unrecorded number of Chinese civilian passengers. Two of Standard Oil's four smaller company craft were also lost elsewhere in the same attacks.

  Cameramen Norman Alley and Eric Mayell filmed parts of the assault, including the low strafing runs and the ship sinking mid-river. Survivors then waded through knee-deep mud to a nearby village, carrying those too wounded to walk. They were eventually taken aboard American and British ships; earlier that same day, a Japanese shore battery had fired on the British gunboat Ladybird. For three days, survivors endured near-freezing nights with inadequate clothing and no food, until all sixteen wounded reached safety.

  That afternoon, the same Japanese pilots who had attacked the Panay went on to bomb the British steamer SS Wantung.

• 4. Diplomatic Aftermath

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  Joseph C. Grew, the American ambassador to Japan, had spent more than 30 years in the foreign service by the time news of the sinking reached him. Grew immediately thought of the Maine, the American warship that exploded in Havana Harbor in 1898. That disaster had helped push the United States into the Spanish-American War. He hoped the Panay's sinking would not become a similar spark for war with Japan.

  Vice Admiral Rokuzo Sugiyama, chief of staff of Japanese naval forces in northern China, was assigned to deliver the apology. That formal apology reached Washington, D.C. on Christmas Eve. A US Navy court of inquiry later determined that American flags had been clearly visible on the Panay throughout the attack, undercutting Tokyo's account.

  At a meeting held in the American embassy in Tokyo on the 23rd of December, Japanese officials offered a different version of events. They claimed a single navy airplane had briefly machine-gunned one boat, and that army motor boats had attacked Chinese steamers fleeing along the opposite bank. Even so, the Japanese navy maintained that the whole episode had been unintentional.

  On the 22nd of April 1938, Japan paid an indemnity of $2,214,007.36, officially settling the incident. With the indemnity paid, American newspapers declared the matter closed, a verdict the surviving film footage would soon complicate.

• 5. Evidence Of Intent

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  American historian Richard B. Frank pointed to newsreel footage that showed Japanese aircraft flying so close to the Panay that the pilots' faces were visible. Frank called it "potent evidence" that the pilots' claim of mistaken identity wasn't true. At Roosevelt's request, Universal Pictures cut that sequence from its newsreels to help defuse the political crisis.

  Historian John Prados found that Navy cryptographers had intercepted and decrypted Japanese traffic relating to the attacking planes. That traffic indicated the pilots were acting under orders, not making a mistake, though the information stayed secret at the time. Releasing it would have revealed that the United States had broken Japanese naval codes.

  Writer Nick Sparks has argued that the chaos engulfing Nanjing gave renegade factions within the Japanese army an opening. In his view, these factions wanted to force the United States into open conflict and drive it out of China for good.

  Colonel Kingoro Hashimoto had founded the right-wing secret society Sakurakai and belonged to the Black Dragon Society. Before that day, he had already shelled the British vessels SS Scarab and HMS Cricket. When told the ships were flying the British flag, Hashimoto replied, "I do not recognize any flag but my own." He had also ordered his troops to fire on every ship on the Yangtze "regardless of nationality."

  Whatever their motives, Tokyo's decision to apologize also set in motion a flood of private Japanese donations meant to smooth over the damage.

• 6. Money And Medals

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  Japanese individuals and organizations soon began sending letters of apology and gifts of money to American diplomatic offices and the Navy Department in Washington, D.C. Contributions ranged from letters penned by schoolchildren to organized pools of adult donors.

  The most prominent donor was the America-Japan Society, headed by Prince Tokugawa Iesato, which collected 16,242.56 yen from 7,749 people and 218 organizations.

  Secretary of State Cordell Hull stated that "neither the American Government nor any agency of it nor any of its nationals should receive sums of money thus offered or take direct benefit therefrom." Hull worried, though, that a flat rejection "would produce some misunderstanding of our general attitude and offend those Japanese who make such a gesture."

  As a temporary fix, only the American ambassador in Japan and the American ambassador in China were allowed to accept Panay-related donations. Consulates in Nagoya, Kobe, Nagasaki, and Osaka were still receiving money, along with offices in Taipei, Keijo, Dairen, and Sao Paulo. All of it was forwarded to Ambassador Grew in Tokyo, who kept it in the embassy safe.

  A Nagasaki newspaper, the Nagasaki Minyu Shimbun, published an article on the 7th of January describing local donations, including an excerpt from a schoolboy's letter. American consul Arthur F. Tower told Grew that a reporter from the Tokyo and Osaka Asahi Shimbun had also visited him. That meeting, on the 23rd of December, was to ask about the contributions. Tower assured Grew that "this consulate has not sought to give publicity to the donations received or offered and has furnished information concerning them on two occasions only, when requested."

  The final solution was the Japan-America Trust, created in the name of Panay survivors and the families of those killed. The trust funded the upkeep of American sailors' graves in Japan, some dating back to the Perry Expedition of 1853.

  Service members aboard the Panay received the Navy Expeditionary Medal and the China Service Medal. Fireman First Class John L. Hodge and Lieutenant Clark G. Grazier each received the Navy Cross for their actions during the attack. Two British officers, Vice Admiral Lewis Eyre Crabbe and Lieutenant Commander Harry Barlow, received the same honor for helping recover Panay survivors.

  The medals and the trust closed the books on Panay's material costs, but its human witnesses would carry the story for decades to come.

• 7. Legacy

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  Fon Huffman, the last survivor of the incident, died in 2008. Kaname Harada, the last surviving Japanese pilot who took part in the attack, died in 2016.

  Author Philip K. Dick referenced the episode in his novel The Man in the High Castle. The incident also appeared on a collectible picture card from the 1940s, part of a series called Horrors of War. That card's title was "The sinking of the Panay."

  British writer Douglas Galbraith folded the incident into his 2005 novel A Winter in China. Newt Gingrich and William R. Forstchen described it too, in their historical fiction novel Pearl Harbor.

  The 2009 film John Rabe returned to Nanjing once more, weaving a fictionalized version of the Panay's sinking into its telling of that same December.