The Panay incident

On 12 December 1937, the day before the fall of Nanjing, Japanese naval aircraft bombed the American river gunboat USS Panay and the three tankers she was escorting on the Yangtze. The gunboat sank that afternoon. The United States and Japan were not at war, and on board were the last American diplomats and journalists evacuated from the Chinese capital. Two American sailors, an Italian journalist and the master of one of the tankers were killed, along with an unknown number of Chinese passengers. Japan apologised, disciplined several officers and paid compensation, and Washington considered the matter closed. It was nevertheless the first time Japanese weapons had sunk an American warship, and the first serious sign of how easily the war in China could draw America in.

Popular lists speak of three dead and eleven wounded. Three dead is the figure given in official American tallies for the Panay alone: two sailors and the Italian journalist. To these must be added the master of the tanker Mei An and the Chinese crew members and passengers of the tankers, whom no one counted. There were far more than eleven wounded: according to the US Navy, 43 sailors and 5 civilians.

Gunboats on the Yangtze

Since the Opium Wars the Western powers had maintained flotillas of flat-bottomed gunboats on the Yangtze to protect their citizens, missions and merchant shipping from pirates, bandits and the warring armies of Chinese generals. The American Yangtze Patrol belonged to the Asiatic Fleet. The Panay, built in Shanghai and commissioned in 1928, was a small vessel of under 500 tons displacement, armed with two 76-millimetre guns and machine guns. She was commanded by Lieutenant Commander James J. Hughes.

When open war between China and Japan broke out after the Marco Polo Bridge incident, and in the autumn, after the bloody Battle of Shanghai, Japanese armies moved upriver, the gunboats began evacuating foreigners. On 1 December Tokyo issued the order to capture Nanjing. Most of the American embassy staff had already left in November, and the Panay remained at Nanjing as station ship, to take off the last Americans at the last moment. On 11 December, as Japanese shelling of the city intensified, the gunboat moved upriver. On board were 5 officers, 54 enlisted men, four embassy staff and ten civilians, among them the newsreel cameramen Norman Alley of Universal and Eric Mayell of Fox Movietone, and the Italian correspondents Sandro Sandri of La Stampa and Luigi Barzini Jr of the Corriere della Sera. The ship was escorting three tankers of the American Standard-Vacuum Oil Company, the Mei Ping, Mei An and Mei Hsia, on which several hundred of the company’s Chinese employees and their families were fleeing. The Americans had informed the Japanese command in Shanghai of the ship’s movements and anchorage.

The attack

By the morning of 12 December the Yangtze was already a dangerous place. Near Wuhu a Japanese heavy field artillery regiment under Colonel Kingorō Hashimoto, an extreme nationalist and co-founder of the secret Cherry Blossom Society (Sakurakai), fired in the fog on vessels on the river, including the British gunboats HMS Ladybird and Bee. On the Ladybird one sailor was killed and several people were wounded, among them the British Rear Admiral Reginald Holt. According to the British chargé d’affaires, Hashimoto later admitted that he had orders to fire on all ships on the river.

That same morning Japanese naval aviation received word from the army that Chinese troops were fleeing upriver from Nanjing aboard ten large vessels and many junks, together with a request to attack them. Aircraft of the 12th and 13th Air Groups took off from the airfield at Changzhou: Yokosuka B4Y level bombers led by Lieutenant Shigeharu Murata, who four years later led the torpedo bombers over Pearl Harbor, dive bombers under Lieutenant Masatake Okumiya, and Nakajima A4N fighters.

The Panay and the tankers lay at anchor some dozens of kilometres upriver from Nanjing – about 45 kilometres, according to most accounts. Large American flags were painted on the gunboat’s awnings and superstructure, and the ensign was flying from the mast. At about 1.30 p.m. three level bombers dropped eighteen 60-kilogram bombs from high altitude. Two hit the Panay: the first brought down the foremast and wrecked the bow gun, seriously wounding the commanding officer. Then came the dive bombers and fighters, which strafed the ship from low level. The crew returned fire with machine guns but hit nothing. The gunboat was taking on water, and at about 2 p.m. the executive officer, Lieutenant Arthur Anders, wounded in the throat and unable to speak, gave the order to abandon ship in writing. The wounded and the survivors crossed to the shore in boats. According to survivors’ accounts the aircraft also machine-gunned the boats, and some witnesses said that a Japanese army motor launch had fired on the sinking ship as well. Hidden in the riverside reeds, knee-deep in mud, the survivors watched the Panay go down at 3.54 p.m. Alley and Mayell filmed the attack and the sinking.

The tankers were also bombed and burned or ran aground. The master of the Mei An, Carl H. Carlson, was killed, along with many Chinese on board. On the Panay, Storekeeper Charles L. Ensminger and Sandro Sandri were killed, and Coxswain Edgar C. Hulsebus died of his wounds during the night. Over the following days the survivors, among them the seriously wounded, made their way through freezing nights to nearby villages, from where they were picked up by the American gunboat USS Oahu and the British Ladybird and Bee. That same afternoon the same Japanese airmen attacked British ships on the river.

Apologies from Tokyo

The Japanese authorities reacted quickly, aware of the gravity of the incident. On 13 December the Foreign Minister, Kōki Hirota, called in person on the American ambassador, Joseph Grew, to apologise, and the commander of the Japanese fleet in China, Vice Admiral Kiyoshi Hasegawa, sent his chief of staff with apologies to the flagship of the American Asiatic Fleet. The Vice Minister of the Navy, Isoroku Yamamoto, publicly accepted responsibility on behalf of the navy. The ambassador in Washington, Hiroshi Saitō, bought radio airtime and apologised to the American people. In Japan many people, from schoolchildren to associations, sent letters of apology and donations for the victims’ families to American missions.

President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was shaken. On 13 December he instructed the Secretary of State, Cordell Hull, to tell the Japanese ambassador that he wished Emperor Hirohito to be informed of his indignation. On 14 December the American government delivered a note in Tokyo demanding a formal apology, full compensation and guarantees that such attacks would not be repeated. Japan claimed that the airmen had mistaken the vessel for a Chinese one because they had not seen the flags. The US Navy court of inquiry, whose report was published on 24 December, found that the flags had been clearly visible and that the aircraft had attacked at close range. Most historians regard the explanation of a mistake as unconvincing: Alley’s footage shows aircraft flying so low that, according to the American historian Richard B. Frank, the pilots’ faces could be made out. Some scholars also point to Japanese cables intercepted by the Americans and to Hashimoto’s orders. Japanese sources, for their part, stress that the fleet command in Shanghai had not passed on to the airmen the information about the gunboat’s anchorage. The dispute over whether the attack was deliberate has never been definitively settled.

On 24 December Hirota handed Grew a reply in which Japan accepted all the American demands, while still maintaining that the attack had been a mistake. The Navy Minister recalled the commander of the 2nd Combined Air Group, Rear Admiral Teizō Mitsunami, and the squadron leaders were reprimanded. In reality Mitsunami soon received another command. Washington accepted the reply, and on 26 December the matter was formally closed. On 22 April 1938 Japan paid $2,214,007.36 in compensation.

America does not want war

Ambassador Grew feared that the Panay would become a second Maine, the warship whose sinking in Havana in 1898 had pushed the United States into war with Spain. That did not happen. Roosevelt considered economic sanctions, the seizure of Japanese assets and a joint naval demonstration with the British, but gave up the idea when it became clear that public opinion was not demanding retaliation. At the turn of 1937 and 1938 he merely sent Captain Royal Ingersoll, the head of the Navy’s War Plans Division, to London for confidential talks with the British Admiralty on cooperation in the event of war with Japan.

The mood at home was, if anything, isolationist. Many newspapers asked why American warships were sailing on Chinese rivers at all. According to a Gallup poll of January 1938, some 70 per cent of Americans wanted a complete withdrawal from China, including the gunboats and the marines. A few days after the Panay was sunk, supporters of Congressman Louis Ludlow gathered enough signatures to force the House of Representatives to vote on his proposed constitutional amendment, which would have made a declaration of war, except in the event of an invasion of US territory, subject to the citizens’ approval in a nationwide referendum. Roosevelt wrote that such an amendment would cripple any president in the conduct of foreign policy and encourage other nations to violate American rights. On 10 January 1938 the House rejected the motion by 209 votes to 188. The margin was worryingly narrow.

Alley’s film reached cinemas at the end of December and showed millions of viewers Japanese aircraft over the sinking ship. According to some accounts, at the White House’s request the studio cut the shots in which the low-flying aircraft were most clearly visible, so as not to inflame tensions.

Significance

The Panay incident coincided with the fall of Nanjing and with the first news of the massacre committed in the city. In the eyes of many Americans Japan began to appear as an aggressive power that took no account of anyone, although for another two years this did not translate into concrete steps. For Tokyo the affair was proof that the United States, despite Roosevelt’s Quarantine Speech of October, had no intention of fighting for China. At the same time Japanese leaders noted how quickly and generously they had had to apologise in order to avoid a conflict for which neither the army nor the navy was ready.

In the following years Washington moved from protests to economic pressure: a “moral embargo” on the sale of aircraft, notice of the termination of the commercial treaty in 1939, successive export bans and finally the oil embargo of 1941. Several of the men who took part in the attack on the Panay later fought against the Americans, and on 7 December 1941 Murata led the torpedo bombers over Pearl Harbor. American commentators later called the sinking of the gunboat a “prelude to Pearl Harbor”. That is a shorthand, since four years separated the two events, during which both sides could have turned back many times; but on 12 December 1937 American sailors were killed by Japanese bombs for the first time.