Cameraman Norman Alley was napping on the gunboat’s deck when Japanese bombs started falling around him. The Universal News cameraman grabbed his camera and began filming as explosions ripped through the USS Panay on Dec. 12, 1937. Across the river, three Standard Oil tankers burst into flames. Japanese dive bombers flew close enough overhead for Alley to see the pilots’ faces. The United States and Japan were not at war yet, Pearl Harbor was still four years away.
By the time the attack ended, three Americans and an Italian journalist were dead. The Panay sank into the Yangtze River in China. Japan immediately claimed the bombing was a terrible mistake and an accident. However, the film that Alley took proved them wrong.
Escape From Nanjing
The Panay had protected American interests on the Yangtze River since 1928. Built in Shanghai as a flat-bottomed river gunboat, the 191-foot vessel carried 59 crew members and mounted two 3-inch guns plus eight machine guns. A brass plaque expressed the vessel’s mission in the region, “For the protection of American life and property in the Yangtze River Valley and its tributaries, and the furtherance of American good will in China.”
Japanese forces surrounded Nanjing in early December 1937. The city served as China’s capital at the time. Lt. Cmdr. James J. Hughes received orders on Dec. 11 to evacuate the last Americans still in the city. The ship took aboard four embassy staffers, four American citizens and seven foreign nationals.
Several journalists boarded the ship. Alley and Fox Movietone News cameraman Eric Mayell came aboard to film the evacuation. New York Times photographer Norman Soong joined them along with Collier’s Weekly correspondent Jim Marshall. Italian journalists Luigi Barzini Jr. from Corriere della Sera and Sandro Sandri from La Stampa also boarded the ship.
The Panay was also ordered to escort three Standard Oil tankers including the Mei Ping, Mei An and Mei Hsia. The ships were carrying roughly 800 Chinese employees and their families fleeing the city. Hughes ordered large American flags to be painted on the gunboat’s upper deck where they would be visible from any aircraft. More flags were flown from the ship itself and the mast. He radioed Japanese forces every chance he got to avoid any incidents
The ships moved upriver on Dec. 11 while Nanjing burned behind them.
“That night all of us stood and watched the burning and sacking of Nanking, until we rounded the bend and saw nothing but a bright red sky silhouetted with clouds of smoke,” Alley wrote.
The Attack on the USS Panay
A Japanese infantry unit signaled the Panay to stop around 9:40 a.m. the following morning. A lieutenant boarded with four riflemen and asked Hughes about any Chinese troop positions they may have spotted. Hughes explained that the United States was neutral and shared intelligence with neither side. The Japanese officer seemed to accept this response and left. The convoy anchored 28 miles north of Nanjing. Hughes again radioed Japanese forces with his exact location.
Crew members sat down and ate Sunday lunch around 1:30 p.m. when lookouts spotted three aircraft approaching. The Yokosuka B4Y Type-96 bombers had entered Japanese naval service the previous year. They each carried 132-pound bombs.
The bombers suddenly attacked without warning. The first bomb hit the Panay’s port bow, destroying the forward 3-inch gun. Shrapnel tore through Hughes and several crew members. The explosion wrecked the pilot house, smashed radio equipment and disabled the fire room. The ship lost all power. Hull leaks caused the vessel to list and settle forward.
Alley and Mayell filmed the attack. Soong snapped photographs despite water from near-misses drenching him.
“My first reaction was that the Japanese, mistaking the Panay for an enemy ship had then realized their error and were leaving but this was wrong,” Alley said. “Almost directly thereafter a squadron of six small pursuit-type bombers came over at a much lower altitude and immediately began to power-dive.”
The dive-bombers came in and dropped numerous small bombs on the vessel.
The crew manned the remaining machine guns and returned fire. However, they failed to hit any of the aircraft. Lt. Arthur Anders took command from the wounded Hughes. With the ship sinking, Anders gave the order to abandon ship at 3:55 p.m.
The Panay had no lifeboats. The survivors used two small motorized sampans to ferry wounded men to the shore. Japanese fighters strafed both boats. More men were wounded. A Japanese artillery unit nearby began shelling the ship as it went under.
Across the river, the oil tankers burned. Japanese bombers had struck all three vessels. Standard Oil captain C.H. Carlson died aboard the Mei An. Two of the tankers sank. The third beached itself. Hundreds of Chinese civilians were killed or wounded in the attack.
The gunboat rolled over and disappeared under the surface. Two American sailors and Italian journalist Sandro Sandri died in the attack. Forty-eight people were wounded on the gunboat, 43 sailors and five civilians.
After the Sinking
The survivors huddled in the reeds along the riverbank. Japanese aircraft circled overhead. Many men wore only the clothes they’d grabbed during the evacuation. December temperatures on the river were near freezing.
U.S. Army Capt. Frank Roberts, a military attaché who spoke Chinese, organized the group. Embassy Second Secretary George Atcheson Jr. helped arrange assistance from a nearby village. Before leaving the shore, Alley wrapped his film canisters and Mayell’s in canvas and buried them in mud to prevent Japanese forces from finding the footage.
Poor Chinese villagers shared rice and tea with the survivors despite their fear of Japanese retaliation. The survivors spent three nights hiding in the cold.
British gunboats HMS Ladybird and HMS Bee reached them on Dec. 14 along with the American gunboat USS Oahu. Japanese forces had even fired upon these ships that day. The rescue vessels transported the wounded and survivors to Shanghai. They eventually boarded the heavy cruiser USS Augusta, Admiral Harry E. Yarnell’s flagship, before being returned home.
The same Japanese forces that had attacked the Panay also bombed the British vessel SS Wantung later that day.
The Film Proves Japanese Claims Wrong
Alley returned to recover the buried film. He turned the footage over to Navy officials.
In the aftermath of the attack, Japan claimed poor visibility and confusion caused the incident. Japanese officials said their pilots never saw the American flags. The weather had been too misty to identify the vessel properly.
President Franklin D. Roosevelt viewed Alley’s footage before its public release. The film showed clear skies and sunny weather. Japanese aircraft flew within a few hundred feet of the Panay, close enough that Alley and Mayell filmed individual pilots’ faces through their cockpit windows.
A Navy court of inquiry investigated the incident and determined multiple large American flags were clearly visible on the Panay during the attack. The weather was clear and sunny. Visibility was excellent. The court interviewed survivors and examined the newsreel footage. Officers concluded the Japanese claims were false. The ship had been properly marked and identified.
Navy cryptographers had intercepted and decoded Japanese naval communications. Historian John Prados later revealed the decoded traffic showed the pilots received official orders before attacking. This particular information stayed classified to protect American codebreaking capabilities.
Roosevelt requested that Alley cut 30 feet from the 53-foot newsreel before theatrical release. Even after being edited, the footage completely debunked the Japanese claims.
Movie theaters screened the film on Dec. 19. American audiences watched their gunboat sink, saw wounded sailors abandon ship and witnessed Japanese fighters strafe the rescue boats. Newspapers published survivors’ accounts. Public outrage grew.
“Hell, I can believe those babies flying level up there at 7,000 or 8,000 feet might have made an error,” Alley said years later. “But not those dive-bombers coming down at us from a few hundred feet.”
The Japanese conveniently forgot that their forces attacked numerous American and British ships. Colonel Kingoro Hashimoto later informed British officers that his forces had received orders to fire on all vessels on the Yangtze. The Japanese likely wanted to sink the oil tankers and kill the Chinese aboard the vessels. As the escort for the tankers, the Panay was seen as a legitimate target by Japanese forces.
The Diplomatic Crisis
Ambassador Joseph C. Grew in Tokyo feared war. He remembered how the USS Maine’s 1898 explosion in Havana Harbor triggered the Spanish-American War. Roosevelt briefly considered military action but faced strong isolationist sentiment from his cabinet and the American people. Many Americans questioned why the Navy even operated in China. Britain rejected any potential action against Japan.
Japan quickly moved to contain the damage. Vice Admiral Rokuzo Sugiyama delivered a formal apology that reached Washington on Christmas Eve. Though Japan maintained the attack was an accident despite the evidence.
Individual Japanese citizens sent letters and money to the embassy expressing shame. Ambassador Grew’s Dec. 20 diary entry noted his embassy had been “deluged by delegations, visitors, letters, and contributions of money — people from all walks of life, from high officials, doctors, professors, businessmen down to school children, trying to express their shame, apologies, and regrets for the action of their own Navy.”
Japan paid $2,214,007.36 on April 22, 1938. The money helped fund the Japan-America Trust, which maintained graves of American sailors in Japan dating back to Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 expedition.
An Overshadowed Event
The Navy awarded the Navy Cross to Fireman First Class John L. Hodge and Lt. Clark G. Grazier. Two British officers received the Navy Cross for helping rescue the survivors. All Panay crew members received the Navy Expeditionary Medal and China Service Medal.
The attack shifted American public opinion against Japan. Congress passed the Naval Act of March 1938, authorizing the expansion of the Pacific Fleet. But the incident was quickly forgotten by most Americans, even after Japanese expansion became a major concern in 1940 and 1941.
When Japanese aircraft struck Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, few Americans recalled the gunboat that sank four years earlier. For most Americans, World War II started at Pearl Harbor. For the men aboard the Panay, Japan had been an enemy of the country for years already.
Interestingly, one of the pilots who led the attack on the Panay, Lt. Shigeharu Murata, commanded torpedo bombers at Pearl Harbor that would severely maul the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Even today, the Panay Incident is completely overshadowed, though it is the first of numerous events that put the U.S. and Japan on the path to war.
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