Content provided in partnership with
Japanese attack USS Panay
Spokesman Magazine, March, 2005 by Dennis F. Casey
A United States Naval Court of Inquiry in Shanghai submitted evidence that the sinking was deliberate. With negotiations between the United States and Japan at a critical stage and focused on issues relating to control in the Pacific and events in China, the last thing the Roosevelt administration wanted was a war in the Pacific; and with isolationism riding high in Congress, a declaration of war would not likely have been in the cards.
When the Roosevelt administration accepted the official explanation, a collective sigh of relief swept over the country. In a poll taken in 1937, voters favored a policy of complete American withdrawal from China to include all military personnel, missionaries and medical missions. When the Japanese government later paid the indemnity of $2,214,007.36 asked by the U.S. Government, the issue seemed officially closed.
- Most Popular Articles in News
- The Ten Best Laptop bags
- Tata plans cheapest-ever car for Indian market
- GLOBALIZATION AND THE DEVELOPMENT OF UNDERDEVELOPMENT OF THE THIRD WORLD
- Corn is good for you; Corn is not only a tasty treat, but also a cereal that ...
- THE 50 BEST STYLISH HANDBAGS TO CARRY
- More »
What interested Ambassador Grew and other American State Department officials was that letters of regret came into the American Embassy from all over Japan.
Factory workers, school children and individual families sent letters and cards expressing how sorry they were for the mishap. Many of the letters included money. Visitors and delegations of Japanese citizens visited the embassy in Tokyo and expressed their shame and offered apologies for the behavior of their navy. In one letter Japanese sailors living in Yokohama apologized and sent along a check for $87.19 for the bereaved families of the Panay.
Ambassador Grew certainly felt that the Americans were receiving mixed messages from Japan. On the one hand the embassy in Tokyo and American consulates in other parts of the country were witnessing a groundswell in apologies. On the other hand, the day after the Panay sank, Japanese General Iwane Matsui sat atop a white horse and led his troops into Nanking on the heals of Chiang Kai-Shek's retreating army.
General Matsui proclaimed that the "Japanese Imperial way was shinning through." General Matsui and some of his subordinates would face charges for crimes against humanity at the end of the war for what would be called the rape of Nanking. German army observers reported to their superiors in Berlin how shocked they were at the brutality of the Japanese soldiers. Indeed, Japanese soldiers murdered over 250,000 Chinese men, women and children mostly by beheading and bayoneting.
The reaction to the attack in Washington came quickly. Secretary of State Cordell Hull denounced the sinking of the Panay as the handiwork of "wild and half-insane" Japanese admirals and generals. President Franklin Roosevelt, who watched newsreel film shot from the deck of the Panay by Norman Alley of Universal News, ordered parts of the film showing the faces of Japanese pilots censored.
The president wanted to avoid war with the highly prepared and combat tested Japanese military, especially given the knowledge that the American military at this time was grossly unprepared after more than a decade of miniscule defense budgets. Many senior American military officials felt that the Japanese had carefully planned, coordinated, and executed the assault on the Panay. Others accepted Japan's official explanation.
