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America, remember your Sundays,
Remember Pearl Harbor,
Remember the Panay.
Research into the historical events surrounding the bombing of the U.S.S. Panay, December 12, 1937 on the Yangtze River near Nanking, China
'Concerning the Panay sinking--and other Related Matters'
July 15, 2000
I found another book with the photograph of the miniature Pearl Harbor. I mentioned these earlier.
This one is on page 151 of LIFE World War II, Philip A. Unhurt Jr. It's a coffee table book of photos of the war. Caption reads...
On a painstaking detailed model of Pearl Harbor back in Tokyo, used to familiarize attack pilots with their target, Japanese technicians emplace replicas of US warships at their moorings in Pearl Harbor.
So...that's two photos before and one after Pearl Harbor. It's kinda big to be a strategy mock up (I was tempted to buy a rubberized model on ebay of Nanking. It WAS a spotters model used in 1944.) The ships are six, seven feet long! I'm kinda leaning to...it's a movie set for a propaganda film, what the American Heritage article stated--made after Peal Harbor.
On the web searches I cant help but notice all the quarrels about Pearl Harbor: did we know, didn't we know, how come we were so taken by surprise, surely we knew, and if we knew, did we deliberately not warn Peal Harbor?...
There was a full government enquiry into this during the war (on the web are sites), and now lately it fuels the conspiracy theorists. I cant get too deep into that! Conspiracy theories can gobble up all your time...
However, MarianaMoore, however, the crew of the Panay seem to think the attack on their gunboat was premeditated. Some Japanese planner pointed at a strategy map and said, "Bomb this gunboat, and this gunboat, and this gunboat...
Premeditated. The Japanese conspired. To attack the Panay, to attack Pearl Harbor.
What I think, in the case of Pearl Harbor, is that we knew the Japanese were coming, and we planed to attack them after they had stuck their necks out far enough. There is a lot of ocean between Japan and Hawaii. All the battleships were in Pearl Harbor, but three of our aircraft carriers were out on the open ocean. Many planes were at Pearl Harbor.
It would have been like the Battle of Midway. There, the Japanese sent a task force to attack Midway Island, and we knew from intercepts of their intentions. Our task force intercepted them, and planes from our carriers, and from Midway island, sunk and disabled so many of the Japanese aircraft carriers (3 sunk 1 damaged?) that it broke the Japanese Navy.
At Hawaii, our two aircraft carriers attack, and the planes from Hawaii attack.
So, why didn't that happen?? if my idea is right?
I'm not sure... I dont even know if my conjecture can hold water about the three carriers...they were up to something, but I dont recall exactly what their mission was that day...I'll have to check!!
Maybe we didn't think the Zeros were such good airplanes, or that they could fly the long distances they could. Maybe we thought they were all out of range, and we could sleep in that Sunday.
This would explain why no one was alerted. An alert would tip off the Japanese, and they'd turn around home and start another plot.
And I agree, the attack on the Panay was deliberate, no accident. Hashimoto went to prison (why he was released is more conspiracy fuel) and Matsui was hung. Okumiya survived to visit Alaska and give a talk about the Zero and the war in the Aleutians.
One of the Panay crew survived to have a kid grow up to be an astronaut, which I think one of the coolest events I've found!
Next: The Alaskan Zero
My Panay research began with the story as told by Perry. And it wasn't research, it was just a story I read in an old magazine--American Heritage. That was in 1987 or so. This past February I lighted on the subject for my project and went to the library to begin and found Perry's book. Oh, I thought this was lucky. I didn't think there would be a whole book.
And right after I read the book, I found the Tutuila's story in February "Naval History". I found this magazine at Barne's & Noble. Just on a hope I looked at the magazine section, and there it was--a Yangtze Patrol Gunboat on the cover! More luck!
And with it, the Military History Quarterly with the Pearl Harbor model picture.
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Back in 1987 reading about the Panay coincided with the story of the USS Stark being hit by the exocet missiles in the Persian Gulf.
I felt a real sense of menace when that happened. I even felt that Japan somehow had a hand in it. A farfetched idea, and not being an expert of any sort, I only mulled this over to myself.
I must have made the connection with the Stark and Japan because I had read about the Panay. I still find myself wondering if the date the Stark was hit had some significance in Japan's conflict with the US in the Pacific War. They seem a superstitious bunch. The Panay was attacked on Sunday, December 12, and Pearl Harbor was attacked on Sunday, December 7.
I acknowledge that coincidence doesn't mean superstition has a valid reality. But I grew up listening to Vin Sculley's Dodger broadcasts. They are peppered with observations of coincidence. And then there's the poet's "more than coincidence..."
The Stark was named after Admiral Stark, the commander of Pearl Harbor when it was attacked. And the Stark Incident was a surprise attack.
This sorta of comparing has been done with the Kennedy and Lincoln assassinations...both were succeeded by Vice President's named Johnson...and so forth...
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I've watched television and movies all my life--I'm from the first full fledged TV generation. And the vast majority of these films are detective stories--mysteries. We watch the heroes follow clues. So my generation isn't without "skills" when solving mysteries. A curious attitude is now second nature, and it should be no surprise that government and our history is examined and questioned, and possible conspiracies imagined. We like this kinda stuff.
Along with this we have a sifting ability. Just finding our favorite movies, keeping track of favorite actors, keeping abrest of all the Hollywood stories, has given us this.
Now, with the web, we can interact. We're gonna raise hell. We'll sniff out every tree, bush, and clump of weeds!
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A method I have hit on is taking a detail, and comparing how it is presented in different accounts of the events. "One thing!", like Curley says in "City Slickers".
An example: My title is adamant--The Bombing of the USS Panay, Sunday, December 12, 1937, 27 miles upstream from Nanking on the Yangtze River, China." I felt I needed to state these details of time and place right from the start. If I'm wrong, I thought, the reader need not continue who has a knowledge of the Panay. But someone who does, I felt, would respect my attention to detail, and understand why...
The "why" is because some accounts have the Panay bombing on December 11! And some in 1938! (the latter are usually very brief one's in some timeline, or encyclopedia).
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To start, I didn't know anything about China. It took awhile just to figure out the Yangtze River. I wanted a map, ideally one of those satellite views from space, and I looked and looked. Sometimes I was looking at the Yellow River. I still haven't found a good topo map.
Maps, as a story I found in an asian art magazine, are beloved by the Chinese for contemplation. A large map of China was a part of the earliest emperor's palace. I'll have to find a quote from that... I spent weeks search wording Yangtze River. A map was to be the major feature of my first idea for the booklet.
Some say 27miles, some say 28, some give the "marker", or river feature near an island.
You know, as a detective, you want the crime scene undisturbed, and from the evidence a model is made--a map. Everything in it's place.
Finding Chang using Bergamini's maps was kind of an eyebrow raiser--I had thought to use his maps! I'd given up finding a topo, and while I had been reading and re-reading Bergamini, I hadn't noticed his two maps of Nanking. When I finally saw them, I said to myself, "Damn, there they are!" I scanned them in, and was geared up to Photoshop them, but one day I just wrote out in Word the booklet. I'd finally gathered enough to write it out, and what I wrote looked okay. In fact, it's pretty good, and once I get to stemming it, that'll be apparent. (keyword my poem "Visit" and that shows this idea--keyword the names and nouns--even "hermit crab". I wrote it with that in mind. Once having done that, read the poem again. This is no less a thing than going to an author's sources, and reading them for yourself, and then rereading the author's work.)
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The date of the Panay bombing can be confused because of the international dateline. In Japan and China, December 7 here is December 8. And, I'm guessing, both a Sunday in the year Pearl Harbor is bombed.
Life magazine states that the Panay left Nanking at 8:35 in the morning, the same day it was attacked. Other's say it left the day before, on the eleventh. It's kind of important when it left. The crew may have witnessed the Chinese soldiers "scrambling like scared rabbits", trying to get out of the one exit through the walls, and being shot by their own countrymen. It is a horrific scene. I have to check out Perry's book again as in it is a scene of junks being blown up by the Japanese, but I forget what else.
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Many are trying to get Nanking right. By right, I mean "mapped out" . The Nanking part of the booklet is meant to be stemmed too, and it leads into "all that". Sigh. The whole booklet is the equivalent of a search engine's list.
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I would hope, dear Webizen, that time is taken by all to use the search engines, even your own at the library/bookstore. (They hate me. I dont buy 'm, I try not to dog-ear 'm)
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In the previous post I left off with a question about our carriers at Pearl Harbor. Could they have been laying in wait, anticipating the attack, much as they did later at Midway? A breaking of the Japanese code, and knowledge of where the Japanese task force was, would make this possible. But I thought, maybe the range of the Zero fighter surprised us. They attacked sooner than we anticipated.
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So, to scope this out, I went keywording....ship location pearl harbor. And I found them, where our Carriers were. More on that later...
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The Japanese wish they would have found them, they wanted them to be in Pearl Harbor. It was a great dissapointment. And it was a great fear. Not knowing where they were, made them suspect they could be attacked, and they turned around and left-- went home after only two hours of bombing.
The histories I've read from our view make little of our carriers, except to say they escaped the attack by being else ware.
A view from the Japanese side puts the emphasis right where it belongs, where these carriers were and what they were doing!!
The Japanese didn't know, and the histories on our side since, that I've read like I said, dont say much about them.
It's important.
On my "map" of Pearl Harbor I need to pinpoint them. And the Japanese carriers.
One, the Enterprise, wasn't far away, another was on the West coast, and another headed towards Wake or Midway--not certain.
The histories conflict on this "detail".
And the time--0600 the Zero's leave the flight decks, or 0548. Or... Time and distance could explain how Admiral Stark was caught flat footed. And McArthur too in the Philippines...
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And this all leads to the Alaskan Zero story, and another book I found two days ago in Barnes & Noble by good luck...
Midway The Battle that Doomed Japan by Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya. It's a reprint by Ballentine Books.
And we're gonna have to get Kemp Tolley and his little boat into this too...
If the Maharishi were gonna assign me a meditative word, I might request "okumiya".
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And I got China Pilot by Felix Smith from the library. Way of A Fighter to China Pilot to...??? Just need one more pilot's tale to link Panay to Stark. Pilots give the best "mapping". China Pilot deserves its own post...
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Of course, it was an Iraqi pilot that bombed the Stark. To infer that Japan had any part is unfair, and likely wrong headed. Even to suggest... But it was in the papers I remember...in the mix of technologies being acquired by Iraq was some mention of Japan's dealings, likely oilfield stuff. If nothing else, it was a French missile from a Russian aircraft. Japan dealing with Iraq is one of those things I really dont want to look at...Heck, our dealing with Iraq puts me off.
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Time to watch videos from Blockbuster---North by Northwest. I think the crop duster might be a Curtiss Hawk. And The Last Emperor. When shown in Japan, the story goes, the Japanese tried to cut out the Nanking scenes.
Oh! This a good place to catch the use of nation's names. "Japanese" above could easily refer to the foibles of one individual, or a small group. As with the Panay, "Japan" bombed the Panay may have been just one rogue individual. An Ollie North loose cannon. But that's how histories are written. Japan did this, America did that...
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north to Alaska...
"I want to bomb Shanghai." --Eastern Jewel in the movie "The Last Emperor"
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How in the world could anyone watching this movie know what in the world is going on if they hadn't read these books I've been reading!! It's not possible. I had tried to watch it before, but always just flipped the channel. It didn't make any sense.
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Well, played against the background of knowing a little of the history of the times, the movie makes some sense.
The movie "The Sand Pebbles" has this same problem. Knowing the history makes the movie better, and more sensible.
Eastern Jewel is in Bergamini's book (and he must have gotten her story from some other book), and she was a "piece of work". A Manchurian, enlisted by the Japanese as a spy, she did indeed get her wish, and is part of the Shanghai/Nanking bombings.
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In The Last Emperor was the scene of the interrogator berating the two brothers for writing accounts of their lives that had different dates for the same events. Historians must like this scene.... And it's a scene worth contemplating.
I have the sense that the web is not unlike the circumstance in the prison for the captured Emperor. He was required to write out his personal history as a confession. Doing this would rehabilitate him. This is some communist mind manipulation. I dont know, but on the web I see this, folk writing out the history of things as if in a confessional. Maybe the communists got it from the Catholics!
He who controls the past controls the future, he who controls the present controls the past. --Orwell.
I'm not fond of quotes, but that one does get at everyone's purpose. And on the large scale, the quarrels on the web are laying out our history for all to see, if they have the time to visit umpteenmillion web pages!.
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I tried mightily on the web, using keyword "Admiral Halsey" and "Task Force 8 Pearl Harbor", to find the locations of the aircraft carriers. A three or four hour hunt.
And I found them okay, but a lot's missing.
I found them much better in a book from the library, "Pear Harbor Japan's Fatal Blunder The True Story of Japan's Attack on December 7, 1941" by Harry Albright.
It's a book with no index, no bibliography. I recognize some things taken from the Midway book. And in the middle is a "What if..." chapter about the Japanese over running Oahu. As it happens, I started reading this chapter first, and got totally befuddled--I thought I'd slipped into an alternative reality!
Starting from the beginning, I got to liking it okay. And the whole theme of his book is the carriers, ours and theirs. And I think it puts to rest the conspiracy theories. We were lucky, or as some noted, divine providence had a hand in it.
The book has some nice tidbits...
"The Russian fleet commander Admiral Stark was not even there, absent attending a party ashore in the fortress."
That's from the sea battle between Japan and Russia at Port Arthur, Japan's first big victory (1905), which was a template for the Pearl Harbor attack.
Short and Kimmel took the fall for Peal Harbor. Sometimes I get Stark confused with Short. Both Short and Kimmel have had their ranks restored, albeit, posthumously.
And that's a Russian Stark at Port Arthur. That's three Starks!
"Then on 12 December 1937 American and British seamen felt the full fury of the Japanese wrath.
The river gunboat U.S.S. Panay was bombed and strafed by Japanese aviators as she lay in the Yangtze River near Nanking... ... ...The attack was no accident, having been planed in the operations room of the large Japanese aircraft carrier Kaga with the attack planes launched from her deck." ... ...p38
I dont know where he got that. Perry does speculate the planes came from a carrier, but they were land based Navy planes temporarily in the hands of Hashimoto. I'll have to go look up Kaga.
From reading this book it doesn't seem likely the range of the Zeros was a factor--the Japanese snuggled right up close to Oahu. So my theory leaks. But we'll still visit Alaska and the "Koga" Zero!
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Dont let me forget Magic/Roswell and Magic/Purple Code. I thought the two were related....
Pearl Harbor, Deborah Bachrach, Greenhaven Press, Inc. Part of this publishers "Great Myteries" series that includes: Animal Communication, Atlantis, The Bermuda Triangle, Bigfoot, Dinosaurs, ESP, Pearl Harbor, Poltergeists, Pyramids, The Shroud of Turin, The Solar System, Witches.
Must be the Roswell links...
The following is from the Shanghai Daily website. I quote it in full. It overlaps my own "Black Saturday" post--still in the works. Note Chennault, and the listing of all the aircraft. The journalist who did this (it's not bylined) did a good job of research. I found it by luck--keyword "kaga carrier shanghai" on Yahoo I believe. It's a flashback story among regular current news.
It dates from March 1999, or I'd say the author snuck a peak at my weblog!!
There's a resurgance going on in Shanghai--lots of new things. Before long, I suspect, it will be the greatest city on earth. Going through the web pages at this site gives a look at it.
Old story of Shanghai
In mid-1937, after years of preparation and baiting, Japan finally began its full-scale effort to conquer China. The war came to Shanghai on August 14, known thereafter as "Bloody Saturday", from the air. The Japanese launched bombing raid attacks on Shanghai and Nanjing from Taiwan , but a passing typhoon made it impossible for their fighter cover to take off from the carrier Kaga, near Shanghai. The large Mitsubishi G3M2 "Nell" bombers were greeted by the unopposed Chinese 4th Fighter Wing led by Gao Zhihang and miserable weather over target. Col. Gao's Hawk IIIs shot down several of the raiders and the others diverted to bases in Korea and Japan. This good luck would not last. The Chinese air force launched its own attacks despite the bad weather. Chinese Northrop bombers took off from Guangde, about 120 miles west of Shanghai with early Curtiss Hawk II dive-bombers supporting them. About 40 planes arrived over Shanghai, which was covered in thick cloud. The Curtiss Hawks began dive-bombing the Japanese Marine headquarters at the Kung Ta textile mills while Northrops attacked Japanese cruisers and supply ships at Wusong and the Japanese warship Idzumo, moored next to the Japanese consulate on the Whangpoo River, which served as the Japanese military headquarters. They missed. According to one account attributed to Claire Chennault, Chinese airmen had been trained to bomb from 7,500 feet, but the thick cloud made it necessary to come in much lower, and they released their bombs at 1,500 feet without adjusting their bombsights. Another possibility is that the bomb racks, notoriously tempermental, released early when the arming switches were thrown. This would better account for the bombs falling where they did, according to some. The damage may even have been caused by or compounded by bombs jettisoned or dropped from a Japanese aircraft in the clouds above. In war strange things happen. The next day and over the next weeks, the Japanese bombers from Taiwan and Korea returned with escort and inflicted great damage on Shanghai and Nanjing. Victims ranged from Mr and Mrs Robert K. Reischauer, brother of the Japanologist and future ambassador, to the burnt baby photographed on the tracks at Shanghai South by "Newsreel" Wong. China put up a heroic resistance in the air and on the ground, its Curtiss Hawk and Boeing 281 pilots fighting to the last with frightful losses against the deadly new Mitsubishi "Claude" shipboard fighters. An elite Chinese unit of Boeing 281 (P-26) monoplanes defended Nanjing to the last plane, while on the ground in Shanghai the crack German-trained KMT "Ironsides" troops, the "Lost Battalion" held the Joint Savings Godown on Suzhou Creek. But Shanghai (the parts not controlled by the foreigners), and then Nanjing, fell to the invaders. An excerpt from Sin City, by Ralph Shaw, a British journalist in Shanghai from 1937 to 1949. He got the day and a few other details wrong, but the feel is right: "On August 13th, incidentally my birthday, two small Chinese planes appeared over Shanghai, flying high to avoid the barrage of anti-aircraft fire unleashed by the Japanese in Hongkew. The target of the planes appeared to be the ancient Japanese cruiser, Idzumo, permanently anchored close to Garden Bridge, a former Imperial Russian warship captured during the Russo-Japanese war of 1905. This was the headquarters of the Japanese Navy in Shanghai, impotent as a fighting unit but useful as a monument to commemorate the country's victory over a Western power. The first bomb landed in Nanking Road between the Cathay and Palace Hotels. It created havoc. Hundreds of pedestrians of many nationalities simply disappeared in a whirling mass of dismembered bodies. Trams were set on fire. Motorists were burned to cinders in their blazing vehicles. The few who survived had not long to live. There was even greater devastation on Avenue Edward Seventh, where the second bomb dropped. This was the Chinese theatre district, an area of street stalls, of pavement sideshows, always thronged with sightseers. The carnage was appalling. It was the last attack launched by the Chinese in the Shanghai area - an appalling debacle that clearly proved to the world that China's material resources were not only scarce but that in quality they precluded any worthwhile offensive action against the well-armed Japanese."
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The second bomb fell on the "Great World", an amusement complex right out of a Fellini movie.
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My
search that turned this up was aimed at finding where the Japanese
aircraft came from that bombed the Panay. The Pearl Harbor book author may
have gotten his note they came from the Kaga from a Naval Institute Proceedings
story...
Same, p. 559; Grew Ten Years in Japan pp. 232-42. The allegations of Hashimoto's responsibility were obtained by Mr. Hallert Abend of the New York Times and other American newspaper correspondents, and transmitted to me by Admiral Yarnell in 1947. Note: But for an excellent Japanese account of this affair, see Commander Okumiya "How the Panay Was Sunk," U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings pp. 587-96 (June 1953). The author, whose plane squadron led the dive-bombing attack, makes out a good case for the fliers who neither recognized Panay nor were informed of the gunboat's presence in the vicinity. The strike was made on the basis of army intelligence, not on the orders of Colonel Hashimoto; the Japanese naval aviators thought they were bombing enemy troops escaping up-river in Chinese merchant ships.
http://metalab.unc.edu/hyperwar/USN/ships/dafs/PR/pr5-sinking.html
This is a footnote to a web site story of the Panay (it might be Tolly writing)--a good one too.
I'd like to get a hold of that issue of Proceedings, and too Okumiya's "Zero" book.
Very early on I emailed the Naval Institute web site. I was all excited about finding the Tutuila's story in Feb 2000 Naval History. And they responded, "Huh?". Geez. I got no cachet. I tried to strike up a conversation, but nada. Anyway, I might be able to find that issue with bibliofind.com. I've been browsing there and finding books, lots and lots...and I cant buy them. But I've thought to use them at the library searches. Too maybe the University of California system has it--I need to join up as "Friend of the Library" again, but it's a long drive.
My student site is still up at Palomar, and someone hit the submit button on Project 9. For that one I had to make a form, and it's hooked to response-o-matic. It was about the Panay, and someone clicked on it, but left no trace. Hmmph. I thought the student sites would be gone by now. This is a student site too!!
I might enroll again in the Fall.
"Newsreel" Wong was aboard the Panay. Someone was trying to sell a print of his famous photo on e-bay.
Two quotes follow, then some comment, then another quote. The third quote is not factual. Please note that...I'll explain in comment after it. And tie these three together.
War Games
from web site
U.S. Navy Plan Orange, is a Operational and Tactical level game of the hypothetical naval war that planners on both sides of the Pacific envisioned happening between 1920 and 1936. NPO takes place in 1930, and features some of the great unbuilt ships of both nations: the South Dakotas with their mighty 12 16" guns, the Tosa and Kaga BC/BBs with their high speed and heavy hitting power. Also here for the first time is early strike capable naval avaiation including the Carrier Zeppelins Akron and Macon. Single ship counters for BB's, BC's, CA's and many CL's. DD's are portrayed in two, three, and four ship squadrons. U.S. Navy Plan Orange, utilizes the Great War at Sea system and in completely compatable with it.
from "Midway" book
"In the tabletop maneuvers, for example, a situation developed in which the Nagumo Force underwent a bombing attack by enemy land-based aircraft while its own planes were off attacking Midway. In accordance with the rules, Lieutenant Commander Okumiya, Carrier Division 4 staff officer who was acting as an umpire, cast dice to determine the bombing results and ruled that there had been nine enemy hits on the Japanese carriers. Both Akagi and Kaga were listed as sunk. Admiral Ugaki, however, arbitrarily reduced the number of enemy hits to only three, which resulted in Kaga's still being ruled sunk but Akagi only slightly damaged. To Okumiya's surprise, even this revised ruling was subsequently cancelled, and Kaga reappeared as a participant in the next part of the games covering the New Caledonia and Fiji Islands invasions. The verdicts of the umpires regarding the results of air fighting were similarly juggled, always in favor of the Japanese forces.
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There, the somewhat reckless manner in which the Nagumo Force operated evoked criticism, and the question was raised as to what plan the Force had in mind to meet the contingency that an enemy carrier task force might appear on its flank while it was executing its scheduled air attack on Midway. The reply given by the Nagumo Force staff officer present was so vague as to suggest that there was no such plan, and Rear Admiral Ugaki himself cautioned that greater consideration must be given to this possiblity. Indeed, in the actual battle, this was precisely what happened.
pp85-86 paper back "Midway The Battle that Doomed Japan", Mitsuo Fuchida and Masatake Okumiya, Ballentine
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The following quote is from a "simulation" I found. It's about the USS Stark being attacked in 1997. This did not happen! If a deep book mark or search engine has brought this passage up for you here, this part about the Stark is not real, it's a fiction. Dont get duped like I did! More comment following the quote...:)
from web site
CNN
Homepage for the Middle East Politics Simulation -
CNN team.
The University of Melbourne, Australia / The University of Canterbury, New
Zealand.
Hi Everyone!