Commodore George Dewey defeated a Spanish squadron at Manila Bay in May 1898, early in the Spanish-American War. A few months later, U.S. Army forces under Major General Elwell S. Otis took control of the Philippine city. Most of the Spanish squadron had been sunk by the American Asiatic Squadron or scuttled in the battle’s closing moments as Spaniards abandoned ship. At the outset of an occupation of the Philippines that would last for decades, U.S. personnel took control of the Spanish gunboat Panay. The ship—and several similar vessels—had been saved from destruction because, poorly armed and armored, the Panay had not participated in the battle. Taken into the U.S. Navy, the small coastal vessel became a workhorse of the Indo-Pacific. A second gunboat of the same name became even more famous.
The Spanish Navy laid the keel of the first Panay at the Cavite shipyard in the Philippines in 1884, and the ship became a patrol vessel for the Spanish squadron that defended the colony. At just 160 tons displacement and 94 feet, 10 inches, in length, the Panay needed only 25 to 30 sailors and was armed with a single 6-pound gun and two small 1-pounders. In Spanish service, the ship and crew conducted maritime security patrols and fought pirates in the South China Sea. In 1899, the U.S. Navy commissioned the USS Panay under the command of Ensign Harris Laning.
During the counterinsurgency conflict that came to be known as the Philippine Insurrection, the Panay operated throughout the archipelago. For three years, the gunboat moved soldiers and Marines around the islands to reinforce positions, patrolled to intercept contraband and supplies the insurgents were moving by water, and blockaded parts of islands that were under insurgent control. In 1902, the Panay was taken out of commission for extensive repairs, which took five years to complete.
The gunboat was recommissioned in 1907 under the command of Midshipman Chester Nimitz, who was promoted to ensign a few months later while still skipper of the vessel. During Nimitz’s tenure, the Panay patrolled around Mindanao and spent time as a station ship at the small naval station at Polloc. After a few months, Ensign Nimitz and his crew were transferred to bring the destroyer Decatur (Destroyer No. 5) back into commission. Famously, Nimitz would run the Decatur aground a few months later and suffer a court-martial for the incident.
The Panay continued service in and out of commission, mostly serving as a yardcraft and ferry, moving sailors and passengers around Cavite and Olongapo until 1914, when the ship was finally considered too poorly maintained to continue service.
As the insurgencies in the Philippines came to if not a close, then at least the low-grade simmer that continues to flare occasionally even today, the Asiatic Squadron took on an additional duty of protecting U.S. economic and diplomatic interests on China’s Yangtze River. The Navy’s maritime security force assigned to Chinese waters came to be known as the Yangtze Patrol, and it comprised some of the Panay’s fellow former Spanish gunboats as well as rotating destroyers deployed from the West Coast of the United States. In the years after World War I, the former Spanish vessels continued to deteriorate in material condition but remained vital to the Yangtze operations because of their shallow draft and ability to move with the riverine merchant traffic. Commanders of the Yangtze Patrol Force and their superiors in command of the Asiatic Fleet began asking the Chief of Naval Operations (CNO) to request that Congress fund construction of new, purpose-built riverine gunboats.
After years of requests to Congress in the CNO and Secretary of the Navy’s annual messages, funding was appropriated for the construction of a small group, starting with the USS Guam (PG-43), commissioned in December 1927. That same year, the keel for new Panay (PR-5) was laid at Kiangnan Dockyard and Engineering Works in Shanghai. Constructed in China by U.S. partners, the second Panay was twice the size of the original, with a crew of nearly 60 and armed with a 3-inch gun on a pivot on the bow and another on the stern and a collection of eight .30-caliber machine guns mounted on the rails. Commissioned in September 1928 under the command of Lieutenant Commander James Mackey Lewis, the new Panay joined the patrols of the upper Yangtze, where the ship’s 5-foot, 3-inch, draft was most useful.
In the 1920s and 1930s, U.S. merchant ships, expatriate businessmen, and missionaries carried on a bustling trade and made their homes on the rivers and coast of China. The Yangtze was by far the busiest waterway. Riverboats sailing for American steamship companies moved cargo to Shanghai for export. These ships as well as oil tankers from U.S.-owned Standard Oil Company required protection as China suffered through a period of instability and civil war. Warlords, bandits, and the warring Nationalist and Communist forces all posed risks to U.S. economic and diplomatic interests. The ships of the Yangtze Patrol Force escorted U.S. merchant ships, put armed guards on vessels, protected maritime infrastructure, and sometimes landed sailors to provide local security and protect civilian populations from violence.
The Panay and the five other gunboats constructed in the Shanghai shipyards were joined by destroyers sent on rotation from the Asiatic Fleet headquarters at Subic Bay, Philippines. They also frequently cooperated with British patrol vessels and the navies of other nations. With their extremely shallow draft, the gunboats worked the upper reaches of the river without reinforcement, and combat was not unheard of. One of the Panay’s commanding officers reported that taking fire from the shore had “become so routine that any vessel traversing the Yangtze River sails with the expectation of being fired upon,” but that “fortunately, the Chinese appear to be rather poor marksmen.”
After the incident at Marco Polo Bridge in Manchuria in July 1937, Japan invaded China and began sweeping south toward the capital at Nanking. The U.S. Navy and international forces began evacuating their citizens from the city as the Japanese pushed through the Nationalist Chinese forces’ resistance. In November, the Yangtze Patrol Force focused on noncombatant evacuation operations for American civilians and U.S. embassy personnel. The Panay was assigned to stay in the harbor at Nanking and wait as long as possible to withdraw the last of the State Department workers. On 11 December, the final group boarded the gunboat, which also took on a group of international journalists trying to escape the city. The Panay sailed with three Standard Oil Company ships under convoy. They headed upriver and anchored 21 miles from the city, believing they would be safe from the fighting.
On the morning of 12 December, as Chinese forces used the river to evacuate from the city and move to safety, the Imperial Japanese Army ordered aircraft to attack “any and all ships” north of Nanking on the river. The Imperial Japanese Navy, which U.S. personnel had apprised of their movements, requested confirmation of the order. However, when the army insisted, Japanese naval aircraft launched attacks on the river. As 1400 approached, three bombers rolled in on the convoy. The Panay was hit, as was Standard Oil’s tanker Mei Ping. A second wave of Japanese biplanes swept over the river and dropped another 20 bombs on the ships. The Panay’s pilothouse, radio room, and engine room were all disabled, and the ship began taking on water. The sailors fought back, firing the .30-caliber machine guns from the rails at the attacking biplanes. However, the defenses failed, and the Panay sank into the river as the survivors abandoned ship. Three Americans were killed, and 43 sailors and 5 civilian passengers were wounded.
In the aftermath of the attack, the Japanese claimed mistaken identity and blamed the attack on poor communication among their troops. The State Department lodged a formal protest with Tokyo, but in the end the Roosevelt administration accepted a Japanese apology.
The Imperial Japanese Army continued what came to be known as the Rape of Nanking. The sinking of the Panay marked the growing tensions between the United States and an Imperial Japan set on expanding across Asia—and foreshadowed the coming war in the Pacific. While neither Panay gunboat was a large warship and the ships conducted the kinds of brown-and-green-water operations that rarely gain headlines, their history from the Spanish-American War to the eve of World War II marked a critical time in the rise of U.S. naval power.
