If today’s naval officers were asked to name the longest uninterrupted naval operation in the almost 200 years of our military history, few would be able to give the correct answer. It is not well known that for three quarters of a century, through wars, revolutions, and “times of trouble,” a small flotilla of odd looking ships sailed China’s principal river with a unique singleness of purpose—to protect American lives and property. This was YangPat, the legendary Yangtze Patrol.
Under the Manchus, China’s views on foreigners in general were well expressed by a viceroy who declared, “The great ministers of the Celestial Empire, unless with regard to carrying tribute, or in consequence of Imperial commands, are not permitted to have interviews with outside barbarians!”
This condescending attitude was forced to change, however, after the First War with Great Britain, from 1839 to 1844. Persistent governmental pressure gained concessions for British merchants engaged in the profitable China trade. In 1842, the Treaty of Nanking ceded the island of Hong Kong to Great Britain and opened the ports of Canton, Amoy, Foochow, Ningpo, and Shanghai to foreign residence and commerce. British consuls were appointed at each port for communications between English and Chinese officials. As a consequence, American commerce with China flourished mightily, along with that of the European powers.
By 1865, however, U. S. preoccupation with the Civil War, the activities of Confederate raiders, and the clear advantages of the new European steamers over the Yankee clippers had all but wiped American commerce from the Far Eastern seas. Thus it was when the Monocacy and the Ashuelot, the original ancestors of YangPat, were sent out to China in 1866, they found there were very few American interests to “protect.”
While ships of the East Indies and the China Squadrons had from time to time made visits up the rivers of China, these two sidewheel steamers (with full sail rig) were the first sent out specifically for river duty. Their presence was legalized by the Sino-British Treaty of 1858, the United States enjoying equal rights as a Treaty Power.
As late as 1903, this Treaty was appealed to by the commanding officer of the Villalobos, a small, U. S. gunboat whose presence was protested by a local Taotai on the upper Yangtze. The position of the Villalobos (a Spanish American War prize) was defended by the Secretary of State who wrote that, “The Department is inclined to the opinion that Rear Admiral Evans [CinC Asiatic Fleet] is right in his contention that our gunboats may visit inland ports of China, including those which are not treaty ports. Even if this right were not granted us by treaty, Rear Admiral Evans is unquestionably right in using it when like ships of other Powers are constantly doing so.”
The early days of YangPat were relatively uneventful. The Ashuelot was wrecked in 1883. The Monocacy’s log reveals a daily routine of exchanging calls with Russian, Japanese, British, and Austrian warships, “drill at the great guns, exercise at single stick, and repel boarders,” and the return from time to time in double irons of AWOL seamen and marines.
The Monocacy carried 35 cutlasses, 16 battle axes, and 12 boarding pikes, but no mention is made of their ever having been bloodied in combat on the Yangtze. Her 60- pounder Parrott muzzle-loaders had been replaced by something slightly more modern by 1903, when the durable old ship finally was disposed of as being too rotten to risk moving off the pile of her own ashes and coffee grounds on which she sat.
Even by 1895, the American commercial stake (and thus YangPat’s responsibility) trailed behind that of other countries engaged in the China trade. Britain accounted for a giant 70 per cent of China’s foreign trade, the United States, 10 per cent, closely followed by Japan and Russia. The Czar’s and the Mikado’s gunboats sailed the Yangtze, and Russian Imperial troops guarded their big concession at Hankow, 600 miles upriver.
The Spanish American War and “Manifest Destiny” brought a crackling change in U. S. views on the Far East. We acquired a number of ex-Spanish gunboats in the Philippines, which greatly augmented the force on river service in China. The larger oceangoing gunboats, Helena and Wilmington, had arrived by 1901, when the Yangtze gunboats were constituted a subdivision of the Asiatic Fleet under the command of the Senior Officer, Yangtze River. At Shanghai, lay the big monitor Monterey, as station ship, her tremendous turret guns an impressive display to power-respecting Chinese.
Even yet, however, the Son of Heaven at Peking commanded enough respect and the memories of the foreign interventions of 1841 and 1858 were sufficiently fresh to maintain a degree of order on the rivers that rarely called for more than a showing of a gunboat flag to discourage any local pushing about of missionaries or merchants.
With the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty in 1911, China literally fell to pieces. As if by a magic stroke, the unity of the country disappeared. Viceroys who wielded a well nigh absolute power in their provinces became independent rulers and fought each other without being able to establish even a semblance of order or unity. Internal wars became endemic. Until the consolidation of Nationalist power in the 1930s, the gunboats were indeed to earn their keep.
River navigation became a way of life for YangPat’s flat-bottomed fleet, manned over the generations by thousands of U. S. Navy men, sounding their way with bamboo poles from swampy, teeming Shanghai, through the boiling rapids of the gorges to mountain- ringed Chungking, 1,400 miles from the sea. During the flood season, the banks of the lower river sometimes wholly disappeared and it was necessary to navigate by village rooftops. And when the ship was completely out of sight of land, although 300 miles upriver, there was nothing but an occasional pole to mark the channel through the earth-laden, chocolate-colored water.
In 1914 the two small gunboats Monocacy (after the earlier one) and Palos were constructed at Mare Island and transported to the Far East in sections for reassembly at Shanghai. They were the first ships of sufficient power and light enough draft to tackle with some assurance the rapids of the gorges leading to Chungking.
In 1914, 11 years after the first Monocacy was disposed of, a smaller, more powerful namesake was constructed at Mare Island and shipped in sections to Shanghai for reassembly. The Monocacy was photographed at Changsha in August 1932.
Let us look in on a little scene in the daily life of the Monocacy. A “repel boarders” drill has just been concluded and the ready arms set back in their racks in wardroom, crew’s quarters, and bridge. The Bosun’s pipe trills once more. “Now deck force, stand by to spar moor." A pair of sweating coolies throw on the few, last scoops of coal before preparing to clean and bank the fires. Three-foot flames and a swirl of black smoke issue from the buff twin stacks; much of the combustion takes place beyond the combination wood-and- coal-burning firebox. With a cafe-au lait bone in her teeth, the white-hulled ship plows through the earth-brown water, her three-foot freeboard amidships barely high enough to keep the chop from swashing aboard. She sheers toward the wall of broken rock that rises a thousand feet or more in steep, barren slopes almost from the river’s edge. The Skipper notes with relief the junkload of coal already at the rendezvous, fuel for the next day’s all-out struggle against rapids sometimes running faster than the little ship’s 13 knots. Foot by slow foot the wire hawser is heaved in. The end is dragged upriver and secured to rocks ashore by as villainous a looking lot of wretches as anyone could find in all China—Yangtze trackers. The lucky ones are clothed in tattered rags; the others are stark naked except for a tobacco pouch or a tiny money bag.
The ship is soon moored for the night, snug against 20-foot spars set perpendicularly to her hull against boulders on the bank, wires out fore and aft. If the river doesn’t rise unexpectedly from an upstream freshet and no timber raft comes crashing down across the bow, the night could be a quiet one.
Through the years of World War I and the early Twenties, YangPat’s problems were routine. Normally the Isabel, the trim ex-yacht flagship, lay at Hankow, and one or another of the Asiatic Fleet’s ships acted as Shanghai station ship. The Villalobos usually wintered over at Changsha on Tungting Lake, walled in by low water, and the Monocacy and the Palos rotated at Chungking. The Elcano, an old Spanish War prize, lay at the foot of the gorges at Ichang, to furnish a squad of four or five sailors as armed guard on American ships going upriver. The advent of steam navigation in the gorges in 1898 had embittered the junkmen, who for thousands of years had held a monopoly. They expressed their displeasure by an occasional fusillade at a passing steamer in the rapids, with the hope of killing the pilot and thus at once wrecking the ship.
The passage by merchant steamer or gunboat from Shanghai to Chungking averaged 30 days, an indication of the magnitude of the Great River. And Chungking was by no means the head of navigation.
In the two decades before World War II, YangPat had become the “last frontier” for Navy men, the ultimate in adventure on an adventuresome station. Exotic emigre Russian girls murmured in husky accents over small bottles of champagne in Shanghai and Hankow cabarets, where showers of “mex” silver dollars clanked and spun onto the dance floors to encourage the performers. Young officers with the modest pay of a junior lieutenant rode half-broken Manchurian ponies at the Hankow Race Club, played badminton, and dined on snails and red wine at Shanghai’s opulent Cercle Sportif Français. They hired a private ricksha for the princely sum of a quarter a day and were carried in sedan chairs from the broad river’s edge up the immense stone stairway to the city at Chungking. In the multitude of bars, the clatter of dice boxes deciding who signed the chits for the five-cent scotch and sodas all but drowned out the universal summons of the East: “Boy!”
Farther upriver, an occasional bullet zinged off the armor plating of the gunboats as they passed emits of the local warlord’s troops, picking lice out of their nondescript uniforms and bathing and sunning themselves on the foreshore.
“Oh, they are just country boys; they mean no harm,” explained the Chinese commander of some trigger-happy soldiers to a protesting U. S. gunboat skipper. “As I was leaving the ship to visit you, General,” said the Skipper, “several of my sailors were amusing themselves with the 3-inch gun on the fantail. They had a live shell in it and had it aimed at your yamen, which is a very prominent white target. But I am glad to hear you understand the foibles of country boys, General, and will not be alarmed at such playful behavior!” The record reveals that sniping in that particular reach of the river ceased forthwith.
There were many variations. One little band had established a “toll gate” on the middle river on the authority of an old Krupp field piece. Their knotty fire control problems had been solved by boresighting at a whitewashed rock on the opposite bank. When a gate-crashing vessel interposed between gun and rock, a shell was slammed into the breech and the firing lanyard yanked. The project failed to prosper; a miss astern invariably was rung up, and the free loader proceeded untaxed and unharmed, to the chagrin and utter mystification of a gunner who clearly never had been tipped off on the merits of leading a moving target. The average gunboat skipper felt genuinely reluctant to discourage such harmless enterprise.
The typical old Yangtze sailor, the “river rat,” was too pleased with his lot to allow himself to become a disciplinary problem of any consequence and thus risk being shipped “outside.” None of the men were married in those times; they did not seriously contemplate official matrimony on a-dollar-a- day, the prevailing wage of the average seaman and about half that of the average petty officer. The hatful of silver “head” dollars, slapped down one by one to hear their ring for genuineness, was gone soon after payday. Ten per cent flowed directly into the long, thin hands of the boss coolie on board, for a one-sided division with his dozen minions who shined the shoes, pressed the dress blues, cleaned the pots and bilges, fried the individual orders of pancakes and eggs for breakfast, and made up the bunks. The lion’s share went to liquidate the pile of chits accumulated since arrival in port in Mama Wong’s, or Cockeye’s, or Slippery Ling’s Bar and Restaurant, or similar places which provided the woodwork into which the river sailor disappeared in those wholly Chinese cities above Hankow. What remained in crumpled paper dimes or unidentifiable provincial silver of small denomination fell into the grimy hands of small beggars on the foreshore, crying, “No papa, no mamma, no chow-chow! Poor little bastard! Please give me ten cents!” Or into the money belts of the ricksha coolies, a cheerful, canny lot of small-bore bandits unique in their position outside the “chit” system.
The first mention of the term, Yangtze Patrol, is believed to be in the Secretary of the Navy’s Annual Report of 1920:
The Yangtze Patrol was reorganized last December, Captain T. A. Kearny being placed in command. The Palos and Monocacy were active last spring in defending vessels from river pirates and lawless elements who were holding up and looting steamers and junks and firing on passing craft.
With the exception of the above two, the Patrol’s ships, already old when captured from the Spanish 25 years before, were in an advanced stage of decrepitude. Six new gunboats were reluctantly authorized in 1924, but funds were not appropriated until 1926, when a peace-minded Congress was at last jolted into belated action by the alarming situation then developing in central China. They thus missed the action now to be described.
The Cantonese—the Irish of China—had begun with fire and sword to carry out the will of Sun Yat-sen, “Father of the Republic.” “We must arouse the people,” wrote Dr. Sun, “fighting side by side with such races of the world as have accorded us equal treatment . . . press the abrogation of unequal treaties!” The Cantonese soon reached the Yangtze, driving all before them. In every port coincident with their arrival came anti- foreign troubles, labor difficulties, and at some points actual anti-foreign outbreaks. Their two Soviet advisers helped plan the operations that in a remarkably short period of time gained their object of creating tremendous obstacles to foreign trade.
The anti-foreign violence blazing on the lower Yangtze infected the upper river as well, although these people were nominally the enemies of the crusading, ever-advancing Cantonese nationalists.
At Wanhsien, in the gorges between Chungking and Ichang, Yang Sen, a Szechuanese warlord, seized two British river steamers and crowded them with hundreds of his troops, holding under threat of instant death the ship’s officers charged with the sinking of a sampan loaded with his ragtag soldiers. One of the bloodiest skirmishes on the upper river resulted when three British gunboats attempted to recapture the merchant steamers, in the face of some 15,000 well-armed troops and a number of field guns. Of the seven British officers in the gunboats, three were killed and two wounded. Of the 103 enlisted men, four were killed and 13 wounded. The wounded were rushed to Hankow by the U. S. destroyer Stewart, which had to use her main battery to blast a way into the city.
“Shell no hit, Chinese die anyway!” excitedly reported a coolie witness to the British Bee-class gunboat’s 6-inch shells shrieking down the middle of Wanhsien’s narrow main street. Ramshackle buildings collapsed in clouds of ancient dust from the concussion of the bucket-sized projectiles.
Operating between Chungking and Ichang through the gorges was a fleet of some 50 merchant steamers, one-fourth of them American. From Ichang to the sea there were many more. Even oceangoing ships drawing 25 feet journeyed the 600 miles upriver to Hankow in seasons of high water.
The very existence of all this shipping on the Yangtze was now threatened by the violent nationalism of the New Order, screaming, through its coolie mobs, “Death to the foreigner!”
Nanking fell to the Cantonese on 23 March 1927, and they at once instituted such a reign of terror that immediate evacuation of all foreigners along the river was commenced. It was the beginning of a series of minor engagements that collectively amounted almost to war. In 37 encounters during 1927-28, no U. S. Navy personnel lost their lives, but dozens were wounded.
The list of ships rushed upriver reads like a small fleet. It was YangPat’s zenith. Her little flotilla consisting of the Pigeon and the Penguin (World War I minesweepers), Elcano, Isabel, Monocacy, and Palos was reinforced by a light cruiser and ten destroyers. Main batteries blasted away and machine guns and rifles chattered and popped. At the beginning, the ships were not fitted with proper means of defense against small arms fire. Sand bags were promptly obtained and odds and ends of boiler plate were set about the bridges and gun mounts. Floor plating was torn up in the enginerooms and went to build bulletproof havens for destroyer men sniping at their opposite numbers a few hundred yards away on the banks.
The Secretary of the Navy said that, “There can be no doubt that the attack at Nanking on foreigners, including Americans, was premeditated, carefully planned, well organised and efficiently executed by organised troops. Nor can there be any doubt that the energetic and prompt action of the naval forces of America and Great Britain in laying down a barrage . . . prevented a wholesale massacre.”
A witness to the scene wrote that, “one has to face a Chinese mob but once to realize its terrible possibilities. Like wolves, the pack closes about the unfortunate foreigner, shouting, screaming, and throwing filth. No man’s life is safe before the insensate rage of these wretched coolies. And always in the background may be seen hovering like a vulture the paid agitator, hired to produce exactly this result. The most dreaded sound in China is the noise of running feet!”
The Cantonese, now calling themselves Nationalists, by 1928 had consolidated their power along the lower and middle Yangtze and were the de facto government of half of China. Clearly becoming more conservative and responsible, they had won a small measure of Western confidence by establishing close rapport with Chinese businessmen in order to procure essential financial support. More to the point, they had turned viciously on their erstwhile Communist partners and had sent their Soviet advisers packing in such haste that the Chinese comrades in their concentration points at Hankow and Shanghai found themselves either hot-footing it for the hills or facing Nationalist firing squads.
Thus it was that by the time of the launching of the first of the six new gunboats, the crisis was close to becoming history.
Constructed at Shanghai, the Guam (later renamed Wake), Tutuila, Panay, Oahu, Luzon, and Mindanao were ideal ships, not only for the rivers of China, but also for her climate. Living spaces were almost all above the main deck. Two triple expansion steam engines of short stroke and high speed drove small propellers in tunnels, providing some protection in the occasional groundings and from big floating logs, which broke clear from timber rafts. Three rudders gave powerful steering control to cope with the swirling waters of the gorges and the capricious movements of Chinese sampans, which attempted to shave pursuing devils off their trails by passing within a hair’s breadth across a gunboat’s bow. High power radio equipment maintained the essential good communications; the gunboats not only protected Americans in China, but were also the eyes and ears of the U. S. embassy and the military over immense stretches of the river that constituted the principal highway and area of concentration of half of China’s more than 400 million people.
By 1929, comparative order prevailed throughout the length of the Yangtze, but militant cockiness and a rash of boycotts and strikes directed toward foreign business accompanied the newly found Chinese strength and unity.
The Japanese, possibly through considerations of “face,” particularly resented this harassment. With no more at stake, actually, than had the United States, and far less than Britain, but with more force conveniently available and no pious sentiments against its use, they made clear to the Nationalists that a modification of attitude would be appreciated. The Japanese argument was backed up by guns, planes, and tens of thousands of excellent troops, a mode of expression to which the Chinese have always been eminently sensitive. An immediate reorientation resulted, it is true, but the Japanese found themselves the object of concentrated Chinese animosity, while the not-so-long-ago equally vilified Americans and Europeans discovered themselves, to their pleased surprise, court favorites.
The hostilities that erupted around Shanghai in 1932 were a bloody prelude to a period of intermittent tension which finally burst into full war in 1937.
The stay of execution for YangPat due to the Japanese issue meanwhile rested its shaky claim to legality on the hoary precepts of the 1858 Sino-British Treaty. Its mission, no less ancient, was at least on paper in the Secretary of the Navy’s 1922 Annual Report, as being, “to protect U. S. interests, lives and property and to maintain and improve friendly relations with the Chinese people.”
As Sino-Japanese hostilities continued to blaze in the Yangtze valley, a restatement of YangPat’s mission along more specific lines was made in 1937. Substantially, the new document crystallized what had been in effect since the first Monocacy had bluffed her uncertain way past the Son of Heaven’s excited mandarins some 70 years earlier. “U. S. armed forces,” wrote the Secretary of State on 10 August, “have no mission of offensive action against the armed forces of any other country, nor is it one of coercion of foreign governments. Their primary function is protecting American nationals; secondarily, American property. They are not expected to hold positions at all hazards, nor against a responsibly directed armed force of any country operating on express higher authority.”
Just four months after the Secretary’s enunciation above, there occurred an incident that was to fill the world’s headlines for weeks, have considerable effect on the rearmament policy of the United States, and speed up the hardening of American public opinion against Japan that was to reach its peak in the holocaust of Pearl Harbor.
This incident was the apparently premeditated attack on the gunboat, USS Panay.
For a period of some days, shells had been plopping with monotonous frequency uncomfortably close to the Panay, sitting at the sorely beset Nationalist capital of Nanking as station ship. The ship was a radio relay to the U. S. Ambassador, then in Hankow some 400 miles upriver, and provided office space for a rearguard embassy contingent.
On 12 December 1937, the fall of Nanking clearly being only a matter of hours away, Lieutenant Commander J. J. Hughes, the commanding officer, got the Panay underway in convoy with three Standard Oil river vessels and headed upriver to less hotly contested territory.
The Panay's normal complement of five officers and 50 men was swollen to about 70 by a mixed bag of embassy personnel, American and foreign civilian refugees, and most fortuitously, a squad of topflight newsreel cameramen and correspondents who had been covering the fighting at Nanking. As if guided by an omniscient fate, they had just completed a short documentary on the Panay, to show the folks back home how life was lived in a U. S. warship in the danger zone. They thus already had in the film cans a perfect prologue to the high drama soon to unfold—not only the slashing attack itself and the actual sinking of the ship, but also the equally stirring three-day struggle of the survivors to bring their dead, wounded, and themselves out of the swamps to friendly hands.
About 20 miles above Nanking, vigorous waving of flags on the bank caused the Panay to lie to while a boatload of armed Japanese soldiers chugged out to the ship. Lieutenant Murakami hauled himself up the short ladder, followed by his sword-bearer and two armed soldiers. Lieutenant Commander Hughes met the lieutenant at the gangway, noted the presence of the armed followers but allowed them to remain on board in view of his instructions from ComYangPat (Rear Admiral William Glassford) to overlook certain departures from accepted form when dealing with the Japanese army because they were unfamiliar with Navy etiquette. Lieutenant Murakami was interested in the movements of the Panay, the character of her convoy, and of the activities of any Chinese troops sighted en route. The former matters were clarified fully; as to the Chinese troops, Lieutenant Commander Hughes explained that the United States was a neutral and thus not at liberty to disclose the military situation of one opponent to the other. Lieutenant Murakami left the ship, inviting Hughes to return the call, which the latter, under the circumstances, politely declined.
Proceeding upriver some five more miles, the Panay and convoy anchored in a wide place in the river, chosen as a spot least likely to become the scene of an artillery duel between combatants or to arouse the suspicions of either side.
The weather was calm and the sky was nearly cloudless.
At 1337, three twin-engined planes were sighted at medium altitude, but no particular attention was paid to them as this was a more or less ordinary occurrence. A few minutes later, with no more warning than the scream of falling bombs, explosions wrecked the Panay's bridge and forward 3-inch guns, breaking Lieutenant Commander Hughes’ hip and punching holes in the ship forward that were the eventual cause of her loss.
For the next 20 minutes, the Panay was bombed by six more single-engined planes, which finally descended almost to masthead level for strafing runs fore and aft where the Panay's machine gun battery could not bear. The Panay's 30-caliber Lewis guns chattered away when a target presented, directed by a chief boatswain’s mate truly stripped for action—the first bombs had brought him charging out of the shower without so much as a towel. The executive officer, Lieutenant A. F. Anders, hit by splinters in the throat and unable to speak, wrote his instructions on the white deckhouse bulkheads in blood from his badly wounded hands. The chief engineer reported to Lieutenant Commander Hughes, propped up in the galley doorway, that the portable pumps had been smashed and the steaming boiler holed; there was no possibility either of pumping the ship out or of beaching her. The newsreel cameramen and correspondents, now thrust personally on an exploding stage they had so far viewed only as spectators, ground away with cameras and recorded notes with the reflex action of the old pro.
At 1554, battered by 20 or 30 near-misses and hits, her flag still flying, huge stars and stripes vividly painted on her topside awnings, the Panay rolled over and sank. In many trips of her two small boats, several times strafed en route, the living and the dead had been taken ashore where the survivors huddled in the high reeds and swamp to avoid searching Japanese planes which continued to buzz the area.1
The planes were easily identified as Japanese naval aircraft. However, the Japanese army, flushed with success at Nanking, was not reluctant to share the spotlight. Colonel Hashimoto, the senior Japanese military commander on this section of the river, told newsmen that his orders were to “shoot anything that moves on the water.” He had recently confirmed these instructions by shelling HMS Ladybird, a small Yangtze gunboat, killing a British rating.
American public opinion since the start of the “China Incident” in 1932 had increasingly supported China in her struggle against the continuing Japanese advance. The Chinese cause had been enhanced by a century of American missionary work in China, well known to every Sunday School child who had contributed pennies to the project. President Roosevelt openly admitted his leaning toward China, to some extent influenced by his family’s earlier commercial connections there. And the Chinese diplomats, clearly the best in the Washington arena, worked their charm, threats, and blandishments on all comers. That the Japanese-American trade outweighed our commerce with China five to one, was mutually complementary, largely non-competitive and that this sound situation was likely to continue, was apparently wholly lost sight of by Americans.
The sinking of Panay thus loudly twanged national heartstrings.
Admiral William D. Leahy, Chief of Naval Operations, on emerging from the White House, said that the situation was, “so tense that only the President and the Secretary of State should discuss it publicly.” Homer Martin, President of the United Auto Workers, an organization which could scarely be accused of fearing Japanese competition, urged a boycott of all Japanese goods. On 14 December, the House of Representatives passed a resolution demanding sanctions against Japan. The British press was filled with suggestions that, “the time has arrived when words are futile; the Far East crisis calls for action,” and on 18 December the headlines stated that the United States might make a naval display in the Panay case and that Britain would send warships. The American public, if one can judge by its expressions of sentiment in letters-to-the-editor columns of that time, did by no stretch of the imagination want war with Japan. But they did strongly desire the imposition of restraints on Japan, the nature of which when actually applied at a later date inevitably led to the very war they were trying so desperately to avoid.
The Panays survivors (three had been killed and 15 wounded) had barely dragged themselves out of the swamps when the most profuse apologies commenced to pour in. Ambassador Saito in Washington told newsmen, “tragic mistake . . . terrible blunder.” The Japanese Foreign Minister called on Ambassador Joseph C. Grew in Tokyo in an unprecedented move to tender apologies and take full responsibility. Ordinary citizens on the streets of Tokyo stopped foreigners with a polite bow, hat in hand, expressing their sincere personal apologies and chagrin. School children brought their little collections of sen to the American Embassy for forwarding to the families of the Panay dead. The chief of Japanese naval aviation in China, a rear admiral, was relieved. The CinC of the the Japanese Imperial China Seas Fleet had requested his own recall. Nobody had gone so far as to commit hara-kiri, but it probably was the biggest fuss kicked up by so small a vessel since Cleopatra’s barge rendezvoused with Marc Antony.
Almost at once, Japan arrogated to herself the “right” to regulate the traffic of foreign gunboats on the Yangtze, claiming military expediency, but more probably manifesting illusions of sovereignty in what Tokyo already was considering a Japanese province. On 21 December 1937, nine days after the Panay sinking, Admiral Harry Yarnell, CinC Asiatic Fleet, received a letter from Vice Admiral Kiosho Hasegawa, CinC Imperial Japanese China Sea Fleet. It covered in detail Japanese views on movement of shipping on the Yangtze, and concluded . . . “in view of the fact that minesweeping operations as well as mopping up of scattered Chinese troops are still going on along the river, it is the desire of the Japanese Navy that foreign vessls including warships will refrain from navigating the Yangtze except when clear understanding is reached with us.” (Emphasis supplied.)
Admiral Yarnell, who in cold anger recently had received this same admiral in the American flagship at Shanghai when the Japanese had come to apologize for Panay, was in no mood to temporize. In part, he replied that, “We cannot. . . accept the restriction suggested (emphasis supplied) by your letter that foreign men of war cannot move freely on the river without prior arrangement with the Japanese and we must reserve the right to move these ships whenever necessary without notification.” The letter was cosigned by the senior officers present of the French, Italian, and British naval forces.
Following this and until Pearl Harbor, our gunboats not only continued to ply the lower and middle river, but also were in large part logistically supported by Japanese aircraft and shipping, the only available means of transporting mail, food, fuel, and personnel.
During 1938, the Japanese amphibious juggernaut continued its ponderous crawl up the Yangtze toward Hankow, the temporary Nationalist capital. In August, the Luzon and the Tutuila, generously ballasted with Japanese beer for the latter’s anticipated prolonged internment upriver, carried the U. S. Ambassador and suite to Chungking, the new provisional capital. The Luzon returned to Hankow (which shortly thereafter fell) and with the Guam, Monocacy, and Oahu continued to defy the Japanese in following the precepts of independent action set forth by Admiral Yarnell. Cut off completely from the outside, the Tutuila was, for better or worse, wholly on her own, serving as communications relay for the American Embassy and such intrepid newshawks as managed to beat their way to, and maintain themselves in, near-medieval Chungking.
The Tutuila's tenuous logistic thread via truck and pack pony to Indochina supplied only the most urgent necessities and spare parts. As in days of old, her five officers and 54 men lived off the land. Her special Disbursing Agent (SDA), a line officer feebly groping his way through the BuSandA Manual, waited with mixed emotions the six months necessary for the return mail to bring fatherly advice from Washington. “Your account is suspended in the item of purchase of three buffalo calves; only sides of beef are allowed in this category. Charges for skinning and butchering are not acceptable. The Tutuila is listed as oil burning; what is the justification for ten tons of coal? The payment to diver for recovery of motor sampan piston which fell overboard is incorrect in that voucher is signed in Chinese. The proposed contract for rapeseed oil is not clear. What is rapeseed oil and for what purpose is such a large quantity intended?” After the above, the suspension of a mere $7,000 or so (crew pay slips for that amount unlocated) was something of an anticlimax.
“Things might be worse,” ruminated the SDA as he sat before the cheery open fire at the club, restoring his sagging spirits with a tall gin locally distilled from Szechuan oranges. The smoke spiralled up from his cigarette, personally rolled from fragments of local black cheroots, the tobacco first soaked in water several days to remove some of the sting, then dried in the sun. The aroma, if one could be sufficiently charitable to so term it, tended to mask the odor drifting over from the nearby graveyard, where thousands of victims of the recent bombing raids had been hastily buried in makeshift coffins.
The club members had been in unusually good form when the SDA had arrived from his afternoon horseback ride. (Everybody was required to exercise an hour a day, conditioning for a possible non-voluntary fast exit on foot to Indochina.) The British military attaché’s glass eye was already in its place of safekeeping for the evening, in a tumbler of water at the end of the bar, a precautionary move which generally never was made until at least several rounds of drinks had been accounted for. The cause for the excitement turned out to be the story concerning one of the British vice consular types, who while running for shelter during the last raid had been knocked flat by a dismembered leg hurtling through the air over the Embassy compound wall. Aside from the indignity of it all, there was the question of what to do with the several hundred Chinese dollars found tucked inside the stocking.
Below the club, on the yellow mirror of the Yangtze, a huge stars and stripes optimistically marked the deckhouse awning of the squat Tutuila as being a forbidden target for Japanese bombers. Alongside the gunboat, a wisp of smoke arose from a small Chinese coal-burning tug supplying steam to the Tutuila's generator and galley bean kettle. There remained in the Tutuila only enough oil to drive her a few hundred miles if further withdrawal upriver became advisable.
“If the rapeseed contract goes through,” said the SDA to his bearded British colleague, the Number One of HMS Gannett, “we can dispense with that dirty little tug for awhile, and I will be spared this damnable business of a daily scouring of the waterfront for a few baskets of decent coal!”
It was a comforting thought to the SDA to recall that he now at least had a system to permit a night’s sleep uninterrupted by the shouts of late-homing Chinese majong addicts, bellowing for a sampan to take them across the river. One simply whanged a pebble from a slingshot into the darkness toward the disturber of the peace, while the deck watch simultaneously fired a blank round in his Springfield. There would be a moment’s silence while the alerted Celestial tied splash and bang together, then a clatter of stones under flying feet as he took his departure up the foreshore at flank speed. The word would soon get around the all-night noodle parlors that the Yankee gunboat was not one to trifle with after dark.
A mile away, across the river from the anchorage, the war-swollen Nationalist capital of Chungking lay in panorama on a vast hillside. The frequent night air raids brought into play the nervously probing fingers of the defenders’ searchlight beams, stitched together by the streams of red tracers exchanged between Japanese bombers and Chinese pursuits. An occasional stricken plane drifted flaming to earth like a slow-motion shooting star. In the still night air, the fascinated spectators on the south bank could hear the shouts and cries of the wounded city welded into one great, distant roar. The whole picture, in full sound and color, was one of fantastic magnificence, tempered only by the thought of the death and destruction below in the violent flashes of the bomb explosions and the mounting red glow of the fires.
The gunboats thus were looking out a window on war, with some attendant danger. The Tutuila had been near-missed once, holing her waterline and smashing the officers’ private motor skimmer. The British gunboat had likewise been so favored. The rescue party from the Tutuila found the skipper dazed but coherent, his cabin door blown off and debris scattered about. “Those bloody bahstards!,” he roared. “They’ve bloody well broken my lahst bottle of decent gin!”
For YangPat, the months preceding the epic voyage of two of its ships from Shanghai to Manila were filled with a foreboding not generally shared by less well informed and less exposed Americans. On 31 October 1941, Rear Admiral William Glassford, Com Yang- Pat, secretly informed his captains: “In case of war our major effort is to preserve our personnel and ships as much as possible for subsequent action ... by retiring to the Philippine Islands . . . secondary, inflict greatest possible damage. If necessary to protect against great odds, use fire for maximum destructive effect.” (A ship-destruction bill had long been one of YangPat’s general drills.)
As the probability of war increased, a further instruction from ComYangPat said, “inflict greatest possible damage on enemy property. Ordinarily you should not be diverted by seeking out an enemy man of war for the sole purpose of engaging in action. You should engage enemy forces of equal or inferior strength which oppose such operations as you may be able to conduct for the destruction of enemy property. You are not expected to engage an enemy of superior strength except that, needless to say, you will defend yourself if so attacked.”
On 8 November, CinCAF radioed ComYangPat that, “President has approved withdrawal from China of all Marines and withdrawal of gunboats after consideration of functions each performs in connection with nearest diplomatic agent.”
On 18 November, CinCAF recommended to OpNav the immediate withdrawal of the gunboats. This was a decision not lightly taken. The ships were without outside keels or gyros, had a freeboard aft and amidships of not much over three feet, with rudders and propellers practically at water’s surface. They had not been in salt water in years; there was no assurance of the tightness of their condensers. Such was the apprehension over their safety that two Bird-class minesweepers were started out from Manila to rendezvous off Formosa and if necessary tow them the rest of the way or take off their crews.
The Wake, the smallest of the three, arrived at Shanghai on 28 November, after a somewhat hairy trip downriver bracketed much of the way between two Japanese gunboats continually exercising at general quarters. She was to be left at Shanghai as communication ship for the Consulate General, manned by some 30 sailors commanded by Lieutenant Commander Columbus D. Smith, a reserve officer called in from piloting merchant ships on the Huangpoo River at Shanghai.
Recognizing that full resistance against attack could not be expected from the Wake's skeleton crew, all ammunition was removed except that for the machine guns. Her only defense in case of serious attack was to blow herself up. (The suddenness of this attack, when it came, precluded the carrying out of the plan, and the Wake became the only ship to fall intact into enemy hands in World War II.)
At 0200 that night, 29 November, after a day of frantic preparations, the two gunboats, Luzon and Oahu, with crews in a state of near exhaustion before the voyage had even commenced, slipped quietly down the Huangpoo and into the Yangtze for the open sea.
Admiral Glassford indicated his skepticism in an, “if, as, and when” message to CinCAF. “Shall make effort to run straight Manila inside Pescadores arriving if all goes well about 4 or 5 December. Should war conditions render necessary shall follow coast await opportunity final leg Manila ward. If unable make Manila propose make for Hongkong in hostile emergency.”
CinCAF’s concern was soon justified. The typhoon making up through the Formosa Straits had already reached the two minesweepers en route the rescue and they were in deep trouble. Breaking radio silence, the Pigeon informed her intended ward that, “have suffered rudder casualty and lost one anchor. Finch lost two anchors. Necessary proceed lee of Formosa to make repairs.” The Finch, unable to anchor, towing the Pigeon, unable to steer, was staggering to the rescue!
Without keels, the Luzon and the Oahu skidded to leeward as mounting seas and winds pounded them unmercifully. Their story is best told in Admiral Glassford’s own words:
The 2nd and 3rd of December will never be forgotten in all their grim details. Not only were we constantly harassed by sweeps of Japanese aircraft overhead and by insolent men of war ordering us to do all manner of things that we could and would not do, but as we approached the Straits of Formosa and later got well into it, we experienced a heavy, choppy sea which was almost the undoing of the personnel if not the little craft themselves. We were tossed about as by a juggler, now up like a shot to a crest from which we would fall like a stone. The ships were rolling 28 to 30 degrees on a side, with a three-second period. They were taking green seas over the forecastle and even more dangerous, surging seas over the stern.
Speed had been reduced to little more than steerage way, but even so the engines raced violently, the ships shaking and trembling.
What disturbed us most was whether or not the human beings on board would be worthy of these incredibly stout little ships. For nearly 48 hours there was experienced the hardest beating of our lives at sea. There was no sleep, no hot food; one could scarcely even sit down without being tossed about by the relentless rapidity of the lunging jerks.
The very worst of all the trip was after clearing Formosa, with a quartering sea. I recall just before dawn of the 4th of December, while clinging to the weather rail of the bridge deck, that our situation could not possibly be worse and wondering just how much longer we could stand it. Not the ships, which had proved their worth, but ourselves.
War struck three days after the gunboats’ arrival at Manila. Admiral Glassford was reassigned and the unit designation disappeared. Although the Tutuila remained under our flag until January 1942, when she was turned over to the Chinese at Chungking, the end of a 75-year chapter had already been reached when the Wake was captured at Shanghai on 8 December. YangPat was dead.
There remains but a short epilogue. The little craft had proved themselves at sea; they were soon to do likewise in battle. Attached to the Inshore Patrol in Manila Bay, the Luzon and the Oahu, plus the Mindanao from south China, blazed away with machine guns and 3-inch guns at the Japanese flanks on Bataan and at the Japanese planes which ruled the local sky.
It was suggested to General Douglas Mac- Arthur that the gunboats might be allowed to make a run for it to the south with volunteer crews. The staff prepared a reply that, “these vessels are performing essential duties covering entrances to minefields, on patrols toward Manila and off the coasts of Bataan, the vital north channel and the waters adjacent to Corregidor . . . but that if opportunity arises and their essential usefulness ceases, endeavor would be made to permit these naval units to seek safety to south.”
The opportunity never arose. Fighting to the very last, their death sentence was fully understood in the dramatic words of their commander: “I intend to fight this army to destruction!” said MacArthur. “The gunboats are necessary in the defense!”2
1. See also M. Okumiya and R. Pineau, “How the Paney Was Sunk,” U.S. Naval Institute Proceedings, June 1953, p. 587.
2. For further reading, see the following U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings:
R. C. Sutliff, “Duty in a Yangtze Gunboat,” July 1935, p. 981.
Cameron M. Winslow, Jr., “Action on the Yangtze,” April 1937, p. 491.
Esson M. Gale, “The Yangtze Patrol,” March 1955, p. 307.