December 12, 1937, a Date that will live in Infamy?!?!

  • Liaison TripleA '11 '10

    On December 12, 1937, Japanese planes bombed the U.S. gunboat Panay, cruising China’s Yangtse River. Three Americans were killed, and 43 were injured.

    W H A T ? ! ? ! ? !

    Comments please…


  • The “Battle of China” film in Frank Capra’s “Why We Fight” series (which argues that World War II started in 1931, with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria) mentions the Panay Incident.  As I recall, it describes it as an attack by “the blood-crazed Japanese” and implies that it was deliberate while being officially described as “a mistake.”

  • Liaison TripleA '11 '10

    Wow, Blood Crazed?

    That’s an objective point of view if I’ve ever heard one. :P


  • @Gargantua:

    Wow, Blood Crazed? That’s an objective point of view if I’ve ever heard one.

    The narration in “The Battle of China” is quite harsh towards Japan, but it sounds almost restrained compared to the narration in Capra’s film “Know Your Enemy: Japan” (which wasn’t part of the “Why We Fight” series).  In the words of historian John W. Dower, who wrote “War without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War”, Know Your Enemy: Japan is “a potpourri of most of the English speaking world’s dominant clichés about the Japanese enemy, excluding the crudest, most vulgar, and most blatantly racist.”  I have a copy of it on DVD, and I think that the above quote from Wikipedia should actually say INCLUDING rather than “excluding” because it’s certainly one of the crudest, most vulgar, and most blatantly racist films I’ve ever seen.


  • @Gargantua:

    On December 12, 1937, Japanese planes bombed the U.S. gunboat Panay, cruising China’s Yangtse River. Three Americans were killed, and 43 were injured.

    W H A T ? ! ? ! ? !

    Comments please…

    This gets its own thread, really? I bet if we started a thread about what began on the day after the Panay was bombed, Dec. 13 1937, the thread would get closed down.

    This was all the pre-text America needed to start taking economic action against Japan, and if this didn’t what took place the following six weeks after sure as hell did. Alas it was not to be about would take America another 4 years to pull its head out of the sand and do the right thing……

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