    30

    their

    take the country by force.

    America was determined to avoid a fight.  We were suffering from a

    devastating economic depression.  What's worse, Japan was allied with

    Hitler's Germany.  The Germans and Japanese had been building advanced

    planes, tanks and warships for years.  They had drafted young men in huge

    numbers and prepared them for battle.  We Americans loved to tell each

    other tales of how we had won the First World War.  But we hoped never to

    be embroiled in a massive conflict again.  Our army had been pared down to

    a force smaller than that of Czechoslovakia,67 and our military equipment

    was obsolete.  Our men could scarcely have withstood an assault by a

    determined group of Boy Scouts.

    At the end of 1937, the Japanese invaders arrived on the outskirts of the

    Chinese city of Nanking.  Nanking had a small contingent of American

    citizens.  Moving up and down the nearby international waterway of the

    Yangtze river were American commercial ships.  To protect both from the

    guerilla bands who roamed the Chinese countryside, the Americans had

    stationed a small gunboat--the Panay--in the Yangtze's waters.

    Our government wanted to avoid damage to the gunboat in the brutal

    fighting between the Chinese and the Japanese.  On December 1, 1937, the

    American ambassador in Tokyo told Japanese officials the gunboat's exact

    location, explained that it would abide by the terms of American neutrality,

    and informed the Japanese that the gunboat would be used to evacuate

    American citizens peacefully if that became necessary.  On December 10,

    evacuation became very necessary indeed.  The fighting around Nanking

    had turned deadly.

    The crew of the Panay worked for two days and nights loading on

    American journalists, photographers, businessmen and embassy personnel.

    Then the ship steamed upriver to find a safe haven.  The anchorage it chose

    was not safe enough.  At 1:30 in the afternoon, Japanese warplanes came

    over the horizon and attacked, sinking the neutral U.S.S. Panay.  When the

    Panay's passengers piled into lifeboats and headed for shore, Japanese planes

      soldiers in the most populous empire on earth--China.  Their goal: to

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