[QUOTE=NavyDiver;3193792]A little bit of unknown history :
It’s a day seared into America’s collective memory: December 7, 1941.
The day Imperial Japanese warplanes launched a devastating surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, sinking or damaging 19 US Navy ships, destroying 180 US aircraft and killing more than 2,400 Americans, servicemen and civilians.
“A day that will live in infamy,” in the words of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt. And as the history books have it, the day that dragged the United States into World War II.
But the first Japanese sinking of an American warship was not on that day, or even that year – and it was nowhere near Pearl Harbor, or even US soil. It was four years earlier, on a much less remembered date, thousands of miles from Hawaii.
On December 12, 1937, the US Navy river gunboat USS Panay and three Standard Oil Company tankers were evacuating American citizens trapped by Japan’s invasion of Nanjing when they were targeted from above in an attack that, like Pearl Harbor, stood out both for its mercilessness and the fact that the US and Japan were not at that time at war.
Nine Nakajima fighters strafed the convoy with machine gun fire, shooting even on its lifeboats, while three Japanese Yokosuka rained down at least 20 132-pound bombs. Four people died – two US sailors, an oil tank captain, and an Italian journalist. More than 40 servicemen and civilians were injured.
So shocking was the unprovoked attack that many expected Washington to declare war then and there. Had it done so the Panay’s place in history might not have been eclipsed by the events of four years later.
But historians say the sinking of the Panay was a seminal event nonetheless, one that helped turn the tide of American opinion in a conflict seen by some academics as the beginning of World War II in Asia
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The Japanese claimed that they did not see the U.S. flags painted on the deck of the gunboat. Tokyo officially apologized, and paid a cash indemnity. The settlement mollified some of the U.S. anger, and newspapers called the matter closed.
Imagine that if it happened the other way round......................................?
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