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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