America and Nanking: The Panay, Magee’s Film and the Road to Pearl Harbor

The river gunboat USS Panay settles in the Yangtze River after attack by Japanese naval aircraft, 12 December 1937, the day before Nanjing fell. Photo: US Navy (photo by a survivor), Naval History and Heritage Command NH 50802, PD US Navy via Wikimedia Commons.

The Rape of Nanking · Chapter 7 of 10

America and Nanking

The Panay, Magee’s film and the road to Pearl Harbor: what Americans did, saw, sold and refused to do, before, during and after the massacre.

1910–1948Nanjing · the Yangtze · Washington · Tokyo~30 min read

When the Japanese army entered Nanjing on 13 December 1937, the largest group of Westerners left in the city was American. Fourteen of the twenty-two foreign residents who stayed to run the Nanking Safety Zone were citizens of the United States: university teachers, missionaries, a surgeon, nurses and a YMCA secretary, most of them attached to institutions that American churches had built over the previous three decades. Their letters, diaries, protest notes and one amateur film are the core of the contemporary Western record of the massacre. Twenty-eight miles upriver, on the afternoon of 12 December, Japanese naval aircraft had sunk the US gunboat Panay, which had just evacuated the American embassy staff. The two events, one a matter of international law between governments and the other the fate of a Chinese city, reached American newspapers within days of each other.

The American response to both was cautious. Washington demanded and received an apology and an indemnity for the Panay. It made no comparable demand about Nanjing, and for almost three more years American companies went on selling Japan most of the oil, scrap iron and steel its armies used in China. Only in 1940 and 1941, as Japan joined the Axis and moved into Indochina, did the United States cut off scrap and then oil, and the embargo of July–August 1941 set the timetable that ended at Pearl Harbor. After the war Americans prosecuted the Tokyo trial, and the Nanjing missionaries returned as witnesses.

This chapter follows that thread before, during and after the massacre. It draws mainly on contemporary American records (the Navy’s and State Department’s papers, the missionaries’ letters held at the Yale Divinity Library, the Magee film, newspaper and magazine reports), on the transcript of the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (IMTFE), and on trade statistics compiled by economic historians. Where sources disagree on dates or numbers, the text says so. The military story of the river war is in Chapter 2; the Safety Zone itself in Chapter 5; and the German side of the same story in Chapter 6.

Before 1937: Universities, Missions and Gunboats

American involvement in Nanjing was older and deeper than any other Western presence in the city. The University of Nanking was formed in 1910 from colleges run by Methodist, Disciples of Christ and Presbyterian missions; its campus on the hill north of the Drum Tower is now the Gulou campus of Nanjing University. Beside it stood the University Hospital, known locally as the Drum Tower Hospital. Ginling College, a women’s college founded by a consortium of American mission boards in the 1910s, moved in 1923 to a new campus of Chinese-style buildings designed by the American architect Henry Murphy, west of the university; Minnie Vautrin had taught there since 1916, and from 1928 its president was Wu Yi-fang, one of the first Chinese women to head a college. The Nanking Theological Seminary, the YMCA (whose secretary from September 1936 was George Ashmore Fitch), the Episcopal American Church Mission of John Magee and Ernest Forster, and the Presbyterian mission of W. Plumer Mills completed a network of institutions, homes and compounds concentrated in the northwest of the walled city.

That geography mattered. When the International Committee drew the boundaries of the Safety Zone in November 1937, it enclosed the university, Ginling, the hospital and the mission compounds, and many of the twenty-five or so refugee camps were set up in their buildings (Chapter 5). The Americans who stayed did so in large part because the institutions were theirs, and because the Chinese staff and students they had worked with for years were staying too. Several of them, including Vautrin, Smythe, Bates and McCallum, had been sent by the Disciples’ United Christian Missionary Society; Bates and Smythe were University of Nanking faculty, Wilson a surgeon at its hospital, Riggs its agricultural engineer.

The second American presence was naval. Under treaty rights dating from the nineteenth century, the US Asiatic Fleet kept a Yangtze Patrol of shallow-draft gunboats on the river to protect American citizens and commerce, much as Britain, France, Italy and Japan kept their own. The Panay (PR-5), built in Shanghai and commissioned in 1928, was one of the newer boats. The patrol had been used in anger in Nanjing before: during the “Nanking Incident” of 24 March 1927, when Nationalist troops attacked foreign consulates and residences, American and British warships shelled the area around Socony Hill to cover the evacuation of foreigners. Ten years later the gunboats were still there, and the State Department still relied on them to carry its diplomats out of danger.

Autumn 1937: The Quarantine Speech and American Opinion

The war that began at the Marco Polo Bridge on 7 July 1937 (see the Marco Polo Bridge collection) reached American households mainly through the Battle of Shanghai. The photograph of an injured infant in the bombed South Station on 28 August, taken by H. S. “Newsreel” Wong and seen by millions of readers of Life that autumn, became the best-known image of the war. Japanese naval aircraft bombed Nanjing itself from mid-August, with heavy raids in late September that drew formal protests from the American, British and French governments.

On 5 October 1937, in Chicago, President Franklin D. Roosevelt gave the speech that came to be named after its central image. He compared the spread of international lawlessness to an epidemic and suggested that peace-loving nations might “quarantine” aggressors, without naming Japan or proposing any measure. The reaction was mixed and largely hostile in the isolationist press, and Roosevelt did not follow it with policy. The Neutrality Acts of 1935–37 still governed American conduct, although Roosevelt avoided invoking them in China by declining to recognize a state of war, which would have cut off arms sales to China as well as to Japan. The Brussels Conference of the Nine-Power Treaty signatories, convened in November with American participation, adjourned without action while the Japanese armies advanced on Nanjing.

The Panay Leaves Nanjing, 11–12 December 1937

The American embassy had moved most of its staff upriver to Hankou (Hankow) with the Chinese government in late November. A small group under the second secretary, George Atcheson Jr., stayed in Nanjing and kept in contact with Washington through the Panay’s radio. As the Japanese closed on the city, Atcheson and his colleagues boarded the gunboat, together with a handful of American and European civilians and several journalists. On 11 December, under Japanese shelling near the city, the Panay moved upriver, escorting three tankers of the Standard Oil Company (Socony-Vacuum), the Meiping, Meian and Meihsia, which carried company employees and their families. The State Department had informed the Japanese government of the ships’ intended position.

According to the National Archives’ account, the gunboat carried 73 people: 5 officers, 54 enlisted men, 4 embassy staff and 10 civilians. Among the civilians were the newsreel cameramen Norman Alley of Universal and Eric Mayell of Fox Movietone, the Italian journalists Sandro Sandri of La Stampa and Luigi Barzini Jr. of Corriere della Sera, Colin MacDonald of The Times, Jim Marshall of Collier’s and Norman Soong of the New York Times. On the morning of 12 December the convoy anchored at a point the Navy recorded as mileage 221 above Woosung, about 28 miles above Nanjing near Hanshan island, off what is now Ma’anshan in Anhui. The ship flew large American flags, and flags were painted on her awnings.

The Attack: Bombs, Strafing and the Sinking

Shortly after 13:30 on 12 December, Japanese naval aircraft attacked. Three bombers came first, followed within minutes by a second wave of single-engine dive bombers and fighters; in all about twenty bombs were dropped, and the ship and the tankers were strafed. The Naval History and Heritage Command (NHHC) records that Japanese pilots had been told that Chinese forces were fleeing upriver in merchant vessels and that they were to attack “any and all ships” in the Yangtze above Nanjing. Among the Japanese naval aviators were Lieutenants Okumiya Masatake and Murata Shigeharu; four years later Murata led the torpedo bombers of the carrier Akagi against the battleships at Pearl Harbor.

One of the first bombs hit the forward part of the ship, wrecked the pilot house and the forward gun, and wounded the commanding officer, Lieutenant Commander James J. Hughes. Gunners fired back with the ship’s .30-caliber machine guns. With the Panay taking water, the executive officer ordered the ship abandoned; the crew and passengers went ashore in the ship’s two sampans, which were themselves fired upon. The gunboat sank at 15:54. The three tankers were also bombed and set on fire. Survivors hid in the reeds along the bank, carried the wounded inland and, helped by Chinese villagers and officials, reached Hohsien (He County), from where they were taken off by gunboats on 15 December.

The same day, upriver at Wuhu, Japanese army artillery under Colonel Hashimoto Kingoro fired on British gunboats and merchant vessels, hitting HMS Ladybird. Hashimoto, a founder of the ultranationalist Sakurakai, was later tried at Tokyo, but for his part in planning aggression rather than for the river attacks (see Chapter 8).

The Dead, the Wounded and Norman Alley’s Newsreel

Four men died. Storekeeper First Class Charles L. Ensminger was killed aboard the Panay. Coxswain Edgar C. Hulsebus was mortally wounded and died later (accounts differ on whether he died the same night or on 19 December). Captain Carl H. Carlson, master of one of the Standard Oil tankers, was killed, and the Italian journalist Sandro Sandri died of his wounds. The official American count therefore spoke of three Americans dead. The NHHC gives 43 sailors and 5 civilians wounded. How many Chinese crewmen of the tankers died is not known.

The attack was filmed. Norman Alley of Universal Newsreel and Eric Mayell of Fox Movietone kept their cameras running through the bombing and the abandonment of the ship, and their footage, flown out by way of Shanghai, reached American theaters at the end of December and in early January. The pictures of low-flying aircraft over a ship flying the American flag were difficult to reconcile with Tokyo’s explanation that the pilots had not seen the flags. On 31 December Alley briefed the Assistant Secretary of the Navy in Washington.

Apology, Indemnity and the Ludlow Vote

Japan moved quickly to contain the damage. On 13 December the Japanese ambassador, Saitō Hiroshi, called at the State Department to express regret, and the Japanese government accepted responsibility while insisting the attack had been a mistake. Roosevelt asked that his displeasure be conveyed directly to the Emperor and demanded a full apology, compensation and guarantees. On 20 December Japan admitted that army launches had machine-gunned the ship and the survivors after the bombing, and the formal Japanese apology reached Washington on Christmas Eve. The Navy ministry assigned an admiral to apologize, the commander of the naval air group was relieved, and Japanese citizens sent letters, cards and money to the American embassy in Tokyo. Ambassador Joseph Grew wrote that “never before has the fact that there are ‘two Japans’ been more clearly emphasized” (quoted in Plante, Prologue, 2001). On 22 April 1938 the Japanese Foreign Office handed the United States a check for $2,214,007.36 for property losses, deaths and injuries, and the incident was declared closed.

The domestic reaction showed how little appetite there was for confrontation. On 13 December, the day after the sinking, North Carolina’s junior senator, Robert Rice Reynolds of Asheville, a Democrat and outspoken isolationist, called for the withdrawal of American gunboats and citizens from Chinese waters rather than any retaliation. Many newspapers and members of Congress agreed. In the House, the long-stalled Ludlow Amendment, a proposed constitutional amendment requiring a national referendum before Congress could declare war except in case of invasion, had been brought to the floor by a discharge petition. On 10 January 1938 the House voted 209 to 188 to return it to committee, after heavy pressure from the administration. Gallup polling in January 1938 found about two-thirds of respondents in favor of the referendum idea. The vote was the closest the amendment ever came to passage.

The settlement of the Panay case was a diplomatic success on its own terms. It also defined the limits of American action. The United States had asserted its rights as a neutral and its claim to compensation for American property and lives; it had not claimed any standing to speak for the people of Nanjing, and in the weeks that followed it did not.

Diplomats Return to a Ruined City

No American official was in Nanjing during the worst weeks of the massacre. The State Department ordered the third secretary John M. Allison to reopen the embassy on 28 December, and Allison and the vice-consul James Espy reached the city with a small staff on 6 January 1938, after Japanese authorities had delayed their return. What they found went into dispatches to Washington. Espy’s report of January 1938, drawing on what the missionaries told him and on what he saw, described mass executions, rape and looting on a scale no outsider had yet confirmed officially. These embassy reports are contemporary evidence: they were written within weeks, by officials, for their government, and they were later available to the prosecutors at Tokyo.

The embassy also became a channel for the Safety Zone’s complaints and for property claims. American flags and proclamations were posted on American-owned buildings; Japanese soldiers repeatedly tore them down and entered the compounds. On 26 January 1938, while Allison was investigating a report that a Chinese woman had been abducted from an American property and raped, a Japanese soldier slapped him in the face; Charles Riggs of the University of Nanking, who was with him, was also struck. The State Department published an account of the incident on 28 January in which Allison said that “there could be no excuse for the slapping.” A Japanese officer apologized on 27 January, and Tokyo offered a formal apology. The “Allison incident” received more coverage in American newspapers than many reports of Chinese deaths, a disproportion that the missionaries in Nanjing noticed.

John Magee’s Camera

Content note. This section describes and shows a frame from film of wounded survivors of the massacre. The photograph is blurred; click or tap to reveal it.

John Gillespie Magee (1884–1953) was born in Pittsburgh, graduated from Yale in 1906, was ordained in the Episcopal Church and went to China in 1912. In December 1937 he was chairman of the International Red Cross Committee of Nanking and a member of the Safety Zone committee, and he set up a refugee hospital for wounded soldiers and civilians. He also owned a 16 mm movie camera. Between December 1937 and early 1938 he filmed what he could: mostly patients in the University Hospital, the wounded and the dead brought in from the city, some street scenes shot through windows or from a distance, and the sites where families had been killed. He interviewed survivors and wrote explanatory captions for each scene, a narrative that gives the film its value as evidence. The Yale Divinity Library describes the result as the “first available visual documentation of the Nanking Massacre.”

Magee’s footage has a particular evidentiary weight. It was made at the time, by a named person with no reason to invent, with captions recording names, ages, dates and places, and some of the people he filmed survived to be interviewed decades later. One of them was Li Xiuying, a pregnant 19-year-old who was stabbed many times while resisting soldiers and was treated by Dr. Robert Wilson; another was the family of Xia Shuqin, then eight years old, at No. 5 Xinlukou, where Magee filmed the scene after seven of the nine members of her household had been killed (see Chapter 4). When, in the 2000s, Japanese writers suggested that Xia was not the girl in Magee’s film, Japanese courts found they could not prove it (Chapter 9).

Fitch Carries the Film to Shanghai

The film could not be developed or shown in occupied Nanjing. In January 1938 Fitch arranged to be summoned to Shanghai on business and obtained permission to travel on a Japanese military train. In his diary he recorded that he carried eight reels of 16 mm negative sewn into the lining of his coat (quoted below). Sources differ on the day: dates of 19, 20 and 23 January appear in the literature. In Shanghai the negatives were developed and copies were made. One set went to Germany, where the diplomat Georg Rosen urged his Foreign Ministry to acquire a copy and John Rabe showed it at his lectures in Berlin (Chapter 6); prints were also shown in Shanghai and, privately, in Tokyo.

Fitch took a copy to the United States in the spring of 1938. He showed it to church groups, civic clubs, journalists and officials, and, by later accounts, to officials in Washington, on a speaking tour that took him across the country. The reception disappointed him. Audiences were moved, but the debate in the United States was about staying out of war, and Nanjing appeared to many observers as one more city lost in a distant conflict. The historian Joseph Ho, as quoted by The China Project, places Fitch’s frustration in that context: after more than a year of screenings, he had seen little change in opinion or policy.

Sewed into the lining of my camel’s-hair great coat were eight reels of 16mm negative movie film of atrocity cases.

— George A. Fitch, diary, January 1938, as quoted in The China Project (17 May 2023)

Life Magazine and What Americans Knew

The American public was not ignorant of what had happened. The first reports came from the five foreign journalists who stayed through the fall and left on 15 and 16 December: Tillman Durdin of the New York Times, Archibald Steele of the Chicago Daily News, Charles Yates McDaniel of the Associated Press, Leslie C. Smith of Reuters and the Paramount newsreel cameraman Arthur Menken. Steele’s dispatch, filed from the USS Oahu, and Durdin’s long report in the New York Times of 18 December described mass executions of prisoners and civilians on the Yangtze waterfront. Missionary letters, circulated privately and then printed, followed. In the spring of 1938 the Manchester Guardian correspondent Harold Timperley compiled the Safety Zone documents and missionaries’ accounts into What War Means: Japanese Terror in China, published in London and New York; Hsü Shuhsi’s Documents of the Nanking Safety Zone appeared in Shanghai in 1939. Reader’s Digest carried accounts in July 1938.

American intelligence knew more. In January 1938 a Japanese Foreign Ministry telegram to the embassy in Washington, intercepted and decoded by the US Army’s code breakers, quoted Timperley’s suppressed dispatch about atrocities in the lower Yangtze; Timperley’s figure of 300,000 dead referred to civilians killed across the whole Shanghai–Nanjing campaign, not to Nanjing alone, a distinction that has often been lost since (see Chapter 9).

On 16 May 1938 Life, then the most widely read magazine in the United States, published ten small frames from Magee’s film, credited anonymously, under a cover showing a Chinese soldier titled “A Defender of China.” They were the first moving-picture evidence of the massacre that most Americans could have seen. The pictures were grainy, the text short, and the coverage did not become a campaign. What Americans knew in 1938 was enough to establish that a massacre had happened. It was not enough, against the weight of isolationist feeling and the Depression, to change what the United States sold to Japan.

Scrap Iron and Oil: American Trade with Japan, 1936–1941

Japan fought its war in China largely on imported materials, and the largest supplier was the United States. Japan had almost no domestic oil, limited iron ore, and a steel industry that depended on scrap. The economic historian Ryohei Nakagawa’s compilation of American export statistics shows the pattern. American exports of crude oil to Japan rose from about $14.2 million in 1936 to $29.9 million in 1938, and exports of refined products from $14.2 million to a peak of $35.3 million in 1940. Combined exports of scrap iron and copper jumped from $11.9 million in 1936 to $37.4 million in 1937, the first year of the war. Raw cotton, the largest item before the war, declined.

In tonnage the scrap figures are starker. Nakagawa gives American scrap shipments to Japan of 942,100 metric tons a year on average in 1933–36, two-thirds of all Japan’s scrap imports; 1,777,000 tons in 1937, or 73.4 per cent; and 1,006,700 tons in 1938, 74.1 per cent. Time reported in October 1940 that American shipments had been about two million tons in both 1937 and 1939. In oil, a 1940 study by Richard Newcomb quoted by Nakagawa found that the United States supplied roughly two-thirds of Japan’s total petroleum imports in 1939. (Popular statements that the United States supplied “80 per cent” of Japan’s oil appear widely but rest on varying definitions; this chapter uses the documented figure.)

Contemporaries saw the connection. Church groups, the American Committee for Non-Participation in Japanese Aggression (founded in 1938) and some newspapers argued that Americans were, in effect, supplying the bombs that fell on Chinese cities; dockworkers on the West Coast staged protests against scrap shipments. Against them stood the law of neutrality as then understood, the Depression-era value of the trade, and a strategic argument inside the administration that an embargo might push Japan to seize the oil of the Dutch East Indies. That argument proved correct in 1941.

From Moral Embargo to Oil Embargo, 1938–1941

American economic pressure came slowly and in steps, each justified on narrow grounds. The State Department’s own wartime account, Peace and War (1943), and the Office of the Historian set out the sequence. None of the measures before mid-1941 was presented as a response to Nanjing.

1. 1 July 1938The State Department asks manufacturers not to sell aircraft and aircraft parts to countries bombing civilian populations, the “moral embargo.” It has no legal force but is widely observed.
2. 1939The moral embargo is extended to aircraft materials and to technical information for making aviation gasoline.
3. 26 July 1939The United States gives six months’ notice to end the 1911 Treaty of Commerce and Navigation with Japan, effective January 1940, freeing it to restrict trade.
4. 2 July 1940The Export Control Act gives the President power to prohibit or curtail the export of basic war materials. Aviation gasoline and machine tools come under licence; licences for Japan are refused from August.
5. 26 September 1940An embargo on iron and steel scrap to all destinations outside the Western Hemisphere and Britain is announced, effective 16 October 1940. The next day Japan signs the Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy.
6. 26 July 1941After Japanese troops occupy southern French Indochina, Roosevelt freezes Japanese assets in the United States. From 1 August no export licences for oil are granted, a de facto total oil embargo, matched by Britain and the Netherlands.
7. 7 December 1941Japan attacks Pearl Harbor, the Philippines, Malaya and Hong Kong.

Alongside the restrictions, Washington began to help China. The Export-Import Bank extended the first American credits to China in December 1938, repaid in tung oil, and further loans against tin and tungsten followed in 1940; China became eligible for Lend-Lease in May 1941. By then the asset freeze had left Japan with a stock of oil its navy calculated in months. The Japanese government chose to seize the resources of Southeast Asia rather than accept American terms, which included withdrawal from China. The negotiations of autumn 1941 between Hull and Ambassador Nomura foundered on that point above all. In that sense the war that had produced the massacre at Nanjing was the issue on which the Pacific War began.

The Flying Tigers and Pearl Harbor

American volunteers had reached China before the United States went to war. Claire L. Chennault, a retired Army Air Corps captain, had advised the Chinese air force since 1937. In 1941, with the approval of the Roosevelt administration, he recruited about a hundred pilots and some two hundred ground crew from the American services for the American Volunteer Group (AVG), equipped with Curtiss P-40 fighters bought on Chinese credit. Trained in Burma, the group first went into combat on 20 December 1941, over Kunming, two weeks after Pearl Harbor, and it was absorbed into the US Army Air Forces on 4 July 1942. Its shark-mouthed fighters, and its nickname, the Flying Tigers, became symbols of an American commitment to China that had been almost entirely rhetorical in 1937.

On 7 December 1941 Japanese carrier aircraft attacked the Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor (see the Pearl Harbor collection). The torpedo squadrons were led by Murata Shigeharu, who had flown against the Panay four years earlier. Roosevelt signed the declaration of war against Japan on 8 December; the Nationalist government in Chongqing, which had fought Japan without a declaration since 1937, formally declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy on 9 December. Within months the American garrisons at Wake Island and in the Philippines (Bataan and Corregidor) would experience the same army’s treatment of prisoners that Nanjing had seen.

After the War: Americans at the Tokyo Tribunal

The International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which opened in Tokyo on 3 May 1946, was an Allied court, but its prosecution was American-led. The chief prosecutor was Joseph B. Keenan, a former assistant attorney general. The Nanjing case was assembled by Assistant Prosecutor David Nelson Sutton, a Virginia trial lawyer, working with the Chinese associate prosecutor Hsiang Che-chun (Xiang Zhejun). Sutton went to Nanjing in the spring of 1946 to interview witnesses and collect records, among them the Safety Zone documents, burial-society records and the American embassy’s files. His papers, now digitized by the University of Virginia School of Law, show how much of the case rested on the work of the Americans who had stayed in 1937.

Three of them testified in person. Dr. Robert O. Wilson, the surgeon who had operated almost alone at the University Hospital, took the stand on 25 and 26 July 1946. Miner Searle Bates, the University of Nanking historian, testified on 29 July 1946, and John Magee on 15 August 1946. Lewis Smythe gave an affidavit on the Safety Zone committee’s protests to the Japanese embassy, and James McCallum’s diary was entered as evidence. Chinese witnesses, including Xu Chuanyin of the Red Swastika Society, Shang Deyi and Wu Changde, survivors of mass shootings, testified in the same weeks. (Whether George Fitch gave evidence in person has not been confirmed for this chapter.) The tribunal’s judgment, read in November 1948, relied on this evidence for its findings that more than 200,000 civilians and prisoners were killed and about 20,000 women raped; how it did so is the subject of Chapter 8.

The Witnesses Afterward

The Americans of the Safety Zone paid for what they had seen. Minnie Vautrin stayed at Ginling through 1938 and 1939, running classes and relief work, and was awarded the Chinese government’s Order of the Brilliant Jade in July 1938. Exhausted and depressed, she broke down in the spring of 1940, left Nanjing in May, and took her own life in Indianapolis on 14 May 1941, aged 54. She is buried in Shepherd, Michigan. John Magee returned to the United States in the summer of 1938, spoke widely about Nanjing, served as Episcopal chaplain at Yale from 1946 and died in 1953; his son John Gillespie Magee Jr., author of the poem “High Flight,” had been killed in 1941 while flying with the Royal Canadian Air Force. Robert Wilson later practiced medicine in California, where he died in 1967. Several others, including W. Plumer Mills, were interned by the Japanese after Pearl Harbor and repatriated in 1943.

Their records outlived them. The missionaries’ papers went to the Yale Divinity Library, which began its Nanking Massacre Project in the 1990s and published Martha Lund Smalley’s collection of eyewitness letters in 1997. In 2001 Magee’s son David gave his father’s camera and some 105 minutes of original film to the Memorial Hall in Nanjing; in 2016 the Magee family gave the Yale Divinity Library thirteen reels of his films, two of them from Nanjing, which were digitized with the USC Shoah Foundation. In Congress, House Concurrent Resolution 357 of the 106th Congress, introduced by Representative Lane Evans in June 2000, cited the “Rape of Nanjing” and called on Japan to apologize and pay reparations to victims of its wartime crimes. It was not adopted, but it marked how far the subject had moved, through Iris Chang’s book of 1997, from the margins of American memory (Chapter 9).

Why the American Thread Matters

For American readers the story of Nanjing is usually told through its rescuers, and rightly: the work of Vautrin, Wilson, Bates, Smythe, Magee, Fitch, Mills, Riggs, McCallum and their colleagues saved lives and created a record that has never been successfully discredited. But the American thread also includes the government that settled the Panay for two million dollars and said nothing about the city, the Congress that nearly required a referendum before any declaration of war, and the exporters who sold Japan most of its scrap iron and oil for four years after Nanjing. All of these were rational positions in 1937 and 1938. Together they show that information was not the problem. Americans knew, from their own citizens, very early, what had happened in Nanjing. What they did with that knowledge came slowly, for reasons of their own, and the war came anyway.