Pre-WWII Japanese attack on Americans

Found this on my usual rounds on teh Internets. An incident in 1937, somewhat reminiscent of Pearl Harbor. An American ship was deliberately attacked and sunk by Japanese planes in an unprovoked peacetime incident, though this one took place in China and not on American soil.

http://history.sandiego.edu/gen/WW2Timeline/panay.html

Click on the numbers under the picture to the right for newsreel footage, and the Reader's Digest condensed version of events. #2 seems to need a password, 1 and 3 are the same, but 3 is bigger 🙂

You gotta wonder what the reasoning was here. Did they just want to send the msg, "Stay out of our way"? Or was this a test to see how we'd react? Perhaps both. It seems of larger import than just the incident itself, given the events to follow.

I love the internet. Something to learn at every turn.

I would guess they were flexing their muscles a bit. They were pretty much able to do what they wanted in China as they pretty much rode roughshod over most of the Chinese army and did so until they met Zhukov with his Russian Armor in Mongolia. I don't have a very thorough understanding of the Japanese military, however during that time period, this is an action that would have required high level approval and not just "an accident". What they found was that we weren't anxious to go to war to protect something so far away, which is just the information they needed to start moving into the Pacific.

I was flipping channels the other night and ran across a Documentary about the situation between Japan and the US right before the attack. Apparently, we actually had good relations with them. The emperor had been in the US not long before on some sort of business.

It also discussed the fact that Japan actually didn't want to "suprise" us at Pearl Harbor. There was some sort of snafu on the part of the Japanese embassy in the US. They were in the process of typing up an official notice declaring War, but didn't get it finished in time to present to the secretary of state or someone like that.

Not that it would have made much difference, but I thought it was interesting that they were going to present it shortly before the attack on Pearl Harbor.

You'd think that's something they'd care enough about to do right.

No matter what they intended, they were gonna attack Pearl Harbor right around when the declaration of war was delivered. They had their ships moving towards Pearl, and probably would've had their planes in the air at the time they meant to deliver it. I doubt Pearl would've had time to receive the news, much less had time to prepare for any possible attack.

They feared what we could bring to bear on them, as the U.S. had twice their population, and the massive supply of natural resources they so badly wanted. They had missed out on the colonial period in history, and wanted to secure for themselves what many others already had: room to grow and natural resources.