"We Wondered if it Meant War"

Oops, missed it: I learn from the radio that yesterday was the 70^th Anniversary of the sinking of the gunboat Panay (link). You remember? No, neither do I (link), but apparently it was a big deal at the time. A Japanese force attacked an American gunboat in the Yangtze River outside Nanjing. Japan was at war with China, but not with the United States. In retrospect, the incident appears to have proven a pivot point, tilting American opinion against Japan, and easing the path to outright war four years later.

I’ve known two people in my life who are tied in my mind to the Panay. One was a guy named Weldon James who, when I met him in the early 60s, was ensconced in a comfortable gig as an editorial writer at the Louisville Courier-Journal. He was a pleasant, clubbable sort of man, but it seemed the first thing you learned about him was that as a young reporter he’d been on the Panay; apparently he had been dining out on it ever since.

In the 60s, when I met him, Weldon was also an officer in the Marine Reserve. In 1966, with the Vietnam War heating up, Weldon did something almost unexampled: he quit his job to volunteer for active service. He left with a flourish: his final editorial was a personal farewell headlined “A Matter of Belief: It’s Past Time to Say to Hell With Ho” (link).

But there is no need to feel compassion for Weldon as he slogs through the paddies with an M-1: he seems to have spent his duty time as a public affairs officer in Hawaii, and then in Washington DC. He ended his career, ignominiously some would say, still in Washington, as a bureaucrat (link).

Years later, one winter night in Wisconsin, I was introduced to an old lady—she was then in her 90s—a birdlike little woman with blue-tint hair. “I am from Killingworth, Connecticut,” she announced with schoolteacher precision. “Do you remember the Longfellow poem, ‘The Birds of Killingworth.’”

Um, no. But someone had told me that she had been in Shanghai in the 30s. I told her I knew a guy who had been on the Panay. Her answer is inscribed on the tablets of my memory:

“Yes, I remember the night. We were dancing on the embassy roof. We wondered if it meant war.”