WAR IN CHINA: Regrets

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Finally Executive Officer Arthur F. Anders, shot through the throat and unable to speak, scrawled the order to abandon ship on the bulkhead. While the crew and refugee passengers, many of them wounded, were being taken ashore in small boats, the planes machine-gunned them, then veered off to bomb three Standard Oil tankers. The refugees, fearful of more attacks, lay freezing in the muck & reeds of the river bank when Japanese motorboats appeared, fired a couple of belts of machine gun bullets into the Panay, boarded her and finally left her to sink. Two hours and 20 minutes after the attack began the Panay capsized and sank. Not until long after dark, by devious routes, some carrying their wounded on borrowed stretchers, did the survivors reach the town Hohsien. There they were picked up some 36 hours later by the Oahu and the British gunboat Bee.

This week in Shanghai industrious New York Timesman Hallett Abend believed he had discovered that the machine-gun attack on the Panay's survivors was ordered personally by Colonel Kingoro Hashimoto, leader of an especially notorious Japanese military clique. Colonel Hashimoto was generally regarded as one of the heads behind the unsuccessful Tokyo putsch nearly two years ago, when Army detachments ran amok, murdered Finance Minister Korekiyo Takahashi, seized the Metropolitan Police building (TIME, March 9, 1936 et seq.). Afterwards 15 young Japanese officers were executed but Colonel Hashimoto, having political influence, was merely cashiered. This year Japan's need of trained officers in China put him back in uniform, and it would be strictly in character for Colonel Hashimoto and his fanatical clique to think the best thing they could do for Japan would be to embroil her in war with the U. S. and other "Foreign Dogs."