The incident happened on Dec. 13, 1937, as the USS Panay was evacuating U.S. embassy personnel from Nanking, China’s capital of that era. It was a city under siege whose downfall became the infamous Rape of Nanking.
The Panay was a gunboat that belonged to the U.S. Asiatic Fleet, whose 1930s peacetime mission included protection of American lives and property from pirates along the lawless Yangtze River, under a treaty with the Chinese.
 Fon Huffman, 94, is the last living survivor of the USS Panay, which was attacked and sunk by the Japanese in 1937 on the Yangtze River in China. He lives in Sierra Vista with his daughter and son-in-law. (Mark Levy-Herald/Review) |
One of those old Navy “river rats,” 94-four-year-old Fon B. Huffman of Sierra Vista, remembers when veterans of the Yangtze Patrol could fill 20 reunion buses.
“Now I’m the only one left,” Huffman said wistfully last week. He lives with his daughter and son-in-law, Nancy and Steve Ferguson.
Huffman joined the Navy at age 16, a farm boy from Truro, Iowa. He came from Madison County, the birthplace of John Wayne and home of the covered bridges of book and film fame. By the time of the Panay Incident, Huffman was a 24-year-old veteran sailor.
He was a water tender second class in 1937. His job was to man the boiler room, to “burn the oil and make steam.” The Panay could make 17 knots and was powerful enough to get in and out of mountain gorges where water could rise suddenly 400 feet, leaving boats stranded high and dry.
Huffman remembers awakening to the attack, which began at 1:38 p.m.
“I was sound asleep,” he said. “Bombs blasted us.”
The Panay was a 191-foot-long craft with a crew of four officers and 49 enlisted men, plus a native crew of about a dozen. The ship was a shallow-draft vessel with a flat bottom that allowed it to become occasionally grounded on river sandbars “as harmlessly as a soap dish,” according to “The Panay Incident”, a book by Hamilton Darby Perry, published in 1969.
The Panay was the second generation of a gunboat named for an island in the Philippines. She was armed with eight .30-caliber Lewis machine guns, four on the port side and four on the starboard. The guns were designed to rake shorelines, not defend against an aerial attack. A 3-inch gun was mounted on the bow and stern. Those, too, were inadequate preparation for the changing times in which aircraft would become the key weapon in naval warfare.
The ship picked up a number of evacuees from Nanking and headed down river for Shanghai. Japanese troops had just broken into Nanking, and even though the United States was a neutral country at this time, Nanking was a dangerous place to be.
The evacuees aboard the Panay included a number of American and Italian journalists. Thus, the incident was well covered by the media of that day. One of the U.S. newsmen, Norman Alley of Universal, captured valuable newsreel of the airplanes attacking the ship and her gunners firing back.
Neutral British naval vessels also were involved in the incident, including their assisting the rescue of the stranded Yanks and their passengers.
Three men aboard the Panay died, and 27 were injured. From the shore, the crew watched their ship sink.
In newsreel and still photos, Huffman is seen throwing an improvised flotation device overboard. He had given up his own lifejacket to Alley. Huffman had received a 1-inch shrapnel wound in his right shoulder from a bursting bomb. He did not immediately report his injury and would not receive his Purple Heart Medal until 1993.
On the bridge, the ship’s commanders were exposed to the attack. The captain, Lt. Cmdr. James J. Hughes, was severely wounded. He gave an order to the second-in-command, executive officer Lt. Arthur “Tex” Anders to abandon ship. Anders, the father of Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders, had been wounded in his throat, was unable to speak, and he wrote the order on a wall with a bloody finger, Huffman said.
Fortunately, Alley’s 5,300 feet of newsreel made it back to America, but before it was released in theaters, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered 30 feet of film to be cut where it showed Japanese bombers at nearly deck level, according to Perry. This helped America to remain neutral in the early years of the Pacific war by supporting the official apology of Japan, who claimed that its pilots had made a “mistaken identity” of the nationality of the Panay, even though it displayed several large and conspicuous American flags that the pilots should have seen. Extra flag display had been ordered by Hughes for the very reason that he feared a mistaken identity.
On April 22, 1938, the Japanese cut a check for $2,214,007.36 in reparation to the United States for “settlement in full” for the supposedly accidental American casualties that included the sinking of the Panay.
Out of this settlement, Huffman received $1,200. He spent $800 of it on a brand new Chevrolet coupe.
Huffman served the Navy for 20 years, transferring from active duty to the Reserve on June 16, 1949. He had held eight ratings, including that of chief boiler man at his retirement.
Besides the Panay, he had served aboard the Navy ships Lexington, Augusta, Texas, Stack, Hawkins and Lloyd Thomas.
As a “tin can man” in the Atlantic Ocean, he saw destroyer convoy duty from America to Iceland, “and the Limeys (British navy) would take them from there on over.” In the Pacific Ocean, he was at Guadalcanal.
He was in Bermuda on Dec. 7, 1941, when Pearl Harbor was attacked. He was on the destroyer USS Stack when the USS Wasp collided with it on March 17, 1942.
“They told us to zig, and we should have zagged,” he said.
During his younger days with the Yangtze Patrol, he earned $29 in pay per month and had to provide his own uniforms.
To this day, Huffman maintains a serious attitude about the Panay Incident. He strongly feels it was deliberate.
“They knew who we were.”
CITY EDITOR Ted Morris can be reached at 515-4614 or by e-mail at cityeditor@svherald.com.
