The Pearl Harbor Before Pearl Harbor Everybody Forgot About

The attack came without warning. One day in early December, American sailors looked to the sky in terror as enemy aircraft came screaming down towards them. As bombs rained down and exploded all around them, the sailors scrambled to their guns and fired desperately at the dive-bombing aircraft, which swooped so low the gunners could see the pilot’s faces - and the bright red discs painted on the wings. After barely thirty minutes, it was all over. With four sailors and passengers dead, 48 wounded, and the vessel beginning to sink, the Commander gave the order to abandon ship. If you think you’ve heard this story already, think again, for this scene did not play out on December 7, 1941 - a date that still lives in infamy - but on December 12, 1937. And this action took place not in the sleepy tropical paradise of Hawaii but on the turbulent, muddy waters of China’s Yangtze River during a conflict all but forgotten today. This is the story of the USS Panay [“Pah-nigh”] Incident, the surprise Japanese attack that almost dragged America into war four years early. USS Panay was the lead vessel of the Panay class, a family river gunboats specially designed for service on the Yangtze and its tributaries. Western gunboats had been a constant presence on Chinese rivers since the Opium Wars of 1839 and 1856, when the British forced the Chinese to sign a series of so-called “Unequal Treaties” opening the country to foreign trade. Businessmen and missionaries from all around the world flooded into China’s interior, with dozens of trading ports, settlements, and missions popping up along the coast and the banks of the Yangtze. But as the power of the ruling Qing dynasty began to crumble, these foreign settlements came under increasing... This is an abridged version of a video on our channel TodayIFoundOut which you can check out and subscribe to here:    / @todayifoundout