394.115 Panay/164: Telegram
The Consul General at Shanghai (Gauss) to the Secretary of State
[Received December 20—7:50 p.m.]
1194. Consul General Okazaki on special detail at Shanghai where he serves principally as liaison with the Japanese military called on [Page 514] me this afternoon with a Japanese military staff officer with whom he had just arrived from Nanking and sought to impress upon me that the Japanese Army bore no ill will toward the Americans and did not deliberately attack any American ships or citizens. He could give me no satisfactory explanation, however, of the reported boarding and machine-gunning of the Panay by an army surface craft nor did his detailed report of poor communications explain why the Japanese military authorities, knowing that the American steamers had been bombed and sunk failed to send information immediately to Shanghai.
2. Okazaki returned later this evening to say that another military officer, Chief of the American Section of the War Office, had just returned from Nanking and vicinity and reports that a Japanese Army surface boat contacted the Standard Oil steamers on the right bank of the river and attempted by signal flags to warn off the Japanese bombing planes but were unsuccessful and several members of the army unit were wounded by bomb fragments, that men of this unit rendered assistance to the Americans, that the surface boat later visited the Panay but found her sinking rapidly and could find no one aboard, that this boat did not machine-gun the Panay, but that another army surface boat in the vicinity machine-gunned a Chinese boat which was following the American ships and this Chinese boat was captured and is now at Nanking.
Sent to the Department. Repeated to Tokyo, Hankow and Peiping.