Last Word

For the U. S. Government, the sinking of the U. S. gunboat Panay by Japanese bombers on December 12 is officially a closed incident. But to the U. S. public, which knew that two newsreel cameramen were among the Panay survivors, all the evidence was not officially in until the newsreels arrived. Last week, after a record ten-day rush from Shanghai via U. S. destroyer, China Clipper and cross-country plane. Movietone and Universal reels gave the last word on what happened to the Panay,

First audience sat mute, wide-eyed. Most of them were seeing for the first time U. S. sailors wounded in deadly earnest, U. S. gunners firing at something besides war game targets, alien waters closing over the U. S. colors as a U. S. manofwar, however unseagoing, sank to the 180-ft. bottom of the broad Yangtze.

As confirmation of newspaper reports the films provided a double check in almost every detail. They show the Panay, loaded with news correspondents, cameramen, embassy attaches evacuated from burning Nanking, being visited, identified by a Japanese patrol launch before the bombing. They enumerate the Panay's many flags--two flying from masts, two stretched horizontally over deck superstructures for identification from the air.

They attest to a brilliant sun that glinted off the dazzling white of the Panay's squat hull. They show that the attack was methodical, crafty, well-aimed. Because the cameramen (Universal's Norman Alley, Movietone's Eric Mayell) stayed on the Panay to take shots of the wreckage, they missed the machine-gunning from the air of the first boatload of survivors to head for shore, an attack that killed two already wounded seamen. The boat, holes torn in its planking by bullets, was filmed later. Because the cameramen buried their equipment in the mud when a Japanese launch headed out from the opposite shore, they missed the final Japanese machine-gunning of the abandoned hull, the reported boarding of the Panay by a Japanese search party.

The brief shots of the actual engagement are undramatic by Hollywood and headline standards, important by history's. Limited by the necessity of keeping under cover, Mayell's camera watches bombs landing around the nearby Standard Oil boats, sees a fallen Panay seaman being hauled to a hatchway. Alley's lens catches a Japanese plane diving to attack, while squinting gunners, one trouserless (see cut), try to stem the attack with antiquated 1917 Lewis machine guns. Both cameras show the crew running to emergency posts at the start of the raid, both film the tattered, bloody sailors leaving the ship, peer into the gaping holes in the Panay's armor, sweep over decks strewn with wreckage. Movietone's nine-minute release concentrates on the hardship of the survivors' overland escape to safety. Universal's 23-minute three-reeler also gives shots of sacked and burning Nanking.

Most memorable shot in either reel is one taken in burning Nanking before the cameramen boarded the Panay. It shows a Chinese woman, one child in her arms, another tugging at her from behind, squatting beside a corpse, her crinkle-faced, open-mouthed misery oblivious of the camera as again & again she picks up and drops the dead hand of her husband.

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