The incident truly offers a range of alternatives, a “panoply of possibilities” from war to retreat, and I’ll explore each in turn. Perhaps even more likely would have been a very risk-averse US public demanding greater retrenchment from China, or the Far East, to avoid an unwanted war, as contemporary comments by progressive Texas congressman Maury Maverick at the time indicated. That is one direction the incident and its aftermath might have played out differently, but not the only alternate path. The incident has been used as a PoD for what-ifs several times, usually as a way to bring about an earlier US-Japanese war, often as something more like a 1 on 1 fuel. The incident was ultimately settled by Japan issuing an apology and paying compensation to the United States, but not diverting from its aggressive China policy and the US not straying from its policy of merely morally criticizing Japan’s war against China and refusing to recognize Japan’s conquests. Some film showing more detail of the attack was censored. In OTL, a partial film of the attack was shown. This thread is designed to consider a range of alternate outcomes for OTL’s Panay Incident of December 1937, when Japanese aircraft attack and sunk a US patrol boat, the USS Panay on the Yangtze River.
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