High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! The USS Panay Incident was a Japanese attack on the American gunboat USS Panay while she was anchored in the Yangtze River outside Nanking (now known as Nanjing), China on December 12, 1937. Japan and the United States were not at war at the time. The Japanese claimed that they did not see the American flags painted on the deck of the gunboat, apologized, and paid an indemnity. Nevertheless, the attack and the subsequent Allison incident in Nanking caused U.S. opinion to turn against the Japanese. Fon Huffman, the last survivor of the incident, died in 2008. The 2009 film John Rabe portrays a fictionalized version of the incident.