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While word sped to tell the Chinese Foreign Office that Ambassador Johnson and staff were moving onto the U. S. gunboats Luzon and Guam anchored off the Nanking Bund, Second Secretary J. Hall Paxton, son of a missionary, was alone in asking if he could stay and keep the U. S. Embassy open. The Ambassador said "yes." In 1927 when Nanking, then only a provincial capital, was entered by troops of China's present Premier, young Mr. Paxton was there as Vice Consul. The troops had got completely out of hand, looting every foreign house in town, killing six foreigners, and Vice Consul Paxton was able to get out safely with many U. S. citizens only under cover of a protective barrage laid down by U. S. and British warships firing from the river. With fine missionary spirit, Second Secretary Paxton thinks none the less of Chinese on this account, was deeply pained as anti-U. S. feeling spread like wildfire in Nanking last week and Chinese shrilled: "We have been deserted by the American Ambassador."*
Arriving U. S. correspondents, as they drove into Nanking, flying U. S. flags on their rented cars, were greeted by Chinese with catcalls, insulting gestures. On this day of tense fear that Death might rain at any moment, 29 suspects, mostly natives born in China, but with one or more Japanese parents or grandparents, were shot in Nanking as spies. Drugstores sold civilians thousands of makeshift gas masks made of mere gauze, then a government order directed "confiscation of all gas masks in Nanking for military purposes." Meanwhile all over the capital, toiling furiously at the orders of Generalissimo Chiang, Chinese constructed dugouts with such energy that 5,000 shelters capable of holding about ten persons each were ready at the zero hour set by Admiral Hasegawa. Ordinary Nanking civilians were free to flee, and a large part of the population of the capital had exited in good order, with firms like Standard Oil speeding their Chinese employes to safety, but by decree of Generalissimo Chiang the penalty for a Chinese who quit any government job in Nanking classified as "essential" was Death.
Clawing Condors. "Spare Nanking! Respect international law. Don't bomb defenseless civilians!"—Such was the gist of diplomatic pleas and protests made meanwhile at Tokyo by Britain and the U. S., later joined by two other occidental states. Japanese officials replied that their "humane objective" was to end the war as quickly as possible, but all the same Nanking was spared from noon, the original "Zero Hour," until the next morning—not out of Japanese respect for the protests of the Great Powers but because of "weather unsuitable for bombing."