Great Pacific War: A History of the American-Japanese Campaign of 1931-33 Read Online Free PDF Page B

Government, still hoping for peace, was careful to abstain from any action that might be interpreted as preparation for war. But special precautions were observed by the Canal authorities during this period of crisis, all mercantile ships, American as well as foreign, having to undergo inspection before being permitted to enter the waterway.
    At dawn on March 3 a large Japanese cargo steamer, the Akashi Maru , owned by the Osaka Shosen Kaisha, arrived off Colon, where she was boarded by an American guard boat. She proved to be from Hamburg to Kobe, with a consignment of heavy machinery and railroad material. Her papers were quite in order, nothing of a suspicious nature was discovered by the inspecting party, and as no instructions had been received to hold up Japanese ships, it was decided to let the vessel pass through. The captain was told, however, that an armed guard would remain on board his ship while it was in the Canal zone, and as he raised no objection to this a party of four marines, under a corporal, were detailed to accompany the Akashi Maru as far as Panama.
    The huge freighter, of nearly 12,000 tons dead weight, was worked through the first locks and entered Gatun Lake eight miles astern of the American cruiser Huron , which had preceded her through the Gatun locks. Once out in the lake she steamed at her full speed of thirteen knots, making such good headway that at Bas Obispo, where the channel enters the famous Culebra Cut, she had reduced the distance between herself and the cruiser to five miles. It has always been thought that she wished to involve the Huron in the catastrophe about to occur; but in this she failed, for the American warship escaped injury of any kind. The Akashi Maru was approximately midway in the Cut when a thunderous explosion was heard, and a gigantic column of water, smoke, and dust shot up to the sky. Blending with the echoes of this terrific detonation was heard a roaring sound, of which the sinister import was but too well known to those familiar with the Canal. The shock of the explosion had dislodged millions of tons of earth from the steep sides of the Culebra ravine, causing a landslide of infinitely greater dimensions than any that had been previously experienced.
    When a party of Canal officials reached the scene of the disaster, an extraordinary spectacle met their gaze. A thick pall of dust still hung over the Cut, both sides of which had collapsed for a distance of nearly a thousand yards. Where a broad channel of water had existed half an hour before was now a solid rampart of earth twenty-five feet high. This, of course, was the bed of the Canal, which had been forced up by the overwhelming pressure of the adjoining hills. Of the Japanese steamer that had caused the havoc, not a vestige remained. It seemed impossible that a great ship could be utterly blotted out in the space of a few seconds, yet so it was. Fragments of her structure were eventually picked up miles from the scene of the explosion, but the ship herself and all on board had vanished completely.
    It needed only a cursory glance to perceive the appalling extent of the damage. Landslides were of not infrequent occurrence in the Cut, and special machinery was held ready to cope with them. But no such cataclysm as this had ever happened before. Months must elapse ere a channel could be cut through the mountainous debris , and meanwhile the Canal would remain blocked at the very period when its use promised to be of vital importance to the United States. The mystery of the explosion which produced this fateful result has never been fully cleared up. The Japanese Government disclaimed all knowledge of the cause, contenting itself with the suggestion that the oil fuel of the Akashi Maru might have caught fire and destroyed the ship — a theory dismissed by experts as too childish to be worth a moment’s notice. In their opinion nothing less than an immense quantity of high-explosives could have caused so