The Kweilin incident occurred on August 24, 1938 when a Douglas DC-2 airliner named Kweilin carrying 18 passengers and crew was shot down by Japanese aircraft in China. There were fourteen fatalities. It was the first civilian airliner in history to be shot down by hostile aircraft. The pilot was American and the crew and passengers Chinese. As it was unprecedented for a civilian aircraft to be attacked, there was international diplomatic outrage over the incident. In the United States, it helped solidify the view that Japan was morally wrong in their war against China, but the incident was not enough to spur the US into action against Japan despite Chinese entreaties. The Kweilin was rebuilt, renamed as the Chungking and destroyed by the Japanese in a second attack two years later. Kweilin Incident DC-2 number 32 Kweilin was owned by China National Aviation Corporation (CNAC), one of the first commercial airlines in China. It was operated under contract by Pan American pilots and management who were mostly American in 1938. The plane was on a routine civilian passenger flight from the British colony of Hong Kong to Wuchow, the first stop en route to Chungking and Chengtu in Szechwan province. From Hong Kong, Chengtu was over to the northwest. The flight had fourteen passengers, plus a steward, radio operator Joe Loh, copilot Lieu Chung-chuan, and American pilot Hugh Leslie Woods. The Kweilin left Hong Kong at 8:04am. At 8:30am, soon after entering Chinese airspace, Woods spotted eight Japanese pontoon-fitted planes in what he believed to be an attacking formation. Woods took evasive maneuvers by circling into a cloud bank and was fired upon by the Japanese planes, their intentions made clear. As the DC-2 was unarmed, Woods put it into a fast dive to find a place to make an emergency landing, but the fields were rice paddies crisscrossed with dikes. Woods saw a river and made a perfect water landing with no injuries or damage; the plane was designed to float. However, Woods soon discovered he was the only person aboard who knew how to swim and the swift current bore the plane into full view of the circling Japanese planes. They began to strafe it with machine gun fire. Woods saw an unused boat on shore and swam to retrieve it. During the swim he was repeatedly strafed with machine gun fire but was not hit. On