descend to safety in their parachutes; the very first recorded act of Japanese fighter pilots strafing downed airmen occurred on 19 September 1937, when Chinese Air Force pilot Lt. Liu Lanqing (劉蘭清) of the 17th Pursuit Squadron, 3rd Pursuit Group flying P-26 Model 281 fighters, was part of an intercept mission against a force of 30 Japanese bombers and fighters attacking Nanjing. Lt. Liu bailed out in his parachute after his plane was shot up and disabled, and while hanging in his parachute during descent, was killed by the Japanese pilots taking turns strafing him; his flight leader, Capt. John Huang Xinrui, tried shooting at those Japanese pilots shooting at the helpless Lt. Liu, but was shot up himself and had to bail out, waiting until the last possible moment to pull his parachute cord to avoid the cruelty of the Japanese pilots. As a result, Chinese and Russian volunteer pilots were all warned about opening their parachutes too early if bailing out of stricken aircraft. But even after a safe parachute descent, the Japanese still went after downed airmen; on 18 July 1938, Soviet volunteer pilot Valentin Dudonov was hit by an A5M fighter piloted by Nangō Mochifumi, after which Dudonov bailed out in his parachute and landed on a sand bank on Poyang Lake, only to be continuously strafed by another A5M. Dudonov, running in wild zig-zags and eventually hiding underwater in the lake, survived when the Japanese A5M finally departed. When the Americans joined the war in 1941, they too endured many harrowing and tragic war crimes, clarified by and prosecutable under the protocols of the Geneva Convention. Attacks on neutral powers Article 1 of the 1907 Hague Convention III – The Opening of Hostilities prohibited the initiation of hostilities against neutral powers "without previous and explicit warning, in the form either of a reasoned declaration of war or of an ultimatum with conditional declaration of war" and Article 2 further stated that "[t]he existence of a state of war must be notified to the neutral Powers without delay, and shall not take effect in regard to them until after the receipt of a notification, which may, however, be given by telegraph." Japanese diplomats intended to deliver the notice to the United States thirty minutes before the attack on Pearl Harbor occurred on 7 December 1941, but it was delivered to the U.S. government an hour after