HMS Eagle had already experienced two confrontations during its China Station service. Japanese forces had fired on one of the carrier's aircraft. In a separate episode, a Swordfish accidentally dropped a wooden practice bomb on a Japanese gunboat that had been troubling a British gunboat. The wooden weapon limited the material consequences, but routine reconnaissance and gunboat policing had still produced armed friction. The imagined January 1939 crisis therefore grows from an existing pattern of Anglo-Japanese tension.
Notable Point · 19:10-19:57
HMS Eagle enters the crisis with prior Japanese friction
Earlier confrontations involving an Eagle aircraft and Japanese gunboats show that the counterfactual crisis builds on an already tense operating environment.