As the "Corriere della Sera "Asian correspondent, he went to China. On 11 December 1937, he was aboard the USS Panay on the Yangtze Patrol in Nanking at the prompting of George Atcheson, a U.S. Embassy official. Also aboard were Universal News cameraman Norman Alley, Movietone News' Eric Mayell, the "New York Times"'s Norman Soong, "Collier's Weekly" correspondent Jim Marshall, and "La Stampa" correspondent Sandro Sandri. Atcheson had invited them aboard the Panay so that they could document the fall of the city from relative safety. The four journalists had been covering the ongoing Japanese invasion of China in the mid-1930s, and found themselves in the thick of things in early December 1937 as Japanese forces moved on Nanking.