Meanwhile, the First Army moved north from Inchon and in two days of fighting over April 30 and May 1 pushed the Russians back along the Yalu River near Andong. This minor engagement had major ramifications. The Japanese, regarded by many in the West as quaint little people from an exotic land, had defeated Caucasian troops of a world-class power. Stock markets in New York and London suddenly realized Japan was a sound investment, and foreign purchases of government bonds and offers of loans buoyed the wartime economy. On the home front, however, the public was shocked and critical because the more than 900 Japanese killed or wounded exceeded total battle casualties for the Sino-Japanese War. Vice War Minister Lt. Gen. Ishimoto Shinroku defended the troops’ performance to reporters by attributing the losses to modern weapons technology, not incompetent leadership.21
On May 25, the Second Army’s three divisions attacked an entrenched Russian infantry regiment defending Nanshan on the narrow neck of the high ground that separated the northern and southern halves of the Liaodong Peninsula. Fighting began early in the day with a three-hour artillery preparation, followed by a textbook frontal assault against the still mostly intact Russian positions. By midmorning the Second Army had thrown its final reserves into the battle but still could not break the defenses. As artillery ammunition dwindled, casualties mounted, and the troops became exhausted, staff officers recommended that Gen. Oku Yasukata, the Second Army commander, withdraw and regroup. Oku instead ordered renewed attacks, regardless of losses.
Tactical doctrine depended on dense columns to build up sufficient fire superiority to carry a defensive position, but Nanshan’s limited maneuver space canalized infantry attacks into direct frontal assaults. The combination of tactics and terrain left massed attackers exposed to withering Russian fire that inflicted staggering losses before the Russians finally retreated in the late afternoon. The army later described these assaults as “human-bullet attacks” and claimed for public consumption that they epitomized uniquely Japanese virtues of courage, determination, and self-sacrifice.22 In fact, when staff officers at imperial headquarters received the first official reports of 3,817 casualties in the Nanshan fighting, their immediate reaction was that a careless cipher clerk had mistakenly added an extra digit.23
The army’s tactical doctrine was mismatched against modern weapons technology. According to a young captain attached to the Second Army, “It’s not our human-bullet tactics that throw away brave warriors’ lives. It’s the superior Russian fortifications and equipment and our lack of machine gun firepower that gives us no chance of winning. With machine guns extending the distance [of the killing zone], table-top tactics can no longer have any practical application.” Extended lines of skirmishers soon replaced the densely packed columns, and intervals between individual soldiers increased. Some tactical commanders, such as Col. Ichiwara Shinichirō, quickly adapted. Ichiwara’s nonchalant attitude had embarrassed his junior officers during peacetime maneuvers, but at Nanshan he repeatedly rallied his men, ignoring heavy Russian fire. In real fighting, he later remarked, the enemy was less cooperative than on exercises.24
Army Chief of Staff Yamagata, Prime Minister Katsura (concurrently an active duty general), War Minister Terauchi Masatake, Manchurian Army commander Ōyama, and his chief of staff, Kodama, gathered at Imperial General Headquarters on June 10 to set the operational direction of war. Katsura participated in IGHQ conferences in his capacity as a retired general officer but was not kept informed officially about operational matters. However, he received accurate information from the senior statesmen (Yamagata and Itō) because the army did provide them accounts of the military situation. Katsura was also a close friend and drinking companion of War Minister Terauchi, who likely passed him information. Because of the cumbersome and exclusionary bureaucratic system, informal personal relations played a crucial role in coordinating military, political, and diplomatic initiatives.25 A brief review of operations highlights these deficiencies.
The Manchurian Campaign
The Manchurian Army, consisting of the First and Second armies, would advance along the South Manchurian Railroad to Liaoyang, where the First Army would envelop the enemy’s right flank, destroy the Russian field army, and open the way to Mukden and the decisive battle before Russia could mobilize its full military strength. Simultaneously, the Third Army would attack Port Arthur and after taking the fortress rejoin the field armies near Mukden.26 The Russian commander, however, fought a series of skillful delaying actions in June and July to buy time for reinforcements to arrive from European Russia. Port Arthur was left isolated and besieged by the recently arrived Third Army.
General staff officers had not originally considered seizing the port and were unaware of the extent of Russian improvements to the fortress’s defenses. Russian military engineers had shrouded their work in tight security, and Japanese spies lacked the technical expertise to determine the strength of the improved concrete-and-steel fortifications. As a consequence, they reported that the Russians had merely extended existing trench lines, leaving the impression that Port Arthur was weakly defended as it had been during the Sino-Japanese War.27
On August 19 the complexion of the war changed dramatically when the Third Army commander, Lt. Gen. Nogi Marasuke’s, ill-conceived frontal assault against Port Arthur cost at least 16,000 killed and wounded, a disaster compounded by his stubborn refusal to halt the futile attacks. A few days later Ōyama’s armies suffered more than 23,000 casualties during the seven-day battle for Liaoyang (August 25–September 3). The First Army struck the Russian center while the Second and Fourth armies turned the enemy’s eastern flank. Unable to encircle the Russians, the Japanese resorted to costly frontal attacks.
Though the army publicly glorified the efforts of the so-called human-bullets to sustain home-front morale, more responsible commanders were appalled at the needless slaughter. Junior officers blamed the “big-shot tacticians” for stubbornly applying textbook tactics that needlessly threw away soldiers’ lives. Ōyama relieved three major generals, all brigade commanders, because their inflexibility caused unnecessary casualties.28
The combination of heavy losses and the inability to encircle and destroy the enemy field army shook Japanese regimental and division commanders’ self-confidence. At the height of the Liaoyang fighting, Tokyo newspaper editorials confidently predicted another Sedan, a reference to the Prussian army’s encirclement and destruction of the French army in 1870. Self-confident and certain of the outcome, the First Army’s officers and men anticipated truce talks after the battle. Morale plummeted as the realization sunk in that they faced renewed fighting. Replacements for Nogi’s Third Army at Port Arthur lost heart when battle-toughened veterans dismissed them as cannon fodder. The commander of a Guard infantry brigade wrote to the vice chief of staff that just declaring morale was high did not necessarily make it so. Discipline suffered, and the army resorted to field gendarmes to drive reluctant troops forward, at least in one case at bayonet point.29
Map 5
Although the army had steadily expanded from 123,000 officers and men in 1896 to 191,000 in 1903 and increased its reserves proportionately, it could not compensate for the unexpectedly high attrition during the opening engagements. These battles made clear that more troops were needed. Immediately after the Liaoyang fighting, the emperor, at IGHQ’s request, on September 29 activated four new divisions, doubled the second reserve obligation to ten years, extended the age limit for the first reserve term from 32 to 37 years old, and added forty-eight infantry battalions to the second reserve. The new provisional divisions would be organized by February 1905, but they would not be trained and ready for operations until late May at the earliest. By the time the first of the new formations was activated on April 15, 1905, the major fighting was over.30
The Vladivostok naval squadron added to the overall sense of gloom and anxiety in Japan. On the morning of April 26, Russian warships surprised and sank a small Japanese ship carrying a 200-man infantry company
. The soldiers refused surrender or rescue and went down with their sinking ship. Army authorities stoked patriotic home-front fires by portraying the act as a deliberate decision to avoid the shame of surrender and the debasement of captivity.31 Russian raiders continued to cruise the Sea of Japan, picking off victims, spreading panic among Japanese coastal towns, and provoking public criticism of the military’s incompetence.
In mid-June the Vladivostok squadron sank a large army troop transport carrying almost 2,000 soldiers and irreplaceable artillery and stores. When the admiral charged with protecting the convoy could not find the Russian warships to retaliate, angry Tokyoites stoned his house, denounced him as a Russian agent, and demanded his suicide. Wild rumors about the Vladivostok fleet terrified civilians and forced the cabinet to order an emergency reinforcement of coastal defenses in Tokyo Bay and Tsushima Island.32
While the Russian squadron rampaged seemingly at will and Nogi’s Port Arthur offensive collapsed, the northern front stabilized around Liaoyang. By the end of September the army had committed three divisions to Port Arthur, sent eight to Liaoyang, and mobilized 65,000 replacements to fill the losses in its infantry divisions. In addition, field army commanders wanted the two divisions remaining in the homeland strategic reserve, but IGHQ insisted that they were needed for coastal defense against a possible Russian landing. Emperor Meiji intervened in the dispute between the field army and IGHQ by deciding that one homeland division would deploy to Liaoyang.33
In early October a Russian offensive surprised the Second Army at the Shahe River, about 45 miles northeast of Liaoyang, and in the week-long battle that followed, three Japanese armies again failed to envelop the Russian flanks. Losses were heavy: more than 41,000 Russian and 20,000 Japanese fell. By this time, sickness was ravaging the field armies as beriberi, typhoid, and dysentery incapacitated thousands more troops. Ōyama halted his armies to regroup.
While Ōyama reconstituted his battered forces, imperial headquarters, reacting to the navy’s demands that Port Arthur be taken quickly, again ordered Nogi to attack the fortress. After his first setback, IGHQ had reinforced the Third Army with heavy artillery in hopes of breaching the Russian defenses. Higher headquarters grasped that artillery observers atop the dominating heights of Hill 203 could direct accurate plunging fire onto Port Arthur and its harbor, making them untenable. Nogi and his staff, however, had never been to the front lines and regarded the heights, particularly Hill 203, as secondary to the Third Army’s objective of capturing the town.34
After a council with IGHQ liaison officers on September 5, the Third Army staff agreed to attack Hill 203. Assaults two weeks later seized outposts on Hill 203 but could not take the crest. Although Nogi had received reports from the front that parts of Port Arthur could be seen from recently captured hills, the full impact of this intelligence escaped him, and he suspended the offensive on September 22 after suffering 5,000 casualties.
The well-publicized struggle for Port Arthur captured world attention, and the western press popularized Nogi for its readers as the personification of the samurai warrior, who uncomplainingly endured hardship and suffering. Kodama and other senior commanders, however, were appalled by Nogi’s incompetence, which had shifted the strategic focus of the war, cost tens of thousands of unnecessary casualties, consumed vast quantities of scarce war material, and achieved nothing. The Third Army opened its third major offensive on November 26 and the next day finally captured Hill 203. The fortress and naval base were defenseless and soon surrendered. More than 59,000 Japanese casualties paid for Nogi’s victory.
In late January 1905, Russian forces tried to drive the Japanese back to Liao-yang and inflict as many casualties as possible. Fighting in bitterly cold weather near San-de-pu, the Japanese stopped the counterattack—at a cost of more than 9,000 casualties. Next followed the epic struggle from February 22 through March 10 for Mukden, a battle that pitted almost 300,000 Russians against slightly more than 200,000 Japanese. The Japanese again tried a sweeping double envelopment but could not close their pincers in time to trap the retreating Russian armies. Despite losses of 70,000 Japanese and almost 90,000 Russians, the battle was indecisive and the ground war in Manchuria was stalemated.
Tokyo misread these results. On March 11, Katsura and Terauchi proposed new offensives to Yamagata, who in turn forwarded their recommendations to Ōyama. Responding from Manchuria a few days later, Ōyama described Mukden as indeed a great victory, but he dwelled on his heavy casualties and exhausted supplies. He needed time to rebuild his logistics network and wanted the cabinet’s guidance in the form of a unified military-diplomatic policy on whether to pursue the Russians or switch to a protracted war strategy.35
Ōyama’s sobering assessment convinced Yamagata and Terauchi that Japan had no means of forcing the Russians to capitulate, short of attacking Moscow or St. Petersburg, which of course was impossible. The Manchurian Army could not even attack Harbin some 250 miles away because of recent personnel losses, especially among officer ranks; ammunition shortages; logistics deficiencies; and transportation problems, including a requirement for extensive railroad construction to build a line for transporting supplies to forward units. Taking this into account, on March 23 Yamagata requested the cabinet end the war by diplomatic means.36
IGHQ recalled Kodama to Tokyo at the end of March for discussions on whether to continue a protracted war or sue for peace. Kodama’s outspoken criticism of the general staff’s ineptitude peaked when he called the vice chief of staff a fool for starting a fire without knowing how to put it out. At an April 8 meeting, the senior statesmen and major cabinet ministers resigned themselves to the possibility of a protracted war unless diplomatic measures could achieve satisfactory peace terms.37
In mid-October 1904 the Russian Baltic Fleet had sortied from its home port for an eight-month, 10,000-mile voyage via the Cape of Good Hope to reinforce the Russian Far Eastern squadrons and relieve Port Arthur. The adventure ended on May 27, 1905, in the Tsushima Strait, where Vice Adm. Tōgō Heihachirō’s combined fleet sank twelve first-line Russian warships and captured four more. Antiwar demonstrations erupted in Russia, where the crew of the battleship Potemkin mutinied. Internal unrest, the gloomy military situation, and the czar’s concern about a possible invasion of Sakhalin made the Russians amenable to negotiations. Japan’s leaders, aware that their armies and resources were exhausted, were likewise anxious for talks and secretly approached U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt to mediate. After a month of discussions at Portsmouth, New Hampshire, mainly about Russian refusal to consider indemnities or territorial concessions, on September 5 the Russians grudgingly agreed to cede southern Sakhalin Island to Japan. In addition, Japan received exclusive rights in Korea and control of Russian railroad lines in southern Manchuria. But there was no indemnity.
During the lead-up to war, the army appealed to an increasingly literate public and conscript force with themes of Japan’s uniqueness by virtue of the unbroken imperial line. Pamphlets subsidized by the war ministry explained in simple language that the army protected Japan from foreign threats, much like the wall around a storehouse kept wild animals or thieves from stealing treasures. Essays popularized notions that seishin and the intangible factors of battle were responsible for tiny Japan’s victory over the enormous Chinese Empire and that Japan had to fight Russia to save China from itself and prevent a collapse of the international order.38
Building on that foundation, wartime propaganda had concealed Japan’s military weaknesses to manufacture an unprecedented national commitment to the war across the society. The potent combination of prewar indoctrination and wartime propaganda raised popular anticipation that shared hardships would entitle everyone to benefit from the fruits of victory. With these unrealistic expectations, the Japanese people were infuriated that the treaty contained no indemnity and doled out seemingly paltry rewards for such great sacrifices. Anti-treaty rioting and popular demonstrations erupted in Tokyo as the public directed its fur
y against the civilian cabinet. It might better have targeted the army.
An Assessment
Despite its extensive planning, modern weaponry, and expanded force structure, the 1904 army was still an amateurish one, characterized by regional cliques, favoritism, incompetence, and nepotism. In 1901, for example, the staff college had reorganized its curriculum to prepare officers for command of large units (brigade and higher echelon) and educate them with the latest technological principles. Instruction, however, remained rooted in tactics, and the curriculum stressed individual initiative that taught officers to command by resolute action and not get bogged down in details.39 Staff officers assigned to the respective armies in the Russo-Japanese War were expected to be decisive, but they lacked practical experience and tended toward doctrinaire staff college solutions, regardless of circumstances. An uncritical adherence to the norm pervaded the officer corps.
Many senior officers had made their rank and reputations as young soldiers in the restoration wars of the 1860s or the Satsuma Rebellion of the mid-1870s. Too many were autodidacts, ill prepared to encounter the rapid advances in early twentieth-century technology, military professionalism, and warfare. Nogi, for instance, a veteran of the restoration wars, the Satsuma Rebellion, and the Sino-Japanese War, was stumped when looking at a topographic map of the Port Arthur defenses. Unable to understand terrain contours or elevations, he concluded the shortest distance between two points was a straight line and ordered an attack into the most difficult and best-defended terrain, where his troops suffered enormous and unnecessary losses.
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