Admiral Togo

by Jonathan Clements

  Tōgō returned to Shanghai in June 1884, just ahead of the news that something had indeed ruined the treaty. A French force had run into what appeared to be Chinese soldiers in a Vietnamese border area and wrongly assumed they were retreating. Instead, the Chinese tailed the French for several days, ambushing them late in the afternoon of 23 June near the small village of Bac Le. Although the Chinese suffered heavier losses, the French were still forced to retreat with twenty-two dead. Paris demanded reparations, which were not forthcoming from the Chinese. Accordingly, in August 1884, the French struck back.

  The French naval commander, Vice Admiral Amédée Courbet, had recommended that his ships should punish the Chinese by seizing strategically important territory close to Beijing. He suggested Weihaiwei or Port Arthur – both valuable seaports that overlooked the Yellow Sea route to Beijing’s port at Tianjin. The only consideration that kept the French from doing so was the fear of other powers, since other European nations, particularly Russia, already coveted the area. Instead, Courbet was ordered to keep his reprisals to territory that, while still of use to the French, would not interfere with the actions of other imperialist powers. Courbet decided to sail up the coast from Indochina, bypassing the British colony of Hong Kong and treaty port of Amoy. The next worthy prize was the great naval town of Fuzhou, once the home port of the Africa-bound treasure ships of the Ming dynasty admiral Zheng He, and the power-base of fabled pirates of old. Courbet’s flotilla entered the approach to Fuzhou, French flags flying gaily from his masts.

  News reached Shanghai of ‘trouble’ in Fuzhou. Tōgō sailed south immediately, and reached Fuzhou on 1 September. Vice Admiral Courbet and his ships were nowhere to be seen, forcing Tōgō to piece together what had happened from the reports of others and the wreckage strewn around the ruins of Fuzhou’s harbour, the waters thick with driftwood and the macabre flotsam of thousands of Chinese corpses, rotting on the shores or floating out to sea.15

  Fuzhou was technically a river port, set a little way inland on the wide but twisting River Min. The Min delta was guarded by forts with powerful guns whose mountings only allowed them to fire out to sea. As soon as Courbet had steamed past the Chinese forts, their heavy artillery was powerless to stop him. Rather than launch an attack immediately, Courbet had instead lurked in the river for two days, eyeing up the squadron of over twenty Chinese vessels in the harbour – a wooden corvette, and a cluster of gunboats, scouts and torpedo boats. At 2 p.m. on 23 August, Courbet gave the order to open fire.

  At close range, the French made short work of much of the Chinese fleet in just twelve minutes. The ‘Battle’ of Fuzhou dragged on for another two hours and continued in a fashion after nightfall, as the Chinese seized local junks and launched them at the French as fire ships. The following day there were no ships to fight back as Courbet turned his guns on the Fuzhou arsenal. Ground forces, however, maintained a strong defence; and Courbet decided to keep to the water. On 25 August, he turned back downriver and steamed out to sea.

  Notoriously, at no point had France declared war.16 Courbet had received his orders the previous night and had calmly informed the French consul of his plans, as well as the captains of three nearby British ships and an American corvette. In hindsight, it seems suspicious that British and American neutrals should have been in the area, but that the Japanese should only hear about it afterwards – perhaps the Europeans still held the Japanese at arm’s length, and did not trust them with advance knowledge of the French plans. But regardless of whether the Japanese absence was intentional or not, Tōgō took special note of Courbet’s behaviour. Later, Courbet would assert that he simply could not have announced his belligerent intentions before steaming upriver, as the shore batteries would have destroyed his force before they could reach Fuzhou. It was, in French eyes, a justifiable deception to sneak past the shore batteries under a flag of peace, and to Tōgō’s great interest, the European powers largely agreed.

  The shore batteries were no longer there when Tōgō arrived. With their guns fixed facing out to sea, they had been defenceless against the departing French, who had pounded them into the ground. Always a few steps behind, Tōgō tailed the French to their new target, the north end of the island of Taiwan. Courbet had only attacked the island under protest, as he still regarded France’s interests as best served by taking a peninsula closer to Beijing. However, the harbours of Danshui and Jilong in north Taiwan had both been regarded as ideal spoils by one of Courbet’s fellow admirals, who also noted the presence of coal in the Taiwanese hills. But while Courbet was a dab hand at firing guns at forts, he enjoyed less luck with landing forces. Breaking off the assault, the French sailed for Hong Kong, tailed all the while by the Amagi.17 When the French set out in October for a second assault on Taiwan, Tōgō followed them again. As the shore battles continued, Tōgō came aboard Courbet’s flagship and asked permission to inspect the fortifications in French hands. Courbet not only granted it, but allowed Tōgō to see his own report of the naval actions against Jilong.

  In early October, Lieutenant Commander Tōgō was permitted to go ashore on Taiwan, accompanied by a towering young French engineer officer, Joseph Joffre. Tōgō and his subordinates inspected the ruins with great interest, making careful notes of the kind of damage inflicted by shells against different types of structure. They pored over the coastal fortifications, evaluating what had gone right for the defeated Chinese and wrong for the victorious French. Tōgō also noted the lie of the land, and the place where the Chinese had placed their shore batteries. To the French, this all seemed largely irrelevant, but Tōgō was thinking ahead. The detailed report that he presented back aboard the Fusō in Shanghai assumed, rightly, that the French would not stay in Taiwan, that the Chinese would reoccupy but also largely recreate their damaged forts, and that on some unspecified future day, a Japanese force would make use of the knowledge he had amassed.18

  5

  Princes and Prisoners

  Promoted to Commander, Tōgō was ordered off the Amagi in June 1885 to a shore posting. With the Japanese now attempting to build state-of-the-art warships at home, Tōgō was ordered to supervise the construction of the Yamato, one of three composite sloops under construction in home waters, with twin propeller shafts – a new development for Japanese-built ships. Tōgō was expected to supervise the Yamato’s final stages of completion in the light of what he had learned from observing the construction of the Fusō in London. Japan still lagged far behind Europe in such matters; the Yamato was soon destined to be outclassed by other ‘Japanese’ ships already under construction in Britain, and her armaments had to be bought in from abroad anyway.1 Nevertheless, it was a worthy task for Commander Tōgō, who also received the honour of commanding the new ship as she put to sea. In July 1886, Commander Tōgō of the Yamato was promoted to Captain in a shake-up of the ranks of the Imperial Navy. The round of promotions was not universal, and seemed designed to quietly halt the careers of officers whose knowledge or attitudes were deemed unsuitable for a modern navy. In achieving the rank of Post Captain at the age of thirty-nine, Tōgō seemed to have been signalled out for further advancement.

  Two months later, however, he was struck down by a crippling bout of rheumatism which threatened to end his career. For some time, Captain Tōgō tried to hide the severity of his condition from the Admiralty. He delegated command of the Yamato to junior officers while he writhed in pain on a bed in his cabin. When the news got out, he was relieved of his duties in September and sent home to recuperate. On several occasions, he filed reports with the Admiralty claiming to be on the mend, only to shamefacedly retract his applications for reinstatement to active service. Relapses were followed by convalescent periods at hot springs; although for much of the ensuing two years, Tōgō was bedridden, only leaving his house on a handful of occasions. Attended faithfully by Tetsu, he lay in bed throughout the day, attempting to serve the Imperial Navy in a different way by studying textbooks of international law and naval tactics.
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  Captain Tōgō pleaded that he was on the mend once more in early 1887. In the summer of that year, he served on a commission that investigated a minor disciplinary incident when the corvette Kongō had run aground. The doubting Admiralty, still not wishing to put a sick man in charge of a warship on the open sea, then wisely gave him a new position that kept him close to home – a supervisory role at the Yokosuka Arsenal. Technically, Tōgō was also the commander of the Asama, an ageing training vessel that remained permanently anchored in Yokosuka harbour, like the Worcester of his England days. Even captaining a ship that never moved was too much for the ailing Tōgō, who was soon back in bed. He was, at least officially, captain of the Hiei for a period in 1889, before records show him back on land, serving on a court martial investigating an explosion on Navy property.

  Navy records have Captain Tōgō returning to active duty in May 1890, although Mrs Tōgō would probably have more accurately dated her husband’s recovery to a night in January when the couple conceived their second son, Minoru (born 10 September 1890). The family relocated to Kure Naval Base, whose waters Tōgō had once surveyed in the Amagi, where he was now appointed chief of staff to the resident admiral. As the heart of the nation’s sea defences, Kure afforded Tōgō many new opportunities to see elements of navy life that would have escaped a mere sea captain. Kure was the centre for navy repairs, for constructing new vessels, and the headquarters of the supply staff. He was seconded to a committee that inspected the marine defences – mainly the sea mines – in the Straits of Shimonoseki and, despite another minor relapse of his condition in the winter, served without incurring any penalties.

  Nevertheless, Captain Tōgō had a new opportunity to fight a battle with little more than signals and cunning. With Mrs Tōgō six months pregnant with their next child,2 Tōgō was called away to the dockside at Yokosuka to entertain some foreign dignitaries. A Chinese squadron had put in at Yokohama. Notably, it was the Chinese squadron with special responsibility for north China’s sea environs – in other words, the warships based at the Yellow Sea port of Weihaiwei, charged with protecting the approaches to Tianjin and Beijing, the coasts of Korea and, in the event of war, the ships most likely to fight against the Japanese themselves.

  Commodore Ding Ruchang, who Tōgō had last encountered in Korea, was determined to fight a propaganda war of his own. His ‘goodwill cruise’ was actually an excuse to show off his latest acquisitions: two massive German-built battleships that dwarfed anything the Japanese had to offer. The Dingyuan and the Zhenyuan3 (the ‘Decider’ and the ‘Suppressor’) had been ordered by Beijing years earlier, but had been interned in Europe at French request during the Sino-French War. Now, Commodore Ding made a point of steaming the two vast warships through Japan’s Inland Sea to make it crystal clear that each of his new toys was twice the size of the nearest Japanese equivalent.

  Commodore Ding was a frail, cadaverous man in his mid-fifties, a former cavalry officer who had somehow stumbled into commanding China’s navy. He was also, like Tōgō, a stickler for correct protocol. He had risked his own life in earlier years by protesting to the Chinese government about inadequate naval budgets – an act bordering on treason at a time when the Empress Dowager had been plundering the naval coffers to fund the ostentatious decorations in her Summer Palace gardens. In 1880, Ding had travelled across the world to the north of England so he could personally sail two other British-built ironclads, the Chaoyong and Yangwei (‘Superhero’ and ‘Projection of Power’) back to China to add to his fleet. Now, he was intent on showing the Japanese that the best course of action in naval conflict with China was no action at all.4

  Commodore Ding’s six ships arrived off Yokohama in order to take full advantage of the Japanese media. The classically-educated Ding brought a touch of class to naval events that had recently been dominated by brusque and inscrutable Occidentals; he charmed the Japanese nobility with his off-the-cuff poems and Confucian wit, and successfully gave the impression that much more united China and Japan than divided them. An audience with the Meiji Emperor went without a hitch, although Ding’s true purpose was to entice Japanese opinion-formers down to the dockside. Tokyo urbanites were terrified at the sight of the Chinese ships looming over the vessels of the Imperial Navy. The Meiji Emperor’s own court chronicle noted the revival in modern idiom of the term ‘elder brothers’ to refer to the Chinese. In public relations terms, Ding had made sure the Japanese knew who was boss and, for a brief time, revived the old-time awe Japan had once enjoyed for things Chinese.5

  To make sure that everyone got a good look, Commodore Ding then sailed his military circus down to the waters off Kure, where Tōgō was one of the local dignitaries invited aboard for a tour. Commodore Ding proudly showed off the many refinements aboard his ironclads, their triple torpedo tubes, a desalinisation plant that would make fresh water sufficient for a crew of 300, and even two torpedo boats carried as part of each ship’s compliment, so that the ‘Decider’ and ‘Suppressor’ might suddenly multiply themselves from two big ships into a ready-made flotilla of six. Not every one of these wonders was news to the Japanese, but oriental courtesy on both sides required that the officers make sufficient noises of appreciation and excitement at each new feature. Alone among the Japanese, Captain Tōgō remained conspicuously unmoved.

  His suspicions were justified. At the time of their construction, the two giants were adjudged ‘practically invincible’, but ships already under construction would soon surpass their speed; and although their guns were monstrously powerful, their mountings made them all but useless in even mildly choppy seas. Further-more, the ships had already run into difficulties in Europe. While waiting for the Sino-French War to blow over and for the warships’ delivery to China to be approved, the Dingyuan’s German builders had been unable to resist the opportunity to take her out for a spin. The resultant sea trials had been calculated to annoy the British, but instead led to much smirking from the London Times, which gleefully reported:

  … [I]t was also necessary to test the effect of the concussion of these monster cannon on the corvette itself … [When the guns were fired] a large quantity of skylight and window glass was smashed, a thick iron rail on the bridge was wrenched off, a funnel was snapped in two, the deck was strewn with coals jerked up from the coal bunker, some wooden furniture was smashed into splinters … . How the Chinese are to face … any other foe with such disastrous guns is a question well worthy of their considerations.6

  Unlike his fellow officers, Tōgō remained as suspicious as the British newspapers about the twin giants’ actual capabilities. Instead of poking around the ships themselves, he made the acquaintance of two of Ding’s captains, and found them to represent opposite poles of the Chinese navy.

  One, Lin Taizeng, had none of the excitability of the other Chinese. He sat apart from the proceedings and remained quiet at all times – a man after Tōgō’s own heart. Although Tōgō may not have known it, Lin was from a famous family; his grandfather Lin Zexu had been the commissioner whose resistance to the British had sparked the Opium Wars. Lin Taizeng had survived his grandfather’s rise and fall, and sought a career with the organisation that he felt best able to protect China from future indignities – the navy. He had even enjoyed similar experiences to the young Tōgō, having travelled to distant Britain with Ding to bring home the two smaller warships on their shakedown cruise.

  Lin’s fellow warship captain, Liu Buchan, had an even more impressive resumé, but did not seem to live up to it. As a teenager in 1876, he had studied at Greenwich Naval College in England, returning to Europe several years later to pick up a German warship for the Chinese government. He was a prominent captain in the Chinese fleet, described by his contemporaries as ‘suave, polished, clever’ and yet already suspected by some of his subordinates of not having what it took to command a ship at war. Captain Tōgō would eventually go into battle against both men, but it was Lin that he would remember as a ‘great officer’.7

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sp; Even when the Japanese had left the ship, and were chattering among themselves about the impressive turret-mounted German guns on the Chinese ships, Tōgō seemed cautious. ‘We should need to know a little more about it,’ he said.8

  Captain Tōgō suspected that merely because the Chinese had bought some impressive technology, there was no guarantee that they knew how to use it. As if on cue, it was only a few days before one of Commodore Ding’s propaganda fleet, the Pingyuan (‘Queller’) limped into the harbour at Kure for sudden repairs. The Pingyuan had been built in Fuzhou to German plans, but seemed to have been operated with customary Chinese neglect. Captain Tōgō elected to go on a new inspection tour, but instead of arriving at the dockside in his uniform, he elected to do so each evening disguised in civilian clothes.

  Tōgō was soon horror-struck at the behaviour of the Chinese. Shirts, socks and dirty linen were strung up on washing lines between the Pingyuan’s gun turrets. From his harbour vantage point, Tōgō saw the decks of the Pingyuan unscrubbed and blocked with clutter. Captain Tōgō’s thoughts on the matter were damning in the extreme, and soon reported to his associates:

  The Chinese Squadron is not worthy of the respect and fear of Japanese. It is, so to speak, a bright sword on the surface, but it is overdone, burnt up. It looks threatening, but it is brittle. It will be of no use in time of need. Look at the Pingyuan – she betrays what the Chinese Squadron really is … You know, the gun should be regarded as sacred, but the Chinese use it as a pole to hang their laundry on, and that in a foreign country. They do not know that the gun is, as it were, the soul of a battleship. Besides, the deck is dirty and out of order. Their slovenliness bears an eloquent testimony to the loose spirit of the whole navy. A few excellent commanders will be of but little use, if their men are slack and slovenly.9