Terrific indeed it was – a wide dense pall of smoke, which there was little wind to carry off; through the haze the huge, reeling shapes of the fighting vessels, looming indistinctly, vomiting flame like so many angry dragons, and several of them burning in addition, having been set on fire by shells; and above all the appalling concussion of the great guns, like the bursting of incessant thunder-bolts.6
Quite by coincidence, Tōgō’s gunners were firing on the two ships that a younger Admiral Ding had once steered home from England, the Chaoyong and Yangwei (‘Superhero’ and ‘Projection of Power’). As Tōgō led the Naniwa out for another turn, the ships were subject to a second attack from an unlikely source. The Japanese vessel Saikyō was not even a proper warship. Instead, she was a hastily converted liner, a glorified transport that happened to be carrying Admiral Kabayama, the Japanese navy’s chief of staff, in an observational capacity. Kabayama, a former army officer whose meddling in naval matters was not always welcome, does not seem to have been able to resist involving himself in the battle as well and emptied his ship’s defensive guns into the heavily damaged Chinese vessels. James Allan saw it all:
Meanwhile, the Chinese ships had been forced still nearer the land, and the Chaoyong, an absolute ruin, drifted helplessly ashore, half a league from where we stood. By the aid of our glasses we could perceive her condition clearly – her upper works knocked to pieces; her decks, strewn with mutilated bodies, an indiscriminate mass of wreck and carnage. Her crews were abandoning her, struggling to land as best they could.7
The Chaoyong was the first to go, suddenly listing far to starboard and sinking with great speed. Shortly afterward, the Yangwei erupted in flames and fled for the coast, where she ran aground.
However, the Saikyō’s charge was not without ill effects. Her unprecedented race into action left her open to retaliatory fire from several Chinese ships. She was hit by 12-inch shells, one of which wrecked her steering, while two passed clean through her without exploding. Wheeling out of control, the helpless Saikyō careened past one Japanese warship and straight for the Naniwa, missing the prow of Captain Tōgō’s ship by a hair’s breadth. 8
From a distance, any problems among the Japanese were disregarded. To James Allan, watching the action from a nearby cliff, the Japanese remained promptly obedient to their signals and did not let up their barrages, while the Chinese were clearly getting the worst of it: ‘The Japanese vessels, working in concert and keeping together, as we began to perceive, seemed to sail around and around the enemy, pouring on them an incessant cannonade, and excelling them in rapidity of fire and manoeuvering. Some of the Chinese vessels appeared to me to present an appearance of helplessness, and there was no indication of combination as amongst their opponents.’9
Aboard the Dingyuan, the wounded, half-blind William Tyler stumbled through the carnage. His ears were still ringing from the blast, and would continue to do so for the rest of his life. Up ahead he saw a friend of his, Lieutenant Wu. Even as they exchanged greetings, a man standing nearby was torn apart by an enemy shell, smearing gore and entrails across the deck. ‘So this is civilisation,’ said Wu. ‘This is what you foreigners are so keen to teach us.’10
The survivors on the Dingyuan tried to give as good as they had got. Even with Admiral Ding suffering from terrible burns, with one leg left crushed by the stupid opening salvo of Captain Liu, his ship made a beeline for the Matsushima, the flagship of the Japanese commander Admiral Itō. The two ships pounded each other for an hour, with one shell from the Chinese vessel scoring a direct hit on one of the Matsushima’s guns. Scandalously, the shell broke open to reveal that it was filled not with explosives, but with cement. Another shell from the Dingyuan proved to be of higher-quality manufacture, setting off a pile of ammunition on the Matsushima. The Japanese flagship was left listing and in flames, many of her guns out of action as Admiral Itō steered her out of harm’s way.11
Itō hoisted a new signal: ‘Disregard movements of the Commander-in-Chief’, in order to make it clear that he was merely dealing with his own damage, and that his removal of the Matsushima from the line of battle was not a sign of a general retreat. No such options were open to the Dingyuan – even if Admiral Ding had wanted to retreat, Nicholls was dying below decks. Tyler manned one of the short-handed guns and the selectively obedient Liu was still steering the ship, but the Dingyuan had lost most of her masts. There was, in fact, no longer any mast on which Admiral Ding could hoist any signal, even if he had wished to.
The Japanese ships continued to tear at the Chinese. ‘Throughout the fight,’ commented Tyler with sour admiration, ‘the enemy was as orderly as in manoeuvres; in general, [the Japanese] … circled around us, we steaming on an inner circle. Gradually, the vessels on that inner circle became, from one cause or the other, fewer and fewer.’
The Chinese had begun the day with ten ships. Now, only four remained in the fray, with the others either sinking or fleeing for safety. The captain of the Zhiyuan (‘The Deliverer’) had gone down with his ship after trying to ram the lead Japanese vessel, the Yoshino. From the shore, James Allan saw the Zhiyuan’s final moments:
[The Zhiyuan] had evidently been for long in difficulties, labouring heavily, with the steam pumps constantly in requisition, as we could tell from the streams of water [that] poured from her sides. Bravely she fought on, unsupported, and her upper deck and top guns were served until she sank. At length her bows were completely engulfed; the stern rose high out of the water, disclosing the whirling propellers, and bit by bit she disappeared. We could hear distinctly the yelling sounds of triumph that rose from the Japanese ships as she went down.12
Other Chinese participants had found less heroic ways to leave the battle. The Qiyuan, that same ship that had deserted the Kowshing, did not even enter the battle, but steamed immediately for Port Arthur, her captain signalling that she was suffering from technical difficulties. Later, it was discovered that her crewmen had sabotaged their own guns with a sledgehammer.13
Amid such chaos, the Naniwa steered almost entirely unscathed, with only one man wounded. Only a single Chinese shell struck the Naniwa during the whole battle, smashing through the ship’s hull just below the waterline but failing to explode. Instead, it all but plugged its own entry hole, and spent the rest of the battle where it had ended up, nestled snugly but dangerously inside one of the ship’s coal bunkers.
Not every Japanese vessel had the same luck. The Hiei ran so close to the enemy that the exchange of fire was virtually point blank, devastating the Japanese vessel. The small Akagi came to the Hiei’s rescue, dragging herself into a fight with the Laiyuan (‘Advent’), an armoured Chinese cruiser four times her size. A lucky shot from the Akagi took out the Laiyuan’s bridge, but the gunners on the cruiser tore the Akagi apart in retaliation. Engineers on the Laiyuan remained diligently at their posts, as fires raged through the ship, the temperature in the engine room rising close to 200 degrees Fahrenheit, leaving them blinded, maimed or dying. All the while, the crew of the Naniwa maintained their calm routine of aiming, firing and reloading, pouring rounds into Chinese vessels distracted by other Japanese ships nearby.14
The fire aboard the Dingyuan seemed out of control; the massive warship was now a tower of flames on the sea, as the Japanese ships circled nearer like sharks. Suddenly, a second iron giant swept through the smoke. It was her sister-ship, the Zhenyuan, bravely placing herself in the line of fire while the crew of the flagship struggled to get the fires under control. The Japanese shells now concentrated largely on the two behemoths, while aboard the Zhenyuan the quiet Captain Lin calmly returned fire.15
By now, the light was fading. As the fires aboard the Dingyuan were replaced by smoke, it came to Admiral Itō’s attention that the sun was setting and it was becoming harder to see. His chief concern, considering the number of Chinese vessels that had fled from the scene unharmed, was that they might even now be planning to send out a flotilla of unlit torpedo boats under cover of darkness,
to sink the victorious Japanese even as they claimed to have won the day. After a signal from Itō, the Japanese broke off. The next time their vessels circled out of range, they simply did not return.
The Chinese, who had not actually thought far enough ahead to plan any stealthy night attacks, were left baffled by the Japanese departure. Aboard the smoking Dingyuan, von Hanneken and the concussed Tyler celebrated at the base of the bridge ladder with champagne and biscuits, and pointedly did not offer any to Captain Liu. On her sister-ship, the Zhenyuan, Philo McGiffin was similarly mystified. ‘Had they stayed with us a quarter of an hour more,’ he wrote, ‘our guns would have been silent and our ships defenceless.’16
According to popular myth, a falcon trailed the Japanese fleet for much of the day. As Itō turned from the battle, it swooped out the sky and put to flight a flock of terrified crows. The falcon settled on the mast of the Takachiho and was supposedly captured by the sailors and later presented to the Emperor as a divine omen of Japanese victory. It became the first of many supposed portents of divine approval.17
Itō’s fleet steered a course that looped back towards the open sea, from where the most badly damaged ships were detached for repairs, or, in the case of the Matsushima, the long limp back to Japan. Itō transferred his command to the relatively undamaged Hashidate and took the ships on a long circle out of harm’s way that brought them back in the vicinity of Haiyang at dawn the next day. The Chinese, however, were nowhere to be seen.18
Two ships were sent out to ascertain what had happened to them: the Akitsushima and Captain Tōgō in the Naniwa. It was, however, not much of a mystery. Weihaiwei had no dry dock facilities, so any heavily damaged Chinese vessels were sure to have run for Port Arthur at the end of the Liaodong Peninsula – the only place where they could repair themselves to any great degree. Not all of them had made it. On the beach at Dalian Bay, just a few tantalising miles short of Port Arthur, Tōgō found a beached gunboat that had clearly foundered only partway home. His men used the ship for target practice and blew her up, although subsequent Chinese reports suggested that the Chinese had done so themselves on seeing the approaching Japanese in order to stop her falling into enemy hands.19 At Port Arthur itself, Tōgō saw signs of several Chinese ships undergoing repairs. He noted the visible masts and flags, and then turned back towards Korea to make his report.
The Chinese fleet had been badly beaten, but it was still in possession of its two giants, the Dingyuan and the Zhenyuan, as well as several smaller vessels. Amazingly, in one of the unexplained decisions of the war, it also had a month’s respite, as the attentions of the Japanese military turned to the land war. Even if the Japanese were wary of Port Arthur’s coast defences, it would have surely been wise to keep a naval presence off shore, ready to attack the Chinese if they left Port Arthur, as they were sure to do as the Japanese army drew ever closer along the Liaodong Peninsula.
Instead, Tōgō and his fellow captains were back on duty escorting the army. Even as the Japanese prepared to cross the Yalu into Chinese territory, a massive ‘Second Army’ was assembled in Hiroshima. The fleet returned to Kure to pick them up, transporting them across the strait and along the coast of Korea, dropping them off at Huayuan (‘Flower Garden’), a harbour on the Liaodong Peninsula itself, eighty miles from Port Arthur. The Chinese offered no resistance, and the Second Army was landed without a shot fired. It was a plan typical of the Japanese military’s bias. As in his younger days in the war against the Shōgun, Captain Tōgō was a glorified bus-driver for the army. The landing at Huayuan was a military masterstroke from the army’s perspective, leapfrogging the defenders of the Yalu and leaving them to the First Army, while the Second Army charged along the Liaodong Pensinsula with naval support.
Meanwhile, in Port Arthur, the Chinese war machine was not as efficient as the Japanese might have suspected. William Tyler’s first action on reaching safety was to organise a media clampdown, less for military ends than to prevent the vainglorious Philo McGiffin from sending telegrams back to America boasting of his naval prowess. For the first week that the Chinese fleet was in Port Arthur, the officers bickered among themselves about who was responsible, while the hulks of their warships sat in disrepair. Two weeks after the Battle of the Yalu, an officer aboard the Dingyuan stumbled across the rotting corpse of one of her sailors, left to decompose where he had fallen. Von Hanneken had had enough of the sea and voted himself a commission on land. Admiral Ding’s new ‘vice-admiral’ was John McClure, an alcoholic tugboat captain deemed by many of the surviving foreigners to be a disaster waiting to happen.20
Eventually, on 3 November, the fleet was ordered to leave Port Arthur and chase the Japanese from local waters. Admiral Ding’s superior, the Viceroy Li Hongzhang, protested that the Chinese fleet was reduced to six ships and two torpedo boats, against fourteen Japanese vessels with seven torpedo boats. A requested reinforcement of five ships from China’s southern fleet had been refused, which left the Chinese fleet, even with the two giants, hopelessly outclassed in a pitched battle against the Japanese.
This explanation, at least, seemed to convince the authorities in Beijing, who instead ordered that Admiral Ding’s ships be used to transport army reinforcements from Tianjin to Port Arthur, ready to fight the coming Japanese onslaught on land. Admiral Ding, however, had already given up Port Arthur as lost, regarding it as a site that was doomed to fall as soon as the land route to it had fallen into enemy hands. Instead, he led his fleet out of Port Arthur, abandoning it to its fate, and fleeing across the gulf to Weihaiwei.
On the morning of 7 November, Tōgō’s Naniwa was part of a main force covering the army’s advance on Dalian Bay. Five smaller boats swept ahead in search of mines, but found nothing. With the sun above the horizon, Tōgō fired some exploratory rounds at Dalian’s fortifications, but elicited no response. The entire harbour was eerily quiet. It was three hours before Admiral Itō began to suspect that what he had thought to be a trap was actually another Chinese failure. He nudged his ships closer to land, at a range that would have put them within deadly danger from the guns of the forts. Through his binoculars, Captain Tōgō saw movement in an area around Dalian. But the uniforms were clearly Japanese. As he watched with mounting surprise, there was a flurry of activity on land, and a flag was run up a pole on one of the forts. It reached the height and snapped into view in the wind – it was the Rising Sun. Other forts began flying Rising Sun flags of their own. The Chinese torpedo boats in Dalian harbour, that might have offered some (admittedly suicidal) resistance to the Japanese, were later found to have surrendered practically without a fight. The capture of Dalian gave the Japanese a fully-serviced, operational harbour, deep in Chinese territory, close to Port Arthur and readily resupplyable from both land and sea. Intelligence gathered at Dalian, quite possibly from the surrendered gunboat commanders, told the Japanese of Ding’s dash for Weihaiwei. Admiral Itō sent the Naniwa and a dozen other ships to see for themselves on 11 November. Sure enough, Tōgō could see the remainder of the enemy fleet nestled behind the Weihaiwei forts. But the Japanese did not advance any closer, nor did the Chinese come out to fight.
The Chinese could not even retreat without inviting disaster. Admiral Ding himself protested at the suicidal behaviour of some Chinese commanders. He understood, he said, that suicide was a traditional exit strategy for the Chinese, but complained that the cost of training captains was so high that suicide should be discouraged.21 Unknown to Captain Tōgō, the brave, quiet Lin Taizeng, whom both he and Admiral Ding so admired, had become a casualty of what should have been a simple sailing from one port to another. As the massive Zhenyuan approached Weihaiwei, she had struck an underwater hazard and suffered some damage. Captain Lin was inconsolable – he knew that there were no adequate facilities to repair her. Divers did what they could to fix the hole, pouring cement into an 18-foot gash in the double hull, but the Zhenyuan was no longer suitable for putting out to open sea, and was now rendered little better than a fl
oating fort in the habour.22 The news of her condition was hushed up, but Captain Lin could not bear the shame, and committed suicide. At his funeral, people spat in his coffin.
Abandoned by her maritime defenders, Port Arthur fell within a fortnight to a Japanese land assault. The Chinese defenders could have held out for considerably longer had they not decided to abandon their outer ring of forts, affording the Japanese with ready-made positions from which to bombard the remaining strongpoints. They also tempted fate by posting grisly trophies on the approaches to Port Arthur. With each new area of ground gained, the Japanese soldiers would encounter fellow countrymen, killed, mutilated and strung up as warnings. When Port Arthur eventually fell, there was a massacre of the inhabitants by the infuriated Japanese. Supporters of the Japanese, of whom there were many, glossed over the slaughter as the reaction of the Japanese to Chinese taunts and atrocities. Opponents of the Japanese instead fretted about the behaviour of the Japanese army towards its defeated foes, raising concerns that had ominous foreshadowings of the war crime trials that would follow the Second World War.
Tōgō’s part in the capture of Port Arthur was minimal. He was with the Imperial Fleet as it shelled some of the town’s outlying forts and was a likely participant in the apprehension or sinking of several fleeing despatch boats in the seasonal mists. On 21 November, an approaching storm threatened to dash the fleet into the rocks of the coasts, and the ships were ordered out into deeper water where they would be safer. When Tōgō returned to Port Arthur a couple of days later, the town was already in Japanese hands, and with it the entire Liaodong Peninsula.
8
Though Your Swords Be Broken
Across the gulf at Weihaiwei, Admiral Ding did not rate his chances of a successful sea battle against the Japanese. Instead, he dug in at the sea port, hoping perhaps for a diplomatic end to the onslaught before he was obliged to defend the area. Rather than send out his remaining ships against the better-prepared Japanese, Admiral Ding planned to wait out the Japanese for as long as possible in Weihaiwei itself, his great battleships little more than floating forts.
Admiral Togo Page 12