Five blockships, disguised as coal ships, chugged away from Tōgō’s fleet on the night of 23 February. Their approach was timed to coincide with the setting of the crescent moon at half past midnight. Safely in place, the ships waited in silence until the early hours of 24 February, going into action at 4:30 a.m. One struck a reef and was unable to go on. The second and third raced for the harbour mouth under enemy fire and scuttled themselves in approximately the right positions. The fourth and fifth had less luck, misreading signals from other vessels and misjudging their position, opening their valves and sinking in less advantageous positions. The crews managed to escape with only one dead and a few wounded. Three crews made it to the torpedo boat that was waiting to pick them up; two others were blown out to sea, but were later picked up by Japanese ships.
Tōgō continued to keep the Russians bottled up in Port Arthur, while the Japanese marched on Seoul from Chemulpo, then north to Pyongyang. The Russian response remained sluggish. The ships in Vladivostok were kept busy by a small squadron of Japanese cruisers. Meanwhile, the much-lauded Trans-Siberian Railway was found to be ill-equipped for mass mobilisation. Despite the Tsar’s boasts of his strong communication links with the East, the Trans-Siberian Railway still lacked a vital 40-mile section of track spanning Lake Baikal in Siberia. In summertime, train carriages were ferried directly across the water; in winter, the Russians relied on running tracks across the ice, which was forever shifting and heaving, thus delaying any attempts at crossing. While the Russians struggled with this bottleneck, the Japanese continued to head north largely unopposed. The winter, however, took its toll on them, as did the lack of transport available while much of the navy remained occupied guarding against the Russians. The Japanese dug in around Pyongyang and did their best to make friends with the Koreans, dutifully paying for anything they requisitioned and awaiting the spring thaw.
For the Russians at Port Arthur, the prospects looked bleak. As winter turned to spring, the Japanese were sure to advance out of Korea and into Liaodong, where they might be expected to cut off Port Arthur from any hope of being relieved by land. With Port Arthur under siege, there would be little hope of relief from the railway line that stretched north across Manchuria to Harbin, the junction with the Trans-Siberian Railway. By the time Russian reinforcements arrived in Harbin, they would face an uphill struggle to come to Port Arthur’s aid.
But before the Japanese could cut off the railway, the Russians got the closest thing to a saviour – the respected Vice Admiral Stepan Makarov arrived on 8 March to take charge. Makarov was the best that the Russian navy had to offer, a great captain who had been shunted aside into a pointless onshore post by the politics of the Russian military aristocracy. Now, he raised his personal flag aboard the Petropavlovsk, regarded as the battleship in the best state of repair in Port Arthur.
‘Makarov is coming! Makarov is coming!’ the excited cry went up among the men, and when his flag fluttered in the spring breeze from his flagship’s mast, there were reports of sailors doffing their caps and crossing themselves in devout gratitude. Makarov’s fame was based in part on his military service record, but also on his grasp of naval theory. He had produced many standard sea charts and was credited as the inventor of a new class of steam-powered ice-breaker. Best of all, his fame had spread far and wide through the publication of a textbook on naval tactics. Unknown to the Russians, Tōgō had kept a copy, heavily annotated, by his side for the previous decade.18
With Makarov’s arrival, the Russians suddenly began behaving like they were at war. The Retvizan, which had been little more than a hulk-fort at the harbour entrance for several weeks, was now refloated and repaired. The Russian ships were scraped clean and made ready for battle; and the next time Japanese ships appeared in the vicinity, a party of Russian ships sallied out to engage them.
Tōgō now faced reports of occasional skirmishes between Russian and Japanese vessels, with mounting casualties. One unnamed Russian destroyer took several damaging hits that left her dead in the water. The Japanese boarded, only to find the Russians waiting for them with swords and pistols in hand, ready for a savage battle from deck to deck. Before the Japanese could seize the ship, the crew opened her valves and sank her.19 Makarov was instrumental in this new-found Russian valour. His flag leapt from ship to ship, flying from whichever vessel was in the best position to lead an attack, even if it was not the best armed or armoured. But with the waters receding and the harbour approach still not dredged, Makarov was forced to run back to port and wait for the next high tide.
Tōgō took full advantage of the lull, sending a group of ships over to shell the harbour indirectly from the other side of the mountains, while other vessels closer at hand spotted the fall of shot and telegraphed their observations in real time back to the gunners. Russian plans for Port Arthur had included the building of additional forts to prevent such a bombardment; but as with the dredging, they had never quite got around to it. Instead, the Russians were left fuming as the Japanese shells crashed into the supposedly safe anchorage. The damage was minimal, but it wounded Russian pride. On the bridge of the Petropavlovsk, Makarov lamented his enemy’s ability to exploit Russian weaknesses:
Tōgō is a shrewd fellow to have taken advantage of low tide, when we cannot go out, to make indirect firing upon the harbour and then withdraw before high tide. It is quite provoking to be handled in this way. But I must admit that he knows his business all right. Well, he shall soon catch it for this!20
Late in March, the land forces were drawing near. Advance units of the Russian army had made it across Lake Baikal and reached the critical junction of Harbin in north Manchuria. Now they had streamed down the southern Manchurian railway from Harbin towards Mukden, the capital of Manchuria. Meanwhile, the Japanese were still on the Korean side of the Yalu river. Neither land army had yet reached the Liaodong Peninsula, leaving Port Arthur’s fate still unsure. Unknown to Tōgō, his actions had already made him an international celebrity – 19 May 1904 saw Tōgō’s portrait gracing the cover of the Illustrated London News, along with several conjectural reports of his naval actions against Makarov.
On 22 March, Tōgō was back for a rematch, and noted with interest that the Russians had improved their preparations. Battleships returned fire when the Japanese attempted to fire over the mountain tops again; and every fort was ready to open fire on any ship that strayed within range. One Japanese ship, the Fuji, sustained heavy damage and was only saved by her watertight compartments – in the course of the conflict, the Fuji often bore the brunt of the bad luck, such that Japanese sailors began to give her a superstitiously wide berth.
By this time, Makarov had ordered the approaches to Port Arthur to be heavily mined against any further Japanese assaults. Remembering similar hazards at Chemulpo many years earlier, Tōgō had his officers keep meticulous records of the courses taken by Russian ships out of the harbour. Any strange alterations in course were sure to reflect the location of mines below the surface, and Tōgō wanted that information to hand. Tōgō put the observations to use in April, in a meeting with the commander of the Combined Squadron’s mine-laying force, Oda Kiyozo.
‘As you perhaps know,’ mused Tōgō, ‘Makarov comes out of port with his fleet every time we make an attack on Port Arthur. He always takes the same movement, wheeling round in the direction of Xiansheng-cui. Admiral Shimamura and Captain Akiyama will tell you just what route the enemy’s fleet is in the habit of taking. I wish you to lay your mines on that route on the night before our next attack.’21
Tōgō’s plan had to wait until the spring storms had died down. On the night of 12 April, Oda put to sea with his minelayer, a vessel whose arrival had been long awaited. There was still a fierce drizzle in the air, creating a haze that reduced visibility to winter snowstorm levels and severely affected the performance of the Russian searchlights. Oda’s ship was the Koryo, a light civilian vessel that had been requisitioned as a minelayer soon after it was built.22 From the dec
k, guarded by a small flotilla of silent torpedo boats, he looked on as the Koryo carefully laid mines in what all believed to be the likely path of Makarov’s fleet. Then, satisfied that Tōgō’s orders had been carried out to the letter, the small group of ships slipped away to safety.
At dawn on 13 April, the night-long rain began to dry out into spring mist. A group of Japanese destroyers, originally placed in the area to watch over the Koryo, were still in the vicinity when they ran into a hapless Russian vessel, the Strashini. Outnumbering the Strashini four-to-one, the Japanese made short work of her – she was dead in the water within ten minutes, and sinking fast. A Japanese rescue operation to fish the Russian survivors out of the water was called off by the arrival of a new Russian ship, the Bayan, ready for a new fight. The Bayan, too, faced overwhelming odds, but wisely ran back towards Port Arthur before she could take any fatal damage. As Tōgō might have hoped, the Bayan was only seeking a temporary respite. She was soon back with reinforcements – a veritable parade of the cream of the Russian fleet, including Makarov aboard the Petropavlovsk. In the meantime, Tōgō arrived with his own forces to reinforce the destroyers, leading many to assume that the months of waiting were finally over, and that the long awaited, decisive ‘Battle of Port Arthur’ was finally about to take place.
Makarov, however, had come to slap down four foolhardy destroyers, not to engage the entire Japanese fleet. As first Tōgō’s Mikasa, and then ship after ship of the Japanese navy materialised out of the mist, Makarov sensed that he was being lured into a trap and signalled an immediate withdrawal. With none of their earlier haphazardness, the Russian fleet acted as one, all turning at the same instant, rushing back within the relative safety of the range of the coastal forts. Sure that the Japanese would not venture any further, Makarov began his characteristic parade to starboard, right into the path Tōgō had outlined for his minelayers. Crucially, in his haste to chastise the destroyers, Makarov had not ordered his customary mine-sweeping of the outer harbour before charging out.
On the bridge of the Petropavlovsk, Makarov thought he saw a shadow in the water – a long, dark shape sliding in the shallows. He raised a new signal, warning his men to watch out for enemy submarines, unaware that the Japanese had none. Tensely, expectantly, Tōgō watched through his binoculars. As the Russian ships receded, they faded back into the mist, until he was no longer able to tell one from the other. The seconds ticked past and Tōgō let his binoculars fall, scowling into the featureless haze. The officers around him on the forebridge, who were all aware of the plan, did not dare breathe a word of doubt about the Koryo’s mission.
Suddenly, a vast plume of black smoke erupted through the grey air. Milliseconds behind it came the thunderous rumble of an explosion. The black cloud rolled with terrifying speed over the outline of a Russian ship, as the officers around Tōgō cheered. Even Tōgō permitted himself an uncharacteristic smile, as the smoke cleared and the vessel’s outline was nowhere to be seen. Anxiously, Tōgō’s deck officers asked him how they should phrase their report, as it was not clear which ship had been hit and to what extent she had been damaged. Expressionlessly, Tōgō announced that it was sure to have been the Petropavlovsk, and it was sure to have sunk.
He was right. Amid the elation on the Mikasa, the Japanese had perhaps failed to note the sound of not one but several explosions. Survivors on the Petropavlovsk reported that the entire ship had been violently shaken by the first explosion. They had barely struggled to their feet when a second blast covered the deck with a pall of yellow-blue smoke, sure to have been the detonation of the Petropavlovsk’s eighteen torpedoes. Third and fourth explosions from within the hull were her bursting boilers and exploding magazine, practically ripping the Petropavlovsk in two. The ship listed dangerously to the side, her rear propellers already out of the water. She sank in less than two minutes, taking 630 sailors with her. Makarov, badly wounded by the explosion, went down with his ship.
The Russians launched boats to rescue the survivors, fishing barely eighty men from the water. Other boats poured round after round of ammunition into the sea, falsely believing that the Japanese had a submarine somewhere in the vicinity. In fact, the dark shadow Makarov had reported was a very unlucky shark; but by the time the Russians had worked this out, a second vessel had wandered into the Koryo’s minefield.23 A new explosion tore through the hull of the Pobieda, although she was spared the fate of the Petropavlovsk. Leaning perilously close to the water, the damaged Pobieda limped back into Port Arthur, where distraught land forces were already at prayer and in mourning for the loss of Admiral Makarov.
Tōgō refused to give the Russians time to grieve. On successive nights, he sent warships around to the far side of the hills, to continue his characteristic indirect bombardment of the harbour. Meanwhile, he instructed other vessels to launch Holmes Lights towards the harbour mouth. Originally designed as distress flares, these buoys contained calcium carbide, which would transform into acetelyne gas on contact with the water. A second chemical, calcium phosphide, would combust in the water and ignite the gas, turning each buoy into a floating torch, liable to burn unchecked until its fuel ran out. Seeing lights on the water, the Russians diligently took aim and blazed away, wasting their ammunition by shooting at ghosts.
In distant St Petersburg, the Tsar’s chief of staff made a fateful decision. The war in the Far East had been regarded for months as a minor irritation – an unpleasant itch that would all too easily be dealt with by a fraction of the Russian military machine, just as soon as they arrived in the theatre of war to chastise the Japanese. Response had been sluggish, but the death of Admiral Makarov seemed to galvanise the Russians. On 30 April 1904, it was announced that the Russian Baltic Fleet was to be renamed the Second Pacific Squadron. The implication was clear: a heavy, overwhelming flotilla of reinforcements would shortly be on its way. The slight Russian advantage in tonnage would be increased by a huge number of new arrivals – sufficient tonnage to outclass the Japanese two-to-one. It would take many months, to be sure, but a Russian relief force was coming. The Russians had started a countdown for the rescue of Port Arthur by sea, and were sure to keep the Japanese in the dark as to when the fleet would arrive.24
Tōgō ordered another mission to close the harbour with blockships. After screening thousands of volunteers, a handful of men was sent in on the cloudy night of 2 May, in command of eleven vessels. A strong wind blew up into a gale by the appointed hour, leading Commander Hayashi, in charge of the mission, to call it off – it was more important to Tōgō that the ships be sunk in the right position than it was to merely harass the Russians. However, only three vessels received, or admitted to receiving, the commander’s orders. The other eight, fired up with suicidal fervour, continued their mission despite the countermand.
The ships were commanded by eager lieutenants of the Japanese fleet, determined to make a name for themselves. Five of the ships successfully ran the gauntlet of enemy fire, scuttling themselves around the harbour mouth with varying degrees of success and varying losses of life. In some cases, the crew successfully made it off with minimal casualties. In others, the ship’s crew took heavy losses before reaching their target destination – sinking in flames or off course due to a dead helmsman. In still another, the crew successfully disembarked, only for their lifeboat to be overturned on the rough sea – some were picked up by the Russians, others drowned. On hearing the news that most of his vessels had ‘disobeyed’ his order, Commander Hayashi ordered his own boat to turn back and join them, only to be left inconsolable by a jammed steering mechanism that prevented him seeking a similar death.
The Russians watched from the relative safety of the shoreline as many Japanese sailors trudged out of the waves onto the shore. The Russians waited expectantly for the Japanese to surrender, only to look on aghast as the hopelesly outnumbered handful of men charged Russian positions with pistols and rifles. Others reported similar small-arms attacks from the Japanese that made it ashore, or in
one case, a stricken lifeboat whose passengers fired upon would-be Russian rescuers. Still another beached Japanese ship was the site of a gruesome end – Russian soldiers arrived to take the men into custody, only to discover a sword-wielding officer calmly beheading his fellow survivors. Of the 158 Japanese that had manned the eight ships, only 63 were picked up offshore. Another seventeen were later found in Russian custody, having been apprehended unconscious. The rest either died in the assault, drowned in the aftermath, or were killed in a series of suicidal charges against the Russian forts.
Regardless of Tōgō’s orders or Commander Hayashi’s wishes, the attitude of the blockship crews was a curious development. In March, during a similar assault, reporting of Japanese actions centred on the heroism of one Lieutenant Hirose, who died when he entered a sinking ship in search of one of his fellow officers. The emphasis, in March, was on Hirose’s devotion to his men and his duty. Less than a month later, the attitude of the officers seems markedly different. One Lieutenant Shiraishi, who died in the May assault, openly announced before setting out that he intended to scuttle his ship as ordered, before taking his escape boat and heading straight for one of the Russian forts, apparently with the intention of capturing it, despite the certain likelihood of dying in the attempt.25
Hence, while Tōgō maintained his inscrutable smile and habitual calm in May, we might suppose that others in his service were becoming more eager for victory. Despite an outward appearance of cooperation, there may have still been a certain rivalry between the land and sea forces, and it was only a matter of time before the army literally walked up to Port Arthur and subjected it to a different form of siege. But Tōgō was quite satisfied with the continued blockade. Russian naval strength was still significantly greater than that of Japan, but was almost entirely impotent as long as it was trapped at Port Arthur. Tōgō did not need to sink the Russian fleet; he merely needed to keep it from sinking his own, and from sinking the troop transports and supply ships that plied the narrow straits between Japan and Korea.
Admiral Togo Page 17