1

YELLOW DUST

The sun grew hotter by the day.

Although the army had landed and been deployed according to plan on its way to Manchuria, subsequent fighting was not going as well as it might have. The Second Army was advancing northward through the hills, headed for enemy headquarters at Telissu railway station. Fighting was extremely fierce, the margin of victory continually razor thin.

Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo fretted nervously, wondering what the devil the Second Army was doing. Presumably distracted by the heavy fighting, the Second Army command was not filing up-to-the-minute reports on battle conditions but merely sending a series of wires with the identical message: “Now in the thick of battle.” Of what exactly was transpiring, there was no word.

For a while, Imperial Headquarters was filled with gloom on the assumption that the Second Army must be losing badly. “They do nothing but panic,” thought Kodama Gentarō disparagingly. The thing to do, in his opinion, was to establish a Manchurian army with on-site senior command over the various armies. This would mean transferring Chief of the General Staff Ōyama Iwao and Vice Chief Kodama himself from Tokyo to Manchuria.

Slipups by Kodama and others were partly to blame for the trouble. Their calculations as to the amount of ammunition required for this campaign had been fuzzy, and there was no fixed means of transport. As a result, the Second Army faced nagging problems about replenishing its supplies. Their weapons and ammunition too had turned out to be far inferior to those of the Russians. The rifles were all right, but the artillery guns were ineffective, a third less powerful than Russian guns in terms of range and speed of firing. Not only that, many of the shells failed to detonate.

The cause of the Second Army’s string of victories lay rather in the Russians. Although War Minister Alexei Kuropatkin’s simple, grand strategy aimed at gathering a large army in the vicinity of Liaoyang and using it to destroy the Japanese Army as it advanced northward, Viceroy Alexeyev took seriously the defeats at Jinzhou and Nanshan, and ordered Kuropatkin to rescue Port Arthur. As a result, the army’s purpose was divided, and Kuropatkin sent half his soldiers south.

Lieutenant General Stakelberg, commander of the southbound corps, was known for his intrepidness. South he went, clashing on the way with the northbound Second Army at Telissu. He fought with great courage and put intense pressure on the Japanese forces wherever he encountered them. However, he was laboring under a serious misapprehension: he overestimated the strength of the Second Army several times over.

In the end, Stakelberg pulled back. Had his military intelligence been accurate and had he swept southward with sufficient force to penetrate the Second Army’s zone of control, the Japanese forces, unable to resist, would undoubtedly have suffered a crushing defeat.

The great battle of Liaoyang was fast approaching. This was to be a major engagement of the sort where two sides come together at a preset location, concentrating all the manpower and firepower they each have at their disposal, and clash at a predictable hour until the fated outcome is reached. The looming battle of Liaoyang would be a pitched battle on a scale rarely seen in world history.

With Japan clearly in need of senior officers in command on the scene, it was a given that the man who would actually command the Manchurian Army would be General Kodama Gentarō. Everyone knew that only he had the brains to be head of military strategy for the Russo-Japanese War. The question was: who should be his commander in chief?

Field Marshal Yamagata Aritomo volunteered enthusiastically for the job, once again causing a slight difficulty for Kodama. All his life long, Yamagata was dogged by the childish grand ambition—or the poetic delusion—of proving his manhood by leading a great army in a decisive battle on which hung the fate of the nation. His battle experience was limited to his days in the Chōshū irregular militia, and he had been involved almost exclusively in military administration ever since. This born statesman was highly accomplished in that area, and from the earliest nation-building days of Meiji had been the respected head of Japan’s military. But there was no getting away from his particularly disagreeable personality and narrowness of spirit that would not allow talented underlings to exercise their full abilities.

“I can’t do the job under old man Yamagata,” Kodama let on, appealing to Prime Minister Katsura Tarō and Army Minister Terauchi Masatake. Both Yamagata and Kodama were men of Chōshū, as were Katsura and Terauchi. Though he and Yamagata were bosom friends, Kodama knew that he couldn’t fight a war under the leadership of the strongly idiosyncratic Yamagata, who was bound to second-guess every strategic decision until Kodama would be more worn out from dealing with him than with the enemy.

Kodama had had someone else in mind from the first: Ōyama Iwao. A former Satsuma general, Ōyama was a man of immense generosity and a born leader. Kodama campaigned on his behalf, but Terauchi and Katsura deferred to Yamagata as a genrō of the military. Finally, Kodama appealed to Emperor Meiji, hoping he would issue a direct command. The emperor was not particularly enamored of Yamagata, preferring Ōyama’s expansive style, so he willingly intervened. Ōyama got the job.

Soon after Ōyama was made commander in chief of the Manchurian Army, he went to the Naval Ministry and presented himself at the minister’s office, reporting formally to Yamamoto Gombei, who had already been informed of the appointment and so showed no surprise. He did express regret, however, telling Ōyama outright that it was a shame, that Ōyama belonged in Tokyo and the promotion should have gone instead to Nozu Michitsura, commander of the Fourth Army.

“Yes, I know,” answered Ōyama, equally forthrightly. “He’s a better man for the job.” A fellow native of Satsuma, Ōyama knew all too well Nozu’s brilliance in war. “But all the army commanders are heroes,” he said. The First Army was led by Kuroki Tamemoto, the Second by Oku Yasukata, the Third by Nogi Maresuke, the Fourth by Nozu Michitsura. All four men had played active roles during the upheaval at the end of the Tokugawa period and had come through the fires of war in the Meiji period. Moreover, they were equals. Singling out Nozu as commander in chief would be likely to raise the hackles of the rest, creating a difficult situation. “That’s why I have to go.”

That same day, Ōyama had an audience with Emperor Meiji at the palace. The emperor shared with him the thinking behind his decision. “Yamagata is a good man but too prickly. He criticizes every little thing, which seems to upset the other leaders, but you’re not so demanding. That’s why I picked you.”

Ōyama laughed. “So you’re saying I’ll make a good commander in chief because I’m fog-brained, is that it?”

The emperor laughed back. “Well, something like that.”

Later, Ōyama relayed this conversation to Yamamoto Gombei with a chuckle. Then he added, “Since I was chosen for my fogginess, I’ll leave the details of fighting to Kodama. But if it turns into a losing battle, I’ll take the reins.”

Then he made a request. “I want you to decide when it’s over.” He meant, decide when to make a peace feeler. The two men had previously spent much time discussing this very thing and had begun the war with the understanding that in the end they would appeal to a third country for peace negotiations. With Ōyama off on the battlefield, it would be up to Yamamoto Gombei to carry out this mission single-handed.

“I accept,” said Yamamoto. He personally filled a clay teapot with tea and served his friend. Ōyama picked up his cup and emptied it in one gulp as if it were medicine, then paused before drawling a thank you in Kagoshima dialect. He had some odd ways.

On July 6, 1904, at ten o’clock in the morning, Ōyama Iwao and Kodama Gentarō set off from Tokyo’s Shimbashi Station with their staffs in tow. They arrived two days later at Hiroshima, where the Aki Maru was waiting in Ujina Harbor to carry them to the scene of battle. They set sail on July 10.

On board ship, Kodama spent little time in his cabin, preferring to roam around and strike up random conversations or look out at the scenery. He was like a windup doll, constantly in motion. This small man had always been that way. Traditionally, brilliant strategists seem always to be calm individuals whose every spare moment is devoted to reading. If such a pattern exists, Kodama Gentarō was an exception. With no formal schooling in the ways of the modern military, this self-taught man read little once he was furnished with the necessary knowledge. Only in moments of extreme boredom would he sprawl on the floor with a popular historical narrative, reading at random. The bookworms in the military used to marvel that stratagems so ingenious could emerge from a mind like Kodama’s. The only explanation was that he was a man of genius.

At this time, Jacob Meckel was in the Ministry of War in Berlin. Germany itself was allied with Russia, and so supported Russia in the Russo-Japanese War, but Meckel personally rooted for the Japanese. He also assured the newspaper reporters assigned to the ministry that Japan would win, an outcome of which he had no doubt. Once he told a journalist, “Japan has Kodama. As long as he’s there, the Japanese Army is bound to come out on top.” Even to Meckel, the most brilliant tactician in the German Army, Kodama’s strange faculties came across as genius.

To digress a bit, here’s what Meckel said about the Japanese military around the same time. “German and French military officers show great zeal for study, but there’s no comparing them with Japanese officers. The Japanese make amazing efforts to increase their own knowledge of military matters. The other distinguishing characteristic of the Japanese military man is his fearlessness of death, which will doubtless play into the coming victory.”

The Aki Maru was heading for Dalian Harbor with Ōyama and Kodama aboard, but stopped along the way to call on the Combined Fleet, anchored at the base in the Changshan Islands. This was to allow the two leaders to meet with Tōgō Heihachirō on board the Mikasa and discuss the joint operation.

Saneyuki sat in on these talks as a member of Tōgō’s staff. Kodama kept a cigar in his mouth throughout. Every so often, he would drop it in a burst of hearty laughter, then scramble to pick it up off the floor.

Saneyuki firmly believed that the army’s sensibilities were dulled where Port Arthur was concerned, and he freely shared this view with Shimamura Hayao, chief of staff of the First Squadron of the Combined Fleet. Inside the enemy harbor at Port Arthur lurked one of the world’s largest fleets, a fact recognized though unappreciated by the army. If this fleet should ever get out and have its way on the open sea, Japan’s seaborne supplies would be cut off. Left to its own devices, the army in Manchuria would wither away before the enemy could ever get to it.

For the Combined Fleet, consumed with its blockade of the enemy fleet inside the harbor, laying siege was a painful chore. Sailors had no time off and grew ever more fatigued, but the warships suffered even more. Barnacles grew on their hulls and scale accumulated in their boilers, draining their power and speed, but they couldn’t go into dry dock. If the blockade went on without letup, by the time the main Russian fleet arrived from Europe and it was time to do battle, the Japanese would not be able to summon their trademark speed and thus would be vulnerable to defeat.

“If the enemy comes out of the harbor, that’s a different matter. Then we fight them at sea and destroy them, and that’s that. But they know that, and so they won’t come out.” Saneyuki explained this at the joint navy and army summit meeting aboard the Mikasa. “The enemy is smart. They’re hiding in the harbor, waiting for the Baltic Fleet to arrive. If they keep on waiting, when the time comes, they’ll be at double strength. Then they’ll attack our fleet and sink it, establishing right of passage over the Sea of Japan and isolating the Japanese Army in Manchuria.”

“That would be a disaster,” said Kodama in a loud voice. If that happened, Japan would lose the war.

“Launching an attack from the sea on a fleet inside a fortified military harbor is next to impossible. We have to lure them out, and the only way to do that is to attack from land. If the army attacks the fortress and captures it, the fleet will have no choice but to leave the harbor.”

In Tokyo, the Navy General Staff had already submitted a formal request for combat troops to the Army General Staff.

Attack Port Arthur? The Army General Staff had hesitated at first, but finally gave in to the navy’s insistent demand and belatedly created the Third Army to do the job. This army, under the command of General Nogi Maresuke, had only recently been dispatched to the Liaodong Peninsula. The operation was yet to begin. The meeting aboard the Mikasa revolved around this point. The navy wanted the fortress taken as soon as possible so it could wrap things up at Port Arthur and move the fleet back to Sasebo. Unless the warships were overhauled soon, they would turn into unseaworthy tubs.

Ōyama and Kodama replied that they would do their best to comply with the navy’s request and soon thereafter boarded the Aki Maru, headed for Dalian.

“To be honest,” confessed Kodama in Ōyama’s cabin, “Port Arthur was our oversight.”

Successive vice chiefs of the General Staff had drawn up various plans for campaigns against Russia. The late Kawakami Sōroku had laid his plan, and Tamura Iyozō had come up with a very detailed one. Soon after becoming vice chief, Kodama had dusted off the Tamura plan and used it in designing his own strategy. None of the three men’s campaign plans had called for an attack on Port Arthur.

Of course, in Kawakami’s day Port Arthur had not really been fortified, and even in Tamura’s day there’d been little indication that Russia was in the process of rebuilding the Port Arthur defenses as authentic, European-style forts. Nor was that all. The Japanese Army did not even fully understand what modern fortifications consisted of. And, even if they had understood, Kodama’s plan for a decisive battle in Manchuria treated Port Arthur “as an extra,” as he himself admitted. He thought it could be safely ignored.

Since the Port Arthur fortifications were on the extreme tip of Jinzhou Peninsula, jutting off the end of Liaodong Peninsula, we know that Kodama’s plan had the army leaving that extreme tip untouched, while occupying the Nanshan area north of Port Arthur (this had already been accomplished) and building a powerful line of defense there with which to contain Port Arthur. After that, the main force could proceed northward to the Manchurian plains. This time, imagine the Jinzhou Peninsula as a pinky finger—they would tie a string around it at the top knuckle and cut off the blood supply, making Port Arthur rot.

His plan’s focus was the Manchurian plains. Specifically, the army would subdue first Liaoyang and then Mukden, apportioning its scant (compared to the Russian Army) strength to get the job done.

But then the navy requested this attack on Port Arthur, which they had to carry out. Even though the request came from the navy, in a broad sense it was aimed at the support of Japanese soldiers in Manchuria. They had no choice but to comply.

For that purpose, the Third Army was formed, bringing together the First, Ninth, and Eleventh divisions. If it weren’t for Port Arthur, thought Kodama regretfully, he could have used those three divisions in the battle of Liaoyang. Still, the business at Port Arthur wouldn’t take long, he comforted himself. Not even he had any inkling of what lay ahead. He intended to send the Third Army on to the decisive battle on the Manchurian plains as soon as the Port Arthur fortifications fell. During the First Sino-Japanese War, it had taken a single day to capture the Chinese defenses at Port Arthur, which had been designed by a German; this time, it might take as long as five days, no longer than ten, by his reckoning.

On July 15, the Aki Maru entered Dalian Harbor, which had already fallen into the possession of the Japanese military. The men disembarked.

For its staff headquarters, Ōyama Iwao’s Manchurian Army took over the just-vacated official residence of the Russian mayor of Dalian, an imposing brick building.

“Hard at it, I see!” Kodama went around the staff officers’ table, talking to the men. Each one was busy preparing for the battle of Liaoyang. Not one had time to spare for the attack on Port Arthur. One major even predicted optimistically that the city would fall in a single day. Since the Japanese had already laid claim to cities north of Port Arthur, including Jinzhou, Nanshan, and even this city of Dalian, the expectation that Port Arthur would fall like a ripe persimmon was understandable.

“Any word from Nogi?” Kodama asked Colonel Matsukawa Toshitane. Matsukawa was from Miyagi Prefecture and had a methodical mind.

“Nothing, sir.”

“Hasn’t made any move yet, I’ll bet.”

“No, sir, he hasn’t,” replied Matsukawa, and at this, for some reason, Kodama laughed out loud. Not only were he and Nogi both men of Chōshū, they were also comrades in arms from the siege of Kumamoto Castle back in the Satsuma Rebellion. In Kodama’s mind, his old friend Nogi was eccentric in a lovable way. Though earnest, Nogi was not a capable commander.

“Tomorrow we’ll go to Nogi together and hold discussions to get him to hurry up.” Leaving detailed instructions with Matsukawa, Kodama headed for the stairs.

Nogi had arrived on the scene a month ahead of Kodama and the others, but he hadn’t been killing time. He had carried out preparatory operations needed as a springboard for the eventual attack on Port Arthur. In particular, shortly after arriving, he had attacked a hill west of Dalian, which the Japanese called Tsurugizan—“Sword Hill”—and taken out its stronghold.

The attack on Sword Hill was carried out by the Forty-third Infantry Unit from the island of Shikoku. They attacked on June 26 under heavy artillery cover and took the fort after five hours of fierce fighting. The mountain was defended by a Captain Lopatin, who held on ably with only half the troop strength of the Japanese, making the rounds from position to position to cheer his men and fighting on until he had lost three-quarters of them. This Captain Lopatin was one of the most valiant battle commanders in the entire Russian Army, but after he withdrew to Port Arthur, Stoessel, commander of the fortress there, held him responsible for the retreat and had him court-martialed. Incensed at this treatment, Lopatin committed suicide in prison.

Nogi was impressed by the fighting of the Russian soldiers, but Sword Hill’s quick surrender made him all the more optimistic about the Port Arthur fortifications. What he did not know was that the mountain stronghold was not a permanent fort like the one at Port Arthur. It was more like an entrenchment, something built by Lopatin and his infantrymen for field maneuvers.

General Nogi and his staff, meanwhile, were in a village called Beipaoziya, just before Dalian on the railway line laid by the Russians. There was a railway maintenance center in the village with a two-story brick building that Nogi made his headquarters, using the second floor for his living quarters.

Generals Ōyama and Kodama rode up on horseback to this building, accompanied by nine staff officers. The sun was already high in the sky and scorching the red dirt. The building was surrounded by a grove of poplars, and there was a little flower garden by the front door. The trees and the flowers had been planted by the Russians.

“There are even apple trees!” After Kodama dismounted, he looked around, taking note. Nogi came out to meet them, accompanied by his staff, and as soon as Kodama spotted the general he rushed over and gripped him by the hand. “Please accept my condolences on the loss of your son.”

Nogi’s older son Katsusuke, a second lieutenant, had participated in the attack on Jinzhou as a platoon leader in the infantry’s First Regiment, but at dawn on May 26, two months before this encounter, he had been shot by a Russian defending the eastern city gate with a machine gun. The bullet lodged in the flesh, and he died in the hospital the following day. Ten days later, his father had landed at Yandaao, and the next day passed through the fresh battlefield at Jinzhou. That was when he composed the celebrated elegiac poem, “Outside Jinzhou City Walls.”

Hills, rivers, grasses, trees turned desolate.
For ten leagues the winds smell of fresh blood from the battlefield.
Horses are still, and men are silent.
Outside Jinzhou city walls I stand in the sinking sun.

Kodama expressed his sincere sympathy. Nogi nodded wordlessly, then invited the party indoors.

Kodama seated himself and announced in a loud voice, “It’s hot as the devil!”

Nogi’s staff sat down quietly. Chief of Staff Ijichi Kōsuke, a specialist in artillery from Satsuma, and Toyoshima Yōzō, artillery commander of the Third Army—both of them major generals—were among those present. Somber as Nogi was, his staff officers were equally so. Kodama wondered momentarily if these people were all right.

Few high-ranking officers of the day had taken as much leave as Nogi in their career. His military philosophy was already out of date, so the General Staff couldn’t use him to plan operations, and since he lacked administrative ability they had not been able to give him an administrative post either. He went on leave in May 1901, and when the fighting began he was called up to command the Imperial Guard Division held in reserve.

Eventually, when Imperial General Headquarters formed the Third Army, Nogi was appointed as commander, partly on the recommendation of Yamagata Aritomo, boss of the Chōshū clique. Commanders of almost all the armies from First to Fourth, as well as the Army of the Yalu, were from Satsuma. The sole exception was Oku of the Second Army, who was from Fukuoka. There were no Chōshū natives in command. By the standards of the day, therefore, Nogi inserted a needed balance into the personnel arrangements.

Nogi knew little about campaign planning in modern warfare. However, his personality was eminently suited to commanding a field army. The officer in command should be the object of his troops’ admiration, and in that respect Nogi was ideal. For the rest, he could be assigned someone well versed in the tactics of modern warfare to assist him, and so Major General Ijichi Kōsuke of Satsuma was made his chief of staff. Ijichi had spent years overseas at the German General Staff Office and was a specialist in artillery. Only a chief of staff who was a specialist in artillery was qualified to lead an attack on the enemy stronghold.

In the end, however, Ijichi’s dreadful incompetence and stubbornness made Nogi miserable. Worse, they caused the Third Army to shed needless gallons of blood. The fort at Port Arthur became a vast pump that sucked up Japanese blood.

Here is an example of Ijichi’s blundering.

The plan suggested by the navy was an attack on 203-Meter Hill, a bare elevation that was the sole place left defenseless after Russia set in place an array of concrete defense works in the peninsula hills. Its defenseless state was evident to Tōgō’s fleet on the sea. The first to discover the peak’s vulnerability was Akiyama Saneyuki. But the justification for taking that particular peak was less the sheer ease of the operation than the more important fact that its summit was perfectly situated to look down on the harbor at Port Arthur. If the army captured 203-Meter Hill, hauled a big gun to the top, and fired at the Russian fleet in the harbor, they could make direct hits as easily as dropping stones on the road from a second-story window. Since the point of the land campaign was to get the fleet to leave the harbor, going after 203-Meter Hill was a vital and sufficient tactic.

But Ijichi laughed off the idea. “The army does things its own way,” he said and settled on the direct approach—a frontal attack on the great fort. As the focus of the assault, he chose a point midway between Panlong, the northern fortification, and East Cockscomb Hill, the northeastern fortification, planning to penetrate the fort after slipping through there. Even though the route was between fortifications, there were countless strongholds on each side, providing enfilading fire. You could send millions of troops to storm that corridor, but still all would be instantly killed.

To summarize the rest of the story, when Ijichi’s attack plan failed, at the last moment Kodama Gentarō set aside his work at General Headquarters of the Manchurian Army and came to Port Arthur to take charge of matters himself. He adopted the navy’s proposed strategy and led a full-scale offensive against 203-Meter Hill. By then, the Russians had also realized the hill’s strategic importance and had set up a defense network, so the assault involved enormous bloodshed. The hill’s capture abruptly changed the course of the attack on Port Arthur. In the beginning, it was estimated that Port Arthur would fall in a single day, but counting from the preliminary struggle over Sword Hill, it took 191 days in all. Japanese casualties numbered sixty thousand, a bloody toll without precedent in world military history.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves, so let us return to where we left off.

Ōyama, Kodama, and Nogi climbed Sword Hill soon after its capture, guided by Ijichi. Once on top, Kodama marveled aloud at the view; indeed, the mountain’s defensive position was high. On one side, they could look down on Dalian Harbor and, on the other, beyond waves of green hills to the south, they could see the cluster of defense positions around the fort at Port Arthur.

Ijichi explained his plan of attack, and Ōyama and Kodama listened in silence. Ōyama offered a single comment: “So the navy will bring its guns ashore?”

“Well, that’s the agreement.” Ijichi’s reply lacked energy.

After it was decided to attack Port Arthur in line with the navy’s request, deliberations had constantly taken place at Imperial General Headquarters between the army and the navy. Captain Yamashita Gentarō of the navy had declared his willingness to “put as much of the navy’s heavy artillery at your disposal as I possibly can.” Ijichi Kōsuke and Matsukawa Toshitane, both of whom were present, thanked him cordially for the offer before turning it down.

“The army is using all the manpower it can spare on the Port Arthur campaign,” Matsukawa said, again proving that Japanese Army leaders had no idea of what they were up against. “On the siege line there are as many as three soldiers per meter, a huge number. Seeing that this is such a grand-scale operation on our part, I don’t think we’ll be needing any assistance from the navy.”

Matsukawa was from the infantry arm of the military. His understanding was that the army could grab the big fort by using rifle-carrying infantrymen in sufficient numbers. Even Ijichi Kōsuke from the artillery arm thought the same way. In the beginning, Ijichi attached the Second Infantry Brigade to the Third Army to supply the main firepower. He believed this would be sufficient, and that led him, one of the designers of the plan, to leave Imperial General Headquarters and become chief of staff of the Third Army.

The assumption that the fort could be destroyed using only the shells from field artillery shows a pathetic lack of understanding. The Russians used over two hundred thousand barrels of cement to fortify Port Arthur. They made enormous underground chambers for batteries and barracks. The underground defense works were interconnected by tunnels. Field artillery shells would only blow up dirt and sand off the batteries without causing the least bit of damage to the actual fortifications.

The navy, meanwhile, having been engaged in an artillery duel with the fort ever since the opening of hostilities, was keenly aware of how resistant it was. Full-scale siege artillery was needed, and if the army could not supply it then the navy would have to remove the guns on its warships and carry them ashore to be used as a substitute. In the end, around the time of the Third Army’s assault on Sword Hill, Ijichi reluctantly accepted the navy’s offer. The heavy artillery squad headed by naval commander Kuroi Teijirō was then placed at the Third Army’s disposal.

The army’s fighting was not going according to plan. Had they been on schedule, by the time Ōyama and the others climbed Sword Hill and took in the view, the battle of Liaoyang, a major objective, should have been well underway. But needed supplies were not forthcoming, and that battle appeared likely to run beyond August.

Japanese military planners evidently lacked a strong sense of logistics. At this point, actual daily rations were short, never mind supplies for coming battles. The situation was so desperate that for a week in June the whole Second Army, including the First Cavalry Brigade headed by Akiyama Yoshifuru, went on half rations. For units on active combat duty, this was an especially painful show of ineptitude.

Yoshifuru’s cavalrymen grew markedly weaker. Yoshifuru himself declared, “I’ve got my wine, so I don’t need food.” He declined rations and drank the brandy he always carried with him. When that ran out, he drank Chinese wine.

Supplies were the business of the logistics unit, but nobody had worked out a plan for hauling supplies to the front once they were unloaded in Dalian Harbor. There was a railway at hand but no steam engine—nothing but some three hundred freight cars abandoned by the Russians. These were loaded with supplies, then surrounded by troops on all sides and pushed manually along the tracks. Chinese workhorses were also used. The head of the veterinary section, who was named Kishimoto, went around the Zhuanghe area buying up Chinese horses until he had around six hundred. He fitted them with Chinese-style pack saddles, and used them to transport bales of rice and the like. This emergency transport squad was dubbed the “workhorse queue,” but the horses weren’t strong, and most of them developed saddle sores, so in the end they weren’t of much use. As a result, the men at the front edged closer to starvation.

In the meantime, Major Makino, a military administrator on Great Orphan Hill, fastened his eyes on Chinese horse-wagons. He bought up a big supply of them, calling them the “wheeled queue.” This method proved fairly effective.

In the midst of these privations, on June 21, the Second Army captured Xiongyuecheng, and remained there a fortnight waiting for rations before occupying Gaiping on July 9. The First Army, based in Fenghuangcheng, captured Aiyangbianmen, and Beifenshuiling on the Liaoyang Road, preparing for the battle of Liaoyang.

This was the situation around the time Ōyama and Kodama landed in Dalian.

Around then, Yoshifuru was busily sending out spies to reconnoiter in the city of Dashiqiao and the Yingkou region, which were still in enemy hands. Now and then, a great burst of shellfire would descend on brigade headquarters. When he heard the scream of shells, Yoshifuru would reach for his ever-present liquor bottle. “I can’t stand it without a drink,” he said honestly, valiant a soldier as he was. He occasionally took a swig straight from a whiskey bottle. Apparently, he had no particular need for food to accompany his drinking. Sometimes when visiting the front, he would pull out a stick of pickled radish from his pocket and gnaw on it absently as he watched.

Out on the water, the Japanese Combined Fleet continued carrying out fixed exercises while continuing its blockade, keeping the Port Arthur Squadron penned in the harbor.

“Why doesn’t the Port Arthur Squadron go out and fight on the open sea?” Voices of criticism rumbled within the Russian military. Even Stoessel uttered the same curses over and over again.

British Admiral Sir Cyprian Bridge, a naval tactician who later wrote about the Russian fleet under these conditions, expressed doubt about the sentiments of the Port Arthur Squadron. “Tōgō and Vitgeft”—Port Arthur Squadron commander in chief—“were almost evenly matched in fighting strength. If Vitgeft had made up his mind to fight a decisive sea battle and engaged in fierce, close combat, then, even if he lost the greater part of his naval vessels as a result, he would undoubtedly have inflicted huge losses on Tōgō’s fleet. Russia still had its main fleet in reserve, but Japan had only Tōgō’s fleet. When Russia’s main fleet arrived, Russia would have held sway over the Far Eastern seas.”

This was probably true. This daring plan is what Russia should have followed. Vitgeft’s fleet would have had to be steeled for destruction as it clashed with Tōgō’s fleet in a fight sending both to the bottom of the sea. By sacrificing themselves, Vitgeft and his men could have saved their country. Admiral Bridge’s plan would have succeeded by sacrificing Vitgeft. But Russian people at this time were deficient in such raw vitality, partly because Russian society itself was lacking in spirit, its systems superannuated.

Russia’s Imperial Headquarters gave Vitgeft no such orders in the first place. If the tsar had ordered a fight to the death, the Russians might well have complied out of habitual loyalty. The only order that came down insistently was this: “Escape from Port Arthur and flee to Vladivostok.” Not “Destroy Tōgō at sea and then report to Vladivostok.”

But the end result was the same. The only way to get to Vladivostok was to leave Port Arthur. When they set out, Tōgō would be waiting.

Vitgeft had already gone out of the harbor entrance with his fleet on June 23, intending to obey the order, but Tōgō had immediately appeared with his main force, and Vitgeft beat a hasty retreat. Then Japan’s Third Army began to step up its assault on Port Arthur, causing Vitgeft further panic. Moreover, he had information that the Japanese battleships Hatsuse and Yashima had hit mines and sunk. This news was reported in a highly sensationalized manner. Port Arthur was abuzz with rumors that Japan had lost almost all of its capital ships.

What with one thing and another, among Vitgeft and his staff the desire to make a run for it began gaining rapid ground.

In the streets of Port Arthur, drunken Russian soldiers who caught sight of a Russian sailor yelled for the squadron to leave. Such incidents happened frequently. Sometimes they led to a brawl, and the law would have to intervene. Stoessel fumed at his staff. “What the soldiers say is only right. What the hell is the navy doing? Their sailors do nothing but chase skirts in Port Arthur bars and cower in fear of Tōgō. Our men are only stating the obvious. Why shouldn’t they!”

One time when the naval and army leaders met to debate whether the fleet should leave the harbor or stay, Stoessel got worked up. “I speak on behalf of the entire army. The Port Arthur Squadron should sortie in order to exterminate Tōgō, and, if it does not, the entire squadron should be punished for treason toward tsar and country.”

Vitgeft, the normally placid commander in chief of the fleet, became so furious that he lost his equilibrium. “I beg your pardon. My ships are not under the command of you, an army lieutenant general. On the honor of the navy, I cannot allow such reckless talk.”

“The honor of the navy?” scoffed Stoessel. “What honor is that? The honor of napping at Port Arthur like a duck in a puddle?” The quarrel stopped just short of a scuffle.

The Russian Army was far from sanguine about having the navy sit tight. Tōgō was blockading the harbor to cut off the Port Arthur Squadron, and Nogi was threatening to attack from the rear. If the squadron weren’t there, the Japanese military wouldn’t be so hell-bent on attacking Port Arthur. Such grousing spread throughout the troops.

While we’re on the subject, it must be said that General Stoessel was committing a colossal error. Russia had turned the harbor at Port Arthur into a naval base. To protect a military harbor, the army must build fortifications in the surrounding area. The army at a military harbor is secondary to the navy, and it was incumbent on Stoessel to be more adaptable regarding the navy’s plan of operations. He had no sympathy for the navy, but clung obstinately to the army’s interests. The fault lay not in any character flaw on his part, but rather in the superannuated Russian bureaucracy and the bureaucratic mentality. All Russian government officials and military men of the era were like Stoessel, to a greater or lesser degree.

After the failed effort to venture out on June 23, Vitgeft held a council of generals, and they decided to revert to their former policy: the squadron would be maintained in the harbor as before and would not go to Vladivostok.

August came. Though the attack of Japan’s Third Army had yet to yield results, the navy’s heavy artillery began to make its presence felt, raining shells on the far-off streets of Port Arthur, churning up the occasional pillar of water in the harbor, and sometimes, though rarely, causing damage to warships. Vitgeft had no alternative but to leave.

The naval engagement that would be known as the “battle of the Yellow Sea” and that would exact a grisly toll on both sides began with Vitgeft’s decision to exit the harbor. He had received a telegram from Viceroy Alexeyev informing him that this was the tsar’s desire. His orders were to leave at once and go to Vladivostok. Vitgeft made up his mind to do so and devoted August 9 to preparations. For security reasons, no one but his private staff was informed.

To begin with, they had to lay in rations and coal, the latter a particularly grueling job for seamen of this era. After sundown, every warship began firing up its boiler. From these developments, the crews divined that the time had finally come to leave. “Watch out for Japanese spies” was a watchword aboard the ships, but Port Arthur counterintelligence was strict, infiltration by Japanese agents impossible. Out at sea, Tōgō remained unaware of these stirrings in the Port Arthur Squadron on the eve of battle.

The date changed to August 10. Shortly before dawn, Vitgeft ordered the ships out of the harbor.

The flagship Tsesarevich went first. As protection from torpedo attack, it was flanked by eight destroyers, headed by the cruiser Novik. The ships glided silently over the dark, predawn waters.

The convoy consisted of eighteen ships, with the hospital ship Mongolia bringing up the rear. Six were battleships. They outnumbered Tōgō’s fleet, which had lost the Hatsuse and Yashima. The six left the harbor in this order: Tsesarevich, 12,912 tons; Retvizan, 12,902 tons; Pobeda, 12,674 tons; Peresvet, 12,674 tons; Sevastopol, 10,960 tons; Poltava, 10,960 tons. After that came the cruisers, in this order: Askold, 5,905 tons; Pallada, 6,731 tons; Diana, 6,731 tons. In addition, two gunboats and a number of destroyers prepared the way for the squadron’s departure, busily carrying out minesweeping operations.

When the Tsesarevich passed by Golden Hill outside of the harbor, on its mast were flags bearing the message: “The tsar has ordered our fleet on to Vladivostok.” By this means, each captain was officially apprised of the purpose behind the sortie.

First to spot the mass exodus was the destroyer Shirakumo, which had been keeping a watchful eye. The Third Division was quickly informed, and Division Commander Dewa Shigetō wired an alert to the Mikasa: “Enemy fleet leaving harbor.” Fortunately, Tōgō’s Mikasa and its squad were not anchored at the base by the Changshan Islands but were cruising north of Round Island.

Akiyama Saneyuki was in his cabin on lower deck.

Before going further, we’d like to relate an anecdote about Saneyuki from just before this. In the middle of the night, a torpedo boat patrolling outside the harbor at Port Arthur wired this alert to the Mikasa, which was anchored in the Changshan Islands: “High smoke in the harbor tonight. Signs of enemy movement.” The officer on duty grabbed the telegram, went below deck to Saneyuki’s cabin, and opened the door. Saneyuki was leaning back in his chair with his jacket off. On closer inspection, the officer realized he was asleep. He went over and shouted in Saneyuki’s ear the news that a wire had come in. Saneyuki didn’t stir but opened his eyes. The officer proceeded to read the telegram aloud. As soon as he had finished, Saneyuki said, “The whole navy is to prepare at once to move out. Signal the Taihoku Maru to open the midship boom and fasten torches at either end. Convey this order to the commander in chief and chief of staff on the double.” Then, to the officer’s surprise, he closed his eyes and was again sound asleep.

Before delivering Saneyuki’s order to Tōgō and Shimamura, the officer glanced at the notes he had made, wondering briefly if the message was all right. However, both commanders trusted Saneyuki so implicitly that they didn’t doubt his plan for a moment and nodded their approval.

Despite this previous incident, when the alarm came on August 10, Saneyuki was not asleep. He was on the bridge. He held out a map before Tōgō and indicated the route to take, obtaining the admiral’s approval. The swift cruiser squadron, having received orders to find the enemy fleet, was already on its way. The rest of the fleet set off, cutting through foaming waves.

“Can we win?” wondered Saneyuki. He had never been less sure of anything in his life.

Saneyuki had prepared for this day by cudgeling his brains to come up with several plans, none of which could clinch victory. In his later years, he would often look back on this moment and recall, “Victory seemed impossible, no matter what.”

Tōgō had brought along four battleships. Added to this were the Kasuga and Nisshin, armored cruisers brought in as emergency replacements for the sunken Hatsuse and Yashima. In an artillery battle, however, the Japanese main squadron would be at a disadvantage.

What decided the fate of the enemy’s capital ships in an artillery battle were the battleships’ main guns. The six battleships of the Russian squadron had a total of twenty-four 12- and 10-inch guns, the six Japanese ships, seventeen. Herein lay the biggest reason for Saneyuki’s pessimism. Battle outcomes were determined by the number of artillery shells that could be rained on the enemy in a given unit of time. With this big a difference in firepower, gaining the advantage by a meticulously executed strategy was next to impossible.

Tōgō’s mission was the destruction of the entire enemy squadron. Even one escaped ship could haunt the area, putting the transport of Japanese troops gravely at risk. The enormous task of sinking every ship put the military leaders in this battle under a great psychological strain.

Skies were clear. There was a slight breeze from the south, and virtually no waves. A light mist lay over the water, but visibility was good. It was a fine day for a sea battle.

Tōgō’s fleet was lined up in this order: Mikasa, Asahi, Fuji, Shikishima, Kasuga, Nisshin. They steamed forward in a line-ahead formation.

At half past twelve in the afternoon, from a point 10 nautical miles west-northwest of the reef that the navy called “Encounter Rock,” the enemy squadron was sighted making its way southeast.

“Let’s lure them out into the open sea,” Saneyuki suggested, and this later turned out to be a mistake.

Chief of Staff Shimamura Hayao nodded in agreement and so did Tōgō. That was because, on June 23, when the Russian squadron previously sortied, Tōgō’s fleet had made its move immediately on receiving the notification, intercepting the enemy on its way south. But, before any engagement could take place, the enemy had suddenly reversed course and slipped back inside the harbor.

This previous mischance was constantly on the minds of Tōgō and his staff. They were determined this time to lure the enemy out so far that retreat to Port Arthur would be impossible, and then, after a good fight, destroy them. There would be no rest for Tōgō’s fleet until the enemy was utterly destroyed. To repeat, if even one Russian ship made it back to Port Arthur, Tōgō would have no choice but to put off the longed-for trip to Sasebo and continue the blockade. The only route to victory was to prepare for the arrival of the Baltic Fleet from Europe by getting the warships home for much-needed overhauls in dock. Anxiety over this point robbed Saneyuki and the others of flexibility in their thinking.

At one o’clock in the afternoon, Tōgō ordered his entire fleet to change course 8 points to port—turn left 90 degrees—putting the ships in line abreast. Then there commenced the flip-flop maneuvers that British naval historian Allan Westcott would denounce as “four hours of incomprehensible fleet exercises.”

It was partly exhaustion from the long blockade that caused Tōgō and his aides to misread the enemy’s very simple intent. Saneyuki, convinced that the enemy would fly straight at them, slowly paced the bridge deck as the Mikasa altered course, his eyes intent on the smoke pouring from enemy funnels in the offing. Not for a second did he doubt the enemy’s will to fight. The Russian squadron was at full strength, with seven more heavy guns than the Japanese. If the squadron charged straight ahead, it had a very good chance of sending Tōgō and his fleet to the bottom of the sea. To a military man’s way of thinking, it only made sense that the enemy’s purpose in leaving the harbor must be attack.

But the Russian commander Vitgeft was also less warrior than bureaucrat. One characteristic of tsarist Russia in its waning years was that its bureaucrats were at their most bureaucratic, a poisonous influence that seeped into the disposition of even military men who should have been active. Vitgeft was less interested in crushing the enemy than he was in preserving the Russian tsar’s precious fleet, a feat for which he hoped to win a medal. The imperial order he had received was a simple “Go to Vladivostok.” The tsar may well have expected Vitgeft to encounter and destroy the Japanese fleet along the way, but to a man of Vitgeft’s bureaucratic mindset, taking the order at face value was safer.

“One way or another, to Vladivostok it is.” This being Vitgeft’s unshakable plan, when he saw the Japanese fleet looming on the horizon, his one thought was flight.

As Tōgō bore down upon him from the north in line abreast formation, Vitgeft’s proper response would naturally have been to enter battle formation and face up to the enemy. Saneyuki was puzzled to see that, instead, the Russian ships maintained their southeasterly course at full steam. In an attempt to cut off their progress, Tōgō ordered another turn 8 points to port, changing to reverse line-ahead formation, with the rear ship Nisshin in the lead.

Watching from the bridge deck of the Tsesarevich, Vitgeft was filled with admiration. Japanese fleet maneuvers might even be superior to those of the British Navy, he thought. The irony was that Tōgō’s fleet was doing an acrobatic dance far ahead of the enemy, all alone.

Forty minutes after Tōgō discovered him, Vitgeft was heading southeast, Tōgō east-northeast. The distance between the two fleets was too great for an artillery duel, but each side began to fire its big guns sporadically to test the range. Vitgeft, bent on flight, was moving at top speed. Tōgō and his aides, still unaware that the enemy fleet was going to Vladivostok, thought only of preventing a return to Port Arthur as had happened on June 23. The flip-flop maneuvers that ensued were conceived with this sole purpose in mind.

Determined to head off Vitgeft’s squadron, Tōgō veered northeast and sent his battleships charging ahead full steam, water foaming at their bows. The succession of changes in direction was dizzying. Saneyuki’s trademark nimbleness was put to the worst possible use.

Vitgeft, no less determined not to be headed off, swerved abruptly to starboard and began steaming south, putting Tōgō’s fleet in the van. It was as if Vitgeft had pivoted behind Tōgō’s back and was fleeing headlong south. Or, to put it another way, it was as if Tōgō the attacker had stood with his sword held high, rushed forward holding it aloft and, after crossing swords with his opponent a single time, passed by on the run, momentum carrying him off to the north, while his opponent kept on going south, leaving the match far behind.

“Vitgeft’s dodge,” Saneyuki would call it, the memory of this moment bitter to him for the rest of his life, as well it might be. Once the Russian squadron was gone, it would be no easy feat to catch up with it again.

Having steamed too far, Tōgō had to shift helm yet again. He ordered the fleet to change course 16 points to starboard—that is, turn right 180 degrees. This had become Tōgō’s one-sided acrobatic show. The Mikasa was back in the lead, the formation single line ahead. The fleet picked up speed and raced southwest, spray rising high like mist around the ships’ bows. This time, they would cut across the enemy line, roughly crossing the T. The maneuver posed grave risk to the attacker, but as a way to sink the enemy’s lead ship it was highly effective. Saneyuki had devised the tactic after being inspired by an account in the book of ancient Japanese naval strategy that he had borrowed from his friend Ogasawara Naganari.

The distance from the enemy was 6,000–8,000 meters. Tōgō’s main battle squadron began to concentrate fire on the enemy’s lead ship, the Tsesarevich. The Japanese tactic was to sink the enemy’s flagship and so plunge the enemy command into disarray. To accomplish this, the fleet had to “cross the T” in what was to become a signature battle tactic of the Japanese Navy.

Shell after shell landed on the Tsesarevich—but battleships of the day, fitted with waterline belts of armor, did not sink easily from shelling alone. The enemy naturally responded by setting its sights on the Mikasa, inflicting huge damage. Enemy shells ripped through the ship without a moment’s cease, the great 12-inch guns in particular scoring a direct hit on the rear of the shelter deck, killing many men and severely damaging the mainmast. Two-thirds of the area around the mast was blown away, leaving it like a great tree attacked by a woodsman’s axe, on the verge of toppling.

“If we go too fast, it may collapse” came the report. As a result, at this critical juncture, the Mikasa was unable to travel at high speed and so delayed its chance to engage the enemy in a second round.

The vicious pounding inflicted by Tōgō’s tactic of crossing the T began to take a toll on Admiral Vitgeft, who returned to his former policy of flight rather than fight. This faintheartedness on his part would eventually lead to his own doom. Yet, had he taken action at this time, resolved to fight Tōgō to the bitter end, a different fate would surely have awaited him. Never at any point in the war was Tōgō as hard pressed as at this moment.

To escape from Tōgō, who was hard on his heels, Vitgeft swung his flagship hard aport. For the Russian crew, unskilled in fleet maneuvers, nothing induced such chaos aboard each ship as these mid-battle changes in formation. The line promptly began to undulate, ships coming together like tango dancers locked in embrace, and the fleet’s speed plummeted.

Tōgō adroitly changed course, turning north. He had no intention of letting this opportunity pass. From the relative positions of the two fleets, the armored cruisers at the Russian rear were in sight of all Tōgō’s gunners. The Russian cruisers panicked, picked up speed, and caught up with their own battle squadron, sticking to its shadow. As a result, the squadron moved in an irregular double-line formation.

In that awkward formation, the Russians simply blasted away while fleeing, racing southeast for all they were worth. During this brief interval, the two sides exchanged heavy fire, Russian gunners showing deadly accuracy as they pounded away at the Asahi and Nisshin, inflicting heavy damage.

The Mikasa was the hardest hit, one shell striking the central waterline and opening a great cavity. Another pierced the deck and exploded, and still another hit the rear stack, causing massive casualties. The deck was covered in blood, body parts flying in all directions. As Saneyuki looked on from the bridge, he saw an arm come flying straight at him, strike something, and fall.

But Tōgō’s fleet had not yet fought effectively. Constantly caught off balance by Vitgeft, it had been unable to engage sufficiently in the artillery duel, wasting the greater part of the battle in movements to tangle with and disentangle itself from the enemy. Time was going by fast. Tōgō had yet to sink a single enemy ship.

The enemy was fast receding, without giving Tōgō an opportunity to engage it. He gave chase. In line with Yamamoto Gombei’s policy, the Japanese fleet was put together for speed. But in this chase, the Japanese warships were slow, their hulls and parts worn out from the long blockade.

The Russian squadron was considered slow, and yet here they were making a quick escape. That was because while confined in the harbor Vitgeft had kept his ships in top condition, sending divers to scrape the hulls clean of barnacles before making his exit.

At twenty minutes past three in the afternoon, going on three hours since the discovery that the Russian squadron was on the move, Vitgeft had sailed far out of range of Tōgō’s fire. Tōgō issued a ceasefire and went after the enemy with every ounce of speed he could muster.

“We’ve got to catch them before dark.” The thought was on everyone’s mind. Once night fell, warships of the day were helpless, unable to trade fire or even to determine the enemy’s location.

In the end, Tōgō let Vitgeft get away. The direct reason was the time it took his fleet to turn around in a circle and a half. While Togo was pirouetting, Vitgeft raced off full tilt, and, by the time Tōgō swung into full pursuit, already 30,000 meters separated the two forces. The effective range of Tōgō’s main artillery was around 7,000 meters, so at that point there was little hope.

Tōgō was hot in pursuit. All his staff was consumed with one familiar, anxious thought: if Vitgeft got away, the Russo-Japanese War itself would be thrown into chaos. The enemy squadron would enter Vladivostok. From that base, it could cruise Japanese waters at will, playing havoc with military transport routes. The navy would have no choice but to devote all its energies to the task of troop transport—pushing men and ships alike to their limits—and then, when the Baltic Fleet arrived, fight an enemy doubled in strength. There was no doubt that victory in the war hung on the outcome of this chase across the Yellow Sea.

“The fleet was delayed three minutes by tactical maneuvers,” wrote Akiyama Saneyuki after the war. “For that reason, it took us three hours to catch up with the enemy.”

This was Saneyuki’s take: an initial three-minute delay ended up causing the waste of three precious hours chasing the enemy. The hours were precious because the fleet was racing against the onset of darkness.

As for why they were three minutes late, opinions differed even among battle participants. Vice Admiral Yamaji Kazuyoshi said later that for a moment, when he saw the movements of Tōgō’s main squadron (the First Division), “I thought the First Division was going to go around the enemy’s rear and prevent them from returning to Port Arthur. I was sure that was it.”

That assumption was foremost in everybody’s mind, and that’s how they interpreted what happened: the enemy was bound to head back to Port Arthur as it had on June 23, and so the Japanese fleet took swift action to prevent that from occurring, attempting to cut off their retreat.

But that’s not what Saneyuki said. “At 1400 hours, when the shelling was at its fiercest, the First Division slipped around to the enemy’s west (that is, the Port Arthur side) without realizing it. The enemy quickly lost no time in changing course for the Shandong promontory. Admiral Tōgō turned the head of his fleet, but unfortunately that caused a three-minute delay, and so the First Division was put in the disadvantageous position of following the enemy.”

Whether this happened without their realizing it or by order is impossible now to say, since it took place at the height of the battle. In any case, as British historian Westcott noted, “incomprehensible maneuvers” were the decisive characteristic of this battle.

The experience was a bitter one for Tōgō and his aides, who, vowing not to repeat the same mistake at the subsequent battle of Tsushima, would work out and implement a special plan of attack with that in mind. Later, in different venues, Tōgō and Saneyuki would separately say the exact same thing: “Without the lessons of the battle of the Yellow Sea, the battle of Tsushima would not have gone as well as it did.”

Tōgō gave chase.

Vitgeft was fleeing in desperation, but Tōgō’s pursuit was pathetic. He chased the enemy not as victor but as one who risked becoming an ignominious loser. Never was there a wartime chase so comical. The stronger side fled, and the weaker side took off in hot pursuit, like a dog nipping at the heels of a bear. Moreover, if the bear made it to its lair in Vladivostok, another bear would come, doubling its strength. Flight was the winning tactic. History had never seen such a battle.

“Is the mainmast all right?” Captain Ijichi of the Mikasa asked over and over again. If the mainmast toppled, the ship’s speed would be drastically cut, spoiling the formation and preventing them from ever catching up.

“It was only by the grace of God that the mast held,” Saneyuki would later say. During this chase, under conditions beyond human control, he performed a spiritual feat without precedent in his life: he prayed. In later years, what fixed his spirit in unconventional realms was this early spiritual experience in the Russo-Japanese War, when he prayed for divine deliverance.

The prayers were strictly internal, of course; nothing showed on the outside.

At one point, a late meal was served. Usually the staff gathered for meals in the admiral’s galley, surrounding Tōgō at the table, but this time the admiral was delayed, his seat empty. Following protocol, no one else lifted a fork, but Saneyuki nonchalantly began to eat. He was always like that. He spent so much time immersed in thoughts of battle strategy that he had no energy to spare on other matters. The others habitually stayed around to chew the fat, but after eating Saneyuki would go straight back to his cabin, sprawl on the bunk with his shoes on, and stare up at the ceiling.

Tōgō and Shimamura both treated him as a special case, and the others followed suit.

The ship sliced through the waves at top speed.

While the chase was on, Saneyuki came down from the upper deck and sprawled on the sofa in the staff quarters. In the event that they ever caught up with the enemy he would be ready, having come up with a variety of different battle plans based on every conceivable scenario, but for the moment there was nothing to do but stay the course. He would doze off and snore for a quarter of an hour, then suddenly spring up, grab his compass and square, and work out an idea that had come to him, shaping it according to logical principles. He looked like a madman.

Because of the maintenance work carried out in the harbor at Port Arthur, the enemy’s speed was 14 knots, faster than the Japanese had expected. Saneyuki later had praise for this accomplishment. “At Port Arthur, there were no docks for ship repair. For the Russians to repair and restore their damaged battleships to the point that each one could achieve its maximum speed meant surmounting a host of difficulties. I must say I admire what they did.”

But during its headlong flight the Russian squadron suffered its first misfortune. Just before leaving harbor, the Retvizan had sustained a gash along the waterline. Quick emergency repairs had been done, but the tear had since reopened, and if the ship went too fast it would take on water badly. The shell that caused the damage was not from a Japanese warship but was fired by the navy’s heavy artillery squad on loan to General Nogi’s Third Army. Headed by Commander Kuroi Teijirō, the squad had taken up position behind Mt. Huoshi just three days prior to the battle of the Yellow Sea, bombarding the streets of Port Arthur and the Russian fleet. One shell had landed broadside on the Retvizan as it lay at anchor in the harbor, rupturing it amidships below the waterline and causing a commotion as the ship immediately began to take on water. Repairs were stopgap and insufficient. In the midst of Vitgeft’s desperate strategic getaway, this signal went up the Retvizan mast: “Damage at our waterline, speed cut by 4 knots.”

Seeing this, Rear Admiral Nikolai Matusevich, Vitgeft’s chief of staff, gave a howl of dismay and raised a fist. “Commander, what shall we do?” He awaited Vitgeft’s decision—whether to leave the Retvizan behind or take it along. If the latter, the entire squadron would have to lower its speed as well, at great risk.

The issue of the injured battleship had come up before, as they were preparing to leave the harbor. A majority had been in favor of leaving it behind, but Vitgeft had cast the deciding vote to take it along.

Before Vitgeft could reply, another signal went up: the Retvizan had been repaired and could safely maintain a speed of 12.5 knots. With an overall speed of 12 knots, 2 knots slower than before, the squadron would be overtaken that much sooner. Tōgō, racing at 15.5 knots, was hot on their tail.

Tōgō kept up the chase for three hours, and before sundown at half past five, at a point 45 nautical miles north of Shandong promontory, his Mikasa saw the smoke from Russian smokestacks on the horizon. “We’re saved,” Saneyuki thought. Unaware that damage to one battleship had slowed the enemy, he rejoiced at overtaking them sooner than expected. “It’s providential,” he thought. Any accident that befalls the enemy is always an act of providence.

Aboard the Mikasa, the atmosphere was lively and brisk, the preparations for battle soon done. It was summer, and the day was long. Since they had caught up sooner than expected, at half past five, there remained another two hours of daylight in which to fight. For Tōgō’s fleet, which needed to wipe out the enemy in this limited amount of time, two hours was all too short. There might not be enough time to finish the job, but at least they had caught up before sundown. That much was lucky.

The rearmost ship of the enemy fleet was the battleship Poltava (10,960 tons). When its 12-inch main artillery turned toward the Mikasa and started to spit fire, round two of the battle of the Yellow Sea began. A cloud of dark cannon smoke enveloped the Poltava, and the heavy-caliber shell grazed the Mikasa’s port hull and fell into the water, raising a great column of spray.

Tōgō’s fleet did not lower its speed but kept firing as it steamed ahead, parallel with the enemy. The intention was to cut off the enemy’s lead ship. Eventually, the vans of the two columns closed to a distance of 7,000 meters. Firing on both sides was intense, the air filled with spray from shells landing in the water. Clouds of dust and smoke covered the sea. Shells landed on every ship, friend and foe alike. Fires broke out and were extinguished. On the Japanese side, for these two hours, they had to keep firing and firing even if the gun barrels burned out.

The accuracy of these enemy gunners was far and away superior to that of the Baltic Fleet, which came later. While penned in the harbor, the Port Arthur Squadron had not wasted time but had carried out plenty of target practice.

Damage to the Mikasa was severe. From this engagement alone, the ship suffered ninety-five hits. Fifteen minutes into the battle, a shell struck the rear 12-inch guns, the ship’s main armament, destroying one cannon. One seaman was killed outright, his body split vertically in two. Another eighteen men and officers were felled in the same instant. Among the wounded was Prince Fushimi Hiroyasu, a lieutenant commander.

The thunder of gunfire and the screech of flying shells covered the ship incessantly, rending the air. Explosive blasts carried men away, and shrapnel rained everywhere, sticking jaggedly where it fell.

When a shell struck the crowded bridge at half past six, an hour after hostilities had begun, the ensuing havoc made hell seem tame. A great column of fire erupted, and an instant later body parts flew through the air, entrails spilled, and everything was painted red with blood. Tōgō, Shimamura, and Saneyuki were all on the bridge at the time. The ship’s captain Ijichi, who had been standing beside Tōgō, was injured; next to Saneyuki, five officers including the staff officer Ueda Kenkichi were injured, along with ten petty officers and crewmen.

Tōgō kept his eyes trained on the enemy’s position on the horizon, not a flicker of change in his expression. Concerned for the admiral’s safety, his chief of staff Shimamura implored him to take shelter in the conning tower. The bridge was out in the open where flying shrapnel filled the air, but the conning tower was protected by steel. Nevertheless, Tōgō customarily remained on the bridge during battles, never setting foot in the conning tower. All he said to Shimamura was: “It’s hard to see out from there.” This small man from Satsuma showed greater pluck than any enemy officer.

To a greater or lesser extent, most of the enemy ships were on fire, but none of them sank. Although the Japanese purpose in this battle would not be achieved unless they all went down, Japanese gunners were not as adept this time as in the later battle of Tsushima. Even so, hits on the Tsesarevich included fifteen 12-inch shells. But ships fortified with belts of armor were not easy to sink. Bits of the superstructure, large and small, were blown off like scrap, and the gruesome state of the wounded trapped between those destroyed structures was incomparably worse than anything aboard the Mikasa.

Twelve-inch shells are visible as they come at you. The Japanese shells were different from the Russian ones, with such a distinctive, long shape that Russian seamen nicknamed them “suitcases.” Their destructive capability was vastly superior to that of Russian artillery shells. They contained Shimose powder, the invention of a little-known naval engineer named Shimose Masachika, which was then the most powerful explosive in the world. Its blast power was said to be two and a half times greater than that of most explosives, but the actual force was even greater, as much as three and a half times stronger than the standard. Shells containing this explosive would explode even when coming in contact with water. The sight was extraordinary: towering pillars of water breaking out of the sea accompanied by clouds of dark-brown smoke and shooting flames.

Based on the experience of the First Sino-Japanese War, Japanese shells were aimed not so much at sinking enemy ships as at crippling their fighting ability, a strategy that the world’s collective naval wisdom found strange. It was considered common sense to use armor-piercing shells, as the Russians did. One of those would rip a hole in the side of the ship, go through, and detonate inside, whereas Japanese shells, unable to pierce the waterline belt of armor, would explode on board instead. Powerful Shimose powder not only blasted all shipboard structures to bits but was certain to start a fire as well. With the ship in flames, its guns could no longer function. This way of crippling enemy ships rather than sinking them had been adopted by the Japanese ever since they battled the Zhenyuan and Dingyuan in the First Sino-Japanese War. Shimose powder, cruel as it was to enemy soldiers, was the one physical advantage that the outnumbered Japanese forces could rely on.

During the hours of this battle, the six Russian battleships were hard pressed by this Japanese explosive. Seeing that the tide of battle was going against his squadron, Admiral Vitgeft decided to free his speedy cruisers from this hell and sent up the signal, “Cruisers flee south.” This would be his final command.

For Tōgō, time was running out. With sundown fast approaching, he had yet to deliver a fatal blow. Since he had pulled closer, the two fleets were steaming ahead on a parallel course 5,000 meters apart. The accuracy of each side’s firing was steadily climbing.

In the conning tower of the Tsesarevich, Vitgeft and his staff tensely gazed out to starboard. The Mikasa was about to pass them by.

“Sir, why don’t we spread out?” said one of the aides. Both fleets had sustained roughly equal damage, he reasoned, and so rather than firing their guns while making a run for it they should engage Tōgō directly, line abreast, and seek to overpower him. That is indeed just what the Russians should have done. Had Vitgeft taken his aide’s advice, the fate that came upon him in the next moment would have been averted. The damage to the Japanese fleet would have been incalculable.

But, remember, Vitgeft was a bureaucrat. All he did was stubbornly repeat his orders: “The tsar ordered us to go to Vladivostok.”

The Mikasa overtook them.

The Mikasa, keeping the enemy flagship Tsesarevich beside it toward the rear, fired off large and small artillery with a constant roar in a steady barrage. It was then exactly thirty-seven minutes past six. Just which gunner fired the Mikasa’s 12-inch main gun will never be known, but at that very moment the “fateful shell,” as it would be celebrated in Japanese naval history, flew toward the Tsesarevich. Akiyama Saneyuki called it the “uncanny shell.” Throughout this naval battle, which was, he had confessed, unwinnable, he had stood on the upper deck praying for a stroke of good fortune. The word “uncanny” seems to express his acknowledgment of some unknowable power.

The 12-inch shell landed with a huge explosion around the conning tower of the Tsesarevich, blowing Vitgeft and his staff to bits. There was little blood; it was rather as if the men had vanished into thin air. Only Vitgeft’s leg could be seen rolling around the vicinity of the mast. His chief of staff Matusevich was severely wounded.

The senior officer remaining was the flagship’s captain, Captain N. M. Ivanov. He had one brief moment in which to think of signaling Rear Admiral Pavel Ukhtomsky aboard the Peresvet to take over the flag of the squadron before a second 12-inch shell made a direct and fatal hit, blowing up him, his navigator, and his helmsman. Yet this alone was not what made the shell so fateful.

What was fateful was the felling of the helmsman. At this point, the conning tower contained only corpses; the Tsesarevich was under a dead man’s command. No one aboard knew this, however, much less anyone else in the squadron. The flagship went on clipping through the waves. During battle, in the absence of any signal to the contrary, the vessel astern was to carefully watch the movements of the flagship and follow along.

Of the annihilated senior officers, the one who died last (by a matter of seconds) was the helmsman, who took a piece of shrapnel in the back much as if he’d been stabbed with a carving knife. To support himself, he fell against the helm and in his agony writhed to the left. As the ship’s prow moved, he perished where he had fallen. Guided by this dead man’s hand, the huge bulk of the Tsesarevich began turning to port.

Eduard Schensnovich was captain of the crippled Retvizan, which was following behind the Tsesarevich, and he instructed his navigator to look at the flagship. The navigator decided that Vitgeft was deliberately altering course. The captain agreed with this assessment and immediately turned the Retvizan to port. Captain Vasily Zatsaryonny of the third vessel in line, the Pobeda, naturally followed suit.

But the movements of the Tsesarevich were bizarre. It kept turning to port until it plunged straight through its own line as if gone wild. The Peresvet, fourth in line, narrowly missed being struck broadside. To avoid impact, its captain, Captain Vasily Boisman, quickly swung to starboard—bringing the ship that much closer to the Japanese fleet. He promptly swung to port again. Rear Admiral Ukhtomsky, who was on board this ship, decided that something was amiss with the flagship. Eventually, a signal appeared on the mast of the death ship (put up by a Lieutenant Kamigan, it was later found out): “Commander Vitgeft has relinquished command.”

Seeing this, Ukhtomsky realized that it was up to him to assume command of the squadron. But he made up his mind that under the circumstances he would not follow the same policy as his late superior. Instead of going to Vladivostok, he would return to the haven of Port Arthur.

Ukhtomsky summoned his signalman and tried to put up the signal “Follow me,” but both masts where the signal flags could have flown were gone. In the end, he put the flags out on rails next to the conning tower and changed course to the west, assuming that the other ships would get the message and follow him. This action deepened the general confusion.

The greatest misfortune for the Russian side was that, in this decisive battle, none of the ships knew where to go. The degree of chaos beggars description. The Tsesarevich, its conning tower full of dead men, continued going around in crazy circles. The second ship, Retvizan, turned first to port, then to starboard. The third ship, Pobeda, naturally followed suit. To escape the Tsesarevich as it ran amok, the fourth-place Peresvet, which took over as flagship, veered to starboard and then to port before finally setting a new course for the west. But the other ships had difficulty in realizing that this was the new flagship. Only the fifth-place Sevastopol, following behind, understood and went along. The sixth battleship, the Poltava, was too far away to see what was happening.

“What’s going on?” the ship’s captain, Ivan Uspensky, hurriedly asked his navigator.

“I can’t really say,” answered the navigator with a quaver, peering straight ahead. “All I know for certain is that the flagship Tsesarevich has fallen out of line.”

Naturally, he knew that. The Poltava was just then passing by the Tsesarevich, which had stopped running in circles. Though listing to starboard, the former flagship was in no danger of sinking. Lieutenant Kamigan had attempted to take command of the ship again but hesitated, unsure where to go. Because the fleets had continued steaming on while they fought, the battle site was now far off.

Kamigan decided to go to Jiaozhou Bay. This was in the opposite direction from Vladivostok, but it wasn’t far, and it would be safe. Jiaozhou was leased to Germany, a Russian ally.

The former flagship steamed south, aiming for Jiaozhou and luckily managed to make good its escape, arriving the following night at nine o’clock, without having encountered any Japanese warships along the way. Damage to the ship was so severe that it could not withstand any more voyaging, let alone fighting. As allies of the Russians, the German authorities ought to have broken international law if necessary to minister to this hobbled ship. However, in what was perhaps a national trait, Germans venerated victors but were indifferent to losers. Governor Oskar von Truppel, citing international law, summarily requested the ship to leave. Only recently, Germany had cooperated with the Russian Navy and Army in Port Arthur, relaying military wires between Port Arthur and the Russian mainland there at Jiaozhou.

When the Russians demurred, saying the ship was incapable of leaving, Germany did what any neutral country should have done in such a situation. They removed the ship’s guns and armor, and interned it until the end of the war. Three Russian destroyers also fled to this same harbor and met with the same fate.

Out on the battlefield at sea, night was coming on, forcing Tōgō regrettably to order a ceasefire. The time was twenty-five minutes past eight. Though great damage had been inflicted on each enemy ship, not one had been sunk.

“This is bad,” murmured Saneyuki in the gathering darkness, stunned. “How could anything this bad be happening?”

Tōgō showed no sign of frustration as he ordered a company of destroyers and torpedo boats to clean up. Their crews, accustomed to night attacks, would close in and finish off the enemy with torpedoes at point-blank range. It was far more effective to sink ships from below with torpedoes than from above with a hail of gunfire. The operation was essentially picking off fallen warriors on the run.

Leaving the rest to the smaller ships and boats, Tōgō gathered up the warships in his command and prepared to make a leisurely return to his base in the Changshan Islands.

Saneyuki took a late supper. As he worked his knife and fork, his mind filled with visions of the vast seas of the Far East: the Yellow Sea, the Sea of Japan, the Sea of Okhotsk. Where would the enemy go? Most likely, the ships would not move together, but would each make good their escape individually. In any case, five battleships and a great many cruisers of the enemy fleet were now scattered around the perimeter of the isles of Japan. If they were only bunched up in Port Arthur as before, they’d be far easier to deal with. With the enemy so spread out, from tomorrow Japanese ships would no longer be safe on the Yellow Sea or the Sea of Japan.

“Well, what do you think?” broke in the voice of Chief of Staff Shimamura Hayao.

Absorbed in his own thoughts, Saneyuki had failed to notice when Shimamura, across from him, addressed him. He looked up as if to say, “Huh?”

“You think they can sink three at least?” He meant, could the destroyers and torpedo boats send at least three enemy battleships to the bottom.

“I doubt it.”

“You do? Why?”

“The squadron commanders and captains are worn out from the long siege operation. The boats aren’t moving energetically, judging from what we saw this afternoon.”

During the battle between the main forces, a barrage of countless shells, large and small, had fallen into the sea, making it impossible for smaller boats to play any role. It was true that Japanese destroyers and torpedo boats did nothing but roam around the battle area without contributing anything. But even if conditions weren’t right, weren’t you supposed to leap in, even in the face of certain death? Wasn’t that the nature of war? That’s what Saneyuki thought. Even though the mother ship Mikasa was being heavily bombarded, the smaller boats had only wandered around aimlessly.

Given that attitude in the daytime, how could they engage in desperate nighttime combat at close quarters?

At the very beginning, when they first struck Port Arthur, Saneyuki had anticipated that the destroyer flotillas would sink at least five enemy warships. Of course they would. The Russian fleet at Port Arthur had been anchored and defenseless, like so many “sitting ducks,” as someone had said. There were no booms to speak of. And they were in the outer harbor at Port Arthur.

The ships had attacked at night, groping their way forward, and fired off some twenty torpedoes, managing only to damage three enemy vessels in all. As soon as they had fired their torpedoes they had turned back, all of them returning without a scratch. For attackers to return unharmed could only mean that they had not, after all, been at close quarters with the enemy. In other words, the high-value Japanese flotilla commanders placed on their destroyers meant that they were unwilling to sacrifice them when necessary.

“There are only nineteen destroyers in all of Japan,” mused Saneyuki. “Are the captains too concerned that the loss of a ship would adversely affect the fleet?”

Or was it something else? He couldn’t forget the Americans in the Spanish–American War. They’d been amateurish in the extreme, yet far more adventurous in spirit than any Japanese. Among naval officers, the torpedo-craft captains had been a much more interesting lot than the ship captains, he thought. Maybe it was because the adventurous nature of light craft suited them better. In any case, those Americans were a rowdy bunch. They were drifters from Europe or their descendants, so maybe it was in them to like daredevil stunts.

In contrast, look at the Japanese. For the three hundred years of the Tokugawa period, they’d been farmers, each tending to his little plot of land—a way of life deeply ingrained in Japanese bones. Since the shogunate had outlawed adventure in every sense of the word, the adventurous frame of mind was generally lacking. On the other hand, Japanese were loyal and good at sticking to a set plan, which made them well suited to serving on big warships. A Japanese sailor might see his officer fly through the air in front of him or his mate be torn to shreds, but he would never leave his post. Therein lay the strength of the navy’s main force.

The world of destroyers, demanding individual courage and an individual spirit of adventure, seemed suited to Japanese but ultimately was not. Saneyuki, who had made a study of ancient Japanese naval history, thought privately, “We’ve forgotten the long-ago days when we roamed the coasts as pirates.” Destroyer crews were pirates, pure and simple, but modern descendants of those pirates of old were shockingly inept, to his mind.

When the Japanese destroyers went into action, the sky was still light. The enemy couldn’t have gotten far. “Our lead destroyer,” wrote Lieutenant Yoshida Takeshi, captain of the Shinonome (274 tons) in the Third Destroyer Division, “was the Usugumo”—279 tons—“with Commander Tsuchiya Mitsukane on board.”

We kept going so as not to lose sight of the Usugumo. But then in the pitch dark all the destroyers and torpedo boats started swarming at once toward the enemy ships and nearly ran each other down. It was extremely dangerous. The Usugumo would stagger one way and then the other to keep from running into friendly boats. The rest of us were following behind, and every time the ship did something like that we would come to a dead halt or turn or do something. In the meantime, we lost sight of the enemy completely.

It was a considerable traffic jam.

The battle tactics were crude. Following the First Sino-Japanese War, the Japanese Navy suddenly put together a world-class fleet, miraculously mastering the strategy and seamanship required for a great navy within ten short years—and yet there were oversights. Too much emphasis was laid on the strategy, operation, and offense and defense techniques of heavy ships, at the expense of learning the same about destroyers and torpedo boats. It is simply ridiculous that friendly boats got tangled in a tango on the broad sea and let the enemy give them the slip.

Some of the boats did fire off torpedoes, but all of them were afraid to get in too close to the enemy and fired from a distance, so none of the torpedoes hit. The enemy ships had been damaged in the earlier round of battle, but they were great warships. If they trained their countless guns large and small on one point in the sea and fired, even if they didn’t hit anything, the waves and mist that erupted would be enough to capsize a torpedo boat. That’s what the Japanese feared. None of the boats had the audacity to charge full tilt at the enemy and damn the consequences.

Then there was a night search. They never did relocate the enemy until dawn, when they saw three ships traveling slowly and unsteadily, the very picture of a vanquished foe. The Usugumo, Shinonome, and Sazanami of the Third Destroyer Division attacked, but then, unable to close in and finish off their prey, they fired torpedoes, did a U-turn, and returned to their fleet. Not a single torpedo found its mark.

And so the squadron commanders and captains returned to the base in the Changshan Islands with a dismal record of zero accomplishments to report to Admiral Tōgō.

After this incident, Tōgō replaced all these commanders and captains, though this was not his idea. Tōgō was a man of uncommon generosity, and, even when the officers came to report their utter lack of achievement, he thanked them as usual for their efforts and at the end only nodded without further comment. They deserved a tongue-lashing. Rozhestvensky, commander of the Baltic Fleet, would probably have sneered, “Worried about saving our skin, are we?” And he would have been well justified.

“We lost sight of the enemy in the dark of night,” they claimed.

Even letting this statement pass, once at dusk and once again at dawn they had sighted the enemy and attacked. But torpedoes couldn’t hit their target if fired from a distance by officers with cold feet, thought Saneyuki. As far as he could tell, the destroyers and torpedo boats had been in ceaseless motion ever since the fighting began. The commandants and captains were surely exhausted, their reflexes dulled.

And, even if the attack on Port Arthur had fallen short of his expectations, on paper it amounted to a sterling deed of arms for which these officers were guaranteed medals. That alone wouldn’t be enough to make a man hold life dear, and yet probably they did feel something like that. The depth of fatigue of those on smaller ships must be twice that of the men on the larger ships. A man’s will to fight declines as his fatigue increases. Wasn’t it asking too much to expect these men to rise and fight the coming Baltic Fleet, let alone to win?

“Replace the lot,” Saneyuki recommended to Shimamura Hayao, who nodded and passed on the recommendation to Tōgō,

“Changing horses midstream?” Tōgō was disinclined to act on this suggestion. “You think that’s wise?” The commander in chief’s primary job was keeping up morale. Making reckless personnel decisions was the last thing Tōgō wanted to do just then.

“It’s the principle of rewarding good work and punishing bad. It will charge up the men,” Shimamura insisted.

Tōgō gave his approval.

“And,” Shimamura went on, “to change public sentiment I must be transferred, too. It’s got to be done.”

Tōgō was taken aback, but Shimamura was adamant. From his point of view, since he had recommended the punishment of the destroyer commandants and captains, it would be wrong for him alone to keep his job. Transferring him would clearly settle the question of headquarters’ responsibility and prevent any sapping of morale.

“Let me command one of the cruiser task forces,” he suggested. “For the rest of it, I think Katō Tomosaburō would do a fine job. Anyway, as long as Akiyama’s here, everything will be all right no matter who becomes chief of staff.”

In the end, this was exactly what happened.

The battle of the Yellow Sea was a failure. If the measure of a battle’s success lies in the extent to which its strategic purpose is achieved, then for the Japanese Navy this battle was, if not an outright defeat, at best a failure. The reason is that it scattered the Port Arthur Squadron far and wide across the ocean. It was as if a creel full of fish, large and small, had inadvertently been overturned, spilling its contents into the river.

Of course, the battle was a failure for the Russian side as well. The Russians’ strategic purpose was to leave Port Arthur and make it to Vladivostok—but not one vessel did. Only the Novik managed to get almost all the way there. Small at 3,080 tons, the small protected cruiser Novik had been continually in the van of the battle. Even when the main force was under siege in the harbor, it was the Novik that had bravely ventured out. Its behavior was so different from that of the other Russian ships that it might have been from some other country. Its captain, Commander von Essen, was that sort of man. If someone like him had been commander in chief, the Japanese fleet would never have made it safely through the war.

The Novik fled the scene of battle and made straight for the German protectorate of Jiaozhou, as did the protected cruiser Askold (5,905 tons). Grammatchikov, captain of this ship, was a valiant man with a strong desire for fame. However, the Germans turned both ships away. After leaving Jiaozhou Harbor, the Askold went to Shanghai, where it was interned and disarmed. The Novik alone broke through the enemy forces and started on the perilous route to Vladivostok.

With no word on the Novik’s whereabouts, the Japanese were on edge. In Jiaozhou, the Novik had taken on so much coal that it was piled high on the deck. The light cruiser went past the Kagoshima Osumi Peninsula and entered the Pacific Ocean, pushing north past Kunashiri Strait.

The Japanese cruisers Chitose and Tsushima went looking for the Novik. They proceeded north over the Sea of Japan, entered Hakodate, and snooped around but found no trace of a Russian warship in Tsugaru Strait. Early in the morning on August 19, having pulled anchor and left Hakodate, they were searching along the Hokkaido coast when they received hot news that the enemy had been sighted just after seven o’clock, proceeding northwest by the Atoeya lighthouse in the Kuril Islands. The Japanese cruisers immediately headed for La Pérouse Strait at full speed. Just before dawn the next day, they arrived in the sea off Rebun Island on the northwestern tip of Hokkaido. The two cruisers then split up to hunt their prey.

The Tsushima came upon the Novik outside the town of Korsakov in Sakhalin and drew in. The Novik emerged from the harbor, but after an hour of heavy fighting suffered heavy damage and retreated to safety. The Chitose came running, and both Japanese cruisers went into the harbor only to find the Novik scuttled in shallow water by its own crew. Von Essen and the other survivors had all gone ashore, and so managed to avoid being taken prisoner.

One reason the Russians basically self-destructed without fighting sufficiently was that so many officers in their high command were nobles. Some of the ships, however, did show surprising mettle. The destroyer Reshitelny (240 tons) fled to Yantai, where its captain, A. A. Kornilov, told his men, “The real fighting starts now,” and took on a huge amount of coal. The Asashio and Kasumi of the First Destroyer Division went in pursuit of Reshitelny. As they were doing night reconnaissance of the harbor, they discovered the presence of the Russian ship. Intending to advise surrender, the Japanese sent out a boat containing Sublieutenant Terashima Usami from the Asashio, ten petty officers, and an interpreter.

Terashima boarded the Reshitelny and negotiated on deck with Lieutenant Kornilov. Realizing that escape was impossible, Kornilov covertly ordered his men to prepare to blow up the ship and went on conversing with Terashima. He stalled for time, giving the same vague responses over and over until an hour had passed. Finally, Terashima had had enough and decided to capture the ship. He looked back over his shoulder at Machinist Warrant Officer Sakamoto Tsunetsugu. Kornilov understood what Terashima was about and sprang at him, striking him in the face. Terashima grabbed Kornilov’s arm and tried to fling him off, but the other man was so outsized that the technique didn’t work. Terashima saw that grappling on the deck with a giant like that would leave him at a severe disadvantage, and so on the spur of the moment he grabbed Kornilov and toppled overboard with him in his arms. Once in the water, the two men came apart, and Terashima tried to climb back aboard.

On the deck, a brawl had broken out between the Japanese and Russians. The Russian sailors pounced on Sakamoto and tossed him overboard. At first, the men fought unarmed, but gradually they resorted to firearms. Though outnumbered, the Japanese fought hard. One was killed, and the remaining eleven all were wounded. On the Russian side, of a crew of fifty-one there were over thirty casualties. Just as Terashima was scrambling back on board, the ship trembled, and an explosion went off in the fore part. The Russian sailors leaped into the water in fear and swam for shore. There were no further blasts, and so Terashima took Reshitelny in tow as prize.

“The Russian fighting man was not at all weak,” Tōgō later commented. “In fact, the Russians were powerful fighters. The main reason they lost lay in the difference in their basic concept of war. Russians didn’t think of war as something fought by individuals. The army thought it was fought by units of troops, the navy by ships—so, when a warship was seized, the men felt their duty was done and, with extremely rare exceptions, stopped putting up a fight. Japanese soldiers and sailors, on the other hand, were set to fight as long as they had breath, even if their unit was defeated or their ship destroyed. This difference in concept was the determining factor in victory and defeat.”

It was true. Although no Russian battleship was sunk on the Yellow Sea, the Russians went ahead and adopted a posture of defeat. This greatly benefited the Japanese.

After the battle of the Yellow Sea, the Russians did indeed see themselves as losers. The Tsesarevich fled to the neutral territory of Jiaozhou and was disarmed. The cruiser Askold also took refuge in Jiaozhou for a brief time but was chased away by the Germans and went instead to Shanghai, where it was disarmed. The cruiser Diana, after stopping in Jiaozhou, went all the way to Saigon, where the French authorities disarmed it. The destroyers Grozovoy, Bezshumny, Besposhchadny, and Besstrashny all chose similar fates. The bulk of the squadron, including the five remaining battleships, returned to Port Arthur.

On shore, word that the ships were back caused a commotion. The fleet that had left harbor on August 10 in such high spirits with the Russian Navy’s St. Andrew flags flying high limped back with their superstructures torn to pieces, leaking and listing, little more than floating scrap. Seeing the sorry state of the ships, the soldiers at Port Arthur who had yelled, “Navy, get out!” regretted their former taunts.

A joint summit council of naval and army leaders was quickly held. General Stoessel, who disliked the navy, expressed heartfelt condolences and respect for the navy’s “gallant fighting.” Rear Admiral Ukhtomsky and a dozen other navy officers were present. Every one of them was wounded.

“Japanese shells are powerful,” said someone, and everybody chimed in, agreeing. They still did not know about Shimose powder, but they knew plenty about the devastation it caused. They talked about the unthinkable impact of exploded shells. “Even if one doesn’t hit home but falls in the water beside the ship, the damage is still terrific. It releases a gas with heat so intense that it melts the joints on the steel plates in the side armor belt, so the ship takes on water.” The shells released a great deal of gas at very high temperature. Since even the protected areas of the ship were so vulnerable, the damage to unprotected areas was even worse.

“The explosive power of that gas goes way beyond our shells. It doesn’t just destroy the metal on the side of the ship and the decks, it knocks down smokestacks, smashes ventilators, topples steel masts, and destroys steering gear. The temperature is unbelievably high—it must be a good 3,000 degrees Celsius. The proof is it’s hot enough to melt the coat of paint on steel surfaces. The paint evaporates and burns like alcohol.”

“That’s not a shell, it’s a flying torpedo,” said someone.

“There must be six times as much powder in a Japanese shell as there is guncotton in one of our shells,” said a navy medic. “When a Russian shell explodes, the casing just breaks into large pieces, but a Japanese shell disintegrates into numberless tiny fragments. If one of those hits you, it penetrates to the bone.”

Shimose powder was invented in 1888 and, after extensive testing, adopted by the navy in 1893. The powder was not used in the First Sino-Japanese War, however, which began the following year. Sawa Kannojō, superintendent general of naval ordnance, was quoted in the September 4, 1911 edition of Hōchi Shimbun as saying, “Shimose powder was already available by the time of the First Sino-Japanese War, but we couldn’t use it yet because the machinery wasn’t perfected.” To implement the powerful explosive, various ordnance and other mechanical conditions had to be met. Until the First Sino-Japanese War, the all-important percussion fuse used in Japanese artillery shells was mainly of Dutch make, but this was ill-suited to Shimose powder. The later invention of the Ijūin fuse finally made Shimose powder a practical alternative, and, by the time of the Russo-Japanese War, all shells, torpedoes, and mines of the Japanese Navy were packed with this explosive.

The explosive’s inventor, Shimose Masachika, was the son of a musketeer in Hiroshima domain. His grandfather pored through Dutch books to learn about explosives. Shimose was born in 1859, the same year as Akiyama Yoshifuru, and so both men experienced the upheaval of the Meiji Restoration at around the age of ten. They were also affected in much the same way by the decline of the samurai class, which left their families in straitened circumstances.

After graduating from Hiroshima Middle School, Shimose entered the Imperial College of Engineering in 1878. There was a two-year preparatory course followed by a five-year specialized course. Shimose majored in chemistry and after getting his degree entered the Naval Ministry, where he worked in the arsenal.

Around this time, the head of the arsenal was a Satsuma man named Harada Sōsuke, who went to study in Britain with Tōgō Heihachirō, among others, in 1871. Harada studied weapon manufacturing at William Armstrong’s company in Newcastle. He was fond of saying, “Without superior arms, no nation can be free.” This may well have been the slogan of the arsenal, where invention was prized above imitation.

When Shimose came to work there, Harada told him, “Japan is a weak country. There’s just one way for a weak country to survive in this age of imperialism, and that’s by inventing weapons. Concentrate on the powder used in munitions. Rather than improving on what’s already there, come up with something revolutionary.”

Shimose was convinced and spent three years developing a kind of powder completely unlike the guncotton then in use in Western countries. His invention used picric acid, taking advantage of the shock-sensitive picryl chloride that forms when the acid comes into contact with steel. The terrific explosions that occurred when the acid was driven into steel plates revolutionized the world’s concept of explosives.

In quantitative terms, Japan had little chance of winning the war. The country’s one slim advantage lay in Shimose powder, which produced temperatures so high that people actually said, “If a shell detonates anywhere on a warship, the deck will be too hot to set foot on.” In the beginning, the Russians complained to the world that Japanese artillery shells released toxic fumes. They justified the claim by citing examples such as the time when, after a Japanese torpedo struck the coal bunker on the cruiser Pallada, six sailors approached the scene to put out the blaze and collapsed on the spot as if poisoned by gas. It wasn’t toxic gas that did them in, of course. The temperature of the gas released when the blasting charge went off was extraordinarily high—as high as 3,000 degrees Celsius—and this was the cause of the six sailors’ unhappy end.

Unable to believe that, only thirty-odd years after modernizing, Japan could have created its own new artillery, the Russian naval officers at Port Arthur announced that Japan was using British-made Lyddite shells.

Meanwhile, a Japanese naval research lab did an analysis of Russian shells and found they had extremely low explosive power. Because Russia had formerly been on close terms with France, the Japanese thought at first that they might be using mélinite, an explosive invented by the French, but apparently France never shared the invention with Russia. Russian fuses, moreover, were rather crude, and many shells failed to explode.

Russia first took a serious look at the power of Shimose powder when, in the naval battle off Ulsan after the battle of the Yellow Sea, the cruisers Gromoboy and Rossiya finally staggered into port at Vladivostok. They were both afloat, but neither one was good for anything but scrap. “Damage to both ships was so severe that people shivered at the sight,” declared one newspaper. The ships’ boats lay in shambles, the gun barrels were destroyed, and there were gaping holes in the ships’ sides large enough for a man to walk through. Of the Russians’ twenty cannons, barely three remained usable.

Foreign newspapers also reported on the Japanese explosive. On July 31, the New York Times speculated: “Since Japan is treating this explosive as a top national secret, it is impossible to say for certain, but it appears to be quite revolutionary. Russians were put in the unlucky position of having to learn the powder’s potency through physical experience.”

Based on Shimose powder, which was for naval guns, the Japanese Army developed its own new “yellow powder” (picric acid), successfully producing it on an industrial scale in 1897. This powder never achieved the potency demonstrated by Shimose powder against steel enemy ships.

After deliberation, the Russian Army decided the warships that had fled back to Port Arthur were “too damaged to be of any use as warships” and so would be left to sit unused in the harbor. Most of the crew members were assigned shore duty, and the ships floated empty on the water. Most of their guns were removed and taken ashore for use as heavy artillery in the fortress.

Due to a failure of intelligence, the removal from active duty of what was left of the fleet at Port Arthur remained unknown to Admiral Tōgō, out at sea. Although Japanese intelligence was extremely good in Europe and on the battlefields of Manchuria during the Russo-Japanese War, Port Arthur was an exception. There the Russian military kept city streets under such heavy surveillance that Japanese intelligence was paralyzed. Accordingly, Tōgō did not learn of the fleet’s state until the fall of Port Arthur, and until then maintained the difficult blockade with its heavy price in exhaustion of men and machinery. Naturally, he was impatient to leave and fit out his ships, but until General Nogi’s Third Army prevailed at Port Arthur, he was stuck. The situation was no different from the beginning of the war.

One big worry was gone, however, as a result of the naval battle off Ulsan on August 14.

The Russian naval force based at Vladivostok was an independent cruiser squadron that in the end worked the hardest of any unit in the Russian Navy and did the most damage, not to the Japanese Navy, but to the army. The squadron consisted of three armored cruisers, one protected cruiser, and one armed merchantman, for a total of five. These five ships scoured the Sea of Japan and the Korea Strait, harassing and sinking Japanese transport ships heading to and from Manchuria.

On April 26, the cargo ship Kinshū Maru went down. On June 15, the Hitachi Maru was attacked and sunk with an Imperial Guard regiment on board, and the Sado Maru, transporting a railway engineer corps, was severely pounded and suffered enormous damage. The squadron freely sank everything from large ships like the Izumi Maru (3,229 tons) to, over on the Pacific side, tiny ships like the 100-ton Kihō Maru, Hokusei Maru No. 2, and Fukujū Maru. Finally, they grew emboldened enough to venture over to Tokyo Bay on the Pacific side, graze Izu Peninsula, and wreak havoc on Japan’s naval transport system.

The Japanese assigned Kamimura Hikonojō’s Second Squadron to pursue the Vladivostok Squadron, but the waters were vast, the enemy elusive. For a time this situation cast a pall of gloom over Imperial General Headquarters.

The Vladivostok Squadron was highly mobile. Its sole purpose was to evade the Kamimura fleet and, operating out of Kamimura’s line of sight, disrupt Japanese lines of transportation. The two forces played a constant game of hide-and-seek in the waters around the isles of Japan.

Satō Tetsutarō, staff officer of the Second Squadron, would later write, “Kamimura’s squadron did not enjoy good fortune in war.” Satō was at this time classified together with Saneyuki as a naval strategist.

Kamimura’s mobile attack unit went as far as Askold Island off Vladivostok in an attempt to lure the enemy out to open sea but was unable to get in close as the sea was frozen over. Finally, by breaking through areas of thin ice, the fleet approached the harbor and attacked by long-range firing, but the enemy did not emerge. Subsequently, on hearing that the Vladivostok Squadron had attacked the port of Wŏnsan in Korea, they rushed over but arrived too late. When the Vladivostok Squadron showed up in the Tsushima Strait and fired on the Sado Maru and Hitachi Maru, Kamimura was nowhere nearby. The nation was coldly unsympathetic to Kamimura’s ill-fortune, labeling him incompetent or worse; some called him a traitor. His house was constantly pelted with stones.

Kamimura assiduously continued to hunt for his prey. On the evening of July 1, while cruising southwest of Tsushima, he spotted thin smoke 22,000 meters offshore and tore off in desperate pursuit, but the enemy again fled, managing to disappear as the sun set.

Most painful of all for Kamimura were the events of July 24. At one o’clock that afternoon, he received a wire from Imperial General Headquarters to the effect that three ships of the Vladivostok Squadron were cruising off Izu Peninsula, posing a threat to merchant ships. His orders were to proceed swiftly to Tokyo Bay. He promptly headed the fleet south along the west coast of Kyushu, but as they were speeding on their way, around eight o’clock in the evening orders came in from the Combined Fleet to proceed immediately to Hokkaido instead. The fleet thus was given simultaneous conflicting orders. The orders from the Combined Fleet were to “give up guarding the Tokyo Bay area, go straight to Hokkaido, and wait in Tsugaru Strait to intercept the Vladivostok Squadron on its return.” This clearly contravened the earlier orders.

The reasoning behind the Imperial Headquarters order was that the Vladivostok Squadron intended to proceed down Japan’s Pacific coast, threatening the Tokyo Bay area, before merging with the Port Arthur Squadron. The basis of the Combined Fleet’s order was the contrary supposition that the enemy would pull back and return to Vladivostok via Tsugaru Strait.

After hesitating, Kamimura decided to obey the order from Imperial General Headquarters, the navy’s supreme command. However, the order from the Combined Fleet was the correct one. Akiyama Saneyuki had had a vision accurately foretelling the movements of the Vladivostok Squadron.

Saneyuki’s vision was to a great extent mystical.

During this time, Saneyuki spent all day every day trying to visualize which route the Vladivostok Squadron would take. One night he was unable to sleep. That’s when it happened.

To digress for a moment, an officer once commented, “When I go into Akiyama’s cabin, his eyes will be looking straight at me, but when I speak to him he makes no response.” When Saneyuki was deep in thought, there was something abnormal about him. Idle chatter didn’t bother him. Once, as he lay on the sofa with his shoes on, reading a book, some junior officers began bragging among themselves, half joking, about what they would do if they were in charge of the next operation. Saneyuki suddenly threw aside his book, jumped up, and said, “Say that again. What would you do?” He got out his compass and square and, after listening in all seriousness to the others’ braggadocio, worked out a logical battle plan on the spot.

This time was different. As he lay on the bed with his shoes on, absorbed in thinking, he dozed off from fatigue. Before his eyes spread a scene of pale sky and sea, just after dawn. In the background were rolling hills. It was clearly a scene on Japan’s eastern coast, near Tsugaru Strait. He could see three dark war vessels—the Rossiya, Rurik, and Gromoboy of the Vladivostok Squadron—heading north to Tsugaru Strait.

Saneyuki was disposed to trust this vision that had mysteriously come upon him. The vessels must be on their way back to Vladivostok via Tsugaru Strait. Strategy was something to be worked out with every ounce of brainpower at your disposal, but in the end, as he was well aware, once the plan was pared down to its essentials, you had to fall back on native instinct. He believed the voice of instinct to be the expression of a transcendental state, one that he sometimes attained and one that was worthy of his trust. His involvement with spirituality in later life stemmed from these experiences.

But at the time he said nothing to anyone of this mysterious vision, knowing that if he did, Tōgō and the other superior officers would lose faith in what he said.

He went directly to the stateroom of the chief of staff and gave a reasoned explanation of the Tsugaru Strait theory. The Combined Fleet promptly overrode the orders from Imperial General Headquarters and wired Kamimura to proceed to Tsugaru Strait. Kamimura, however, had already taken action based on the earlier orders. Had he acted on Saneyuki’s hunch instead, the defeat of the Vladivostok Squadron would have come about sooner than it did.

When his fleet was unable to intercept the Vladivostok Squadron, Kamimura Hikonojō was subjected to a barrage of bitter criticism in letters, newspapers, and speeches. After it was reported that the fleet had lost sight of the enemy in dense fog, one member of the House of Representatives made a speech in which he railed, “Turn ‘dense fog’”—nōmu—“upside down and you have an incompetent”—munō!

All of this shows the spirit of the times. This was an age when the Japanese people were hard taskmasters. In essence, they had formed the fleet with their taxes and put Kamimura in charge. He was their representative, and so they found his incompetence to be offensive. Later on, in the militarized state of the late 1930s and early 1940s, the military clique would rule Japan on the borrowed authority of the emperor, acting for all the world as if they had taken over the land where Japanese people resided. The people were their servants and, toward the last, their slaves. The nation at the time of the Russo-Japanese War was qualitatively different from the nation of the 1930s and 1940s.

Later, Kamimura’s staff officer Satō Tetsutarō would recall, “The attacks from the populace were vicious. They even called us the ‘Russian spy fleet.’” Letters like the following poured in: “The Kamimura fleet would make lousy bird catchers. If a bird appeared in Ueno and you gave chase from Shimbashi, do you think you’d catch it?”

Kamimura Hikonojō was a typically pugnacious man of Satsuma. Quick to quarrel as a youth, he hated losing and was a valiant general. The “owner” of the navy during this war, Yamamoto Gombei, chose Tōgō to lead the Combined Fleet and Kamimura to command the Second Squadron, which Yamamoto Gombei needed to carry out brave hit-and-run tactics. Kamimura was chosen because his character suited the job. This must have made the lashing criticism he received all the more intolerable.

“While the fleet was anchored in Tsushima,” Satō wrote in his memoirs, “the commander would often go fishing in a small boat.” Whether Kamimura did this to raise morale by showing his men that, despite the barrage of public criticism, he could relax and go fishing, or whether he did it to calm himself down after a fit of rage, no one knew. In any case, while in Tsushima, Kamimura often had his men engage in sumo wrestling or go mountain climbing to refresh their spirits.

Even when speeding back to Tokyo Bay on orders from Imperial Headquarters, the fleet would frequently be troubled by unverified reports of enemy sightings. On July 25, this wire came in: “Russian fleet is just off Katsuura, Bōsō Peninsula.” The following day came this wire, naming a completely different area: “Off Cape Shionomisaki, Kishū Peninsula.” The second wire was in error.

Eventually, Kamimura’s fleet searched painstakingly around the Izu islands, but by then the enemy had gone, and they returned to Tsushima empty-handed.

Such was the ill fortune that had dogged the Second Squadron. Luck finally came their way when, on August 12, the Vladivostok Squadron left the harbor at Vladivostok and headed south of its own accord. This was essentially an addendum to the battle of the Yellow Sea. When the Port Arthur Squadron set out, it contacted the Vladivostok Squadron with a request to be met halfway. Once the two forces had met and converged, they would then return to Vladivostok together. But, before this could happen, the Port Arthur Squadron was routed and scattered to the winds. Unaware, the Vladivostok Squadron steamed across the Sea of Japan on its way to the rendezvous.

Once the Port Arthur Squadron made its move, the Vladivostok Squadron was bound to respond. From past experience, this was easy to predict. Saneyuki came to this conclusion and, with Tōgō’s permission, issued orders to Kamimura to be on the alert for the appearance of the Vladivostok Squadron.

Even without such an order, Kamimura and his staff officer Satō were well aware of the situation. Resolved to wait north or northeast of Tsushima for the enemy to appear, they assigned ships of the Fourth Division to patrol strategic points, stationing the Niitaka south of Tsushima. On August 11 at forty minutes past ten in the morning, the main force left Ozaki Bay and sped toward its destination. At Tōgō’s order, they stopped west of the island of Heuksando along the way, arriving east of Tsushima at dawn on the thirteenth.

At half past one in the morning on August 14, they arrived off Ulsan to the east and changed course, heading south-southwest. In the early morning, they discovered the Vladivostok Squadron heading south. The discovery came at twenty-five minutes past four, when a dim glow was detected far off on the port bow. There was no moon that night.

What could this be? Excitement stirred aboard the flagship Izumo. As they continued along, the sun came up. Twenty minutes after the light was first sighted, they discovered the three ships of the Vladivostok Squadron moving through the morning mist.

That morning, there was a southerly breeze. The weather was fine, the sea calm. Both sides were in single line-ahead formation. The enemy consisted of the flagship Rossiya (12,195 tons) in the lead, followed by the Gromoboy (12,359 tons) and the Rurik (10,936 tons), all great armored cruisers. The Japanese side consisted of four armored cruisers, with the Izumo (9,906 tons) in the lead, followed by the Azuma (9,450 tons), the Tokiwa (9,855 tons), and the Iwate (9,906 tons). The Asama and Yakumo were also part of this fleet, but both were then in the Port Arthur area.

Around five o’clock, when the two sides were approximately 6 nautical miles apart, Admiral Kamimura sent off the wireless message: “Enemy sighted,” and went into battle position. The encounter took place just off Ulsan in Korea. Partly because the sun was not yet fully risen, the Russians were slow to spot Kamimura.

From the psychological pressure that had been brought to bear on him, Kamimura was out for blood. His desperation in this battle can be told from the speed with which his Izumo raced across the sea, far outstripping the Azuma and the rest. He was prepared to leap into the enemy’s midst with the Izumo alone and open fire. The rearmost ship at this time, the Iwate, was left far behind. One of the officers on board the Iwate saw smoke far off on the horizon, assumed it was from the Vladivostok Squadron, and took a photograph. Afterward, everyone looked at the photograph and had a good laugh, realizing it was their own Izumo. That shows how close the Izumo drew to the enemy in its headlong dash.

Kamimura stood on the bridge. A staff officer beside him, observing the enemy through binoculars, remarked aloud on the unexpected size of the enemy fleet: “They’re huge, sir.”

“Then they will be that much easier to hit,” Kamimura spat out. Full of fighting spirit, he was jumpy and irritable before his first engagement.

Finally, the enemy caught wind of them. In confusion, they suddenly changed course to port, apparently intending to flee east. Kamimura was enraged. If they escaped his clutches this time, he would have no choice but to atone with his life. To keep the enemy from stealing away, he changed course to east-southeast and saw them on the starboard bow. He kept his eyes on them, seeking to shorten the intervening distance.

There was not quite enough light yet to begin a gun battle, and the distance was a little far. But to prevent the enemy from escaping, Kamimura had no choice but to open fire. It was twenty-three minutes past five, when from a range of 8,400 meters he opened fire on the enemy’s rearmost ship, the Rurik. The enemy returned fire.

Every 8-inch shell from the main gun on the Izumo must have been imbued with Kamimura’s resentment. Few if any shots missed; they hit the Rurik as if drawn by a magnet, exploding and setting the ship instantly on fire.

During the entire battle off Ulsan, it was later said, the gunners on the Izumo had to keep shooting without replacements before there was adequate light, straining their eyes. The Rossiya and Gromoboy began to open fire. Soon every ship in the Japanese fleet was keeping up a thunderous fire. Every shell increased the tension over the water; clouds of smoke and soot filled the air, and gigantic pillars of water rose and fell.

The Japanese tendency toward hypersensitivity made Japanese soldiers poor marksmen with small arms. In the First Sino-Japanese War, they seldom did as well as the Chinese soldiers, and, in the Russo-Japanese War, Russian officers and foreign observers were united in their opinion that the Japanese infantry were poor shots. The Japanese Army actually had a phrase shageki baka, “firing idiot.” The idea was that those who were a bit dull-witted were better suited to firing rifles, which requires a calm frame of mind. The general inferiority of Japanese small-arms marksmanship is probably attributable to soldiers’ hypersensitivity to their environment, causing them to become overly excited.

Yet the accuracy of the cannons, even in the army, was slightly better than that of the Russian artillery. In the navy, the difference was greater. You could almost say they were poles apart. It was part of Tōgō’s basic policy to emphasize marksmanship, and in between battles he drilled his men constantly. Not only that, he gathered superior gunners from the entire fleet and put the best on his battleship fleet, the second best on Kamimura’s heavy cruiser fleet. Tōgō’s simple, clear enforcement of his belief that the outcome of a battle depended on big guns on great ships lay behind his fleet’s success.

The accuracy of Kamimura’s fleet was miraculously high. Within thirty minutes of the outbreak of hostilities, all three enemy ships were on fire. What worked in Kamimura’s favor was that the rising sun was continually at his back. He strove mightily to maintain this advantage. With the sun behind them, his men had a clear view of the enemy, and their aim was spot on.

The Vladivostok Squadron’s blunder lay in shooting in the direction of the sun. With the light against them, they could see Kamimura’s fleet only in silhouette, and their gun crews’ eyes quickly tired from squinting.

At fifty-two minutes past five, twenty-nine minutes after the fighting began, the Rossiya and Gromoboy turned to starboard and fled south, leaving the still-burning Rurik alone on the scene of battle. But the Russians of the Vladivostok Squadron were so valiant that they might have been a different race of men from those of the Baltic Fleet. Their devotion to their consort ships was exceptionally strong. The Rossiya and Gromoboy escaped, only to come back and draw near the Rurik. Kamimura’s fleet quickly went forward to block their path, changing course to west-northwest. They saw the enemy off the port side, steered a parallel course, and opened fire.

There was something deeply moving in the efforts of the Rurik to make a comeback. Finally back with its consorts, it got back in formation and savagely returned fire, but at half past six, its steering gear was disabled, and it began to drift.

Kamimura went after the Rossiya and Gromoboy. At 6,000 meters, he subjected them to enfilading fire. With high accuracy, a vast quantity of concentrated shells landed squarely on the ships; but these were great warships and did not sink. Amazingly, after this much hard fighting, at around seven o’clock, the two ships again returned to the Rurik in the midst of the battle. But this time, the Rurik was beyond help.

With its rudder destroyed and a large fire raging on deck, the Rurik could not be saved. The Rossiya and the Gromoboy approached but soon fled north again. They put out their own shipboard fires only to come under heavy raking fire from Kamimura’s fleet, hot in their pursuit, and have flames break out all over again.

But the consort ships were surprisingly unwilling to leave their fallen comrade behind, returning still yet again. Kamimura intervened, firing incessantly until the air was dark with clouds of smoke. Finally, the consort ships had no choice but to give up and change course for the north.

“They mean to go back to Vladivostok!” yelled Kamimura from the bridge. He meant he would see to it they did not.

The Izumo and the three ships behind picked up speed. But, after the long battle, their hulls were in need of cleaning, and none of them could reach their allotted speed. The enemy ships were surprisingly swift. They kept on breaking out in fires, and every man on board enlisted in the fight to extinguish them. The Russians’ guns had largely fallen silent, probably put out of commission by all the shelling, yet their engines were intact and their waterline armor unharmed, it seemed, for they flew along with no diminution of speed.

Herein lay the weakness of the Japanese naval artillery shells known as “flying torpedoes.” As we mentioned before, deliberate emphasis was laid on destroying everything on board enemy ships and taking away their fighting capacity, rather than rupturing their armor and sinking them, or piercing their bottoms and blowing them up.

Though the Rossiya and Gromoboy had managed not to go under, the damage done to them was so extensive that they were little more than junk. On the Rossiya the upper deck was completely smashed, almost all the casements on the main deck destroyed, the mast fallen. Even both smokestacks had collapsed. On the Gromoboy also the defenses on all three decks were utterly ruined. The two ships had only three usable guns between them. Half of the officers had been killed, and few crew members survived unscathed. Those able to work were forced to spend their time extinguishing fires rather than fighting the enemy.

Even so, they maintained a good speed of 19 knots. The Izumo and the rest pursued them at the same clip, which made capture impossible. The Japanese could only continue firing as they gave chase.

Kamimura tried hard to sink the two Russian ships, causing five conflagrations aboard the Rossiya and three aboard the Gromoboy. Throughout the pursuit, he remained on the bridge glaring at the enemy without moving, but after ninety minutes his chief of staff wrote something in chalk on the blackboard and showed it to him. The roar of winds and waves made normal conversation impossible. On the blackboard were these words: “Out of ammunition.”

Kamimura grabbed the blackboard and threw it to the deck. He must have been bitter indeed. But there was nothing for it but to turn around.

After that, the two Russian armored cruisers made it back to Vladivostok, ready for the scrap heap. The Rurik sank. The Vladivostok Squadron was no more.