2

LIAOYANG

Next to Mukden, Liaoyang is the largest city in southern Manchuria, with some thirty thousand households. The city’s history is surprisingly ancient. From the time of the Han dynasty, Liaoyang was a local hub, and in the later Liao dynasty it became one of the five capital cities of the Khitan nation. It was laid out in a square with a neat grid of streets and enormous protective walls, each one as much as 1.5 kilometers long. Those walls, with eight outer gates in all, were extensively rebuilt in the early Ming dynasty.

Five years before the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, imperialist Russia took over Liaoyang and forcibly made it a semi-protectorate. The Russians saw the city as having greater strategic value than Mukden to the north. To borrow from Sunzi’s discussion of terrain in The Art of War, Liaoyang was a crossroads: roads from all directions led there.

The streets of Liaoyang showed how much effort the Russians had put into administering affairs in Manchuria. In only five years, a fine Russian settlement had gone up. Just west of the city was the Liaoyang railway station, with various modern facilities clustered around it. The locomotive yard had a great fan-shaped switchyard of a type not yet seen in Japan. The Russian enclave by the terminal was lined with Western-style brick buildings—everything from official residences and trading houses to churches and clubs. The view from any street corner called to mind a European city. Only the seasonal blanket of yellow dust—airborne sand swept up from the roads—marked this as Manchuria.

General Kuropatkin’s headquarters and official residence were located near Liaoyang Station. Europe’s great military strategist arrived in town three months ahead of the battle. His main task, which he was resolved to accomplish, was to assemble a great army that would wipe out the Japanese Army at one blow. Defeated at Nanshan and Telissu, he had driven his troops further and further north, finally making camp in Liaoyang. He needed to prepare for a major battle that he had to win convincingly to avoid losing favor in the St. Petersburg palace. His reputation had suffered, and he needed to take steps to restore it.

Far East Viceroy Alexeyev, in the role of nagging mother-in-law, kept sticking his nose in matters of strategy and had to be handled with tact. Kuropatkin reminded himself repeatedly, “This is turning out just the way Witte warned it would.” Sergei Witte’s warning had been blunt: “Capture Alexeyev and send him back to Moscow or you won’t be able to fight the war.” Military genius though he was, not even the great Kuropatkin had that much nerve.

Kuropatkin’s plan for the coming battle may be described as grand. Although the battle of Liaoyang would be a field battle, the Russian general introduced elements of siege warfare as well. Besides turning the town into a fortress, he also constructed semi-permanent fortifications and field works nearby where Russian soldiers could lie in wait for Japanese troops. In this way, he artfully combined elements of offense and defense, an approach in keeping with traditional Russian strategy. Vast amounts of materials went into the making of these fortifications.

Northwest of town flowed the Taizi River. Kuropatkin positioned the far right wing of his inner defenses along the river’s lower reaches and extended the line to the south and west to enfold Liaoyang. Along the way, he constructed fifteen heavily guarded strong points. With these as base, he added rows of concealed fortifications and batteries large and small bound together organically by fields of interlocking fire. The Russians excelled at building such fortifications. The one responsible for this design was General Konstantin Velichko, a renowned authority in the field of military engineering.

Kuropatkin requested that the fortifications be made as strong as possible. There was little time to build them since they had to be ready in three months. Major General Nikolai Aleksandrov assured him that, no matter how manfully the Japanese fought, the fortifications would last one hundred days. According to Kuropatkin’s calculations, that would be more than enough time, as he was expecting reinforcements. All he needed to do was hold out till those arrived.

Kuropatkin had two hundred thirty thousand troops at his command, while the Japanese Army numbered only one hundred forty thousand. With those superior numbers, there’s no telling what might have become of the Japanese Army had he gone on the attack. But Russian strategy laid primary emphasis on defense. Kuropatkin practiced “safe attack” by inflicting damage on the enemy (the Japanese Army truly suffered heavy damage), while defending his territory and waiting for the enemy to weaken. The Japanese preferred to leap boldly into the fire like Edo firefighters, but that approach was alien to Kuropatkin. Despite commanding a large field army of two hundred thirty thousand men, he was eager for reinforcements from European Russia, expecting to increase his troop strength by as much as two corps.

Kuropatkin’s battle plan had depth. However, the great strategist did do one peculiar thing: he opened great holes in the city walls as potential escape routes. While constructing elaborate defenses, he prepared simultaneously for the possibility of defeat and flight. This mindset would be a main contributing factor to his defeat in the battle of Liaoyang.

The truth is that the Japanese Army should have reacted swiftly to the deployment of Russian troops in Liaoyang but could not, due to a shortage of ammunition. The Japanese Navy had entered the war with ammunition to spare, but not so the army. As war preparations got underway, army leaders blithely underestimated the amount of ammunition they would need. They were simply unable to conceive of the rate of consumption of material resources in modern warfare. This failure of imagination was a constitutional flaw in the Japanese Army and not just in this era, either—it persisted all the way up to the army’s demise at the end of the Second World War.

A longstanding myth in the Japanese Army was that battles are won by officers’ strategy and daring. Before the war, staff officers devoted themselves wholeheartedly to mapping out strategy, becoming immersed in strategic problems with all the ardor of chess enthusiasts. Liaoyang strategy was one “chess problem” that the General Staff had been working on since around 1902. Army officers made the unfortunate assumption that actual warfare was like chess—an equation that they clung to till the very end. In their simplistic way of thinking, all that it took to convert a “chess problem” into real-life combat was do-or-die fighting on the field. When a strategy that looked good on paper didn’t pan out as expected on the battlefield, they berated the troops on the assumption that men at the front had shown cowardice.

This thinking was shared by all tacticians in the Japanese Army, whether in Tokyo or at the rear. As they prepared to put their Liaoyang strategy into action, instead of ammunition, the army prepared ten thousand boxes to store the bones of the soldiers who would die in battle (according to a Russian source). They failed to grasp that what was needed to flesh out a chess problem and make it into a workable battle plan was not soldiers’ blood, but material resources.

During the buildup to war, the General Staff Office considered how much ammunition to procure. If the amount needed were, say, ten times as much as in the First Sino-Japanese War, they would have to place an order overseas or else expand production in the Osaka Arsenal. But army leaders reached the jaw-dropping conclusion that they could get by with fifty rounds per gun, per month—when, in fact, that much would be used up in a single day.

This plan, totally devoid of any understanding of the exigencies of modern warfare, was the brainchild of the Army Ministry’s artillery section chief. The pervasive evil of kowtowing to experts—or the rigidity of the bureaucracy—led his superiors to approve his proposal. The vice minister approved it and so did the army minister, thus giving it the ministry’s official endorsement. Imperial General Headquarters swallowed the plan whole. The resulting cost in bloodshed would be enormous, yet, due to the smokescreen of bureaucracy, no one was called to account after the war.

And so it was due to lack of ammunition that Japanese troops were not able to promptly start the battle of Liaoyang, their first major land engagement with the Russian Army. Meanwhile, Nogi’s Third Army, struggling to besiege Port Arthur, was exhausting its ammunition supply to no good effect. Imperial General Headquarters was flooded with frantic wires warning that Nogi’s army was scraping bottom. The sheer idiocy of trying to fight a war with insufficient bullets and shells boggles the mind.

This is how an artillery section chief’s catastrophic decision to order fifty rounds of ammunition per weapon before the outbreak of war played a crucial role in the nation’s history. Early on, after a baptism by Russian fire in Nanshan and Jinzhou, the allotment was expanded to “at least one hundred rounds per gun,” but it was already too late. Japan’s arsenal could not expand production overnight, and ordering from abroad (though this was done) could not fill the gap in time. In the meantime, the war proceeded on course. The Russian Army was not about to wait for the enemy to lay in ammunition.

During these battle preparations, the Japanese Army carefully set aside ammunition from the domestic supply. The First Army managed to stockpile 205 rounds per weapon, the Second Army 180 rounds, the Fourth Army 140. Still, it was all too clear that, once fighting began, those paltry amounts would quickly be used up. Requests rained on Tokyo for more. From Nogi at Port Arthur came this appeal: “Stop making ammunition for field guns and mountain guns. Make ammunition for siege guns instead. Six hundred rounds per gun needed immediately.” But Tokyo was unable to grant even this request.

Meanwhile, with the onset of fighting only days off, the following incident took place in Manchuria. On August 23, Kodama Gentarō, chief of staff of the Manchurian Army, received a secret wire from Imperial General Headquarters. It was sent by Major General Nagaoka Gaishi, vice chief of the General Staff. The wire began “For your eyes only” as showing it around carelessly was sure to deplete morale. The gist of the message was this: “The Third Army hasn’t got enough rifle bullets, let alone larger ammunition. We need to give it all the ammunition piled up around Dalian, large and small. There are no more bullets to be had. No matter how much we press the Army Ministry, all we can produce is a mere sixty thousand rounds each month.” The wire ended with an admonition to “resolve to attack Liaoyang with what arms you have on hand.” This admission of the state of affairs was less pathetic than absurd.

The world’s attention was focused on the looming battle. From Japan’s perspective, victory in this first major encounter of the Russo-Japanese War was essential to facilitate diplomatic peace maneuvers and float foreign loans. In the event of defeat, Japan’s international standing would be drastically diminished, and no country would be likely to offer aid.

On August 3, shortly before the opening of hostilities, Imperial General Headquarters sent a wire to Commander in Chief Ōyama Iwao: “In the coming battle, lead us to victory in the Russo-Japanese War.” But not only were ammunition supplies pitifully low, rations at the front were insufficient as well, with some units actually on half rations. The cause was inefficient supply lines. The simple yet urgent business of maintaining supplies, an activity that requires careful planning, was perhaps unsuited to the Japanese temperament. Yet the navy carried out the task punctiliously, managing to get through the entire war without slipup. If army negligence regarding supplies was rooted in some Japanese character flaw, then it was perhaps unavoidable, since a nation’s essential roots are largely evident in its army.

Any deficiency in supplies could be made up for by valor in fighting. This supremely Japanese way of thinking, pervasive in Imperial General Headquarters, was peculiar to the national character and persisted in the Japanese Army to the last.

On August 14, Ōyama ordered the armies under his command, all except Nogi’s Third Army, to march toward Liaoyang. Both in Tokyo and on the continent, there was concern that any further delay would only allow a greater buildup of enemy troops. But the day the command went out marked the beginning of the rainy season. Flooding was rampant, transportation cut off. As a result, two days later, the command was withdrawn.

“The rains that began on the thirteenth still have not let up,” wrote Kodama on a postcard to a friend in Tokyo. To while away the time during the torrential rains, he sat in headquarters and wrote postcards to people all over or composed Chinese verses. On August 22, he received permission from Ōyama and issued orders for the attack on Liaoyang to begin August 26 (for some units, August 28).

Naturally, they couldn’t charge Liaoyang immediately. Their first task was to attack the enemy line from the camps at the front along the Taizi River to Anshanzhan, and then occupy that entire area. Kuroki’s First Army would be the detached force. The frontal assault on Liaoyang would be carried out by Oku’s Second Army, to which Akiyama Yoshifuru belonged, and Nozu’s Fourth Army.

The army marched through seas of mud. When gun carriages and ammunition wagons stuck in the muddy ruts, soldiers gathered round and pushed them slowly forward by brute strength.

On August 3, Yoshifuru’s cavalry had received orders to proceed far to the north toward Anshanzhan to check on the enemy’s situation. They spent the next twenty days doing so by sending small parties to reconnoiter or by having cavalry officers made up like Chinese infiltrate enemy territory. Those who undertook this latter perilous assignment were First Lieutenant Gotō Hideshirō and Second Lieutenant Kobayashi Tamaki.

There is a story connected with this assignment. After the war, when Yoshifuru was sitting in the officers’ lounge of the Imperial Guard Division headquarters, he scrutinized his aide-de-camp and said, “Gotō, you’ve got the face of a Chinese.”

Unsure what had prompted this sudden remark, Gotō felt rather annoyed, yet he had to mumble some sort of reply. “I do?”

“Yes.” That was the end of it. But as he spoke, Yoshifuru’s eyes misted over momentarily.

This Gotō was the very man who, on the eve of battle, had disguised himself as a Chinese and penetrated enemy territory. Though challenged a number of times by Russian soldiers, he had miraculously returned alive.

Remembering this, Yoshifuru wanted to express thanks but said only, “Gotō, you look like a Chinese,” without further comment. Perhaps he assumed that those cryptic words would convey his reminiscence and emotion.

Gotō did not immediately catch on. The next day, it dawned on him what Yoshifuru must have been referring to. When he brought it up, only then did Yoshifuru say, “That was a brave thing you did.” That’s the sort of man he was.

For the rest of his life Yoshifuru would be seen as the last of the old-time samurai. Fearless in battle, he alone of Army Academy graduates did not become a staff officer (and thereby involved in planning and strategy) but served as a unit commander to the last. He cared little for war, however. In a letter home on the eve of the battle of Liaoyang, he wrote this poem.

My grandmother’s spirit:
I want to stop warfare
and live in peace.
Make war for the sake of peace.

On rare occasions, he would compose poems in Chinese or Japanese, but his efforts were bumbling. This one can’t be called a poem, but it shows something of his state of mind.

In the battle of Liaoyang, the role of Yoshifuru’s cavalry was to position itself on the left of the Japanese Army’s central force and move forward in tandem with it, protecting the left flank. The army’s biggest concern was the possibility that Mishchenko, the head of the Cossack cavalry, might appear. If the Japanese troops were sideswiped on their way to Liaoyang in that stretched-out formation, they would suffer a rout. Yoshifuru was to prevent this from happening.

“They don’t know how to use cavalry,” Yoshifuru thought again. The purpose of cavalry wasn’t just to protect against enemy cavalry. The thing to do was to take advantage of the cavalry’s mobility—send it deep into enemy territory to scout strategically high ground from which to gauge the optimal time to strike, and use that information to launch a surprise attack. That was what a cavalry was all about. But it took a genius like Napoleon to exploit the cavalry to the full. Expecting Oku’s aides to be capable of such a thing was asking too much, as Yoshifuru well knew.

He requested that another unit be formed for the purpose of defense. The cavalry brigade on its own would not be enough, and so he suggested adding on another unit with independent fighting potential. Oku’s headquarters accepted this idea. This is how Yoshifuru came to command not only his First Cavalry Brigade but infantry, artillery, and engineers as well. Together these formed a highly respectable force with fighting power greater than that of Mishchenko’s brigade.

As an aside, Mishchenko had fully ten companies of Cossack horsemen but only ten field guns. Even if Yoshifuru came across the powerful Russian brigade somewhere along the way, he could easily crush it. “The only way to go up against Mishchenko’s long-coated Cossacks and win is with firepower.” That’s what Yoshifuru thought.

The Japanese cavalry were attired differently from the infantry. Their jackets were decorated with epaulets, and their trousers were red. When seated on a rather small horse, a Japanese cavalryman looked quaint rather than intimidating. Russian Cossacks wore big fur hats and long coats that fell below the knee. The Japanese carried sabers, the Russians lances. All in all, the Japanese cavalry was at a disadvantage, with smaller men and horses.

To overcome these inherent shortcomings, Yoshifuru came up with his idea of mobile units combining infantry, artillery, and engineering, centered around the main force of the cavalry. His innovation eventually disappeared in Japan but was picked up in the Soviet Army, in the use of combined infantry, artillery, and engineering corps centered around tanks—a development that would lead to the defeat of the Japanese Army at Khalkhin Gol in 1939.

On the night of August 25, Oku’s Second Army swung out.

The Nagoya Division (Third Division) took Liaoyang Road. This division, known for its strength and bravery, consisted of men from Gifu, Nagoya, Toyohashi, Hamamatsu, and Shizuoka. The Osaka Division (Fourth Division) took Niuzhuang Road. Ever since the Satsuma Rebellion, the Osaka Division had acquired a reputation for weakness, but it proved the bravest by far in the thick of the fighting at Nanshan, grappling hand-to-hand with the enemy and occupying the territory in no time. But at the battle of Liaoyang, the shortage of rations hit this division harder than the rest. They became rather listless and received this encouragement from military headquarters: “Remember your valor at Nanshan, where you played such a leading role, and make renewed strenuous efforts.”

Between the Nagoya and Osaka divisions was the Kumamoto Division (Sixth Division), said to be the strongest of all. As the plan of operations unfolded, an order went out officially changing the appellation of Yoshifuru’s command: “Effective immediately, it will be known for the time being as Akiyama’s detachment.” An army directive aimed at Yoshifuru read, “The enemy’s right flank and rear should be threatened with the powerful cavalry detachment.” Yoshifuru and his detachment were assigned to actively menace the enemy’s right flank and rear, and passively protect the left flank of Oku’s army from attack by Mishchenko.

The night of August 27 brought heavy rain. Under cover of this rain, Oku’s army launched an attack on Anshanzhan, which his staff was convinced was the enemy stronghold. After reconnaissance there, Yoshifuru had reported, “It doesn’t amount to much. The main camp is further back at Shoushanpu.” However, Oku’s headquarters dismissed his report. General Headquarters, where Ōyama and Kodama were, agreed with Yoshifuru. Yet, even though they were the headquarters superior to Oku, they could not step in and order Oku to follow his advice.

Oku’s chief of staff was Major General Ochiai Toyosaburō of Shimane Prefecture, who started out as a military engineer. He graduated from the Army Academy in the same class as Yoshifuru and from the Army Staff College in the second graduating class, one behind Yoshifuru. Later on, he would write a book called Explaining Sunzi by Examples in which he dispassionately analyzed the underlying failures of Japanese military strategy in the attack on Port Arthur. Partly because of his background in engineering, Ochiai had profound knowledge of modern fortifications and firm views on how they should be attacked. He was not sent to Port Arthur, however, but was transferred to Oku’s field army instead. Whether he was the right man to be a field army’s chief of staff is not entirely clear.

At dawn on August 27, Oku’s army launched an attack on Anshanzhan only to find that the Russian main force had already retired to Shoushanpu. They were able to occupy the area with ease. Ochiai’s assumption thus proved wrong.

General Oku’s masterful performance at Nanshan was, then and later, a mainstay of his high reputation. When the army’s top echelon was choosing commanders for the Russo-Japanese War, the general opinion was “We can’t leave Oku out,” even though he was not from Satsuma or Chōshū but from Kokura, one of the “renegade” domains. Of the four armies that made up the Japanese Manchurian Army, three had commanders from Satsuma or Chōshū: Kuroki of the First Army was from Satsuma, Nogi of the Third Army was from Chōshū, and Nozu of the Fourth Army was from Satsuma. That only Oku differed indicates the army’s high estimation of his abilities.

Here is an interesting sidelight on personnel affairs in the Russo-Japanese War. The General Staff Office paired each army commander—survivors of the Meiji Restoration all—with an Army Staff College alumnus of the rank of major general. In general, the commanders led by force of character, while chiefs of staff were responsible for tactical planning. Commanders assigned a brilliant chief of staff, someone like Kuroki’s Fujii Shigeta, were fortunate. Those saddled with someone of lesser ability (like Nogi’s Ijichi Kōsuke) were not.

Oku Yasukata was an exceedingly broad-minded man who stayed aloof from the minutiae of tactical planning and decisions. From the beginning, it was his policy to leave such things in the hands of his chief of staff. He would step in only when they were cornered, he always said, or the fighting was out of control. In staff meetings, he took a central seat but scarcely spoke. There was a good reason for his taciturnity: he couldn’t hear. He wasn’t stone deaf, but anyone who wanted to address him had to write out what he wanted to say. All his aides did so, from the chief of staff on down. This physical handicap served to increase the role played by Oku’s chief of staff Ochiai Toyosaburō in determining troop movements. Ochiai was not calm and flexible in his approach, and tended to reject any military intelligence that conflicted with his preconceptions and judgments.

Oku’s army advanced by driving back the enemy in light fighting, but at Shoushanpu the situation changed. There they were dealt a blow great enough to reverse the course of the battle. At first, Ochiai lacked the mental flexibility to register this altered state of affairs. “That can’t be!” He clung stubbornly to his preconceived opinion, insisting loudly that Shoushanpu was no big deal and lambasting the soldiers at the front.

“Shoushanpu” refers broadly to the second line of defense of the Russian Army. The defense line, with the 97-meter hill at Shoushan on its western edge, extended east all the way to high ground in the northeast, where there was a fish-breeding reservoir. Kuropatkin sought to inflict damage on the Japanese Army along this east–west line.

The Japanese forces headed there were Oku and Nozu’s armies. The attack began before dawn on August 30.

“I never fought in a battle so bitter in all my life,” Oku would often remark later. European military history had seldom seen combat on such a scale. Japanese soldiers, moreover, had never before participated in so large an encounter.

The eight hundred guns of both sides went off simultaneously and continued firing all day long. The ground shook. Smoke from exploding shells became a thick cloud that covered the sun, and smoke from belching cannons crawled along the ground. Not only shells flew. Rifles—three or four hundred thousand on both sides—spat fire at the same time.

Akiyama Yoshifuru’s detachment advanced much farther north than Oku’s army, boldly going behind enemy lines and inflicting painful damage on the right flank. The Russians could not dismiss this threat. Their supreme commander was Lieutenant General Stakelberg of the First Siberian Army Corps. His work began at four in the morning when he received an urgent message that Japanese infantry had appeared in front of the camp of his right wing. He tapped the edge of the table where a map was spread out. “The right flank is in danger.”

Blessed with the natural ability to remain calm under any conditions, Stakelberg swiftly ordered the Thirty-fifth Rifle Regiment to face the Japanese Army. The Ninth Division, the one across from the Japanese, was commanded by Major General Kiprian Kondratovich. He gave his forty-eight artillery pieces the order to fire. Up to this point, the Russians had always had numerical superiority in artillery, but not any more. Japanese guns were concentrated here, all 150 of them. They went off simultaneously, aimed at the forty-eight Russian pieces, and inflicted huge damage.

“Freedom to concentrate lies with the attacking side.” Stakelberg addressed the remark to his staff as if delivering a lecture on military strategy. He had always been opposed to Kuropatkin’s defensive strategy. A strong defense required three times the strength of the enemy, in order to be safe whichever way they came. The Russians did not have three times the strength of the Japanese, and so they had to spread their troops thin. The attackers, however, were free to choose the point of their attack and concentrate their fire.

That morning, the appearance of Japanese troops south of Shoushanpu set off alarm bells in Stakelberg’s mind. “What, here already?” It was unbelievable. This was far past the front where heavy fighting was taking place. Later, he found out that it was Japanese cavalry leader Akiyama Yoshifuru, Major General Mishchenko’s counterpart, who had ridden a great distance to attack with guns blazing.

Yoshifuru covertly sent his artillery battery all the way to Wangerdun and had it set up camp there secretly. This hush-hush operation was something he could well be proud of, but he never once boasted of it after the war.

Russian records indicate the intensity of the assault by the “rifle cavalry.” Rifle shells and shrapnel rained on the camp of the East Siberian Rifle Artillery Brigade. In two hours, the Third Company of that brigade lost all its officers and nineteen noncommissioned officers and men, as well as having two cannons blow up. In the end, all its guns were forced into silence.

Determined to silence the enemy in turn, General Stakelberg pulled an artillery corps from the reserves. This was the Second Company of the Zabaikal Cossacks Horse Artillery, which rushed to the scene. As they tried to hurry, unsure which direction Akiyama was shooting from, their field artillery got stuck in the mud. The officers gazed off in the likeliest direction, listening for the sounds of gunfire and searching for the sight of smoke, but Yoshifuru’s battery was like a phantom, its whereabouts a mystery.

All the while, Akiyama’s rifle cavalry kept firing. Not only did this single battery silence the Russian company by ten in the morning, but by noon it had struck down all officers but one of the First and Second Companies of the Rifle Artillery Brigade—an unbelievable outcome.

“Japanese cavalry on the right flank.” This wire reached Stakelberg’s headquarters at six in the morning. It was followed by an urgent message that the Japanese cavalry main force had taken Wangerdun, and a separate band had occupied Wulonghe and Shuiquan. This was Akiyama Yoshifuru.

Stakelberg gave immediate orders to pursue the Japanese cavalry. The recipient of the order was the cavalry leader Colonel Vasily Gurko, who set off with two and a half regiments of Cossack horsemen. The names of his outfits were the Mounted Hunting Corps, the Coastal Dragoon Regiment, and the Border Defense Cossack Cavalry Regiment.

“When Akiyama came to Siberia as an observer of the grand maneuvers,” Gurko commented to his aide-de-camp as he set off, “we went drinking together.”

The attack on Shoushanpu was the most bitterly fought engagement in the battle of Liaoyang. Lieutenant Colonel Tachibana Shūta died in this battle and later became famous in the epic song “Commander Tachibana,” which portrayed him as a war god—gunshin—who died bravely, a smile on his lips, “scattering like cherry petals . . . for the emperor’s land.”

The main Japanese forces of Nozu and Oku’s armies had their work cut out for them. Time and again, they were driven back, even facing the danger of collapse. At Manchurian Army headquarters, Kodama Gentarō grew apoplectic over the inactivity of Oku’s army and fired off wire after wire asking essentially one thing: “What are you doing?” He had intended to hold the Osaka (Fourth) Division in reserve but quickly dispatched it to Oku’s left flank. The reinforcements too failed to perform well, adding to Kodama’s woes.

On the night of the thirty-first, after two days of heavy fighting, alarming news came in. In the enemy’s rear, an enemy force of unknown numbers had appeared at Beitai (4 kilometers west of Liaoyang) and was pushing south. If the report was true, the Osaka Division on Oku’s left flank was about to be penetrated. The Osaka Division was the weakest element in Oku’s army, and, if it disintegrated, the result could be ugly. In the end, though, the enemy went off in another direction.

From the Russian perspective, Oku was fighting the First Siberian Army Corps, while Nozu engaged in mortal combat with the Third Siberian Army Corps. Commander in Chief Kuropatkin inspected the front line and, seeing the fierceness of Nozu’s army, came to the mistaken conclusion that this must be the Japanese main force. (Oku and Nozu commanded armies of comparable size.)

Stakelberg requested reinforcements many times, only to be turned down by Kuropatkin every time. Kuropatkin’s reasoning was as follows: “You aren’t facing the enemy’s main force. The Third Army Corps needs replenishing more.”

Kodama erred even more than Kuropatkin in assessing the enemy’s strength. His error proved fatal. Though inwardly surprised by the enemy’s stubborn persistence at Shoushanpu, he saw that as an outpost, and believed that, if pushed, the enemy would pack up, withdraw to Liaoyang, and establish a base for a great battle there.

Kuropatkin was different. He began deploying reserve corps in Liaoyang to fight the Japanese at Shoushanpu. Even Kodama, berating Oku’s army from behind, did not take the situation seriously enough.

During this time, only Akiyama Yoshifuru’s cavalry brigade, off to the north on the enemy’s right flank, defeated the enemy at every turn and filed continual reports with Oku’s army. The accuracy of those reports was verified after the war, but at the time they went virtually ignored, due to Chief of Staff Ochiai Toyosaburō’s poor judgment.

If the war had continued in this vein, both Nozu and Oku would have been forced to withdraw. They had suffered heavy casualties and their ammunition was nearly gone. Two main factors turned things around for the Japanese Army, saving it from the brink of disaster and leading on to eventual victory.

One was that Kodama borrowed two long-range cannons from Nogi’s army at Port Arthur and gave them to Oku, although Oku had little use for them. Yoshifuru learned about the cannons when he advanced into a small village west of Shoushanpu, where his men engaged in repeated fierce shooting contests with the enemy. While there, Yoshifuru set up headquarters in front of a small roadside shrine. Whenever possible, he chose not to locate his battle headquarters in private houses, preferring to be out in the open air. He spread husks from the kaoliang grain on the road and sat down, folding his long legs into a cross-legged position. He then proceeded to read maps, plan strategy, listen to reports, and dispatch orders. Shells fell in the village frequently, but his expression never flickered.

At this time, fresh gunfire broke out in the northwest corner of the village, as the enemy launched a counteroffensive. They were three hundred strong. Apparently, these were cavalry daring to attack on foot—their uniforms identified them as Cossacks. Without getting up, Yoshifuru sent for an orderly to dispatch the order for a company of infantry to repulse them. When he had done this, he summoned his aide-de-camp.

“Nakaya, tell me something.” As he spoke, bullets hit the roof of the shrine over his head, shattering tiles, but he kept right on talking. The gunfire coming from Oku’s main force to the rear struck him as sounding different from usual. “Isn’t that siege artillery?”

Nakaya thought so too. The target was apparently the enemy camp at Shoushanpu. But even though the ground in that area had been heavily fortified, there could be little advantage in using big guns to pound what was not a proper fort but a mere cluster of small field works.

“Go tell them that if they want to use siege guns, they ought to fire them at Liaoyang Station in the distance.” Yoshifuru knew from reconnaissance that Kuropatkin’s headquarters was nearby. He knew also that ammunition and other military supplies were stored at the station. Firing the big guns there would be sure to shake enemy morale and give the enemy’s senior command a sense of defeat.

Nakaya tore off to the rear on horseback. Oku’s headquarters accepted the recommendation, for once, and shortly thereafter began bombarding the station. The psychological toll on Kuropatkin was devastating.

The greatest contribution to victory in the battle of Liaoyang came from Kuroki’s First Army. The armies of Oku and Nozu, the main force of the Japanese Army, made a strong frontal assault on the enemy’s main defense line, but Kuroki’s army wasn’t there. It was playing the role of flying column off to the right. Far off in the mountainous region to the east, Kuroki was on the move. His mission was to make a great detour, cross the Taizi, and encircle Liaoyang from behind or else attack from the side.

Kuroki’s chief of staff, Fujii Shigeta, had long been an outspoken proponent of this plan, which he declared was their only hope of taking Liaoyang. Like Yoshifuru, Fujii was a member of the first graduating class of the Army Staff College, where, again like Yoshifuru, he had received no awards for excellence. But before the outbreak of war, he had carefully prepared for the impending battles in his role on the General Staff and had grown convinced that the walled city of Liaoyang could be taken no other way.

When Fujii first proposed making a detour and crossing the river in a surprise attack, Kuroki had responded with lightning quick understanding. “Right. Like Yoshitsune at Hiyodorigoe Cliff.”

Only a military genius could have devised the strategy so brilliantly executed by medieval warrior Minamoto no Yoshitsune. The enemy forces of the Heike were then encamped in what is now the city of Kobe, where sawtooth mountains press up against the sea leaving a narrow strip of land extending east and west. The Heike main force was securely wedged in this stronghold with its head to the east and its rear to the west. The leader of the main force on the other side, the Genji, was Yoshitsune’s older brother Noriyori. He attacked straight from the east, making a frontal assault where the Heike had erected a stockade. As the two armies clashed before that stockade, all at once the rear of the Heike camp was attacked by a separate division. Out of the blue, soldiers on horseback came thundering over the ridge of mountains that extended like a folding screen beside the camp. This was the celebrated attack at Ichinotani.

Before the battle, Yoshitsune had been in the capital, and then suddenly he had taken off. On the way to Kobe, he had made a quick detour north over Tamba Road, racing along lightly equipped. Some sources say he had with him seventy men, others put it at roughly double that number. In any case, it was a small force, no more than two hundred strong. They had charged to the top of Hiyodorigoe Cliff and then poured down into the valley of Ichinotani, raiding the enemy camp with a rush of men and horses. This incident led to the Heike’s ultimate defeat.

Kuroki’s army would play the role of Yoshitsune, who had accomplished his daring feat with a handful of soldiers. Common sense seemed to dictate that to be successful, the detour strategy must rely on a few lightly equipped men. Kodama, however, decided to devote an entire army to the mission.

Kuroki’s army was large. The divisions under his command included the Imperial Guard as well as the Sendai Division (Second Division), the Kokura Division (Twelfth Division), and the Imperial Guard Mixed Brigade. This great army went on the march days before the armies of Oku and Nogi, who would make the main frontal assault. (For convenience, let us call the front where Kuroki’s army fought the “eastern front.”)

Kuroki would circle to the east and attack Liaoyang from that direction. Along the way, his men would have to attack and destroy numerous enemy fortifications. Their path was far from easy. Some in the main army headquarters worried that the men would be so hard pressed, going from battle to battle without adequate rest, that their strength might give out. The prelude to the battle of Liaoyang would be so long for Kuroki’s army that it was feared his men and officers might collapse from exhaustion.

The limits to human endurance mean that no battle, however momentous, can continue indefinitely. The epic battle of Sekigahara in Japanese history lasted roughly five years, surely close to a record. In early modern times, the 1809 battle between France and Austria at Wagram went on for fourteen hours, and, in 1812, the battle of Borodino lasted twelve and a half. But for Kuroki’s army, the battle of Liaoyang began on the evening of August 25 and did not stop for a full eleven days. For Oku and Nozu’s armies, it lasted eight days.

Foreign observers were astounded. How could Japanese soldiers withstand such draining battles when they were so small of physique, with a diet that was significantly poorer than Europeans? In any case, on August 24, Kuroki went on the march. His men began by attacking the enemy’s first line of defense, stretching from Hongshaling Peak to Sunjiasai and to Gaofengsi Temple. After two full days of hard action, they conquered the entire area in a display of almost unbelievable daring and persistence.

After that, they carried out a series of follow-up attacks. The Sendai Division carried out a bold night attack, climbing Mt. Gongzhang and wiping out the enemy camp there. Doing this with a full division of twenty thousand men was unheard of and inspired much admiration as a feat unique in the annals of warfare. Night raids were a specialty of the Sendai Division, one which they practiced with special vigor before the battle of Liaoyang.

But what accounts for the unparalleled strength of Kuroki’s army overall? For one thing, Kodama had used a combination of particularly strong divisions in constructing it. At the time, Japan’s best soldiers were thought to come from Tōhoku in the north and Kyushu in the south. The Sendai Division was from Tōhoku and the Kokura Division was from Kyushu.

Kuroki’s army would cross the Taizi River. It never occurred to Kuropatkin that this was the Japanese Army’s plan. The Taizi, muddy and swollen from days of driving rain, was in no condition to be crossed by a large army. The Russian general considered the river a natural defense.

Kuroki’s pattern of actions to that point had led Kuropatkin to expect a standard method of attack. In desperate fighting on the eastern front outside Liaoyang, Kuroki’s army was making a standard frontal assault and had already breached the Russian first line of defense.

When news of Kuroki’s occupation and breakthrough was rushed to Kuropatkin in his lodgings near Liaoyang Station, he was nonplussed. “That can’t be!” Kuroki, he knew, commanded the strongest force in the entire Japanese Army, while he himself commanded the strongest units in the Russian Army: the European Russian Tenth Corps and Seventeenth Corps as well as the Siberian Third Corps.

“The tsar himself would applaud the bravery of our men,” said his staff. True enough.

When the Kokura Division attacked Hongshaling Peak, it was defended by the Thirty-first Division of the Russian line infantry. After a fierce exchange of gunfire, the Kokura soldiers climbed the slope under raking fire from every Russian stronghold. For a time, the slope was covered with the bodies of Japanese soldiers, so many that there was no place to set foot. Even so, the attackers kept up the attack. Such a phenomenon was unthinkable according to the European logic of warfare.

When Japanese soldiers had advanced far enough to see the mountaintop just overhead, the Russian soldiers not only fired their muskets but threw rocks as well. Then followed a hand-to-hand battle with bayonets. The defensive battle lasted a full twenty-four hours. Only then did Russia’s Thirty-first Division retreat. They held on that long to allow their allied armies, the Siberian Third Corps and Thirty-fifth Corps, time to retreat.

“They say Kuroki’s army is made up of three divisions, but that’s a damned lie. He’s got another three on top of that.” This became Kuropatkin’s view. From the perspective of European military experts, the conclusion made perfect sense. The fearless aggression shown by Kuroki’s army could only mean that he had plenty of troops in reserve. In fact, Kuroki had only the three divisions, exactly as advertised. If the Russo-Japanese War dragged on, Japan would inevitably suffer from a shortage of manpower. Japanese strategy depended on winning the war quickly, and so, in a manner of speaking, Kuroki’s three divisions had to serve as both work clothes and Sunday best. No fresh change of clothes was available.

Once his first line of defense had been penetrated, Kuropatkin had to stop Kuroki at the second line of defense. He was a good general who feared the attrition of troop strength. Surviving troops from the first line were taken in at the second line in large numbers. The trouble was, the second line of defense was in danger as well.

The Russians’ first line of defense that Kuroki’s army took over after a full day of intense fighting consisted of the following fortifications: The Kokura Division took the high ground from Shuangmiaopu Fort to Yingshoupu Fort. The Sendai Division took the high ground east of Caojiayu Valley. The following day (August 29), the Imperial Guard and the Sendai Division overcame their exhaustion to push ahead further, advancing to the area from Dashimenling Peak to the high ground south of Mengjiafang.

These high hills afforded a good view of the Russian Army’s second line of defense. The land extended skyward in a series of waves, and at each knoll representing the crest of a wave there were numberless pillboxes and earthworks. Each of these positions was connected by trenches in the zigzag shape of lightning bolts, and all around the trenches was barbed wire. It was a death factory without an inch of unprotected ground.

Word came to the railway station that Kuroki had come far enough to look down on the second line of defense, again catching Kuropatkin by surprise. He even wondered if perhaps Kuroki was possessed by an evil spirit. From the first, the name “Kuroki” had been for Kuropatkin a kind of unlucky omen. Kuroki had fought the first land battle of the Russo-Japanese War, landing on the Korean Peninsula and handily defeating the Russian Army defending the Yalu River.

From that time forward, Kuropatkin and his staff took it for granted that Kuroki would always hide out somewhere and come swooping down from the side. To use a term from ancient Japanese military tactics, this was the technique of “hidden chessman.” It seemed to the Russians that Kuroki’s entire army was employed as the “hidden chessman” of the Japanese Army and had been from the very beginning. When the war started, the Japanese main field army abruptly went ashore near Dalian on the Liaodong Peninsula and just as abruptly squared off against the Russian main field army. Only Kuroki’s army entered Manchuria by crossing Korea overland, across the Yalu. His army’s strength was so overpowering that compared to the rest of the Japanese Army, his soldiers seemed to belong to another race of men.

And this has been stated before, but let us reemphasize: putting the strongest divisions together in Kuroki’s army was the doing of Kodama Gentarō. The strategy of organizing an army with one force of especially strong soldiers goes back in Japanese history to the time of Tokugawa Ieyasu, who did this from his middle period on. After the downfall of the Takeda, Ieyasu, with Nobunaga’s permission, took into his service all the Takeda officers and men, and assigned them to his general Ii Naomasa. Ieyasu gave them all matching red armor to wear and made them the vanguard. The army vanguard is like a spearhead with which to penetrate enemy strongholds. The stronger, the better.

The difference between Ieyasu and Kodama is that, while Ieyasu used his spearhead for standard frontal assaults, Kodama used his for an attack by a flying unit, that is, as a “hidden chessman.” This strategy of using a powerful army was unique to Kodama. In all the history of European warfare, there is nothing like it.

Kuroki showed his deftness on the eastern front in the way he kept bearing down on the enemy’s second line of defense while his real intention lay elsewhere, in crossing the Taizi River. Kuropatkin naturally had no inkling of this, and he can hardly be blamed for that. Kuroki had taken the Russians’ first line of defense on the eastern front after a fierce and persistent onslaught. He did not rest on his laurels afterward but pushed further until the second line of defense was before him.

“Kuroki has his eye on our second line of defense, and he means to take it too.” How could Kuropatkin think otherwise? He was convinced of it. At this time on the western front (as we shall call it), the Japanese main force, consisting of Oku and Nozu’s armies, had begun their own bitter assault in Kuroki’s wake. The roar of cannon fire split the skies. Kuropatkin had to deal with simultaneous attacks to the east and west. Developments on the west were a distraction, as this was where the main defensive strength of the Russian Army was concentrated.

Kuroki’s entire army faced west (properly speaking, northwest), poised to charge the second line of defense. But the plan was for the army to vanish into thin air like smoke, falling back all the way to Liandaowan, a crossing point on the Taizi, and then rush across in one swoop.

To accomplish this, Kuroki had to deceive the Russian Army. To that end, he left behind a small number of soldiers. Approximately two thousand men under the command of Major General Matsunaga Masatoshi would stay put, spread out in a long, thin formation. They might be compared to a silken thread—a long, narrow thread to use as bait to lure the massive enemy force. With the enemy hoodwinked, the main force would creep stealthily down the mountain under cover of night, fall back, and pick its way northward between the mountains until it came to the river. This was no sneak attack by a mere handful of men. A full army of thirty thousand men was setting out, field artillery in tow.

Max von Hoffmann, a young officer sent from the German General Staff Office as military attaché, wondered privately if such a stunt was even possible. A small-sized youth who had just been made captain, he was a particularly outstanding member of the illustrious German General Staff Office. For the rest of his life, he would speak about this daring strategy of Kuroki’s—not only speak but write about it too. He found it utterly new. Success would mean that the Japanese, who had learned the art of modern warfare from Meckel, had surpassed their teacher with a brilliant creative tactic. Hoffmann estimated the chances of success as below twenty percent.

Kodama was fussy to a fault. His fussiness caused headaches for the headquarters of the various armies. Occasionally, an officer would yell back over the phone in exasperation, “I’m not a child!” However, the great benefit of his fussiness was that, even under intense battle conditions, the intentions of the General Staff Office were duly communicated to each army.

On the twenty-ninth, Kodama wired Kuroki. “When will you cross the Taizi River?” The content of this question is tactically masterful. Rather than simply urging action, he conveyed his grand plan for the battle and sought to obtain Kuroki’s full understanding. “The reason I ask,” he went on, “is that I intend to use your army’s crossing as the basis for an all-out attack.” If Kuroki was successful in crossing the river on the eastern front, he would order Oku and Nozu to conduct a simultaneous all-out attack on the western front. “The key to Japan’s victory is in your hands,” he was saying in essence, lecturing his colleague Kuroki as if he were a child.

Kuroki fully grasped the immensity of his task. For that reason he pounded the table in a rage and spat out, “Does he take me for a fool?” Kuroki was known as a rough-and-tumble general on the order of Sassa Narimasa in the era of Warring States. He knew that Kodama had persistent doubts about his mental abilities, which enraged him all the more.

Kodama added, “Inform me of the time of the crossing and your troop strength.”

Kuroki wired back a reply through Fujii Shigeta. Assigning Fujii to Kuroki as chief of staff was Kodama’s inspired personnel decision. Of all the chiefs of staff of Japan’s four field armies, Fujii was the ablest. He was not only brilliant but also constantly cheerful, never pessimistic no matter how dire battle conditions became—a trait that would enable him to get along well with Kuroki. His one flaw was a slight tendency to be unfocused.

At this point on August 29, it was not possible to write a reply that Kodama would find satisfying. Fujii sent off a wire to the effect that neither the time nor the troop strength had as yet been decided, but he added detailed information about the prospects for the crossing. Kuroki had already had his engineers investigate where the best place to cross the river might be. Not until after the wire went off did he learn that the river was shallow at the great bend called Liandaowan.

Preparations were ready, and it remained only for Kuroki to decide the timing of the crossing. A small incident helped him make up his mind.

At noon on August 29, Kuroki spotted fires raging west of Liaoyang, northwest of his position. He consulted his chief of staff.

“Fujii, what do you make of that?” Located on the army’s extreme right flank as they were, they had no way of knowing what the fires might signify.

“Beats me,” said Fujii, stumped.

The flames were caused by long-range firing from Akiyama’s cavalry brigade on the army’s extreme left, which reduced the Liaoyang railway terminal to rubble and made the surrounding structures go up in flames. But neither Kuroki nor Fujii knew this.

The Russian report reads, “The Liaoyang railway terminal was destroyed by enemy howitzer shells, so a new terminal was built north of there.”

But Fujii got the strange idea that the Russians might be on the retreat, burning piles of stores as they went. It was in his nature always to take an optimistic view. In fact, the Russians were doing anything but beating a retreat. They were clashing fiercely with Oku on the left flank and Nozu in the center, landing painful body blows. Both Japanese armies faced certain defeat, but, from where he was, Fujii could not tell any of this.

Fujii wasn’t the only one in the dark. Kuroki’s response did not show any sign of worry. “Okay, if the Russian Army is retreating, then now’s our chance. Tomorrow night, the thirtieth, we’ll cross the Taizi and surround them, come what may.” This was how he decided on the date and time of the operation.

But the mission was successful.

Nearly the entire army of thirty thousand men sneaked across the river on the night of the thirtieth and thirty-first. That an army so large should have managed to cross undetected by the enemy was a signal achievement. The basis for victory in land battles of the Russo-Japanese War came, it is fair to say, from just such hairbreadth successes.

Kuropatkin, learning about it after the fact, was furious with his own army. He had squared off against Kuroki with an exceptionally large army, readying three divisions totaling seventy-eight thousand men, and a total of two hundred eighty-four field guns and mountain guns.

Kuroki surreptitiously moved his large army under cover of night, slipping away and crossing the river at a point the Russians had left largely undefended. In so doing, he breached the outer moat of the enemy castle.

Kuropatkin filed a report about the fighting on all fronts during this time. “The fierce attack by the Japanese Army began on the twenty-fourth. We went on the offensive on the afternoon of the twenty-seventh.” He used heated rhetoric to describe the fighting style of the Japanese Army, calling it “frenzied to the highest degree.” While, for Russia, the war was being conducted in what was a stolen colony, for Japan, the nation’s very survival depended on the success of the main force in this first encounter. The Japanese Army could not help being “frenzied.”

In his report, Kuropatkin attempts to convey the fierceness of the fighting by pointing out that of the fifteen hundred casualties suffered by the Russians in the vicinity of Anshanzhan, most were by bayonet and sword. “Everywhere on the front there were close encounters. The attack was do-or-die.” Of his clashes with Oku and Nozu’s armies, he writes with pride, “At 2000 hours on August 31, a heated battle began that finished in the middle of the night. The battle ended in a complete victory for our side.”

This was true. Kuropatkin did achieve a complete victory. As an example of the fierceness of the fighting that led to that victory, he cites the valiant action by the troops under the command of his subordinate, Major General Kondratovich.

The Japanese Army fired off countless shells but our men hung on and defended their positions stubbornly to the point of death. Our front batteries fell partially into the hands of the enemy for a time, but with repeated bayonet attacks, our army recovered them. After each round of hand-to-hand combat, the Japanese Army would retreat, leaving numerous dead behind. To dispose of the bodies we dug many huge holes in the fields of kaoliang, but dig as we would, there were too many enemy bodies to bury them all.

The damage suffered by the Japanese Army must be very great indeed. The damage to our own army is also great, to be sure, but at this time I cannot make even a rough estimate. Major General Rozovsky was wounded, as was Lieutenant General Stakelberg. But the lieutenant general is still in the line of battle.

This report was evidently written amid the confusion of battle. Until August 31, Kuropatkin remained hugely confident of victory. Kuroki’s crossing of the Taizi River dealt him a powerful blow.

“It became clear on August 31 that Kuroki’s entire army had crossed to the right bank of the Taizi,” he wrote. “On this point, I had suspected something of the sort. That is because, on August 30 and 31, Kuroki’s attack on the Russian left flank weakened conspicuously. I wondered then if he might be planning a detour around our left flank with his main force.” Despite this glimmer of suspicion, clearly Kuropatkin never expected that such a large army would be able to cross the river successfully.

In any case, Kuropatkin lashed out in fury at the incompetence of his generals on the eastern front (from the Russian perspective, this was the army’s left flank, from the Japanese perspective, the right). “How can I describe this incompetence? How could you not realize that tens of thousands of Kuroki’s men had vanished before your very eyes? This goes beyond any question of competence or incompetence. What I want to know is, have you got eyes in your heads?” He scolded his own adjutant and chief of staff as if they themselves were the incompetent generals.

Kuropatkin was known as the finest tactician in Europe. His strategies and troop deployments were textbook examples of the art of war, a fact universally acknowledged by all foreign observers. The generals under his command were undoubtedly incompetent. Had their senses been alert and their reflexes nimble, they might have gone off in pursuit of Kuroki as he withdrew, stopped him cold on the banks of the Taizi, and destroyed his army, turning the waters red with Japanese blood.

For Kuroki, the danger had been real. Captain Hoffmann conveyed his doubts to Fujii. “As far as I can tell, your chance of success is minuscule, your risk of failure immense. What if the Russian Army catches on and comes after them? What then?” All hell will break loose, he meant, but he did not say so.

Yet Fujii’s decision was well grounded in the facts. As usual, he took a positive, indeed an optimistic, view of the facts, rather than a negative one. “It’s a gamble, but I’m betting the enemy won’t give chase. Look at the way General Bilderling does things. It’s obvious he won’t come after us.”

Hoffmann, still unconvinced, expressed his misgivings to Kuroki. “If I were you, I wouldn’t do it this way. I’d go after the enemy—Bilderling—in front of me with all my might, push him way back. Once I’d gained a little breathing room, then I’d cross the river.”

Kuroki, a veteran of the Boshin War, scoffed at young Hoffmann’s idea. “You’re talking nonsense.” Hoffmann was technically right, he admitted. In war as in wrestling, once you were grappling with the enemy, you couldn’t magically disentangle yourself and run around behind him. Logic was on Hoffmann’s side—but wars didn’t unfold according to the rules of logic. Granted, the risk was huge, but if you spent all your time calculating risk, you couldn’t fight a war.

Kuroki’s army went across.

You might say that Kuropatkin’s attitude and response to the crossing had a powerful influence on the fate of the Russian Army in this war. He had set the table for the Japanese left flank (Oku) and center (Nozu), but, when he swung completely around, he faced Kuroki instead. It was foolish of him. As he himself wrote in his report, “I resolved to pull out divisions from the forward outposts and bring them back to base camp, concentrating full troop strength on Kuroki’s army.” This move marked a drastic change whereby the eastern front became the major battlefield.

Russian officers and men fighting actively on the western front were left to scratch their heads and wonder what had happened. They were winning against Oku and Nozu. Although victory was in their grasp, the order from the rear was “Retreat!” “Abandon the positions you are now fighting to defend, you’re being transferred out of here” was the message. It is fair to say that every Russian subordinate officer handed this incomprehensible order in the thick of fighting went into a rage. They were distrustful of senior headquarters to begin with. This was the chronic disease of the Russian military (including the navy). This order fanned the flames of their distrust.

“What the hell are they thinking?” yelled one artillery officer from his fort.

The one small bright spot in the Russian Army was the personal popularity of Commander in Chief Kuropatkin, whose astuteness every army leader trusted without question. All of them, from generals commanding corps and divisions to field officers leading regiments and battalions, silently obeyed this new command.

The changeover went smoothly. It was on the morning of September 1 when Oku and Nozu’s armies learned the astonishing fact that the enemy had begun to retreat. Army staff officers congratulated themselves on having put up a ferocious fight, a laughable conclusion under the circumstances. The Russian Army was withdrawing of its own accord, not because it was losing to the Japanese.

“The enemy shows signs of retreat.” When Ōyama and Kodama of the Japanese Manchurian Army received this urgent message, they were puzzled. That the strong stimulus of Kuroki’s maneuver might produce such an unexpected result had never occurred to either of them, which was only natural. This turn of events grew largely out of issues in Kuropatkin’s psychology rather than his strategy.

We know that from the first, in the battle at the Yalu River, Kuropatkin had been impressed with Kuroki’s might—an impression reinforced by a string of defeats. He viewed Kuroki’s might with a mixture of fear and hatred. That psychological state must have overpowered his reason; there seems no other explanation. How else could a military strategist of his stature have made such an elementary mistake? Standard military strategy dictates that a general does not abandon a battle he is winning. Kuropatkin ought to have kept up the pressure on Oku and Nozu on the western front until he wiped them out. Kuroki’s flank attack (though, in point of fact, he had just crossed the river and had yet to launch an assault) required only minimal attention. Kuropatkin had plenty of troops to spare for that. Instead, he turned the entire table around to face in Kuroki’s direction.

Neither Kuroki nor Fujii had any notion of the deep psychological impact on Kuropatkin of their crossing of the Taizi. On either side of the river, fields of rippling kaoliang spread as far as the eye could see, with knolls rising above the plain here and there. Russian field fortifications had covered certain of those knolls with well-entrenched positions. Kuroki, however, thought the area scantily guarded and did not see it as much of a Russian stronghold.

“Those two are good hills,” Kuroki said to Fujii, who also understood the hills’ value as an axis from which to take Liaoyang. They were called Mantou Hill—“Steamed Bun Hill”—and Wuding Hill—“Five-Headed Hill.” As the names suggest, they looked eminently assailable. Neither Kuroki nor Fujii could have foreseen that these would become the scene of bloody battles that would rip and scar the land. They didn’t know about Kuropatkin’s altered state of mind (rather than altered strategy). Kuropatkin was busy withdrawing infantry, shifting artillery, even sending in reserves. He was determined to concentrate his strength against Kuroki’s army, exterminate it, and bring glory to the Russian military by winning this first major land campaign of the Russo-Japanese War.

Kuroki sent the Sendai Division to take Mantou Hill, the Kokura Division to take Wuding Hill. But once the divisions got down to business, they realized that the positions were extremely well defended after all. Kuropatkin had given specific orders to yield no hills to the Japanese. Both of those in question afforded a good view of the plain and were therefore strategically important to Kuropatkin as well. One regiment was already in place, and he had ordered General Bilderling to send in reinforcements.

The Japanese began their attack just as the Russians were increasing their troop strength. The fierceness of the Russian artillery set a new record for the battle of Liaoyang, but the Japanese artillery, limited by restrictions on the consumption of ammunition and by the lack of appropriate battle positions, gave its most lackluster performance to date.

There were frequent instances of hand-to-hand combat. The Harada Regiment in the Sendai Division carried out one of the night raids for which the division was famous, closing in on the enemy to a distance of 50 meters before charging them with fixed bayonets. The Russian gunners at first stayed put and mowed them down, but soon they too came pouring out of the trenches to grapple man to man. Countless blades of friend and foe glinted under the stars, blood spurted, flesh was slashed in a spectacle of gruesome carnage—and then the Russians withdrew. This was midnight on September 1.

The Kokura Division took Wuding Hill, but the struggle to defend it was greater than the struggle to possess it. Russia made every effort to reclaim the hill. The most violent fighting unfolded at Heiyingtai on September 2 and 3. During that time, Kuropatkin had easily three or four times Kuroki’s troop strength. In artillery and cavalry, his advantage was overwhelming. Kuroki, floundering in the surging sea of the Russian Army, never realized that he was fighting the central Russian force—and herein lies the strangeness of war. Sheer foolhardiness sometimes enables men to maintain their courage.

Mantou Hill fell—but this victory too was brief. At dawn on September 2, for the sake of this hill alone Russian artillerymen raked the enemy with concentrated fire from 140 field and mountain guns and then, with an army at newly doubled strength, charged the hilltop, which the Japanese were holding with a single brigade. The bitter contest kept up all day. Atop the hill, the defenders gallantly hung on.

Kuroki Tamemoto was quite a character. At some point during these grisly exchanges, he stretched out on the ground and took a nap. At first he sat and puffed on a pipe, but soon lay back and drifted off to sleep. “What leadership could I offer at a time like that?” he commented later. “All I could do was sleep.” But while he was napping, the tide turned against Japan.

Mantou Hill became the scene of a decisive, all-out stand like that at Tennōzan, where warlord Toyotomi Hideyoshi won a historic victory. On the afternoon of September 2, the Japanese Army yielded the hill, but that evening they went back on the attack and charged to the top. Every last man of them knew that if the Russians retained control of the hill, the army would fall like dominoes and be pushed back into the Taizi.

Kuroki began an evening offensive, leading a valiant charge with hand-to-hand fighting. By eight o’clock that night, they had dislodged the Russians at the point of the bayonet, and the hill was at last secure.

But Kuropatkin was no less determined. He too at once launched another offensive to take the hill back, and, after using up a great amount of artillery, carried out a series of night raids, sending men out in successive waves. Close-range musket firing and hand-to-hand fighting went on for a full four hours, an amazing record in the annals of warfare. Such drawn-out, desperate fighting could take place only in an era when—setting aside questions of moral value—the existence of the fatherland weighed heavily. To soldiers on both sides, the commands of the fatherland were absolute, and the existence of the fatherland ruled every aspect of life. Dying for country was beyond all doubt (for Japanese of this era, at any rate) a noble death. Without these underlying assumptions, the phenomenon would have been impossible.

In the end, the Japanese won by behaving like sumo wrestlers relentlessly moving forward, no matter what. Russian divisions began to straggle separately down the hill, then retreat.

Kuropatkin’s report contains this comment: “The Russian Army frequently occupied the high ground. But, in the end, temporary retreat became an unavoidable necessity.” Kuropatkin here uses the phrase “temporary retreat” for literary effect, but it was clearly a retreat. From then on, he erased from his mind all thought of how determined he had been to take the hill. This is another example of the working of human psychology, not of a tactical approach to combat. Kuropatkin still had an abundance of manpower and ammunition. Had he persisted once or twice more, Kuroki’s army might well have collapsed. In the end, the psychological makeup of those two men, Kuroki and Kuropatkin, determined the outcome of the battle.

Kuropatkin subsequently began doing something that the Japanese found hard to believe: he began to withdraw his entire army. The Russians abandoned Liaoyang itself. When Kuroki heard the news, he scratched his head and muttered to himself, “That’s funny, they’re not even losing.” Only Mantou Hill had been lost, so why on earth withdraw from the entire front line?

Kuropatkin the strategist may have been an absolutist, as brilliant people tend to be. His battle plan at Liaoyang fully deserves a passing mark. The only problem was his change of heart midway.

In the beginning, he overwhelmed Oku and Nozu’s armies on the western front, pushing them to the brink of defeat. In the east, no sooner did Kuroki begin his detour than Kuropatkin changed strategy and swung around to confront him. In this battle, the two sides came out roughly even.

But Kuropatkin grew obsessed with recapturing Mantou Hill, and Kuroki too saw it as his Tennōzan. He wanted to use it as the axis for an operation that would let him encircle Kuropatkin (although, in point of fact, he lacked the numbers to carry this off). Kuropatkin had a similar plan in mind. They fought as if they had a compass and kept stealing it back and forth, the needle pointing continuously at the contested hill. But, after stealing the compass from each other time and again, Kuroki narrowly won the hill in the end. This apparently left Kuropatkin so demoralized that he gave up on the more important task of defending Liaoyang itself.

“There’s still Mukden.” This was Kuropatkin’s plan for a second major engagement. “Things didn’t go as planned at Liaoyang, so I’ll back off, deploy the troops on the front at Mukden, and carry out my strategy there.” Something like this must have gone through his mind. He was a remarkable genius, a man of extraordinary intellect and sensitivity, but not the man to command a great field army.

Kuroki didn’t have half the military knowledge of his Russian counterpart, nor a tenth of his Western-style education. He was a simple samurai from Satsuma. But he was leagues ahead of Kuropatkin when it came to having both the right stuff to lead an army of tens of thousands and the indomitable will to do battle.

After the war, Kuropatkin was judged to have carried out a nearly perfect, textbook example of a tactical retreat. Without allowing the Japanese Army to come after him, he left behind squads in strategic locations along the way, while removing his large army in stages and dispatching it to Mukden. “The Japanese Army goofed and let the prize get away.” This was the general assessment. Despite having emerged victorious, the Japanese Army had surprisingly little to show for it. This is one reason for the malicious reports circulated in the foreign press that Japan did not win at Liaoyang.

The Japanese killed and wounded numbered twenty thousand. Russian casualties were about the same or slightly higher. These numbers in themselves eloquently reveal how desperately both sides fought.

On September 7, Japanese General Headquarters pulled out of Shaho at eight in the morning and entered a still-smoking Liaoyang at one in the afternoon. There by the railway terminal was the building that until a few days earlier Kuropatkin had used as General Headquarters for the Russian Army. Ōyama, Kodama, and their aides went in and decided to take it over for their own purposes.

“Went into Kuropatkin’s former HQ,” noted Ōyama in his diary, writing the Russian general’s name with Chinese characters for “black” (kuro), “pigeon” (hato), and “gold” (kin). The headquarters contained a fine bed that Kuropatkin had left behind when he retreated, and the officers from an impoverished Far Eastern land gawked at its splendor. Since it was too good to throw away, someone suggested deferentially to Ōyama that he use it, if he could possibly bring himself to do so. Ōyama delightedly consented, commenting that he had a fondness for afternoon naps. The acquisition must have given him inordinate pleasure, for he commemorated it in his diary with a haiku.

Entering the nest
of the black pigeon, I take
my afternoon nap

There was one problem with the Japanese General Headquarters, however. They were poor at handling the various foreign war correspondents tagging along after them and offered little in the way of hospitality. Worse, even young staff officers behaved superciliously (as the foreigners thought) and were excessively secretive.

Japanese of the Meiji period had poor understanding of journalists and public opinion. Even Japanese journalists were treated like military porters; many of them even dressed like military porters. Others showed up at the field of battle in striped kimono with the hem tucked up and breeches showing, using an umbrella as cane. Staff officers looked on reporters as a nuisance and drove them off like flies. This treatment roused the indignation of foreign journalists, many of whom packed up and went home. Thus, articles written by reporters with the Russian Army were the ones that got sent around the world.

Kuropatkin was clever here. Amid the confusion soon after the battle of Liaoyang, he held a press conference to spell out what was happening. “We are simply carrying out a planned withdrawal. As proof, you see that we left behind only two cannons.”

Japanese headquarters also held a press conference, but theirs consisted simply of reading aloud a few lines of text. The news that raced around the world was that Japan had failed to clinch a victory. As a result, subscriptions to Japanese war bonds plummeted in London, dealing a severe blow to Japanese wartime financing.

Exactly who treated foreign correspondents lightly isn’t clear. Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo was lacking in the sensitivity and ability to handle international opinion from the first. As soon as war broke out, correspondents from newspapers and news agencies of Britain, the United States, and France flocked to Tokyo, but Imperial General Headquarters took no steps to deal with them. Naturally enough, each correspondent intended to do his reporting from the front, attached to a particular army. “Hurry up and let us do our job!”

Flooded with requests to follow the troops, the reporters’ respective embassies notified the Foreign Ministry. A ministry section chief conveyed the request to a counterpart in Imperial Headquarters whose response was airily dismissive. “That’s the last thing we need to worry about now. They’ll just leak military secrets to the enemy anyway, won’t they?” Imperial Headquarters officials never dreamed that this attitude would have major repercussions on Japan’s ability to float war bonds.

The correspondents languished unhappily in Tokyo. From the first, therefore, they had reason to nurse resentment against the Japanese. The one who showed greatest understanding was Kodama Gentarō. He believed that foreign war correspondents should be taken to the battlefields and took steps to see that they were. Thanks to his intervention, correspondents were assigned to each Japanese army.

But the armies differed in their treatment of war correspondents. Fujii Shigeta was confident enough to allow reporters free access to his tent. He answered their questions without evasion, even explaining what the army was about to do, all of which earned him enormous goodwill. Oku’s staff, however, was secretive. His aides forbade visits to the front and gave no solid answers to questions about the war situation. The same treatment was meted out to foreign military observers, one of whom blustered, “We’re being treated like swine!”

Oku had faced a mighty foe and had, in the latter stage of the Liaoyang attack, shown unmistakable signs of defeat. In the absence of any explanation to the contrary, what conclusion could reporters reach except that the Japanese Army was losing? They extrapolated from this one instance to apply their observations to the entire front line. As soon as the battle ended, they scattered from the field of operations, racing to the ports of Yingkou and Yantai to file stories in their home countries.

“The Japanese Army did not win at Liaoyang. They just got carried along by Russian strategy. The Russian Army withdrew with aplomb.” This was the gist of the reports that spread around the world from telegraphers’ keys.

Racial prejudice played heavily into this development. The phenomenon of members of the yellow race demonstrating any superiority over the white race in an armed conflict was difficult for Western reporters to accept. At the battle of Liaoyang, Japan began to project its image on the world’s screen for the first time.

In the world’s eyes, the Russian bear had stepped back a little, preparatory to delivering the final, fatal blow. Wounded head to toe, little Japan had barely managed to reach Liaoyang, but that constituted no victory. Japan had merely fallen forward because the Russian bear stepped back.

When Imperial General Headquarters realized that this was the tenor of the world’s reporting, a slight case of panic set in. This may have been the first time that Japan was startled by the image of itself reflected on the screen of the international community. When that unflattering image led to a steep decline in London subscriptions to Japanese public loans, the genrō were scared witless.

Japan had no money. On the eve of war, the total (gold) specie in the Bank of Japan was only one hundred seventeen million yen—not enough to fight a war. Some seven or eight times this amount would have to be raised through public loans. Takahashi Korekiyo, vice governor of the Bank of Japan, was working hard in London to float this government debt. Then came word of the “defeat” in Liaoyang. Anticipating a Japanese defeat, people at once sold their bonds or gave up buying them.

In order to devise a countermeasure, genrō Itō Hirobumi, Inoue Kaoru, and Matsukata Masayoshi met with government representatives including Prime Minister Katsura Tarō, Foreign Minister Komura Jutarō, and Army Minister Terauchi Masatake. Yamagata Aritomo, chief of the General Staff, also attended the meeting, where it was decided to issue a directive to the military fighting overseas: “Demonstrate to foreign military observers the empire’s sincerity with your cordiality and openness, and without revealing military secrets.” In other words, don’t miss a chance to propagandize the war. This directive was issued to Ōyama Iwao in the name of Yamagata Aritomo.

When Kodama Gentarō, chief of staff of the Manchuriann Army under Ōyama, read the directive, he let loose with a characteristic blast of temper. Aware of Imperial General Headquarters obtuseness on this matter, he had taken special foreign correspondents with him to Manchuria, mingling with them in his natural convivial style. His reputation among them was accordingly high. Imperial General Headquarters itself was to be faulted for its complete lack of savvy where propaganda was concerned. To fault the army on this matter was an egregious miscarriage of justice.

Kodama promptly wrote out his resignation and sent it to Tokyo. “I deeply regret that my assistance has been insufficient, thus doing injury to the moral influence of Commander in Chief Ōyama. Painfully aware of my responsibility, I hereby beg to be relieved of my command.”

Yamagata was taken aback but managed to talk Kodama out of resigning. That incident, at any rate, was smoothly resolved.

Eventually, Japan published a detailed report concerning the battle of Liaoyang, and so the world recognized Japan’s victory. As a result, the flotation of Japanese loans not only recovered but prospered.

For Japan, the Russo-Japanese War was a tightrope walk in terms of financing and troop strength. As an example, there was no money to pay for the warships Nisshin and Kasuga, which set out from Italy just prior to the outbreak of war and went into action just afterward. The Japanese government looked to the flotation of foreign securities in London in order to make the payments. Success in floating bonds hinged on military success at Liaoyang.

The Japanese government and Imperial General Headquarters fretted continually over the issue of procuring war funds, which kept them needlessly on edge. The Army Ministry and Imperial Headquarters both had the dominant impression that Kuroki was at fault at the battle of Liaoyang. “Why didn’t he go after the Russian Army when it was on the run? He made no effort to go after them and achieve greater success. If he had, there could have been no possible doubt about Japan’s victory, and conditions would have been more favorable for the flotation of loans. But instead of pursuing his advantage, he halted in the occupied zone.” That’s how they saw it. Their constant sense of looming crisis over war finances gave rise to heartless carping.

Thanks to the First Army’s crossing of the Taizi River under the leadership of Kuroki and Fujii, and the subsequent heart-stopping, furious fighting, the Japanese Army managed to eke out a victory in the battle of Liaoyang. But neither the Army Ministry nor Imperial General Headquarters could bring itself to accept what had happened on those terms. Their censure of Kuroki for failing to pursue the retreating enemy was beyond cruel; it was idiotic. After crossing the Taizi, Kuroki’s army fought against a Russian Army four times its size in the struggle for Mantou Hill. Not only that, Kuroki was up against tremendous offensive firepower—fully seventy percent of the artillery in the Russian Army. He finally managed to dislodge the enemy only by throwing in all his reserves.

When the Russians decamped, he had no energy left to go after them. Not only that, the departing Russian soldiers were deliberately deployed so as to prevent pursuit. To expect Kuroki to chase after them anyway under those circumstances was unrealistic.

Even so, Imperial General Headquarters was unrelenting. As a result, Kuroki ended his days a general, even though the other army commanders in the war—all except Nogi, who committed suicide—were made field marshals. Fujii never rose above lieutenant general. This unbelievably mean-spirited way of thinking was dominant in the Japanese military, perhaps because of the nation’s extreme financial difficulties during the war.

The Osaka Arsenal was supposed to manufacture all the ammunition needed to send to the front, but consumption of shells far outran their production capacity, and the country was reduced to making hasty purchases from overseas. After the battle of Liaoyang, there was no ammunition left over for the next campaign. On September 15, the Army Ministry sent out orders for munitions to weapons manufacturers around the world, including names like Armstrong, Kynoch, Kings Norton, and Nobel.

These companies naturally had to be paid. Takahashi Korekiyo, vice governor of the Bank of Japan, was then touring Europe with his secretary Fukai Eigo in tow, trying to dredge up the needed funds. Looking at the situation objectively, one would have to say that surely no country ever fought a war with such a ridiculous amount of scurrying around.

Takahashi had set sail from Yokohama on his mission back on February 24 of that same year, 1904. Barely two weeks had passed since Japan’s declaration of war against Russia. A send-off party was held for him at Yokohama Specie Bank, where a rather strange scene was enacted. Genrō Inoue Kaoru, who had been in charge of government finances ever since the Meiji Restoration, stood up and tried to deliver a speech. “If the flotation of foreign loans does not go well, and war funds cannot be raised, what will become of Japan? Unless Takahashi succeeds, Japan will be finished.” He got that far and then choked up with tears. Unable to say more, he hung his head in silence while an awkward hush fell over the room.

Takahashi went first to New York. There he contacted several bankers, none of whom held out any hope. Just then the United States was eagerly introducing foreign capital from Britain, France, and elsewhere to develop domestic industry. As a result, there was no money available for lending elsewhere. Takahashi gave up on the United States and crossed over to Europe.

France was then a country of great financial resources, but, out of consideration for the Franco-Russian pact, it was lending money to Russia. Takahashi went to Britain. Though there was an Anglo-Japanese Alliance, this arrangement did not require Britain to help Japan defray war costs. Takahashi went around to all the major banks and capitalists in London. The results were hopeless. All were sympathetic to Japan’s situation, but none could see their way clear to extending financial assistance.

In Europe, Takahashi observed that the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War had caused no decline in Russia’s credit. Rather, the market value of Russian bonds in Paris and London actually showed a slight increase. Japanese bonds did not fare as well. The value of Japanese bonds fell from eighty pounds sterling to sixty as soon as the war began.

“Since we are so unpopular, will the British people respond even if we issue new war bonds?” The gloomy thought weighed on Takahashi’s mind. Banks were willing to lend money to Russia as a matter of course. Russia had vast lands and mines at its disposal, and with that as collateral, a lender had no fear of suffering any loss, come what may. But Japan had neither land nor mines to offer as collateral. Despite these unfavorable circumstances, Takahashi succeeded in having war bonds issued by offering tax income as security. Unfortunately, the interest rate on the bonds was an extraordinarily high six percent, at so-called “colonial terms,” referring to the harsher terms imposed by Western powers on Asia.

As he was running around making deals under these difficult circumstances, Takahashi met with an unlikely piece of luck. Jewish financier Jacob Schiff, a United States citizen who happened to be visiting London just then, approached Takahashi of his own accord with an offer: “I’ve heard of the struggles you are going through. Let me be of such service as lies in my power.” Jacob Schiff was of German extraction, born in Frankfurt, but he had traveled to the United States at a young age and worked his way up by selling used clothing. At that point, he was owner of the American firm Kuhn, Loeb & Company and head of the American Jewish Committee. Concerning the ten-million-pound war loan at six percent that Takahashi had scraped together, Jacob Schiff volunteered without hesitation, “I’ll underwrite half.”

From that time on, Schiff stayed in close contact with Takahashi and played a key role in his success in selling bonds. At first, Takahashi had trouble understanding why this American Jew would be so willing to come to Japan’s aid. Schiff explained that Russia persecuted Jews. Six million Jews lived in Russia, and, according to Schiff, the history of imperial Russia was a history of anti-Semitic atrocities. It was still going on, he added. “We Jews pray earnestly for the fall of the Russian tsar. It so happens that your country Japan in the Far East started a war with Russia. If you win, there is bound to be a revolution in Russia. Revolution would mean the end of the Russian monarchy. That is what I want to see happen, and that is why I am offering you this perhaps unreasonable assistance.”

When Jacob Schiff explained his reasons for backing Japan, Takahashi’s secretary Fukai Eigo was mystified. “Are racial issues that serious?” he asked Takahashi later. To the Japanese mind, Jews were money worshippers. Why would a Jew take his precious money and give it to Japan, when Japan’s victory was by no means assured? Schiff had said that Russian anti-Semitism was the reason. In Japan, where the population was far more homogenous, such tensions were hardly likely to become a problem.

Fukai Eigo used all his connections in London’s financial world to check up on Jacob Schiff. He also explored the issue of Russian persecution of Jews. The more he learned, the more he realized that the problem was horrifying in its scope. The history of Russian persecution went back to the sixteenth century, when Ivan IV attempted to convert the Jews to Christianity, and the Jews resisted. An imperial order then went out, stating that all who refused to convert should be thrown into the river, and thrown they were.

Persecution intensified in the late nineteenth century, reaching cruel extremes. As head of the American Jewish Committee, Jacob Schiff did all in his power to remedy the situation. He appealed to the governments of Britain and other nations, but no country was willing to interfere in what was clearly a domestic problem in Russia.

Schiff lent money to the Russian government as a private citizen, asking in return an immediate halt to the slaughter of Jews for the crime of being Jews. This ploy was effective in the short term, but, after a year, the situation reverted to what it had been before. Schiff lent money repeatedly but ultimately lost faith in the integrity of tsarist Russia. Revolution, he began to think, was the only answer. One thing that tsarist Russia had in greater supply than any other country was rebels. There were easily over one hundred different parties interested in overthrowing the government, including freedom parties in Poland and Finland, both of which Russia had subjugated.

Schiff doubtless provided financial assistance to these various groups as well. In the meantime, along came the Japanese military, with strength far greater than that of any revolutionary or freedom party. The Japanese military was bold, well organized, and mighty. To Schiff, it seemed obvious that Japan would be Russia’s downfall. He didn’t even care if Japan lost the war. The important thing to him was that the Russian state would be seriously weakened. That was why he came to Japan’s assistance.

The world was certainly a complicated place, mused Fukai, who had worked as a reporter for Kokumin Shimbun, a pro-government newspaper, before going into government work. Later, he became governor of the Bank of Japan. He would live on to witness Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War, before dying on October 21, 1945.

Racial issues taught Fukai Eigo the world’s complexity, but Takahashi Korekiyo shared the sentiment with even more intensity. “Indeed, the world is truly complex,” he told Fukai. When Schiff had offered to support Japan in order to save the Jews in Russia, Takahashi quickly understood that the reason was eminently realistic. He himself, as a young man living in the United States, had once been sold as a slave.

Takahashi Korekiyo was curiously optimistic by nature, with a background strikingly out of the ordinary. The adopted son of Takahashi Kakuji, a low-ranking ashigaru samurai from the Sendai domain, he never knew his true parents until after he grew up. His birth father was Kawamura Shōemon, a master painter in residence at Edo Castle, his mother a maid in the Kawamura residence and the daughter of a fishmonger in Shiba Shirogane. He was handed over to the Takahashi family soon after birth.

One day, when Korekiyo was a small child, as he was playing at a small shrine next to one of the domain’s Edo mansions, who should come along to worship but the daimyo’s wife. Unafraid, he toddled up to her as she knelt on the wooden floor of the hall and climbed up into her lap. In the feudal society of those days, this was a bizarre and wholly unexpected event. The tot was all smiles, however, and attendants didn’t have the heart to scold him. He soon captivated the daimyo’s wife, who ended up inviting him to visit her in the castle the following day.

The story created a sensation in the ashigaru tenements, where people talked of nothing but how lucky the Takahashi kid was. This conclusion reached the boy’s ears, and he came to believe himself luckier and better off than anyone else. This became a lifelong article of faith, he recorded in his autobiography. “No matter what blunders I made or what difficult straits I fell into, I always made great efforts, believing luck would turn my way in the end.” No one but a fellow with this sunny outlook could have succeeded in touring Europe to scrape up money for the Russo-Japanese War. Others went over fearing the worst and, sure enough, came back empty-handed.

In 1867, just before the fall of the shogunate, Takahashi had gone off to study in the United States. Using his connection to a Yokohama shopkeeper named Eugene van Reed, he sailed to San Francisco, where van Reed’s parents lived, and moved in with the elderly couple. Not long afterward, he received an introduction to a family named Brown and moved in with them instead—completely unaware that he had been sold as a slave. When the truth came out, he raised an uproar, but curiously, Takahashi never, for the rest of his life, considered this a tragedy or indulged in any self-pity over the incident.

When Fukai Eigo brought up the topic of the seriousness of racial problems in the world, Takahashi merely smiled broadly and said, “I know.”

In any case, a Jew supported Japan. “If possible,” Takahashi wrote in his memoirs, “Schiff wanted Japan to win.”

But even if final victory was beyond Japan’s grasp, the longer the war continued, the more internal strife there would be in Russia, leading to a change of government. Schiff felt the war should go on at least that long. Besides, since Japanese soldiers were well disciplined and strong, as long as Japan’s military expenses were met, he was sure to get what he wanted in the end. The Russian government would change, and Jewish families would be spared persecution. This was the real reason why Jacob Schiff underwrote Japanese war debts.

Not only in the case of Takahashi, but in other cases as well, racial friction worked in Japan’s favor. Nothing is so fierce as the rebellion that arises when a people or a nation is subjected to oppression.

Nineteenth-century Russia had invaded and conquered a vast area, and among its conquests was Poland. What was once the kingdom of Poland became a state in the Russian Empire, and Polish young men were drafted to fight the Japanese Army on the Manchurian plains. Ever since Russia annexed Poland in 1815, patriots there had pushed steadily for independence, only to be put down each time by the Russian police or army.

Finland, which Russia seized in 1809 in a deal with Napoleon, was the same. For a time, the Finns were granted autonomy, but the father of Tsar Nicholas II began a policy of Russification that his son continued with a vengeance, sending in troops and ending Finnish autonomy, halting the legislature, and making Russian the official language. In 1903, the year before the Russo-Japanese War began, he suspended the constitution and placed the country under the autocratic rule of a governor general. This wave of Russification provoked many forms of resistance, culminating in the assassination of Governor General Nikolai Bobrikov in 1904—the very year the Russo-Japanese War broke out. That same year, there was also a nationwide general strike.

The tsarist regime was saddled with issues like these. In Russian satellite areas, dissident parties and independence parties continued active underground campaigns, while, in Russia proper, the contradictions and tyranny of the regime bred more and more revolutionaries each year.

When contemplating war with Russia, Japanese Imperial Headquarters decided to conduct a large-scale intelligence operation aimed at inciting resistance among discontented elements in the Russian Empire in order to topple the tsarist regime. The coordinator of this operation was Colonel Akashi Motojirō, who had served as military attaché in France and Russia, and was accordingly well informed about European affairs. Akashi hailed from the Fukuoka domain and had graduated from the Army Academy in the sixth class, somewhat after Yoshifuru. He was a hero in the rough Asian mode, careless of his appearance, but what he managed to accomplish is nothing short of astonishing. He spent capital liberally. At a time when Japan’s annual revenue was two hundred fifty million yen, the General Staff allotted Akashi the colossal sum of one million yen to carry out his mission. This fact alone gives some idea of the scale of his activities.

Colonel Akashi was a man of great imagination, and this trait made him well suited for espionage. He was also capable of passionate involvement, which perhaps made him a fitting choice to coordinate a large-scale intelligence operation in the West. His great untidiness is well known. Fortunately, he joined the Japanese military in its formative period, since the military bureaucracy would certainly have rejected anyone like him later on.

Uehara Yūsaku, general and chief of staff of Nozu’s army, once took Akashi to see Field Marshal Yamagata Aritomo, a genrō whose power within the Japanese Army was so great that he had dictatorial powers in personnel matters. According to Uehara, Akashi became engrossed in a certain topic and began to talk enthusiastically without stopping, forcing Yamagata to listen closely. It was a chilly time of year and Yamagata, having caught cold, was sitting next to a heater with his legs wrapped in silk floss. Akashi, talking to him from the other side of the heater, became so caught up in what he was saying that he wet his pants—and kept right on talking without even noticing. His pee rolled down his trousers and onto the floor, wetting Yamagata’s silk floss and chilling the great man’s feet. Even so, the intensity of Akashi’s passion was such that Yamagata could not even shift the position of his feet but had to keep on listening.

Akashi established contact with virtually every major revolutionary, dissident, and freedom fighter in and out of the Russian Empire, gaining their trust in every instance. His characteristic intensity may well have made him more attractive in their eyes. He met Lenin too and spoke about him after the war. “He was absolutely devoted to the cause with no regard for anything but the nation and no thought of his own life, let alone greed or self-interest. The person who will bring about the coming revolution will probably be Lenin.”

Once, when he was in Europe, Akashi was smoking a cigar at a certain meeting when Lenin said to him laconically, “Nice taste in cigars.” Akashi instantly stubbed his cigar out, having grasped the meaning behind Lenin’s words. Lenin was surely trying to warn him that anyone planning to be a leader of workers must be careful even about his choice of cigar.

Lenin also had a firm policy that those instigating demonstrations or riots were not to pass out arms. As long as the people were unarmed, he told Akashi, the police and army could not brandish weapons either.

The great success of Akashi’s work as agent provocateur owed less to his talents than to his capital of one million yen. Nagaoka Gaishi wondered privately if it was wise to hand over such a huge sum of money. In Nagaoka’s eyes, Akashi was annoyingly argumentative as well as untidy and unprepossessing in appearance. Worse yet, he was no linguist. Nagaoka later admitted that he only realized how capable Akashi was after his spectacular success in sowing disorder in Russia.

In the end, not even a man of Akashi’s gifts could probably have accomplished so much without extraordinary financial support. His power was the power of money. Russian revolutionaries gathered around him not because of his personal magnetism, but because of his boundless (so they thought) generosity. Though he seemed slapdash, he was skillful at handling money and kept scrupulous accounts. Unable to use up the entire million, he returned to Japan with over two hundred thousand yen in cash, and receipts and notations accounting for every penny of his expenses.

In the end, the vast sum of money that he spent was fully justified by the scale of the disturbances that took place within the Russian Empire. Key government officials were preoccupied not by foreign campaigns but rather by the threat of internal collapse. When they thought about the problems that required their attention, foreign campaigns were last on the list. Every loss in Manchuria and every domestic riot filled them with fresh conviction that the war must be ended at the earliest opportunity.

In its conduct of the Russo-Japanese War, the Japanese government adopted a policy of quick, decisive battles. Every leading figure in the government, the army, and the navy was well aware that Japan would lose the war unless it achieved a rapid series of victories in an extremely short time and then negotiated for peace. The conditions had to be ripe for Russia to agree to a peace feeler, which meant bringing Russia’s domestic crisis to a head—in other words, fomenting revolution. To accomplish that goal, Japan was willing to spend any amount of money. Pulling off a revolution would more than balance the books. Akashi was entrusted with this job.

He consorted with too many revolutionaries to list them all here, but the full list would surely amount to a who’s who of the Russian Revolution. There was Lenin for starters and also Father Georgi Gapon, a priest who headed his own political party; thinker Pyotr Kropotkin; Konni Zilliacus, activist for a Finland free of Russian influence; Georgi Plekhanov, founder of the Social-Democratic movement; writer Maxim Gorky; Pyotr Struve of the left-leaning Party of Popular Freedom; and countless more. They all had one thing in common: they wanted to see Japan win the war with Russia. In this respect, they were no different from Jacob Schiff.

In any case, this war with its complicated political and strategic background had passed the Liaoyang stage.