5

THE STORMING OF PORT ARTHUR

Meanwhile, the death struggle at the fortress in Port Arthur went on. General Nogi’s Third Army followed their second all-out attack of September 19 with another on October 26. Both ended in wretched failure. Total casualties since the start of this battle numbered upwards of twenty thousand, an appalling figure.

This was no longer war, but disaster.

“We would like the focus of attack to be confined to 203-Meter Hill.” The navy’s messages took on a pleading tone. Capturing 203-Meter Hill would suffice, since all they still wanted was to look down on the harbor from the hilltop. The General Staff Office in Tokyo was well aware of this. Yamagata Aritomo, chief of the General Staff, understood perfectly.

The only dissent came from Nogi’s on-site headquarters, which responded, “That will be unnecessary.” They clung stubbornly to the same method of attack, lining up soldiers in front of the fortress and marching them relentlessly forward—thus sending vast numbers of their countrymen to meaningless deaths. Never before had incompetence at the helm caused a disaster of such proportions.

Voices calling for Nogi’s dismissal were by now a concerted majority in Tokyo’s Imperial Headquarters. Even Yamagata, Nogi’s diehard supporter, concurred. But Nogi could not be removed without the approval of his direct superior, Commander in Chief Ōyama Iwao, who dismissed the proposal out of hand: “That would only have a harmful effect.” The commander of an army was a symbolic figure, and switching commanders in mid-campaign would be detrimental to morale. Strategy and morale were the twin keys to victory.

Ōyama was adamant. “When there is a failure of strategy, staff should be prodded to deal with it. No personnel changes are called for. We will leave things in place and try another approach.” Firing Nogi’s chief of staff Ijichi would be simple enough, but that would only drive home to everyone in the Third Army, top to bottom, that he and Nogi were entirely to blame for the deaths of so many of their comrades. The army would be rocked, a general collapse of morale perhaps impossible to stave off. That was Ōyama’s fear. By “try another approach,” he meant sending Kodama Gentarō to Port Arthur, even though that wasn’t his sphere, and having him take charge behind the scenes. That way, Nogi and Ijichi would not lose face and a collapse of morale could be prevented.

But Ōyama, taciturn by nature, did not spell out this plan in so many words. Besides, Kodama was embroiled in the ongoing battle at Shaho and could not be in two places at once. Knowing it was impossible to send Kodama to Port Arthur just yet, Ōyama bided his time.

No one in Ōyama’s General Headquarters had faith in Nogi’s abilities; in the obstinacy of his strategy, advisor Ijichi inspired universal loathing. There were dark murmurings. “Ōyama knows the pointless carnage at Port Arthur is Ijichi’s doing, but still he doesn’t dismiss him. It can only be because they’re both from Satsuma.”

Japan’s army was running out of soldiers. Imperial Headquarters jealously guarded its few reserves on the mainland, the Seventh Division (Asahikawa) and Eighth Division (Hirosaki). While Russia had another million men in reserve, Japan had only these two divisions in the wings, numbering roughly thirty thousand men. This state of impoverishment was a crisis in itself. Such were the conditions of the Japanese Army in the summer of 1904, leading up to the battle of Liaoyang.

But every battle in Manchuria entailed immense bloodshed. Amid the chronic manpower shortage, it gradually became clear that further confrontation with the huge Russian force was impossible without sending over one of the two reserve divisions. Around July or August, opinion in Tokyo and Manchuria coalesced. “Send one division anyway.” The problem was: send it where? To the main battleground on the Manchurian plains or to Port Arthur? Both were in flames.

Nogi’s headquarters in Port Arthur wasted no words. “Just send us some men.”

Imperial Headquarters couldn’t decide what to do. Without resolving the issue, they mobilized the Eighth Division, concentrating the troops in Osaka to await orders. From there, the troops could board ship as soon as their orders came through.

The battlefields thirsted for fresh blood. Troop strength fell with every skirmish and so far had been bolstered with conscripts. The consensus regarding conscripted reserves was that they consisted of older, mostly married men who as fighters didn’t hold a candle to the regulars. This was a fact. The Seventh and Eighth divisions, however, were made up of crack soldiers in active service.

“How can we possibly send those men to Port Arthur? The division is too precious to be ground up during a pointless campaign.” Such was the unanimous sense at Imperial Headquarters. Nogi’s headquarters wanted fresh blood without any adjustment in military tactics.

Nagaoka Gaishi called the idea “the height of folly.” Though everyone may have agreed with this assessment, they still couldn’t come to a decision. Imperial Headquarters continued to waver between the two alternatives, finally arriving at a highly irregular solution: let Emperor Meiji decide. This must have felt like drawing lots.

The Eighth Division, on standby in Osaka, consisted of men from the northern prefectures of Aomori, Iwate, Akita, and Yamagata. They assembled in Osaka in early September, their hearts heavy with apprehension. Would they be sent to Port Arthur? Troops ordered there suffered such a decline in morale that they were said to become like “sick sheep.” This vaunted division, the strongest in the Japanese Army, was no exception.

Fortunately, the Eighth Division was spared the fate of Port Arthur. While they cooled their heels in Osaka, over a dozen communications flew back and forth between Imperial Headquarters and Kodama Gentarō, until finally Kodama agreed to abide by whatever Imperial Headquarters decided. Emperor Meiji’s answer came down on September 27: “Send them north.” Use the reserves on the Manchurian plains, in other words, not at Port Arthur.

The division commander was Lieutenant General Tatsumi Naobumi, a native of Kuwana (present-day Mie Prefecture), who, as an officer on the shogunal side in the Boshin War, gave considerable grief to Yamagata Aritomo, then head of the imperial forces. Tatsumi was a brilliant field commander, and people said that his coming to the battlefield would in itself give the army a great boost.

The soldiers were transported by sea from Osaka and arrived at the battlefield after the battle of Liaoyang. They just managed to participate in the final stages of the battle of Shaho, where their contribution figured decisively in the victory. Kodama sent Imperial Headquarters this highly unusual wire: “I am supremely grateful for the enlightened imperial decision.”

In the meantime, Nogi’s headquarters, that cancer eating away at the army, expressed displeasure that the Eighth Division had been sent north and made repeated requests for the Seventh Division. Once the Seventh Division was deployed, mainland reserves would be down to zero. “And, if we send those troops to Port Arthur, most will die in the first charge.” This was Imperial Headquarters’ fear.

September passed, and the end of October came. When the all-out attack on Port Arthur ended again in massive bloodshed and failure, replacements were, of course, needed—a need made all the more urgent by the Baltic Fleet’s imminent approach. Even so, Imperial Headquarters continued to debate the appropriateness of sending the lone remaining standby division to Port Arthur. Lack of faith in the strategic brains in Nogi’s headquarters was to blame for such waffling over a decision that ought to have been clear-cut. Weighed down with worry, Imperial Headquarters went round and round in circles.

Ijichi, of course, didn’t attribute his repeated strategic failures to any flaw in his approach. He buttonholed every messenger from Tokyo to make his case that headquarters wouldn’t provide the necessary ammunition. “The trouble is Imperial Headquarters.”

This judgment was unfair. Imperial Headquarters had called a temporary halt to production of field guns and mountain guns in order to manufacture ammunition for siege guns. Kodama, who was then commanding a field operation, had personally approved the measure. Desperate for ammunition as he was, he had taken a broad view of the war situation and agreed that Port Arthur should have priority. Ijichi seemed incapable of similar objectivity. His continual habit of blaming his own mistakes on others, moreover, gave his character a somewhat effeminate tinge.

Ijichi’s accusations eventually reached Yamagata’s ears in Tokyo. Unable to let the matter pass, Yamagata fired off a lengthy message to Nogi.

It has come to my attention that your chief of staff has made frequent statements attributing the lack of satisfactory progress in the attack on Port Arthur primarily to a shortage of ammunition. Stop and consider. Given the dearth of production facilities in our country, it should be evident that army commanders must content themselves with a small amount of ammunition. But, as the accompanying documents attest, by and large, we have sent all the ammunition you have requested. In order to get ammunition to Port Arthur, everyone involved, from the prime minister on down, has labored night and day to come up with extraordinary measures, doing everything from increasing production to making purchases abroad. These efforts have resulted in a generous increase despite our straitened circumstances. For the chief of staff to make such claims not only harms military prestige and undermines morale in the siege army but is inimical to the interests of the chief of staff himself. He would have been better advised to discuss his opinion on the ammunition shortage before going overseas.

Before his assignment to the front, Ijichi had been inspector of field artillery in the Inspectorate General of Military Training. Though this was his area of expertise, he had been completely unaware of the situation until leaving the country. Yamagata pressed the point home: “How is it possible that he would become aware of the lack of ammunition and discuss it openly only after ordering a number of attacks?”

Then, perhaps fearing he had gone too far, he added a final comment: “Of course, I have only heard rumors of your chief of staff’s imprudent remarks and have not verified the facts. But, if the rumors are true, be sure to chastise him thoroughly.”

Although a man of high ideals who was hard on himself, General Nogi never raised his voice to his subordinates. He tended to do as Ijichi wanted. Even though Third Army headquarters was clearly so far to the rear that keeping up with the brutal fighting conditions at the front was impossible, Nogi made no attempt to move closer despite others’ urging. The reason was that Ijichi had told him that farther to the rear, away from the din of gunfire, he could plan strategy better as he could hear himself think.

Nogi never said a word to Ijichi about Yamagata’s blistering comments.

Here a digression. Kodama Gentarō’s two main generals were Major General Iguchi Shōgo and Colonel Matsukawa Toshitane. Iguchi, a Shizuoka man, was in the second graduating class of the Army Academy. An indifferent strategist, he was something of a critic and after the battle of Shaho dished out praise or censure to the various army staffs. He sent his comments to Nagaoka in a letter, the contents of which were highly inflammatory.

“The man is poison.” This was his scathing denunciation of Fujii Shigeta, Kuroki’s talented chief of staff and a man with a solid record of achievement. Fujii had a reputation for using ingenious machinations to oust subordinates he disliked. He also apparently attempted to hog credit for his subordinates’ accomplishments. In short, although as chief of staff he was a man of rare ability, he was very much a man with the weak moral character generally found in those praised for their ability. War with Russia was a risky tightrope, wrote Iguchi, and having a man of this ilk in authority at such a time made a questionable contribution to army leadership. His criticism was couched in the most scathing terms. “Let him go on as he is, and there is no telling what sort of mischief he may get up to from selfish motives. He is a most virulent poison.”

It makes sense that from Iguchi’s perspective, a man with a razor-sharp mind like Fujii’s would have seemed poisonous. As a critic, Iguchi was solid in his thinking. In opposing an offensive attack in the battle of Shaho, he showed his cautious and moderate temperament, which was incapable of flights of imagination. Indeed, after the war, he was unable to grasp the future shape of the army and quickly found himself outmoded as a strategist. For someone of Iguchi’s plodding nature, Fujii’s acrobatic mind and abilities would have stood out less for their virtues than for the dangerous traits hidden behind them.

Harsh as Iguchi was in his assessment of Fujii, he was even more emphatic in his denunciation of Nogi’s chief of staff Ijichi Kōsuke, whom he referred to mockingly as “His Honor of the Third Army.” He wanted Fujii and Ijichi consigned to oblivion. “Don’t you have some way of getting rid of them?” He acknowledged that this would be hard to do. Though Fujii was from Hyōgo Prefecture and not in the Satsuma or Chōshū military clique, Iguchi wrote that he had proven skillful at earning the trust of his superiors—“a master of manipulation” was how he put it. Iguchi said of Ijichi, “Due to his relationship with Field Marshal Ōyama, I believe it would be difficult to take steps to get rid of him here in Manchurian Army headquarters.”

In the midst of a hard-fought war, the pettiness of the world inhabited by these chiefs of staff was clear, due perhaps to the nature of their duties. Or perhaps the pettiness was a feature of the Japanese Army overall. The navy doesn’t seem to have suffered from it very much.

Be that as it may, the Third Army at Port Arthur, its strategy in the hands of a chief of staff derided behind his back as a “superannuated anomaly,” was engaged in a desperate struggle. At no other time in history did one man’s brains and temperament go on causing disaster over such an extended period of time. In the meantime, the Russian Baltic Fleet, a continual source of terror to the entire nation of Japan, had set off from the Russian mainland.

Naval headquarters in Tokyo was busy working out what course to take should the fleet unluckily arrive before the fall of Port Arthur. The answer they came up with was invariably the same: Japan would lose the war.

Even under those circumstances, Tōgō’s fleet would probably be victorious over the Baltic Fleet. “We can win all right.” Navy Minister Yamamoto Gombei was unconcerned on that point. He had created the Japanese fleet for the express purpose of defeating the Russian fleet. Indeed, in the qualitative effectiveness of its fleet and the abilities of its seamen, Japan was leagues ahead of Russia. That was why Yamamoto Gombei was positive that the Japanese Navy would under no circumstances suffer a crushing defeat.

But in the case of the navy’s overall strategy, just winning a victory wasn’t enough. We must not forget that every last ship in the Baltic armada had to be sunk. If several of the enemy’s huge warships survived and managed to find safe harbor at Port Arthur, sea transport of men and supplies would be endangered. Slowly but surely, the Japanese forces in Manchuria would lose. This probable outcome was as plain as day.

“Sink every last ship.” Here lay the key to the grand design of winning the war. The trouble was, no naval battle in history had ever ended with an enemy armada being sent wholesale to the bottom of the sea. “Impossible or not, it’s got to be done, or Japan cannot survive.” This was Yamamoto Gombei’s opinion. No mere argument or sophistry, his opinion was based on hard fact, like the answer to a math problem.

Once Yamamoto Gombei pointed this out, Yamagata Aritomo conceded that it made sense and offered encouragement to Ōyama and Kodama, who both understood the situation without being told. Like Yamamoto, they based their actions on a grand view of the war, following the identical thought process. But Nogi’s headquarters, which was nominally under their command, was extremely insensitive to this grand strategy. Every staff meeting would end with the conclusion: “The navy is in too much of a hurry. We in the army have our own way of doing things”—thus dragging the discussion down from the level of grand strategy to a confrontation between the two branches of the military. That was why Nogi’s headquarters kept rejecting the navy’s persistent request for an attack on 203-Meter Hill.

But reality was marching on. The Baltic Fleet had begun its epic voyage.

Rear Admiral Rozhestvensky, commander of the Baltic Fleet, bore a considerable resemblance to Terauchi Masatake, army minister during the Russo-Japanese War. Neither man was imaginative; they both lacked the wits to try exercising their imaginations. They were methodical types, sticklers for administrative work who did all they could to keep things organized. They delighted in strict discipline and took inordinate interest in ferreting out disciplinary lapses among their subordinates. Temperamentally, both men were less military commanders than military police. On top of that, both were supremely secure in their positions and status. Rozhestvensky was the favorite of Tsar Nicholas II, and Terauchi was administrative head of the Chōshū faction headed by Yamagata Aritomo. Fortunately for Japan, Terauchi landed in the administrative position of army minister and had no say in strategy. Meanwhile, Rozhestvensky sped across the waves as head of a great fleet bound for a fateful encounter with Japan.

Originally an aide-de-camp to the tsar, Rozhestvensky had an unusual fixation on grandeur and spotless surroundings that had served him well in that ceremonial post. A headwaiter’s job would have best suited his temperament. Nicholas II believed him to be Russia’s ablest admiral, but the men who served under him privately disagreed. It seems to have been Count Witte, that enlightened Russian statesman, who first saw him for the fool he was.

At the start of the war, Rozhestvensky had the weighty office of acting chief of the Navy General Staff. It was a “weighty office” in Japanese terms. The Japanese Navy was a brand-new organization, highly streamlined and efficient, the division of duties clear-cut; the Japanese chief of the Navy General Staff was in charge of devising naval strategy, and his orders penetrated every corner of the navy. But the Russian nation and navy were highly antiquated in structure. For example, the Russian chief of the Navy General Staff had virtually no say over naval strategy in the Far East. Instead, Far Eastern viceroy Alexeyev, the tsar’s favorite, did as he pleased.

During a court council at the start of hostilities, Rozhestvensky stressed the importance of inspecting every foreign commercial ship that entered the ports of European Russia. He refused to entertain any other opinion on the matter. His reasoning was that Japanese ships were sneaking into the ports disguised as foreign commercial ships. When Witte, who was present at the meeting, heard this, he thought, “This man is either an idiot or a coward.” In his memoirs, he wrote, “I could only marvel at him.”

The Baltic Fleet was established on April 30, 1904. What was until then called the “Pacific Fleet” consisted of the Far Eastern fleets based at Port Arthur and Vladivostok. As shown by the literal meaning of Vladivostok—“conquer the east”—Russia’s naval presence in East Asia was for the purpose of intimidation, to aid in the invasion of China and Korea. The Pacific Fleet alone was comparable to the entire navy of any of the world’s first-rate powers, but it was under continual pressure from Tōgō, and the death of its commanding officer Makarov dealt a heavy blow to Russian prestige.

But Russia still had its main fleet, and the decision was made to send this to the Far East. Warships in various waters around Europe were gathered together and newly organized on the Baltic Sea, and this was christened the Second Pacific Squadron—more familiarly known as the Baltic Fleet.

“You be commander in chief,” the tsar told his favorite aide-de-camp, and so Rozhestvensky (who was also chief of the Navy General Staff) took the job. He threw himself wholeheartedly into the preparations, his days a crazy whirl of activity as he did everything from plan which warships to include and which to exclude, fit out the ships, and put the assembled fleet through maneuvers.

Rozhestvensky’s talent was that of a government official, nothing more, but the man himself, who was possessed of a handsome and dignified appearance, didn’t see it that way. He was confident that if he and the fleet in his command went to the Far East, they would emerge victorious. What lay at the bottom of that confidence was neither an accurate assessment of each side’s fighting strength nor a winning strategy. Like the tsar who bestowed such favor on him and who referred to the Japanese even in official documents as macaques or “monkeys,” he merely had a white man’s sense of superiority. From the start, Rozhestvensky was convinced that white men could not possibly lose to members of an inferior race from an island country in the Far East.

Sending the Baltic Fleet to the Far East was an intrinsic element of the Russian grand strategy for the war. By dispatching the fleet to the seas near Japan, they could destroy the Japanese fleet, isolate the Japanese Army in Manchuria, and starve them out. This was the strategic significance of the move.

But would the strategy prove successful? Doubts floated about even within the navy and among the various cabinet ministers. There was the voyage to the Far East, to begin with. Not only was the distance involved a staggering 18,000 nautical miles, but also the fleet itself was of such monstrous size that refueling along the way posed an enormous challenge. Keeping up the men’s morale was another consideration. In any case, a voyage by a fleet of such size was in itself a historic undertaking. Was it even possible? Naval experts were doubtful.

The strategic success of the voyage depended above all on arriving safely. There was also the question of whether the fleet could indeed win the coming battle. Here the Slavs showed their superiority to Japan’s army leadership in the subsequent war against the United States. Many battle-ready Russian officers made the coolheaded judgment that victory was impossible. Captain Nikolai Bukhvostov, the captain of the Alexander III, for example, predicted that half the fleet would be lost on the voyage due to mechanical problems or other reasons. This dire prediction did not come true. Rozhestvensky entered into the decisive battle with his full armada.

“Even if that doesn’t happen,” Bukhvostov went on, “the Japanese fleet will probably give us a licking. Their navy is better than ours, and the crews’ abilities are very impressive.”

Even though he was commander of a battleship in the fleet, Captain Bukhvostov made these remarks in a speech at a farewell party attended by civilians the evening before the fleet’s departure. Leaving aside the question of whether or not his remarks were appropriate for that setting, Bukhvostov had the cool judgment of a true expert. Experts had verified the quality of the Japanese Navy each in his own area of expertise. Russian officers were strongly patriotic, however, and even the levelheaded Bukhvostov was second to none in that respect.

“We will never surrender,” he concluded his speech. “That is our only resolve.”

Let us get back to our story, and the debate over whether sending the Baltic Fleet to the Far East was the right thing to do. A majority felt that doing so would serve no purpose. “Everybody—not just experts, but anybody with the ability to think straight—could see that the operation was doomed,” wrote Witte.

The final council to debate the issue was held on August 23, at Peterhof. On August 10, the Port Arthur Squadron had suffered grievous damage in the battle of the Yellow Sea. The better part of the squadron was destroyed by Tōgō, and the remaining ships fled back to the harbor at Port Arthur.

The tsar naturally attended the council. Everyone knew his opinion on the matter. He wanted to send the Baltic Fleet, and he was confident of victory.

A dazzling array of prominent people attended the council. Besides Grand Duke Alexei Aleksandrovich and Grand Duke Aleksandr Mikhailovich, there were Navy Minister Fyodor Avellan, War Minister Viktor Sakharov, Foreign Minister Vladimir Lamsdorf, and Zinovy Rozhestvensky. Every one of them masked their real feelings with a polite expression suitable to a court affair, but they didn’t look happy.

This court conference would no doubt have bemused Japanese politicians of the day. Although most of those prominent figures privately thought that sending the fleet would mean Russia’s defeat, no one spoke up and said so. Civilians and military officers alike worried more about the safety of their own positions and status in the bureaucracy than about the preservation of the nation. Any mention of defeat would put the tsar out of humor, and whoever offended the tsar was sure to be demoted in the end. Witte was not present because he had already been removed from office, but he wrote, “I had attended such conferences many times. Everyone present already either knew or surmised the tsar’s intention regarding the topic under discussion and avoided going against it. Anyone whose opinion was at variance with His Majesty’s held his tongue.”

In an antiquated bureaucracy, everything works this way. Japan was not an imperial dictatorship when it took the illogical and unthinkable step of provoking war with the United States in 1941, but, at that time, its antiquarian bureaucracy was no less autocratic than that of tsarist Russia. In the face of the army’s insistence, or bluster, about starting a war with the United States, everyone stayed quiet to save his own skin. Within the army bureaucracy, the few people of calm judgment were all demoted. As a result, the wildest, most fanatical opinion carried the day, and, by letting it pass, the others clung with relief to their personal safety.

In this case, the fanatic was Rozhestvensky himself. He met almost daily with the tsar in his twin roles as chief of the Navy General Staff and aide-de-camp. (This was how things worked in tsarist Russia. Sakharov also was both war minister and aide-de-camp. It boiled down to tsarist despotism.)

“What can we do to teach Japan a lesson?” the tsar asked.

Rozhestvensky fleshed out his idea of putting together a Second Pacific Squadron and sending it to the Far East. Its mission would be to send the Japanese Navy to the bottom of the sea and isolate Ōyama in Manchuria. He expressed no doubt about whether or not this fleet could win. To suggest that the Russian Imperial Navy was capable of defeat would have been disrespectful to the tsar and a serious breach of court etiquette. Besides, Rozhestvensky was convinced that the fleet would certainly sink every last Japanese ship.

He may have thought so because of his personality. Most of all, however, his conclusion had to do with his being chief of the Navy General Staff despite having no battle experience whatever—unbelievable as that may seem. Equally unbelievably, the greater part of his service in the navy had been shore duty; he had basically never served aboard an actual fleet. He had been chosen for his post based on his smart-looking appearance and his skill at making his way around court.

“Rozhestvensky, what do you think?” asked the tsar, last of all. He, of course, knew before asking what the rear admiral’s answer would be.

“We can send the Japanese fleet to kingdom come.” Rozhestvensky didn’t actually say this in so many words. He may have wanted to, but extreme language and straightforward talk went against etiquette at the Russian court, where refinement came first. Rozhestvensky was second to none in his deference to the tsar in such matters.

“This grand expedition will be fraught with danger,” he said. “But if Your Highness orders me to, I will lead it gladly and set off to do battle with Japan.”

What did he really think? True enough, he had suggested that the tsar organize a Second Pacific Squadron to defeat the Japanese Fleet. This the tsar had done. All well and good—but Rozhestvensky may not have counted on being appointed commander in chief. When he first made the proposal back in spring 1904, inciting the tsar to action, he had been a mere rear admiral, far too lowly a rank for the command of such a great fleet.

Somebody else would do it. Based on that assumption, he may have promoted the plan as chief of the Navy General Staff with his usual knowing air, unconcerned about the consequences. There are signs that that was the case.

Russia was a big country with a huge population, and it possessed a great navy, yet, strange to say, compared with Japan it had far fewer admirals of real value. Still, the shortage was not so desperate that a rear admiral had to be made commander in chief. There were admirals, not to mention veteran vice admirals ready for promotion. But the tsar’s favor centered on Rozhestvensky because he was “clever and stylish.” For this same reason, he had favored and made much of Kuropatkin in the army.

An inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West made Russians perceive themselves as dull-witted, coarse, and slovenly. Overall, they saw themselves as semi-Asiatic, and they were hypersensitive to the fact that Westerners saw them that way too. The Russian court was afflicted by a congenital sense of inferiority dating back to the time of Peter the Great. Much was made of officials with a preponderance of German blood. Among those of Slavic ancestry, anyone with European-style agility of character and mind was habitually valued above his ability.

This was true of Rozhestvensky, who deliberately showed off his “European” mental quickness to ingratiate himself at court. As a result, an idea took root in the tsar’s mind: Rozhestvensky would pull off a victory. The seed of that idea was planted by Rozhestvensky himself.

The Baltic Fleet collected at the port of Liepaja on the Baltic Sea before setting off on its grand voyage. Witte referred to Liepaja bitterly as a “cursed port.” Before the outbreak of the Russo-Japanese War, opinion in the Russian government and navy had split down the middle over whether or not to construct a port there.

On the face of it, there could be no better site for a port. Russia was a continental country with few coastal areas suitable for the construction of seaports. Those it did have mostly froze over in the winter. Even Kronstadt, the main port charged with protection of the Russian capital of St. Petersburg, was icebound three to five months of the year. As the country expanded, the desire for ice-free ports grew hot enough to give off black smoke. To be sure, there were some in the Black Sea, and, in the Far East, Russia had possession of the harbor at Port Arthur. Still, a commercial and military harbor near St. Petersburg, the heart of European Russia, was wanting. Liepaja filled the bill. A port there could remain operational all winter long.

But Witte, along with certain elements of the Russian Navy, opposed the idea because of the narrowness of the channel. As they saw it, as soon as war broke out, the enemy would blockade the harbor, rendering it useless. The Russians habitually looked at things in a negative light. For this reason, a majority felt that, rather than Liepaja, Murmansk, located on Kola Bay, would make a better naval base. Witte sided with this opinion.

The debate between these two plans had surfaced in the last years of the reign of the former tsar, Alexander III. On his deathbed, he told his aides, “I want to choose Murmansk,” but died soon afterward with the matter unresolved. Then, when his successor, the ruling Nicholas II, took the throne, he lost no time in issuing an order to build a naval base at Liepaja. Oddly enough, he did so in the name of the previous tsar, who he claimed had supported that plan. He even announced that the commercial harbor would be named Liepaja, the military one, “Port Alexander III.” Witte surmised that one of his aides must have deceived the tsar.

This was how construction of a great Russian naval base at Liepaja got underway. The budget for the project was gigantic, earning the new facility the moniker “Money-gobbling Harbor.”

Before war broke out, Hirose Takeo had toured the harbor. Afterward, he sent Tokyo a detailed report, with sketches, as “secret information.” At the time of his visit, the port was still under construction, and, even when the Baltic Fleet assembled there, it remained unfinished.

“Liepaja is dangerous because it’s ice-free.” Some members of the Russian Navy were actually of this opinion, Hirose wrote. They reasoned that if ships were docked at a port where the sea was frozen then the enemy couldn’t attack, so the Russian fleet would be safe. Hirose was surprised by the morbid intensity of Russia’s defensive mindset. For that matter, Witte’s opinion was not all that different. He cursed Liepaja, going so far as to say that constructing a warm-water port on the Baltic Sea was what had led Russia to do a damn fool thing like sending the Baltic Fleet to the Far East in the first place. In his opinion, Russia had no business embarking on any such costly and risky military adventure, and he blamed the existence of a warm-water port for making it possible.

The name of the battleship Oryol, one of the newest and largest ships in the Russian fleet, means “Eagle.”

“I was a seaman aboard the warship Oryol,” wrote Alexei Novikov-Priboy in the preface to his book Tsushima. He participated in the battle of Tsushima, though still a young seaman at the time. A ship of the same type as Rozhestvensky’s flagship Prince Suvorov, the Oryol was first anchored in Kronstadt, where there was a naval station, but was later sent to the harbor at Liepaja, which was to become a sad memorial for Russia. “The buildings, factory chimneys, and giant cranes of the military harbor were all wrapped in fog,” Novikov-Priboy wrote of the ship’s entrance into the harbor.

Due to the flow of fresh water from nearly two hundred rivers, the water in the Baltic Sea is not very saline. Effectively sealed off by the embrace of the mammoth Scandinavian Peninsula, the sea is covered with heavy fog in spring and autumn. It was not an easy body of water for the crews to navigate. Liepaja Harbor was just then being enlarged, and in the scene before the men’s eyes everything was under construction. The Oryol slipped inside the enormous stone breakwater with its fellow ships and dropped anchor.

In the eyes of Novikov-Priboy, who had until then sailed cruisers, the imposing appearance of this ship was magnificent. Generally regarded as the world’s finest battleship, it was one of a set of four of the same class. The others were Suvorov, Borodino, and Alexander III, all with a displacement of 13,516 tons.

“Russia’s existence and glory depend on its military,” Witte had maintained. “If Russia should suffer a military defeat, that would spell the end of Russian existence and Russian glory.” It was up to these four battleships, the world’s biggest and newest, to protect the glory of the Russian Empire. They formed the nucleus of the Baltic Fleet. In addition, there were three other battleships, eight cruisers, nine destroyers, and six special service ships. Together, these made up the Second Pacific Squadron. Later, they would be joined by the Third Pacific Squadron (one battleship, one cruiser, three coast defense ships) to form the official Baltic Fleet, but at this point the Third Pacific Squadron had not yet been formed.

The hills above the harbor at Liepaja were already dusted with snow. Rozhestvensky was already aboard the Suvorov, which he had boarded in Kronstadt. The day after leaving Kronstadt, the ship entered the port at Reval, which the Russians had once pillaged, and anchored there for a while. After a short time (about a month), the tsar came to inspect the fleet, visiting each ship in turn. When finally he came on the deck of the Oryol and addressed the seamen, he seemed worn out, his voice flat. He called on them to “destroy the insolent Japanese who have troubled the peace of Holy Russia.” The tsar was a small man. Behind him, the towering figure of Rozhestvensky, resplendent in his full-dress uniform with golden epaulets, looked all the more imposing.

The Baltic Fleet departed Liepaja on October 15, setting out on its long, long voyage. First to leave at nine o’clock in the morning and puffing enormous clouds of black smoke was the cruiser Almaz. On the dock, a military band played while a crowd of spectators cheered. The Suvorov began to move out at noon.

Everything was done in the solemn Russian style. On the eve of departure, prayers for a safe crossing had been held on the Suvorov and on the other ships as well. The flag of St. Andrew, the Russian naval ensign, fluttered on every ship. The weather was glorious. The Baltic Sea was a deep ultramarine, as smooth as smooth could be.

“I don’t believe in the success of this fleet.” These words were written in the journal of Engineer Evgeny Politovsky, a shipbuilder on the Suvorov. Politovsky was an able construction engineer, and this was his first cruise. Normally, he worked in the St. Petersburg naval yard constructing warships, but, just when the Baltic Fleet was set to leave for the Far East, all of a sudden he was ordered aboard. The only way to keep this historic voyage of 18,000 nautical miles from ending in dismal failure was to pluck a shipwright from his peaceful workplace and take him along. There was no telling what repairs might become necessary, and they would have to be carried out while the ships were in motion—a daunting feat. Divers would be needed at times, and on occasion the engineer himself would have to don diving gear and go underwater. Politovsky was the right man for the job. Still only thirty, he knew more than anyone about the structure of battleships like the Suvorov.

He left a young wife at home. From the first, he was desperately unhappy, writing to her that he was “utterly disappointed in this fleet.” He knew the quality of the men around him. Neither the gunners nor the firemen had any engineering ability to speak of. He knew too how the long haul ahead—18,000 nautical miles, a ridiculously long journey from an engineer’s perspective—would adversely affect the ships’ capabilities. Above all, he was skeptical as to whether morale could be maintained during a voyage so long. Anti-imperialist sentiment was spreading already among Russian workers and sailors, as he knew better than anyone. They would be lucky if no rebellion broke out before they reached the theater of war.

“I can only feel assured that no one can escape his fate,” Politovsky wrote. “Should I live to return home, I will tell you all.” During the journey, he was kept extremely busy repairing damage and performed his duties admirably. But he was never to return home to his wife. On the Sea of Japan, he was killed by a Japanese shell.

“He may be a terrible coward.”

This character flaw, which Witte observed in Rozhestvensky, may well have rendered the man the least fit to command such a large fleet. From the time they left Liepaja, not only Rozhestvensky but the men under him too were possessed by a delusion. The rumor was that a squadron of Japanese destroyers was lurking in the Denmark Strait to ambush them. The idea was patently ridiculous, as a cursory look at Japanese naval strength would have shown. Was it even possible to send destroyers weighing barely 200 or 300 tons all the way to the North Sea in Europe? That would have necessitated taking along an auxiliary ship for repairs, as well as a couple of protected cruisers. Japan didn’t have that kind of strength.

But even before engaging the enemy, the Baltic Fleet was dominated by fear of Japan. If anyone could pull off such a feat, they felt, it was Japan. Above all, Rozhestvensky himself was convinced of this. He and his aides had no doubt that at the very least Japan must have laid mines in the Baltic Strait along the southern tip of Sweden.

The fleet’s speed was 8 knots.

On the evening of their second day out, as they neared the suspected danger zone, Rozhestvensky gave orders to prepare for combat and instructed everyone to sleep with their clothes on. All the ships’ guns were readied for firing on an instant’s notice.

Speculation was rife, but, on the seventeenth, they arrived safely at Denmark’s Langeland Island and dropped anchor. Still, they couldn’t let up their guard. The danger of Japanese torpedoes or mines wouldn’t end until they had squeezed through the narrow strait, leaving the Baltic Sea behind and entering open sea. That at least was Rozhestvensky’s judgment.

His judgment may not have been entirely a cowardly delusion. Even the Danish Navy sensed danger, sending a cruiser and a torpedo boat out in the open sea off Langeland Island where the Baltic Fleet lay at anchor, wary lest the Japanese Navy adopt the outlandish strategy of attacking the anchorage of a neutral country.

The following day, October 18, the fleet stayed at anchor. The above-mentioned journal of Engineer Politovsky consisted of letters to his wife, and every time the fleet dropped anchor like this he would go ashore and send a letter home. On the eighteenth, Rozhestvensky received a wire from the tsar making him vice admiral.

Already, only three days out of Liepaja, ships were breaking down one after another. The destroyer Bystry collided with the battleship Oslyabya, opening a great gash in its own side. The cruiser Zhemchug’s steam launch was damaged, and the bow of the destroyer Bravy was smashed, so that it took on some water. Repairs had to be carried out every time the fleet was at anchor, giving rise to qualms over the long ocean crossing ahead.

“Japanese torpedo boats are lurking in the North Sea.”

The fleet was plagued by this terrifying yet utterly absurd delusion. No one laughed at the notion. Nobody knows who spread this delusion through the fleet. The probable source of the rumor was the Russian naval command in St. Petersburg. The Russian Empire’s strategic center, which should have been cool rationality, believed it possible. Rozhestvensky himself, having transferred to the fleet from a building in naval headquarters, was a believer.

This incident alone disqualified him from commanding so vast a fleet. Even assuming that the delusion running riot among the men was not of his personal making, as commander, he was the one who should have quashed it. That was the minimum duty of a commander in chief. Uniting men’s minds, raising their fighting spirit, eliminating all trace of defeatism—these were the abilities and the actions that the nation expected and demanded from its military leadership. Strategy could be left in the hands of staff officers.

“If we start to lose the war, I will take command.” These words of Ōyama Iwao, the commander in chief of the Manchurian Army, epitomize the nature of top leadership. The commander’s job is to purge the military of mass fear, delusions, and defeatism. In that sense, Nogi Maresuke’s leadership deserves full marks. That the troops attacking Port Arthur never succumbed to mass defeatism despite their resounding losses owed in large measure to his powers of leadership.

Rozhestvensky himself suffered from defeatism.

“I am not a coward.” So he may have declared, but whatever his personality traits, he was a leader who sowed panic in the entire fleet. Barely three days out of Liepaja, he issued orders so incomprehensible that they seem designed for the sole purpose of fomenting panic. “Everyone sleep in your clothes. All ships be ready to fire at a moment’s notice.” His actions at that point were not those of a commander but rather of someone out to create chaos.

In the military, the supreme command has access to the greatest amount of information. All the rest, from junior officers down, are merely laborers at their respective posts, not privy to information. Informing subordinates is actually undesirable in a military situation, so that they have no choice but to trust their superiors. In psychological terms, a millimeter of oscillation in the top command predictably expands in amplitude to a meter of oscillation below. Rozhestvensky’s shivers naturally created a mood of what can only be called blind panic.

This expeditionary fleet of a scale unmatched in history saw Denmark’s northern tip, Cape Skagen, on October 20, six days out from Liepaja. The entire fleet anchored off the cape, and coaling got underway. For the crews, this was backbreaking labor.

The skies were clear. At three in the afternoon, a Swedish steamboat drew near and signaled that it had an “important communication.” This was a steamboat employed by Russian intelligence, bearing important information. Rozhestvensky took the message, which turned out to be vague. “A three-masted schooner has set sail from an inlet. Highly suspicious.”

“It must be a Japanese spy ship, gone out to inform a flotilla of torpedo boats lying in ambush somewhere.” Rozhestvensky’s imagination was wilder than that of any writer of fiction. The idea that Japanese torpedo boats would be lurking in the North Sea was unrealistic, but even if it were true, they would hardly use a sailing vessel to convey an urgent message. Rozhestvensky’s imagination wasn’t grounded strongly in reality. He possessed great pride, but it’s possible that excessive pride derives from morbid fear.

As a military man, he should have kept his fears locked in the privacy of his own mind. Susceptibility to fear isn’t necessarily a disgrace in the armed forces. Down the ages, many of the greatest generals and strategists have had that trait. Human inventiveness arises less from brave spirits than from spirits subject to great fear. But the greatest generals in history kept their fear to themselves, not letting even their closest subordinates know. That may be the secret of successful high command.

Rozhestvensky did just the opposite, putting his fear on display to the entire fleet by staging a show. He issued orders that all gun muzzles be turned on every passing ship. The fleet was not out on distant seas, but was approaching the North Sea, which thronged with traffic. The North Sea is bounded by the coastlines of Norway, Denmark, Germany, and England. Commercial fishing boats of each of those countries were sure to pass in the vicinity of that great fleet of imperial Russia. Every time one did, the fleet’s warships were to reposition their guns and train their sights on it. The idea was sheer madness.

Or, rather, it was perhaps something like a psychological warm-up exercise meant to induce madness. If anyone had cared to conduct an experiment in instilling an entire fighting force with mass terror, this method of Rozhestvensky’s would have been just the way to go about it.

“Everybody’s nerves were keyed up.” So wrote Engineer Politovsky.

Could Rozhestvensky defeat Tōgō? Some of the seamen in the Baltic Fleet were already beginning to worry. From the first, the name “Tōgō” was well known to the Russian Navy as belonging to the supreme commander of the Japanese Combined Fleet, but of the man himself no one knew anything at all. Even in the top naval countries of Europe, people wondered what sort of fellow he was and what his strengths were. Japanese seamen too had no way of knowing anything about a man who until the outbreak of war had kept a low profile as port admiral. In comparison, Rozhestvensky was rather well known internationally from his treatises on the art of gunnery.

But at issue was each man’s ability as commander in chief. What’s funny about military men is that they always want their leader to be someone of powers so outstanding as to be mystical, and, when they believe that he is such a man, they want to place a kind of religious faith in him. When all the troops share that same faith, then and only then is the high command a success.

Ever since the war began, Tōgō had increasingly been inspiring that sort of mystical faith in his men. In particular, he had gained the greatest trust of his closest aides, commanders, and ship captains during an episode we have already described, when the two great battleships, the Hatsuse and the Yashima, were lost at once when they hit Russian mines on May 15 of that year. The Combined Fleet lost thirty-three percent of its battle capability in that single day. Everyone had assumed that all hope of winning was gone.

But Tōgō never batted an eyelash. The British naval captain William C. Pakenham was aboard the battleship Asahi as an observer, and he soon met with Tōgō to offer condolences for the devastating loss that might determine the fate of the Japanese nation. Tōgō thanked him with a calm smile. Years later, when Pakenham met with Akiyama Saneyuki, he reminisced. “Never did I sense the greatness of the human spirit so strongly as I did then.” By suppressing the intensity of his inner turmoil, Tōgō succeeded brilliantly in preventing the fleet from succumbing to pessimism.

But Rozhestvensky took his personal fear as the script for a show he staged using the entire fleet. They were about to enter the North Sea. The crews were sleepless, on the lookout for phantom Japanese torpedo boats. Every gun was loaded, and every gun barrel swung in unison, following each new craft that came along. “Even if we came upon a small lighter, our destroyer went off after it like blazes,” recorded one witness.

In this drama of fear, tension ratcheted up at every step. The alarming news that Japanese torpedo boats were in the vicinity made the fleet quickly weigh anchor and enter the North Sea. That night there was a dense fog, as thick as mud. As the fleet pushed on through the murky fog, each ship in turn sounded its foghorn to prevent collisions. Depending on the ship, this sounded like the bellow of a giant, the strangled sob of a young girl, or even the spirited shriek of a madwoman. The sounds heightened everyone’s fear.

The wireless communication system that enabled ships to trade information served to intensify the climate of fear all the more. Out of an abundance of caution, every ship sent out a stream of messages, reporting weird goings-on that were mere hallucinations, churning out unsubstantiated reports as if they were pelting each other with stones.

When the sun rose on the morning of October 21, the fog had lifted. At last able to verify the state of their fleet with their own eyes, the men felt relieved. Some whispered their fear of the night to come. Rumor had it that one of the captains had gone insane.

Night fell. Ever since evening, the wind and waves had been high. The fleet steamed ahead, washed broadside by waves. Before nine o’clock, a shocking radio message came in, piercing the men’s hearts. “We are being chased by Japanese torpedo boats.”

The message was from the Kamchatka, the repair ship. Named for the peninsula that the Russian Empire had annexed in 1707, the little boat was loaded with equipment, shipbuilders, and engineers to carry out repairs as needed on the rest of the fleet. The Kamchatka belonged to the First Cruiser Division in the van of the fleet but had been slowed by engine trouble and so lagged behind, bringing up the rear all alone. This must have inflamed the crew’s terror all the more.

The Suvorov was steaming through wind and waves when the Kamchatka’s startling report came in, spurring Rozhestvensky to an immediate response. He ordered all battleships cleared for action and instructed the Kamchatka to keep him fully informed. Russian radio equipment was strikingly inferior to the domestically made equipment of the Japanese Navy. Nevertheless, the radio operator kept up a strenuous tapping and got the message through. The reply that came in was way off the mark, a fact attributable less to the state of the equipment than to the psychological stress of the Kamchatka’s captain.

“They are coming at us from all directions,” he reported. Asked how many enemy ships there were, he replied, “Eight torpedo boats.”

Rozhestvensky never doubted it. A moment’s calm reflection would have shown him how preposterous the claim was. Even if Japan had somehow managed to send a squadron of torpedo boats all the way to the North Sea in Europe, why deploy it against a mere repair ship? Why surround that ship with eight boats and attack it from all sides?

At the end of his exchanges with the Kamchatka, Rozhestvensky advised the repair ship to change course and get out of the path of danger. “When you have evaded the enemy, advise us of your longitude and latitude, as well as your course.”

But the Kamchatka’s response was: “Afraid to reveal.” They feared the worst if enemy torpedo boats overheard them radioing in their position.

Time passed.

At eleven o’clock at night, the Suvorov again sent out a wireless message. “What is happening? Do you still see Japanese torpedo boats?” The radio waves flew through wind and rain, but no immediate response came from the Kamchatka.

Rozhestvensky went into a fury. “Damned cowards!”

At length, there came a chastened reply. “No sign of them.”

Rozhestvensky was relieved. He should have let the matter rest, but his overactive imagination lit up the dark North Sea bright as day. In the world of his imagination, eight Japanese torpedo boats were coming after the Baltic Fleet, plowing through the waves. He gave the order to prepare for action. His move was based on peculiar reasoning: “Kamchatka reports no sign of the enemy. That just goes to show the enemy has given up on the Kamchatka and is coming after the battleships.” If there is a mental disposition that sees things only through the prism of fear, then Rozhestvensky’s disposition may well belong in that category.

Time ticked away, and the great fleet steamed uneventfully on across the dark North Sea

But the seamen in the fleet hunched sleepless at their posts. Novikov-Priboy wrote that although it was permissible for some crew members to sleep, few if any did. The captain’s psychology of fear had infected his entire fleet.

In the dead of night, rain came riding on the wind. “If only there was a moon!” The men cursed the weather. They were exhausted from fighting with their own imaginations in the pitch dark.

The fleet was steaming across the shallow North Sea. Formerly a plain, the land subsided in the diluvial epoch and became sea. In roughly the center of the sea is a vast shallow area known as Dogger Bank, a mere 11 meters deep at its shallowest point. The entire bank is a prime breeding ground for fish, teeming with cod, herring, flatfish, and flounder.

The Baltic Fleet commander should have known that the fleet was approaching Dogger Bank. Among sailors, it was common knowledge that fishing boats from Britain and other countries clustered there year-round, hard at work; Rozhestvensky should have foreseen that fishing boats would be out in large numbers even at night. Had this information, known to every sailor in Europe, been available to him and his aides as they assessed the situation, the great panic that they eventually unleashed might never have taken place.

Shortly after one in the morning, a tricolor signal flare went up in front of the Suvorov. After the war, a survey to determine which British fishing vessel had sent up the signal flare concluded that no signal had ever been released. In any case, the fleet was in an abnormally heightened state of nerves, and so the point was never clarified. What is clear is that the Suvorov, with Rozhestvensky aboard, turned on its searchlight to sweep the darkness. Given everyone’s state of mind at the time, this was equivalent to an order to start fighting. The captain of every warship must have gasped in surprise. Aboard the Suvorov, the bugle call to prepare for action rang out. Rozhestvensky issued battle orders to the entire fleet.

Their opponents were trawlers. The searchlight caught a single-funnel fishing boat in a light so bright that “the red- and black-painted hull stood out clearly,” wrote the Suvorov’s ship engineer Politovsky. It was a British fishing boat. The fleet as a whole, however, mistook it for a Japanese torpedo boat and let fly a thunderous cannonade.

“At the time I was on the fore bridge,” wrote Politovsky to his wife, “but my ears were so deafened by the roar of the cannons and my eyes so blinded by the gunfire that I could not stand it and bolted below, hands over my ears, to watch the spectacle from the upper deck.”

The mad party began.

Every warship in the fleet switched on its searchlight and frantically began firing its guns. Every time a cannon went off, the heavy air over the North Sea was rent in two and flashes of light slashed the darkness. It wasn’t just one or two Japanese torpedo boats (actually British trawlers) that the Baltic Fleet set upon. The more quickly the searchlight crews worked, the more vessels they were able to locate. There was no lack of targets.

At some point, a cluster of fishing boats found itself hemmed in by the armada. The first boat that had been subjected to volley after volley of fire from the Suvorov made no effort to escape for some reason and just stayed put, cowering like a small forest animal waiting for a storm to blow over. There was no sign of anyone on board.

The one bit of good fortune for the trawlers was that the Russian gunners were poor marksmen. Had even one shell scored a direct hit, its target would surely have been blown to splinters, but mostly they landed harmlessly in the sea, sending up monster clouds of spray. The smaller shells were more successful. Every time one hit its mark, a chorus of huzzahs went up from some ships.

The fleet steamed straight ahead. Some fishing boats flipped over like newts, exposing red bellies, while two or three others were on fire. Determined to sink them, the fleet kept shining its searchlights and never let up on the attack.

Although some eyewitnesses may have reported, “No sign of anyone on board,” others described seeing people run around on the narrow decks in a vain attempt to flee, waving their arms up and down in entreaty. The sight of the fishing crews’ hapless confusion made some Russian sailors chortle. “The Japanese Navy is weak!” In this “war theater” built on a grand illusion, there was no compassion for the “enemy.” The fishermen were unable to jump into the sea, which was boiling under the bombardment. Anyone foolish enough to jump in would have been instantly ripped to pieces.

The “battle” continued for a dozen minutes, and then one of the ships located another supposed enemy: “Japanese armored cruiser sighted.” And so the Aurora (6,731 tons), a member of the Russian First Cruiser Division, came under concentrated friendly fire. Many of the shells scored bull’s-eyes. By the time the Aurora radioed in the plaintive message “We are hit,” the damage was done. There were four perforations above the waterline, the funnel was shot off, the chaplain had lost a leg, and the chief gunner was wounded.

By then, Rozhestvensky had realized the strangeness of this naval “combat” and issued a ceasefire, but the noncommissioned officers and crew manning the guns, too excited to control themselves, kept right on shooting. It was a long time before the sea regained its serenity.

“How humiliating!” Engineer Politovsky wrote to his wife back home. “We made fools of ourselves before the whole world.” True enough, the madness of this incident set the world laughing at the Baltic Fleet. But to Britain, the victim of the attack, there was nothing funny about it.

Twenty-one fishing vessels, counting only those whose names are known, had been working that night in the shallows of Dogger Bank, the scene of the nightmarish incident. When the sun rose, the extent of the damage gradually became clear. As they returned to Hull, their base on England’s east coast, the fishermen cursed. “Damn Russians ripped into us like a pack of mad dogs and then lit out.” Some boats had gone down, others had as many as sixteen holes in their hulls. One boat brought back the decapitated bodies of its captain and chief engineer. Others limped into port, barely afloat.

British public opinion took a hard line. Parliament and newspapers dubbed the fleet the “Mad Dog Squadron.” The unprovoked brutality of the Russians’ attack on peaceful fishing vessels was bad enough, but still more despicable, went the argument, was the way the Russians had gone off and abandoned their victims without any offer of help. In that age, the nation was the wellspring of value and honor. Britain responded quickly to the “humiliation and brutality” inflicted on its citizens.

The British government issued standby orders to the navy. Not only that, the Russian ambassador, Count Aleksandr Benkendorf, was issued a warning. “Until the issue is resolved, the Baltic Fleet’s progress across the North Sea must be halted. If the fleet insists on proceeding, please understand that Britain will enter into a state of war with Russia one week from now.”

Foreign diplomacy in that era was backed by military power. The British government not only issued a warning but also instructed two of its own fleets, the Channel Fleet and the Mediterranean Fleet, to be ready for action. Behind this overly harsh response lay, needless to say, the Anglo-Japanese Alliance.

The stance of the British government, Parliament, and the leading newspapers gave the impression that war with Russia might break out at any moment, even though war was not in Britain’s interest. The sort of machismo that refused to back down from the possibility of war was a source of diplomatic energy in that era.

Several factors mitigated against war. First and foremost were the alliances. At that time, France was allied with Russia and also had established an Entente Cordiale with Britain. The French government was quick to appeal to the governments of Britain and Russia, declaring its willingness to take on the role of peacemaker. The squabbling countries accepted the offer. Britain’s brand of fighting diplomacy counted on the appearance of such a mediator to keep the peace.

Amid this international ruckus, the Baltic Fleet continued to steam south.

The British press and news agencies began by calling the fleet a mad dog and ended by branding it “piratical.” The press insisted that the fleet be halted and detained, and that commander Rozhestvensky and his staff be sent packing. The drubbing they received in the press was extremely unfortunate for Rozhestvensky and the fleet, who certainly had no piratical intent when they did what they did. In the darkness, the crews had simply fallen prey to ungovernable fear, and neither Rozhestvensky nor his staff had been able to bring them under control.

The Russians hated the British and, when reviling them for their cunning, called their country “Perfidious Albion.” At noon on the day after the unfortunate incident of firing on fishing boats, the Baltic Fleet passed through the English Channel. The sea was covered with fog, the British mainland invisible.

“This black-hearted land.” Engineer Politovsky, a devoted husband, wrote those words to his wife while looking toward Britain from the deck of the Suvorov.

Though the fleet was reviled as the “Pirate Squadron” or “Mad Dog Squadron,” its crews were human. Many different kinds of birds flew across the English Channel. On spotting the great warships, they would alight on their masts and turrets or rest in the shade of their funnels to ease the fatigue of flight. Some were too exhausted to fly away when anyone approached. The seamen gave the birds water and food before setting them free again.

Rozhestvensky was as quick as ever to berate his men for less than crisp salutes or appearance, but overall the mood of the fleet was somber, the sense of mortification deep.

Ever since leaving the Russian port of Liepaja, the fleet had yet to put in at any port. During the six days since the Dogger Bank affair, they had steamed on nonstop. There were internal rumors that they might stop at the port of Brest, France, but instead they passed it by. Then it was whispered that they were going to cross over the Bay of Biscay without stopping, and they did. The great bay, which lies along the northern coast of Spain and the western coast of France, was unpopular with sailors. The weather there was unpredictable, and, once it turned stormy, the crossing was extremely heavy going.

Fortunately, they had good weather. The problem was rather that, since they stayed at sea, they were unaware of the world’s reaction to their blunder. Rozhestvensky himself was blithe to his aides. “Nothing much will come of it.”

The ill-starred fleet first stopped to rest at the Spanish port of Vigo.

They were greeted by a cluster of rocks on the western coast of Spain, lit by the morning sun. The area had a jagged ria coastline, and the port was narrow and deep, geographically suitable to accommodate a large fleet. High mountains surrounded Vigo, and along the narrow coast was a scattering of fishing villages.

Vigo was a major fishing port. An old castle nestled at the foot of a mountain, and here and there in the mountains modern fortifications had been constructed, each flying the Spanish flag in a corner.

The Baltic Fleet fired off a gun salute in honor of the Spanish national flag. Clouds of smoke went up, and the hills rang with the sound of gunfire. The Spanish fortress guns returned the salute. The Russian crew looked forward to recuperating at Vigo, but British and French newspapers brought to them made clear that this was a vain hope. They learned that their action of firing on unarmed British trawlers in Dogger Bank and then steaming on their way had become hot news around the globe. The British government and Parliament were taking an extremely hard line, even calling the British Navy into play. They also learned that the Russian capital of St. Petersburg was receiving heated protests from Britain, which was demanding that the fleet’s progress be halted until the matter was resolved.

Britain had already begun to take action. The crew of the Baltic Fleet carelessly failed to notice it at the time, but later they found that four British cruisers were hidden deep in a neighboring cove, keeping a sharp lookout.

But the tsar’s expeditionary force also had friends—German steamers. To procure the vast amount of coal the fleet consumed, Russia had entered into a contract with a company in Germany, its ally. Four German colliers were in the harbor waiting for the fleet when it arrived.

The fleet tried to begin coaling immediately. The colliers each drew alongside a battleship, but then unexpectedly a Spanish official came aboard the Suvorov. “Spain is a neutral country,” he stated firmly. “We cannot allow you to load coal in a neutral harbor.”

“I’ve never heard anything so damned stupid!” Rozhestvensky pounded the table in fury when this development was reported to him in his stateroom. If Russia purchased German coal with its own money, what right did any country in the world have to interfere, he wanted to know—but in the end there was nothing for him to do but wire the Foreign Ministry in St. Petersburg and ask the foreign minister for help. Only by having the foreign minister back home send the Russian ambassador in Madrid scurrying could the fleet’s peculiar difficulty be resolved.

The root of British diplomatic strength was the British Navy. From the Russian perspective, Britain’s use of its strength was crafty; Britain was apparently carrying out abominable intrigues on the seven seas.

“The hand of Britain is behind it,” Politovsky wrote shrewdly of the Spanish harbor administrator’s haughty refusal to allow coaling in Vigo. This was so. Britain was not only faithful to its obligations under the Anglo-Japanese Alliance, but actively took the initiative. As the Baltic Fleet departed Europe to wipe out a small naval power in the Far East, Britain did all it could to interfere. Knowing Spain to be neutral, Britain appealed to the Spanish government. This was the gist of their proposal:

The Baltic Fleet committed a heinous act in Dogger Bank, the North Sea, one without any precedent. They intend to continue on their way without clearing up this incident, but Britain, as victim, wishes to prevent that by any means possible. For instance, although the Baltic Fleet may try to replenish its coal in neutral Spanish territory, we wish Spain to deny it permission to do so. For the Spanish government to let the Russian fleet refuel in its territory would clearly violate Spanish neutrality.

And so the Baltic Fleet was stuck in the fishing port of Vigo. The harbor administrator who came aboard the flagship to issue the prohibition was a little, clean-shaven man in his mid-thirties. “Spain does not wish to violate its neutrality.” He said this over and over. One little man succeeded in halting the progress of a mammoth fleet.

The pride of the Russian Empire was forced to lie at anchor under supremely humiliating conditions. When the prohibition went into effect, coal ships were already positioned alongside the battleships, fastened with ropes at the bow. “There could be no greater humiliation,” wrote Politovsky.

Two days went by.

During that interval, how many telegrams must have flown back and forth between Madrid and St. Petersburg? Finally, at one in the afternoon on the second day, the Spanish government relented—with one proviso. Each battleship could load only 400 tons of coal.

The crews swung into action. Even the brig was emptied to get the job done. Russian officers normally did not participate in such manual labor, but this time they pitched in. Coal dust flew, turning faces and clothes black. As night came on, lanterns were lit on all the ships and coaling continued, wrapping up finally at nine in the morning.

The Baltic Fleet was forced to stay five long days in the Spanish port of Vigo. Strategically, those five days were of great benefit to Japan. The Japanese Army had yet to breach the fortifications at Port Arthur.

The Baltic Fleet, meanwhile, felt compelled to reach the Far East while the Russian fortifications and fleet at Port Arthur were still intact. Otherwise, the strategic value of the expedition would be much less, or practically nil.

The five days of enforced idleness took a marked toll on the crews’ morale. “This is our glorious expeditionary force?” That thought was on everyone’s mind. Where was the dignity of their fatherland?

The tsar’s fleet was stuck in a remote Spanish fishing port at the whim of the port administrator. Even the most ignorant sailor knew full well that behind that state of affairs lay the might of Great Britain, ruler of the seven seas. The educational level of Russian sailors was low, and many of them were illiterate, but, even so, to a man they longed for the greater glory of their native land. Even the revolutionaries among them, men who had lost faith in the tsarist regime, were without exception angry and disappointed that the dignity of the St. Andrew warship flag should be treated so lightly and meanly.

“Spanish fools.” Many of them were upset with the harbor administrators who served as checkpoint officials. Engineer Politovsky, who greatly admired the fine natural harbor at Vigo, was puzzled that the Spaniards had not made it into a thriving port. Though blessed with such a fine harbor, the locals made no effort to boost economic development and were content to eke out a living by exporting sardines, no more. Vigo was one step above a tiny fishing village, its lone industry a sardine-processing plant. The town was squalid, the people mired in poverty. “It’s because Spaniards are extraordinarily lazy,” Politovsky thought.

Eventually the fleet had to depart without ever having had shore leave. The next stopover, they all knew, would be at Tangier, on the African coast.

The ships left Vigo early in the morning and entered the open sea single file, in line-ahead formation. Skies were clear, the sea a bright blue that hurt the eyes. The men were happy. If only there had not been the prospect of war at journey’s end, they might have waved their caps in eager affirmation of life and all things on earth.

But in short order they realized that they had picked up an unwelcome tail.

The tail consisted of British cruisers that had been hiding in a nearby port. The Baltic Fleet became aware of their presence after sunset. Around ten at night, a report came in of “mysterious ships aft. Apparently four or five.” It soon became clear that these were remarkably swift warships, four in number.

In the dead of night, there was no moon or stars.

The British squadron flew over the dark sea as swiftly as if it were broad daylight. And they made provocative moves—or, rather, they mocked the Russian fleet. One moment all four ships would be bright with lanterns, the next the lights would be snuffed out, plunging the squadron into blackness. They did this over and over again. Not only that, they picked up speed, passing ahead of the Russian fleet and circling around in front. It was an acrobatic performance.

Speculation was rife. “They mean to report to the Japanese,” some said. Others figured that they intended to goad Rozhestvensky into opening fire and so set off another international incident, thereby causing the expedition further delay. Both theories were correct. Sometimes a cruiser would pull in so close that it seemed in danger of colliding, then suddenly dart off again. The dexterity of these maneuvers was phenomenal.

As Rozhestvensky observed this cheeky behavior from the conning tower of the Suvorov, he drew on his meager store of self-control to keep from boiling over in rage. The following morning, he would strike his orderly for a trifling offense, but that night, up in the conning tower, he controlled himself. He even turned to his staff with a smile. “See there—now that’s a navy!”

Rozhestvensky’s dissatisfaction was reserved for the Russian Navy, which was under his command. He sometimes said the Russian Navy was “no good,” sounding like a foreigner speaking ill of Russia. It was true that Russia did not have a single captain who could pull off clever maneuvers like those, and the training of Russian seamen left much to be desired.

Not that Rozhestvensky was lax with his crews. Far from it. He was a demon for practice and saw that every ship’s day began with the signal for maneuvers: “Prepare for action!” He was especially insistent about gunnery practice. There were a total of 250 gunners in the fleet, and all of them practiced daily until they were worn out. Rozhestvensky was determined to polish the men’s abilities in the remaining interval before they encountered the Japanese.

“The British squadron is terrific.” Admiration burned in everyone’s mind. At the same time, there was a flicker of apprehension. Would Tōgō’s fleet be on the same level? If so, the sailors realized, they might find themselves overwhelmed.

That Rozhestvensky’s fleet had left the port of Liepaja was known to Tōgō’s fleet, which was then blockading the harbor at Port Arthur. They also knew from the newspaper that the fleet had caused an international uproar by firing on British fishing vessels in the North Sea. Akiyama Saneyuki and his mates learned the news at their base behind the Changshan Islands.

“On a night crossing, it could happen,” Tōgō deadpanned, according to his aides. The moral code of Bushidō, the way of the warrior, had been in place since the Tokugawa period and lingered still among officers in their thirties and above. Tōgō was not so flippant as to mock this blunder by an enemy fleet he had yet to encounter.

Saneyuki’s response was unusual. “How many British fishing boats sank?” That was all he wanted to know. He was interested in finding out the destructive force of the Baltic Fleet. He wired headquarters in Tokyo asking for particulars on the “illusionary war” in the North Sea.

“If we were as good marksmen as the Japanese, and if Russian shells had the explosive power of Japanese shells,” then friendly fire might have sunk half the fleet, speculated Novikov-Priboy, the author of Tsushima.

As Novikov-Priboy observed, the marksmanship of Tōgō’s gunners was extremely high, perhaps superior even to that of the British Navy at the time. Tōgō believed that in a naval engagement the key to victory lay, if anywhere, in the accuracy of the big guns. The outcome of the battle depended on whether you hit or missed your targets. That’s why he insisted that gunners in every squadron kept on practicing, whether they were engaged in a blockade, out at sea, or on standby at the base off the Changshan Islands. He did something else noteworthy, choosing crack shots from the entire fleet to man the main guns in the battleship squadron. In Tōgō’s view, the main guns of the battleships exerted the greatest force in a sea battle. Accordingly, he chose aces for the teams that would launch heavy shells from the main guns. Great marksmen are born, not made, he maintained, and there was little to be gained from training someone of mediocre ability. This approach shows Tōgō’s practicality.

So Novikov-Priboy’s observation about Japanese marksmanship was accurate. Also, he was right about the explosive power of Japanese shells, which was owing to Shimose powder. He learned those two characteristics of Tōgō’s fleet only as a result of the eventual sea battle, however, and at the time of the North Sea crossing knew nothing about them.

In any case, by finding out in detail about the Dogger Bank affair, Saneyuki sought to assess the capability of the enemy fleet.

“Rozhestvensky’s voyage.” Known to later generations by this name, the epic voyage and its tribulations were both unprecedented. As in the ancient Chinese phrase “an army sent 10,000 leagues,” the fleet was traveling to distant enemy waters, embarked on a journey the like of which no fleet had ever undertaken before. By journey’s end, both men and ships were certain to be worn out.

But Tōgō’s fleet was in worse shape, already exhausted after continuous sea duty ever since the war began. The Russian general Stoessel, charged with the defense of Port Arthur, was holding Nogi at bay on land and keeping Tōgō pinned to the mouth of the harbor at sea. A man of aristocratic leanings, Stoessel was not only vain and short-tempered but also frequently constrained by the comments of his wife, Vera Alekseyevna. He may not have been the finest commander, but he had the Russian talent for defending a fortress in full measure. In all the Russo-Japanese War, no Russian commander did as much damage to the Japanese Army and Navy as he.

Tōgō’s crews were in a truly pitiable state. Even with the Baltic Fleet on its way, the siege of Port Arthur was making no headway. Protected by the sturdy fortress, the Port Arthur Squadron was alive inside the harbor. If Tōgō eased up on the blockade, the squadron was certain to come out and destroy military shipping routes in the Japan Sea and Yellow Sea.

There was even an unsubstantiated report that the Vladivostok Squadron had undergone repairs. In fact, the Vladivostok Squadron had been defeated in a sea battle with Kamimura Hikonojō off Ulsan. The prize high-speed cruisers Rossiya and Gromoboy had fled back to harbor little better than scrap heaps, never to come out again. Granted, any war vessel that stayed afloat could potentially be repaired. But while the Russians had a large ship-repair factory in Port Arthur, there was no such facility in Vladivostok. As a result, the Vladivostok Squadron led by the brilliant commander von Essen stayed put for the duration of the war. But Tōgō did not know this.

Tōgō was constantly on guard, never free from his fear that the Vladivostok Squadron might pop up at any moment. His fleet was exhausted, moreover, from its long blockade of the harbor. On hearing that the Baltic Fleet had left Liepaja, Tōgō was forced to issue this report on the condition of his warships: “Hulls and engines both extremely degraded.” Carrying out repairs needed to restore the fleet to its full fighting strength would take over two months. In other words, the Third Army needed to capture Port Arthur at least two months before the Baltic Fleet appeared in the seas around Japan.

Meanwhile, the navy was actively cooperating on land with Nogi’s Third Army. The heavy artillery unit of naval land forces went to work attacking the fortress and the town of Port Arthur (though all they did was aim by guesswork). The effect was great, but Nogi’s chief of staff Ijichi treated this contribution rather as a nuisance, lodging frequent complaints about the use of naval artillery.

The death struggle at the Port Arthur fortress went on. The grisliness of that battle was surely unsurpassed in the history of European warfare.

Around that time, a young first lieutenant in the Russian Army cut through the besieging Japanese Army as Stoessel’s envoy. A duke named Radziwill, he fled as far as the neutral ground of Yantai, where he entered the Russian consulate and succeeded in contacting his home country. The young duke horrified foreign reporters in Yantai with his description of appalling battle conditions.

“Why Japanese soldiers die in such numbers baffles me. On September 14, for instance, in the narrow space between the second and third batteries, I came on the bodies of two thousand six hundred Japanese soldiers piled high. Not even Russian military headquarters could come up with any tactical reason for the pathetic deaths of so many men.”

The soldiers were killed not by Russian gunfire so much as by the order to die meaningless deaths, an order which they had no choice but to obey. The incompetence of Nogi’s headquarters resulted in the virtual mass suicide of huge numbers of Japanese soldiers, tormenting the Russians with the stench of death. According to the duke, the unburied remains of a great many Japanese soldiers lay on a slope by one battery in the northeast sector of Port Arthur, exposed to the elements and rotting, the stink unbearable. At a battery barely fifty paces away, Russian soldiers worked in shifts because of the smell. Those on duty wore camphor-soaked handkerchiefs around the lower half of their faces and prayed for replacements to come soon.

“Japanese soldiers mostly died in front of the fortress, but occasionally some of them would make it inside, and then there would be bursts of fierce hand-to-hand combat. I personally inspected one stronghold and saw, mixed in the mounds of dead from each side, a pair of soldiers, Japanese and Russian, who had died locked together. I looked closer and saw that the Russian soldier had jabbed two fingers into the Japanese soldier’s eye sockets, and the teeth of the Japanese soldier were embedded deep in the Russian’s neck. The Japanese soldier was eyeless and the Russian soldier’s windpipe was exposed. The sight was so gruesome that no one, however battle hardened, could have seen it without shivering.”

Stoessel, a Slav, could mount a defense with amazing tenacity. One Russian lieutenant colonel, stationed at a particularly dangerous fortification at the front and unable to endure the ferocity of the Japanese attack, sent a message to Stoessel by horseback to try to persuade him to issue an order to retreat. Stoessel’s reply was the same as on other occasions. “You might not be able to defend that fortification. But you can die.”

The lieutenant colonel obeyed Stoessel’s will and died in battle, along with every man in his unit. Stoessel then sent in another unit as replacement. He was determined not to give up even one stronghold to Nogi’s forces. This was what First Lieutenant Radziwill told the foreign press. His intention was apparently not to extol Russian bravery but to tell about the war’s brutality.

In November, the war situation looked still bleaker for Nogi’s forces.

As before, Nogi’s headquarters continued to reject the naval request to make 203-Meter Hill a main focus of attack. But Tokyo Imperial Headquarters was so insistent in its desire for this to happen that, on September 19, the First Division (from Tokyo) was deployed and made a token assault with a small force, withdrawing when they realized the strength of the opposition. If they’d had any tactical sense, they would have made another try. At that point, the defense of 203-Meter Hill was weak, consisting merely of a scattering of hillside trenches.

We also know that Stoessel noticed this canker sore. Seeing that 203-Meter Hill was the weak point of Russian defense, he hurriedly moved to shore it up. The halfhearted assault launched by Nogi’s army effectively gave the Russians the idea of strengthening their defense. Of all the countless errors committed by Nogi’s headquarters, this was perhaps the worst.

In the meantime, casualties were piling up in Nogi’s army and so the urgent requests were flying out. “Send in the Seventh or Eighth Division.” Imperial Headquarters was generally opposed to such a move. “If we give them to Nogi, he’s only going to kill our crack divisions without achieving anything.” With the Eighth Division sent to Liaoyang, the Japanese Army was down to its last reserve division.

“Send us the Seventh Division.” Nogi’s headquarters kept clamoring. Imperial Headquarters was reluctant, knowing that the men would only end up filling enemy trenches. So far, the style of fighting adopted by Nogi’s headquarters had meant naked assaults with casualties numbering sixteen thousand, then five thousand. The Seventh Division would be wiped out in one go.

But with the looming threat of the Baltic Fleet’s expedition to the Far East, Imperial Headquarters needed Port Arthur taken with all possible speed. They had no choice but to send in the Seventh Division after all.

The Seventh Division was formed of soldiers from Hokkaido and had its headquarters in the city of Asahikawa, with regimental headquarters in Sapporo, Hakodate, Kushiro, and Asahikawa. This division, the last that the Japanese Army held in reserve on the mainland, joined Nogi’s setup. He planned to use the replacements to take 203-Meter Hill. Surprisingly, his headquarters was unaware that, unlike before, the hill was now heavily fortified. They had neglected to do the most basic reconnaissance. Forced by poorly informed superiors to go up against an iron wall, the Seventh Division was of all divisions the unhappiest.

The head of the Seventh Division from Hokkaido was Lieutenant General Ōsako Naotoshi, a Satsuma man. He had no formal education to speak of but was educated only as a samurai retainer of the lord of Satsuma domain. In that sense, he was no different from any army commander who had previously served as a samurai in the old domain system.

Emperor Meiji’s preference in soldiers ran to old-style warriors of the caliber of reformer Saigō Takamori, swordsman Yamaoka Tesshū, and General Nogi Maresuke. Schemers like Yamagata Aritomo were not evidently to his liking. Ōsako, a man with the aura of a Saigō or a Yamaoka, first came to the emperor’s attention when he was a colonel, head of the First Regiment in the Imperial Guard, and drew his favor.

But under the Japanese system the emperor himself, unlike the tsar, had no autocratic power. Judgment and execution of all political and military affairs was left to the cabinet and members of the Army General Staff Office (for the navy, the Navy General Staff). Such men served as “advisors to the throne” in a system where the emperor’s mere existence had much meaning in everyone’s mind. Therefore, even if Emperor Meiji favored Ōsako Naotoshi, their relationship was nothing like that between Nicholas II and his favorites. Let’s just say that the emperor found him intriguing.

Although the emperor had no autocratic power, it did happen on rare occasions that the cabinet would ask him to pass judgment on some matter. Normally, such requests were seen as highly undesirable since they saddled the emperor with responsibility and prevented the cabinet from fulfilling its role as advisor. We have seen that when Nogi asked for the Eighth Division to be sent in, Imperial Headquarters, fearing the incompetence of Nogi’s headquarters, wanted to send the division to the battle on the plains instead of to Port Arthur. Yet they could not cavalierly dismiss Nogi’s request, so in the end they asked for an imperial decision. “By order of the emperor,” they could then say to assuage Nogi’s headquarters. This was the extent of Emperor Meiji’s involvement in political and military affairs.

The emperor’s fondness for Ōsako thus bore no tinge of politics. Since Ōsako knew only the vaguest sort of horsemanship, the emperor announced his intention to teach him. And so, while serving as a regimental commander in the Imperial Guard, Ōsako received a thorough schooling in the subtle arts of horsemanship directly from the emperor.

When the emperor heard from Yamagata that the Seventh Division was on its way to Port Arthur, he murmured, “So it’s come to that!” and was silent. Once the Seventh Division went to war, Japan’s reserves would be exhausted. Japan’s own fate might be bitter, but so was that of this division. It was a foregone conclusion that everyone in it would end up filling enemy trenches at the Port Arthur fortress. The emperor’s heart was heavy.

ōsako himself, as captain of the Seventh Division, was unhappy that his outfit alone remained stuck on the Japanese mainland. Time and again, he traveled to Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo to push his request for orders to the front. He was every inch a Meiji warrior. When the orders finally came through, he made the journey again and met with Yamagata. After that, he called at the palace for a farewell audience with the emperor.

Both men were standing at attention. Ōsako reported that the division had finally been ordered to the front. Normally, the imperial audience of a division commander would then be over. But Emperor Meiji wanted a final exchange with this old man of Satsuma. Moreover, although Ōsako himself might be eager to go to the front, the emperor was concerned that the other officers and men in the division might be dreading their assignment to Port Arthur.

“How is troop morale?” the emperor inquired.

In his rich native dialect, Ōsako spoke forcefully about how keen the men were to fight. “Say we win the war, and after we do it turns out the Hokkaido division was the only one that never got in a lick—Yow! Hokkaido men could never turn their faces south to the rest of Japan ever again! The men’ve been in a right lather. But, luckily, now Your Majesty’s given the order . . .”

The emperor couldn’t help laughing. His sympathetic concern over the division being sent to certain doom was mitigated by Ōsako’s humorous turn of speech. He himself had a humorous side and was drawn to anyone with a good sense of humor. Since Ōsako rarely used dialect in formal situations, his doing so now was undoubtedly a deliberate ploy to keep the emperor from dwelling on the harsh fate awaiting him and his Seventh Division.

Okazawa Kuwashi, chief aide-de-camp to the emperor, was present at this audience and later reminisced, “Never since the start of the war did His Majesty laugh so heartily.”

ōsako had no desire to be made into a tragic figure. His younger brother fought in the war and so did his son Sanji, a first lieutenant who was killed in battle. Like General Nogi, Ōsako knew the pain of losing a son in the war, but the two men’s characters were as different as night and day. After the war, Nogi wrote a famous Chinese-style poem lamenting the many men he had sent to their deaths, with the line “In shame, how can I face their fathers?” Ōsako too wrote a similar tanka, likening his soldiers to flowers.

The flowers I took with me
have drifted away in the storm
I have nothing
to take back to those
who wait at home

“Dismiss Nogi Maresuke and his staff, and reconfigure Third Army headquarters.”

This argument had been waged forcefully in Imperial Headquarters all along, but no one broached it any more. That was because, when Yamagata Aritomo once appeared at the palace to report on battle conditions at Port Arthur, Emperor Meiji had instructed him in no uncertain terms that Nogi was not to be dismissed.

The emperor was voicing the maxim that it was wrong to change leadership in the middle of a military operation, but when Nogi heard later about this injunction he was deeply moved. That shows the kind of spirit he had. Nogi had little sense of himself as a military official of the Japanese nation, seeing himself rather as the emperor’s retainer, who was following the medieval concept of lord and vassal. This was something of a miracle. In the early days of the shogunate, a samurai identified himself by the name of his lord, for example, as “vassal of Lord Asano Takumi no Kami.” Then the word han—domain—came into widespread use toward the end of the Tokugawa period. After that, the domain came to be seen as a kind of juridical person, and that is how contemporary samurai saw it. Loyalty to a fleshand-blood lord took a back seat to loyalty to the domain.

Although Nogi Maresuke attained his majority in the Meiji period, curiously enough, his concept of the nation remained extremely vague. What stood out with crystal clarity in his mind was the figure of Emperor Meiji, and what made his devotion to the emperor so unswerving was undoubtedly the emperor’s injunction that he, Nogi, should not be dismissed.

Yamagata Aritomo was deeply fond of Nogi, a fellow man of Chōshū, and from his youth had looked out for him. At the beginning of the war, when Nogi was a farmer in the village of Nasu, it was Yamagata who summoned him to Tokyo and restored him to active military duty. Now that Nogi was carrying on such an unbelievably inept campaign in Port Arthur, Yamagata felt responsible. Yet, as head of the Chōshū military clique, he wanted more than anything to protect Nogi and, if possible, straighten out what he was doing in Port Arthur.

After the decision to commit the Seventh Division, Yamagata went so far as to wire encouragement to Nogi. However, he wanted Nogi to make 203-Meter Hill the main focus of his attack, and this Nogi refused to do.

Yamagata even appealed to the emperor on Nogi’s behalf and succeeded in getting his friend an imperial rescript of encouragement. Its message was essentially: “hurry and get the job done.” Apparently still not satisfied, Yamagata then wired Nogi a poem of his own composition, written in classical Chinese.

A hundred shells thunder, surprising heaven.
Half a year of siege, ten thousand corpses sprawl.
With a will stronger than iron
Defeat the enemy in one blow at Port Arthur.

Implicit in the poem was a warning: fail in the next general assault, and you will be held responsible.

Nogi’s headquarters behaved strangely. While carrying out a sorry campaign of obstinate bungling on a scale without parallel in history, they did not bother to send in proper reports. Although the headquarters of the Manchurian Army was his superior headquarters, with Ōyama Iwao as head, Nogi’s chief of staff submitted only shoddy, minimal reports.

All the staff officers at General Headquarters were irate. Others pointed out that a shiftless, incompetent leader could no more write a report than he could map out strategy. A report was something you could write only if you were fighting battles worth reporting. How could men whose only strategy was relentlessly killing off their troops be expected to write reports?

It was all due to Ijichi Kōsuke’s lack of competence and character, thought Kodama. But like the other staff officers, he never voiced this observation during the war. He felt sorry for Nogi. The two of them shared a common history—both were from Chōshū, and both joined the army after the Meiji Restoration to fight against Saigō Takamori’s rebel army in Kumamoto as young majors. Kodama had been a staff officer under Tani Tateki, the defending general in Saigō’s siege of Kumamoto Castle, while Nogi led the so-called “peasant soldiers” consisting of the nation’s first conscripts—and got soundly thrashed at every turn by the Satsuma forces. Kodama was well aware that Nogi had been an ineffective commander from the first. Ineffective though he might be, he was fiercely loyal, had a strong sense of responsibility, and was in many ways the image of his distant relative Yoshida Shōin, the great educator and reformer. Of all Nogi’s friends, no one knew him so well as Kodama.

Kodama knew also that Nogi was totally unqualified to lead an engagement of as great import in modern warfare as the assault on Port Arthur. Ijichi would come to his aid, Kodama had thought, but Ijichi himself was a disappointment, and Nogi seemed constitutionally incapable of taking him to task.

At this juncture, Kodama Gentarō sent a letter to Nogi in Port Arthur. “As I wrote in my last letter, we lack adequate battle reports from your army and are rather better informed about the situation from the navy’s reports.” He was advising Nogi to write more detailed reports. Of course, Nogi himself had no need to pick up a pen. What Kodama meant was “light into Ijichi and make him write in greater detail.” But this request was never fulfilled.

“What is the use?” Ijichi protested. “What will General Headquarters do to aid in our assault on Port Arthur? If they responded by sending a division, then it would be worth the trouble, but what have they ever done for us?”

Despite heavy criticism, Ijichi and Nogi’s Third Army headquarters was still located in a safety zone where no bullets flew.

In late November, the third (or fourth, depending on how you calculated it) general assault on Port Arthur would begin. Nogi’s headquarters conveyed this message to General Headquarters in Liaoyang and Tokyo’s Imperial Headquarters, creating a mood of heightened anxiety and expectation. But Nogi’s headquarters itself was almost totally lacking in confidence. Instead of changing strategy, they were going to continue carrying out the same failed plan—what Nagaoka Gaishi called “useless slaughter.” Yet they had clearly lost confidence in slaughter as a tactic of warfare.

Like idiots incapable of learning more than one thing, Nogi’s headquarters made the familiar preparations for the familiar style of assault. Normally, a campaign headquarters preparing for an attack crackles with excitement, but the staff’s enthusiasm had waned. “Chief of Staff Ijichi is downcast.” So reads a report filed by a messenger from Imperial Headquarters on the eve of the assault. This was not the face of a military strategist about to launch a major campaign. Trained in Germany, Ijichi had always had a vaguely Teutonic air, carrying himself with haughtiness, but he lacked the brains to come up with a plan on his own. When he formulated one using borrowed ideas, he tended to place unshakable faith in it. To shield the plan from outside criticism, he was impelled to become arrogant and make it into an article of faith. His being “downcast” probably means that his faith had begun to waver.

The military profession justifies not just killing enemy soldiers but even more so, killing one’s own. Remaining long in the profession gradually dulls the conscience on that point, so that leaders can easily become defective as human beings. Ijichi undoubtedly felt vague horror at the prospect of killing so many of his compatriots, proving that his mind had not been altered to that extent. Even so, like so many military strategists, he put on a bold front. “There’s nothing wrong with our approach.” That’s what he told the emissary from Imperial Headquarters, but he said it with a dejected look.

The emissary in question was Ōsawa Kaiyū, a staff officer born in Aichi Prefecture who also met with Nogi Maresuke. In his eyes, Nogi too did not carry himself like an officer about to send tens of thousands of soldiers to storm an enemy stronghold. The general had gone sleepless for three full days. His insomnia was due in part to his harried schedule, but, in fact, his nerves were stretched to breaking point by the war. To Ōsawa, Nogi did not appear confident of victory.

“I am doing all I can.” Nogi spoke from the heart, looking haggard. “I do not know what more I can do.” He must have been truly exhausted, for then he let slip something no commander should ever say. “If there were anyone else fit for the job, I would like to yield the right of command in Port Arthur.”

Listening to these statements by Nogi Maresuke, a man he did not know well, Ōsawa apparently could not summon any sympathy in response.

“We’ve got one nagging sister-in-law in Tokyo and another in Liaoyang,” complained a young staff officer in Nogi’s headquarters who accosted a liaison officer from Tokyo. “It’s hard to take.”

There was some truth to this. The chain of command was vague from the first, as Nogi’s army owed allegiance both to Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo and to General Headquarters, the headquarters of the Japanese Manchurian Army—yet neither one had power to issue a direct command. Offering opinions by way of suggestion was as much as they could do. “Why not try this?” Nogi’s headquarters took all such remarks as nagging.

It must be stressed again that the Japanese Army probably ought to have separated Nogi’s army from the Manchurian Army of Ōyama and Kodama, and attached it directly to Imperial Headquarters from the first. Ōyama and Kodama, embroiled in conducting open-air warfare on the Manchurian plains, had no time or energy to spare for a completely dissimilar campaign, that of storming a fortress. “Port Arthur is in Nogi’s hands.” That was the prevailing logic. Nogi’s headquarters was free to design and carry out any strategy it wished. Such wide authority, free of restrictions from any quarter, should have lent zest to the command. If a military genius had been operating Nogi’s headquarters, he would have taken full advantage of that freedom.

But to a mediocre leader, nothing is so disheartening as complete freedom to exercise one’s power of discretion. “We are orphaned.” That must have been how it seemed to them. In that sense, Nogi Maresuke and Ijichi Kōsuke were both orphans.

These orphans had the troops under their command replenished and also had the Seventh Division, Japan’s last remaining standby division, sent over from the mainland; the conditions were right for them to hurl this vast supply of fresh blood at the fortress. So began the third storming of Port Arthur, but beforehand Nogi suffered from a nervous disorder and was unable to sleep, and Ijichi lost his usual oily vigor.

Neither man had the least confidence of victory.

All the liaison officers from Tokyo sensed this state of mind. “Headquarters is executing a battle plan that the commanders themselves have no faith in, killing soldiers out of sheer habit.” This was the impression they all received. The expression “useless slaughter” coined by Nagaoka Gaishi conveys the general impression of the visiting “sisters-in-law.”

In the history of warfare, no battle plan is as idiotic as this third assault on Port Arthur carried out by Nogi and Ijichi. Never abandoning the idea of a frontal attack, they rested the success of the plan solely on Japanese bravery. “Charge!” Third Army headquarters merely issued this death order, not functioning as a center of planning or judgment. As for 203-Meter Hill, which the navy and the “sisters-in-law” kept yammering about, they attacked it in dribs and drabs in order to quiet the yammering—an ill-advised way to carry out an attack if there ever was one.

The third general attack on the Port Arthur fortress took place on November 26. The attack targets were Pine Tree Hill for the First Division (from Tokyo) on the right column; Twin Dragons Hill for the Ninth Division (from Kanazawa) in the central column; and the East Cockscomb Hill for the Eleventh Division (from Zentsūji) on the left column. It was to be a complete frontal attack.

Added to this, there was to be another assault carried out by a large suicide force of elite troops. Dubbed the Shirodasukitai, “White Sash Troop,” they would later become renowned as a symbol of the fighting at Port Arthur. Its members, over three thousand one hundred in all, were chosen from each division. From the first, Nogi and Ijichi planned to have Major General Nakamura Satoru lead this special unit. Believing it unethical to send only soldiers to their deaths, they wanted a general in command. Nakamura was then head of the Second Infantry Brigade.

Hailing from the Hikone domain, which came in for particularly harsh treatment in the Meiji Restoration, Nakamura entered the army school for noncommissioned officers in 1872. Three years later, he was a second lieutenant in the army, and during the First Sino-Japanese War he served as aide-de-camp to Emperor Meiji, who was extremely fond of him.

“Nakamura will command the White Sash Troop, will he?” When the sovereign heard this report, it is said that his expression turned gloomy.

Nakamura’s military record dated back to the Satsuma Rebellion, when, shortly after the Conscription Ordinance was issued, he had difficulty leading a band of garrison soldiers. Known as “peasant soldiers,” garrison soldiers of the day would scatter and flee when they encountered shock troops of the former samurai class.

“Soldiers are prone to cut and run.” This impression stuck in Nakamura’s mind. In the interim, twenty-odd years of training had left Japanese soldiers stronger than the samurai-class fighters of years past. Their mettle had been tested in the First Sino-Japanese War, although Nakamura did not take part in that campaign. His last experience of a hail of bullets came in the Satsuma Rebellion.

Before departing for the front as head of the Second Infantry Brigade, Nakamura inspected his men at the Aoyama parade ground and admonished them in ringing tones. “For the duration of this war, let the word ‘retreat’ be obliterated.” Famous in the army for his musical voice, he spoke so loudly that his words carried to every corner of the parade ground. No doubt memories of his younger days in the Satsuma Rebellion moved him to admonish the men that way.

The “no retreat” suicide squad of over three thousand men came under heavy fire at the Port Arthur fortress and suffered fifteen hundred casualties in a bloodbath.

Nothing shows the dearth of ability in Nogi’s headquarters so much as this ill-omened idea of a suicide squad. The technical military term for such a squad is an assault group. By rights, an assault group should be used for surprise attacks and exists for the tactical purpose of making a sudden move against the enemy from the rear. But Nogi’s headquarters used theirs in a frontal attack.

Nor was it merely a frontal attack: the squad was ordered straight down the middle, where the enemy’s strongest defenses were concentrated.

“Headquarters must have been deranged when it set about carrying out this plan.” This was the gist of a written comment by Satō Kiyokatsu, an officer in the commissariat. A hysteria-prone person attempting to escape distress will go into a fit of hysterics, and similarly an incompetent military commander in utmost distress will implement tactics of extreme foolishness. Hysteria is said to be common in women, but among men it is common in military personnel. Hysterical foolishness is particularly common in the military profession. This means that grown men act infantile. Overall, General Nogi’s headquarters may well have been in a state of hysterical foolishness.

The plan that Nogi’s headquarters gave to Nakamura’s White Sash Troop was to lead a bayonet charge up the main thoroughfare, capture Pine Tree Hill, the strongest fort in all Port Arthur, and then pour into the streets of town. They were dreaming.

“Nakamura will bring it off,” Nogi said confidently to Ijichi. General Nakamura Satoru was the one who had told his brigade to obliterate the word “retreat.” Though his philosophy of warfare was old-fashioned, he was known for his bravery. Nakamura was then fifty-one, and whether he had the physical stamina for a dash up the main thoroughfare was open to question, but he was chosen in order to raise morale—to show that even a general would dauntlessly throw himself into the jaws of death. Too many soldiers had been killed at Port Arthur, and so the high command needed to sacrifice one of its own. Three thousand men was the equivalent of three regiments and could have been headed by someone of the rank of colonel.

The name “White Sash” comes from the white sash each man wore from the right shoulder to the left armpit to make identification easier in the dark of night.

Nakamura did not criticize the tactics of the military headquarters but expressed thanks for his assignment. “I have gained a place to die.” Given the state of affairs at Port Arthur, he believed that a general had to die there, and he was sincerely honored to have been chosen for the purpose. His response shows what a thoroughgoing military man of the Meiji period he was.

All of the men were doomed to be slain by the efficient killing apparatus of the fortress, but even if this visionary plan had somehow come true—assuming, in other words, that all three thousand men broke through unscathed and poured into the streets of Port Arthur—what were they supposed to do then? Armed only with Japanese swords and pistols, they were bound to be subjugated in street warfare.

Nogi’s headquarters, which had come up with this fantastic plan, was the target of constant whispers at Imperial Headquarters in Tokyo and at General Headquarters in Manchuria. “No one over there has a clue about what’s really going on.” Not once since the start of the battle had staff officers leaped into the thick of the fray for reconnaissance. Not only that, despite being criticized for locating their headquarters too far back from the front, they had done nothing to remedy the situation. It was obvious that their detached location prevented them from designing strategy that took in any sense of the front.

From the first, Ōyama Iwao had never once interfered in Nogi’s conduct of the battle, but after this he had had enough and, on December 1, sent Nogi a scolding letter of admonition. “The position of your headquarters and reserve troops is too far back, preventing you from coming to the aid of your troops in the event of a counterattack.” How did he think he could fight a war that far back from the action?

Let us return to the White Sash Troop.

The doomed men began action at dawn on November 26, 1904, gathering just north of Kuropatkin’s battery north of Longyan and dressing ranks. In the evening, General Nogi came by, accompanied by his adjutant, to address the troops.

A massive increase in enemy troops is taking place on the continent, and at sea the coming of the Baltic Fleet is not far off. The safety of the nation hinges on how our besieging army fights . . . You who are about to enter the jaws of death—I look upon you with the most ardent expectations. This very day you are called upon to give your lives for your country. Would that you exert yourselves to the fullest.

The words were written out on paper. The general read them aloud, and when he had finished it was reported that “Sadness filled the camp, amid hushed silence.”

The previous day, on the morning of the twenty-fifth, the Russian general Stoessel issued orders to his whole army. “Tomorrow, on the thirteenth”—according to the Russian calendar—“Nogi is going to come at us with a general attack. There are signs in the air, so make sure you carefully patrol each battle station. If you find anything out of the ordinary, however small, report it.”

It seems as if he was gifted with divine powers of perception, but actually that was not the case. Nogi had a peculiar habit which all the Russian officers from Stoessel down were aware of. They noted that “on the twenty-sixth”—the thirteenth by the Russian calendar—“he always begins a bombardment loud enough to rattle heaven and earth, and sends out waves of shock troops.” For the Russians, this made defense easy. Every month as the twenty-sixth drew near, all they had to do was take up their posts, stockpile ammunition in their fortifications, and then, armed to the teeth, sit back and wait. It was a sure thing that Japanese troops would materialize over the ridgeline of the hills. It was as if they came in order to be killed. All the Russians needed to do was throw them in the blender with a hail of shells.

The story of the “twenty-sixth of the month” was this: the Third Army’s first incursion into Port Arthur forts was the June 26 attack on Sword Hill, followed by a July 26 attack on Anziling mountain range. The first general assault, moreover, took place around August 20, when the army suffered heavy casualties. The next attack started on September 19 and lasted several days, followed by another all-out assault on October 26, when Nogi’s forces were dealt a crushing blow. Since then, they had received reinforcements from the home country and so were likely to be planning a fresh assault. Stoessel anticipated that the next assault was sure to take place on November 26.

Why did Nogi invariably choose the same day of the month to make his move? This point mystified Stoessel and his aides. They weren’t the only ones who found it mysterious. The General Staff at Imperial Headquarters was equally puzzled. “All they’re doing is allowing the enemy time to prepare, killing soldiers needlessly. What the hell do Nogi and Ijichi mean by picking the twenty-sixth of the month every single time?” Both Yamagata Aritomo and Nagaoka Gaishi wanted to know. On the occasion of the coming third general assault, they sent a special emissary, one Lieutenant Colonel Mori Kunitake, to call at Nogi’s headquarters in Liushufang and find out. The explanation Ijichi gave was unexpected.

“There are three reasons. One is the need to prepare ammunition. Detonating fuses last a month—after that they deteriorate and are less effective. Therefore, attacks need to be spaced a month apart.” This scientifically debatable and strategically meaningless point was the first reason cited by Ijichi.

“Second, the day we attacked and broke through at Nanshan was the twenty-sixth. It’s good luck.”

And there was more.

“The third reason is that twenty-six is an even number and splits evenly in two. That means we can split the fortress.”

Beside him, Nogi gave a firm nod. This was the level of the brains behind the attack on the modern fortifications at Port Arthur. Soldiers would die.

Stoessel’s warning to his troops to “watch out for the thirteenth”—the twenty-sixth, by the Japanese calendar—was spot on that day.

According to reports from every stronghold in the fortress, from around eleven in the morning to about four in the afternoon on the twenty-fifth, Russian observers watched from afar as Nogi’s troops continuously moved rolling stock from Anziling mountain range toward Wangjia Dianzi. They judged this to be an ammunition-transport unit, whose increased movement was a harbinger of a major offensive.

“Hasn’t Nogi ever studied the part in the tactical textbook that says hide your intention to attack?” Stoessel wondered. In a similar situation, the Russian Army would go to extraordinary lengths to conceal its operations.

At noon on the twenty-fifth, Stoessel issued orders to all units to prepare for battle. In the meantime, one of Stoessel’s most valiant officers, Major General Kondratenko, received an urgent message from Captain Romanovsky, who was scouting the Pigeon Bay area. “Enemy activity in this area picking up fast.” Kondratenko responded by dispatching the Tenth Company of the marines. This is merely one example of Russian precautions. On this day, all the Russian troops in the fortress were engaged in energetic activity. Here reinforcements were sent in, there troops were transferred out.

And, on the twenty-sixth, Nogi’s offensive took place right on schedule.

Russian gunfire rent the air. An array of Japanese guns—everything from siege guns and 28-centimeter howitzers to field guns and mountain guns—returned fire, aiming at the hills of Port Arthur.

The Third Army’s advance was underway.

Around sunset, under the leadership of General Nakamura Satoru, the three thousand men in the White Sash Troop—men whom Nogi had exhorted, “The success of this battle hinges on your efforts”—began to move. They were huddled at the foot of the elevation north of Shuishiying, invisible to the Russians.

The White Sash Troop set out at six in the evening. East of the campsite was a small stream. They followed that stream until they were spotted by enemy searchlights and subjected to heavy concentrated fire. Survivors pushed forward, and at eight-forty the entire troop fixed bayonets, ready to engage in hand-to-hand combat. The immediate goal was to capture the supporting fort at Pine Tree Hill.

“Storm the streets of Port Arthur!” The three thousand men in the White Sash Troop who were given this preposterous order began to fight at eight-forty in the evening, and an hour later were crushed.

The whole idea of them invading the streets of Port Arthur was a fantasy born of Nogi’s madness and ignorance. The town was surrounded by dense fortifications, piled layer on layer like fish scales. At the very first layer, in front of a supporting fort, one half of the three thousand became casualties.

But the valor of Japanese soldiers was great, probably without parallel anywhere in the world at that time. The surviving soldiers cut through barbed-wire entanglements and infiltrated enemy territory, leaping into enemy trenches in strategically senseless heroics. Those who made it into the trenches were hit with grenades and died.

Though killed in great numbers by Russian soldiers, the Japanese invading the trenches managed to dispatch a number of the enemy. But killing a small number of Russian soldiers in trenches did not change the fact that their main goal, invading the town of Port Arthur, was a physical impossibility. Even so, Japanese soldiers continued to believe that their deaths would somehow contribute to victory and went on dying like dogs. They were fortunate in one thing only, that they died never knowing that the headquarters of their army, with their lives in its hands, was one of the most spectacularly unfit command centers in the history of war. The soldiers mostly believed that the generals’ way of thinking was right, but there were a few doubters. Some division and brigade commanders were skeptical and thought the behavior of headquarters strange.

The ablest and bravest generals in the Port Arthur offensive and defensive were Kondratenko on the Russian side and Ichinohe Hyōe (from Tsugaru) on the Japanese side, both of them major generals. Even Ichinohe was frustrated. “Why does command keep coming up with orders that make no sense, that have nothing to do with our actual situation?” Yet he said nothing, afraid to disturb morale, and silently devoted himself to leadership at the front.

Of all the Russian soldiers at Port Arthur, those under Kondratenko were much ahead of the rest in strength. When the White Sash Troop under Major General Nakamura, even after suffering a crippling blow, still managed to continue forward in part and penetrate enemy trenches, the Russians rained bombs on them, and the two sides stabbed and killed each other. Into this hellish scene, a peculiar Russian soldier suddenly appeared.

He swiftly descended the hill with seven or eight grenades strapped to his body in front, back, and on either side. All the fuses were lit. He dove into a cluster of White Sash soldiers, seeking to blow himself up and take a large number of Japanese with him. He died just as he intended to. His body was blown to bits and simultaneously the bodies of several Japanese soldiers flew sky high.

“The indolence of your headquarters is killing soldiers for no reason. I don’t know what you think you’re doing, but the only ones you’re killing are Japanese soldiers!” Kodama Gentarō would later rip into Ijichi Kōsuke partly for authorizing this suicide operation. The one he wanted to yell at was Nogi. Fearing that he might damage Nogi’s authority as the high command, he took Ijichi to task instead.

Nogi had seriously expected the troop’s assault to succeed. But, by ten that night, most of the men lay dead or wounded on the slope amid barbed-wire entanglements. Nakamura himself, gravely wounded, was replaced by Colonel Watanabe Mizuya. The casualties included sixty-six officers; in the end, command of every unit went to lower-echelon or noncommissioned officers. By one in the morning, the battlefield was littered with the wounded and dead. The few surviving Japanese soldiers were trapped, unable to engage in systematic fighting.

Having instructed his own brigade to “obliterate the word ‘retreat,’” Major General Nakamura could not very well retreat himself. But he was severely wounded in the fighting and yielded command to Colonel Watanabe, who made the decision to retreat. Watanabe finally scraped together some able-bodied soldiers and sent for new orders.

Nogi’s headquarters at Liushufang was far away, but eventually, when Nogi took in Watanabe’s report, disappointment was written large on his face. “So it didn’t work.” He felt he had run out of options. Yet something had to be done, and quickly. After dawn, when the sun lit up the slope, all the wounded men stranded there would be run through and killed by Russian bayonets.

Nogi gave the order to retreat.

Like the White Sash Troop’s surprise attack, the systematic attacks carried out by the other divisions also failed utterly. Whole battalions and companies were virtually wiped out everywhere. The 28-centimeter howitzers that Nogi’s headquarters had initially rejected, dismissing them as “unnecessary,” proved potent. Together with the siege guns, they destroyed the fort on the north slope of East Cockscomb Hill and the outer walls of the forts of Twin Dragons and Pine Tree Hills. Even so, the forts continued to function.

The Eleventh Division had taken on those ruined strongholds, sending out wave upon wave of shock troops. But in front of the batteries were fields full of landmines and tangles of barbed wire, with automatic rifles and rapid-firing guns all around. When one Japanese unit was wiped out, the next would attack, climbing over the bodies of their fallen comrades. Rarely, a few soldiers would manage to scale the breastworks, but beyond lay still more automatic rifles, and any who managed to dash through safely would only encounter still tighter defense at the vital points within. Penetrating all those layers of defense was beyond human power.

At this point, Ōyama and Kodama’s General Headquarters had moved north from Liaoyang as far as Yantai. North of them was Kuropatkin’s vast field army, but all the enemies did was glare at each other, neither side willing to launch a heroic battle.

For days, every time Kodama Gentarō opened his mouth, all that came out was “What’s the news from Port Arthur?” He could say nothing else. The safety of the entire Japanese force in Manchuria now rested in the hands of Nogi’s army in Port Arthur. Indeed, if the outlook worsened any for Nogi’s army and its attack on Port Arthur, Japan’s entire army and navy strategy would collapse, and the nation itself would be doomed. The key to the fate of Japan rested with the wits of two of the most foolish and obstinate of men.

General Nogi, mused Kodama, might well end up like General Grouchy if he wasn’t careful. At Waterloo, when Napoleon fought against British and Prussian coalition troops led by the Duke of Wellington, he had General Emmanuel de Grouchy lead a detached force in pursuit of the Prussian Army, another wing of the enemy. His intention was to have Grouchy defeat the Prussians.

Grouchy was a general of no redeeming feature beyond blind obedience to orders. What he did at that time was also in accord with his honest-to-afault personality. Not knowing where to find the Prussians that Napoleon had ordered him to deal with, he marched steadily on until he came within earshot of fierce gunfire far off in the direction of Waterloo. The battle of the main force was underway.

Grouchy should have gone straight there. His staff urged him to do so, some of them in exasperation, but Grouchy wouldn’t listen. “The emperor ordered me to find the Prussian Army.” That was all he would say, and stuck to his prearranged plan. In the meantime, Napoleon was defeated at Waterloo. If Grouchy had had the flexibility and decisiveness to adapt to changing circumstances, if he had rushed to Waterloo and attacked Wellington’s British troops from the side, Napoleon’s fate might well have been different. But fate itself abandoned Napoleon, killing off all his able generals and leaving only a figurehead like Grouchy to command a military wing of such crucial importance. Grouchy destroyed Napoleon’s power.

Nogi’s army in Port Arthur was in a sense a detached force of the Manchurian Army. Just as Grouchy not only failed to find the Prussian Army but also stubbornly defined his own strategic function, so Nogi insistently clung to his bizarre policy of frontal assault on the fortress at Port Arthur. While Grouchy failed to be of any strategic use to Napoleon, at least he managed not to get any of his own men killed. Nogi, by contrast, had for all practical purposes taken on the task of single-handedly using up soldiers in the Russo-Japanese War. In that sense, the sin of his stubborn folly may outweigh Grouchy’s.

On November 26, the date of the third assault on Port Arthur, Kodama Gentarō awoke before dawn in the headquarters in Yantai. He was too worried to sleep.

He put on his uniform, wearing the cap sideways, and stepped into the corridor. The night sentry gave a startled salute. Kodama merely grunted in reply, not bothering to return the salute. Few military men were as incapable of observing the military formalities as he. He generally had a button or two undone and sometimes even wore his shoes on the wrong feet.

The latrine was behind the headquarters building. Kodama relieved himself and had just stepped back outside when all of a sudden his surroundings grew light. The sun was coming up.

Kodama paused by the side of the latrine, pressed his small, childlike palms together, and bowed his head in worship. By rights, he was a man of little religious inclination, but concern over Manchurian strategy had led him to acquire the habit of praying to the rising sun. He needn’t have done his worshipping beside the latrine, of all places, but that’s the kind of man he was.

At first, none of his aides realized what he was doing, and only the noncommissioned officers and soldiers attached to headquarters knew; but one day Colonel Matsukawa Toshitane went into the latrine after him and witnessed the scene. He never mentioned this to Kodama, figuring that anything he said would only embarrass the general.

On the morning of the Port Arthur attack, when Kodama prayed to the rising sun for success, he was skeptical of Nogi’s chance of victory. Normally, he himself worked out a battle strategy by mulling various options until he had them narrowed down to two, but choosing between those final two was always an agonizing experience for him, and he had never yet made the choice with confidence. The nation’s survival hinged on the success or failure of the plan he selected, and, since both alternatives had solid reasoning behind them, it was like drawing lots. That was Kodama’s own expression—“drawing lots.”

You could cudgel your brains till they bled, he believed, but brainpower had its limits, and in the end it all came down to luck. He faced the rising sun and prayed—for a winning lot. It was a truly artless prayer, but in the end what else could he have prayed for?

Whether Nogi’s headquarters in Port Arthur had put any great effort into choosing their final plan was doubtful. Port Arthur strategy had been left in Nogi’s hands, with Kodama completely on the sidelines. His invocation to the rising sun that morning was purely and simply a prayer for the gods to “be with Nogi.”