AFTER THE CONQUEST of the South, Kublai could turn again on Japan. He was now sixty-five, and time was snapping at his heels. But it was more than his age that drove him. He acted like a man obsessed, with the need to fulfil his grandfather’s ambitions for world conquest and the need to punish this ‘little country’ for its temerity in resisting him.
Accounts of this campaign have, until recently, been dominated by the Japanese point of view, because they were the victors and history belongs more to winners than losers. The story has been often told: how the mighty Mongol–Chinese fleet was about to crush the hapless, outmoded Japanese samurai when the Heavens themselves came to the aid of the Japanese by unleashing a typhoon that swept Kublai’s fleet to oblivion. Soon thereafter, the Japanese called the storm the Divine Wind, the kamikaze (kami also having the sense of god, spirit and superior), referring to it as proof that Japan was under the protection of Heaven. This suited the ruling elite, whose power depended in part on faith in their ability to perform the correct religious rituals. It was to evoke the idea of heavenly protection that the suicide pilots of the Second World War were called kamikazes: they were a new divine wind that would ensure protection against foreign invasion. It was a comforting idea. Yet research since 2001 has revealed the notion of the storm-as-rescuer to be a myth. After almost 800 years, it turns out that the Japanese were far more capable than they themselves believed. It was not the Divine Wind that saved them, but Mongol incompetence and Japanese fighting strength.
There was a bad smell about this operation from the beginning. Kublai was out of touch with reality. He seemed to believe that the mere decision to attack would inevitably lead to victory, as if will alone decided military matters. He made impossible demands, ignored logistical problems, and – crucially – took no account of the weather.
To guarantee success, Kublai needed a bigger fleet than before to carry more land forces; for that he needed the compliance of Korea, his unwilling vassal. But Korea had borne the brunt of the 1274 debacle. Her grain had been commandeered, her young men drafted as shipbuilders and warriors, leaving only the old and very young to till the fields. There was no harvest, and no manpower to rebuild the fleet. For five years, Kublai had to send food aid to keep Korea alive. Still it would not be enough. Ships would also have to come from the south, the former Song empire, and its reluctant inhabitants.
It would be simple, of course, if only Japan would acknowledge Kublai’s overlordship. In 1279 yet another embassy arrived in Japan, with instructions to be extremely polite, to avoid the fate of their predecessors. Unfortunately, they arrived just at the moment rumours were spreading fear across the land. A local beauty had vanished in mysterious circumstances, supposedly abducted by a band of Mongol spies who had made a base on an uninhabited rocky islet. A Japanese force had invaded to rescue her. The Mongol chief had dragged her to a cliff top and threatened to kill her, but she had cast herself into the sea and swum to shore, while all the Japanese were murdered by the Mongol spies. She alone survived to tell this dramatic tale, so the story went. True or not, the Kamakura government believed that the three-man delegation from Kublai was part of the same plot. The three were beheaded, and resolve strengthened. Foot-soldiers and cavalry massed on Kyushu. The barrier around Hakata Bay grew longer and higher. Japan braced itself for an assault that was now seen as inevitable.
And Kublai ordered that the fleet should be ready to invade in little more than a year. It would be the biggest fleet ever to set sail, and would remain the biggest for over 700 years, until exceeded by the Allied invasion of Normandy on D-Day, 6 June 1944. It would have a Korean as admiral of the fleet and a turncoat Chinese, Fan Wenhu, as commander of land forces. Their force numbered about 140,000. The plan was for two fleets, 900 ships from Korea and 3,500 from Quanzhou in Fujian, to link up at the island of Iki, 30 kilometres off the Japanese coast, and then invade the mainland together.
That was the plan. It was highly optimistic: 4,400 ships is a vast fleet, especially if they were warships, as accounts usually suggest. In fact, a little long division shows that this invasion was very unlike the Spanish Armada, which consisted of 130 massive warships carrying 27,000 men, about 200 per ship. Kublai’s fleet was more comparable to the D-Day force: some 5,000 vessels, 156,000 men, 31 per vessel, most of which were landing craft. So except for a few massive warships, mainly from Korea, what we are dealing with here is a fleet of small ships. Portsmouth to Normandy is a mere 170 kilometres, a six-hour crossing by engine-driven ships. Kublai would be relying on wind power and oars to cover for the 900-strong Korean fleet 200 kilometres and for the 3,500 much smaller vessels from the south a forbidding 1,400 kilometres. Even with a good wind in the right direction, it would take them six days to reach the rendezvous.
Obviously, Kublai and his commanders aimed to get the conquest over before the typhoon season started in August. But any experienced sailor would have known that it was crazy to rely on a tight schedule. Kublai, the supreme commander, knew a lot about warfare in large, open spaces on land, but he had never been to sea, let alone seen what a typhoon could do. Blinded by desperation and isolated by power, he was taking a fearful risk, and there was no one to tell him the truth.
Things went wrong from the start. The Korean fleet reached Iki, as planned, around the end of May, and waited, and waited. The southern fleet in Quanzhou could not even leave on time. A commander fell ill and had to be replaced. Food rotted in the heat. Epidemics spread. After departure, contrary winds drove many ships into ports along the coast.
Eventually, on 10 June, the commander of the Korean fleet occupied Iki anyway, then, after waiting another two weeks, crossed the small gap to an island in the middle of the bay.
Meanwhile, the southern fleet, now a month behind schedule, went straight for the mainland, anchoring off the low-lying little island of Takashima in Imari Bay, 50 kilometres south of Hakata, intending to march north to meet the others on land.
But the assault never gained momentum. Both fleets found it hard to make landings. Every likely site for 20 kilometres round the bay of Hakata was blocked by the new wall. The Japanese also took the fight out from the shore, rowing nimble little skiffs out at night to cut cables, sneak aboard, cut throats and start fires. True, from the larger ships siege bows acted like artillery, firing massive arrows that could splinter a Japanese dinghy. But the traction trebuchets which might have been effective inshore against land forces were useless when trying to hit moving targets from moving decks. Kublai’s generals bickered in three languages and most of their troops – the Chinese and Koreans – had no heart to fight for their new Mongol masters. The Japanese, with a unified command, years of preparation and on home territory, had well-fortified positions from which to stave off assaults and mount counterattacks.
From the Mongol point of view, the Japanese were everywhere, in huge numbers, galloping back and forth wherever a landing was threatened. One Yuan source later claimed there were 102,000 of them. But Mongol and Chinese officials were recording a catastrophic defeat and had every reason to exaggerate the strength of the opposition. Current estimates suggest a force in the order of 20,000 – enough to hold back the Mongols, Chinese and Koreans, whose huge superiority in numbers was negated by the difficulty of mounting a joint sea-and-land operation so far from home and by being hopelessly scattered. For almost two months, 23 June to 14 August, the two sides skirmished, with no conclusion.
On 15 August, nature intervened. The first typhoon of the season approached, earlier than usual. There’s no telling just how ferocious this particular one was. To sailors in small boats, it wouldn’t have made much difference.
The warships would have been built for storms, but not the 3,500 twenty- or thirty-man landing craft that came from the south. The Korean sailors knew what was coming. To avoid their being dashed on the rocks, their admiral ordered his fleet out to sea. Those who could boarded in order not to be stranded ashore. Many were still clambering aboard or struggling through the shallows when the storm struck. No one recorded the details – the waves, the shredded sails, the broken oars, the smashed ships, the armoured men tossed to their deaths – but some 15,000 of the northern force and 50,000 of the southerners died at sea, while hundreds of others perished at Japanese hands, or were overwhelmed in the small boats that had remained near the rocky shore.
It was a catastrophe never matched in scale on a single day at sea before or since, and never on land either until the atom bomb destroyed Hiroshima, killing 75,000 at a single blow, in 1945.
The flagship, bearing the admiral, Fan Wenhu, and a general, Chang Xi, was wrecked on one of the many offshore islands, Taka. The two mustered other survivors, a couple of thousand strong, who raided locals for food and repaired one of the wrecks, in which the admiral limped home. He lived to fight another day, though he was reduced in rank. The other survivors were mopped up by Japanese. Three were allowed to return, to tell Kublai of the fate of his great armada and its all-conquering army. As for the rest, thousands were killed on the beaches, thousands drowned, thousands were enslaved, while the ships turned to driftwood or vanished into the belly of the ocean. A Korean account of the scene on one rocky foreshore gives a sense of the disaster: ‘The bodies of men and broken timbers of the vessels were heaped together in a solid mass so that a person could walk across from one point to another.’fn1
No wonder the Japanese soon saw it as an intervention by the gods even greater than that in 1274, and the idea of divine protection was entrenched from then on. Both court and military authorities prayed assiduously to keep foreigners at bay. Temples and shrines flourished. Not that prayer was the only defence, for the wall was maintained and manned constantly for the next thirty years, as a result of which some of it has lasted pretty well to the present day. The idea of divine intervention became rooted in Japanese culture. Few questioned the conclusion: that Japan had been saved by a divinely ordained typhoon.
Yet there is growing evidence that this was not so, that the real salvation was down to the Japanese themselves. It is there in Suenaga’s story, as recorded in the Invasion Scrolls, for he fought on both occasions. He talks his way on to a small boat to carry the fight to the enemy. He boards a Mongol ship and takes two heads. He’s brave, eager to take a risk, but well in control of himself. He’s one among many. There’s a terrific sense of common purpose. And it works. Amidst the usual chaos of war, all these uncoordinated actions by individuals are enough to hold back the enemy and keep them out in the bay. Crucially, there is no mention of the typhoon at all. Success is all down to the Japanese. Suenaga shows respect to the gods with prayers, but there is no hint in the account or the pictures that Heaven actually intervenes during or after the action. As Thomas Conlan puts it in his fine study of the invasion, ‘The warriors of Japan were capable of fighting the Mongols to a standstill.’ Suenaga and his fellow-fighters were, in the words of Conlan’s title, ‘In little need of divine intervention’.
Further support for this argument comes from marine archaeologists. Their inspiration was a remarkable man named Torao Mozai, who is worth a brief diversion. He was named Torao (meaning ‘male tiger’) after the day on which he was born in 1914. He joined the navy, but contracted TB in 1939, which probably saved his life, because he spent the war convalescing. Later he got a doctorate in engineering and taught at Tokyo University until 1979. After his retirement at the age of sixty-four, ‘Tiger’ Mozai started a new career researching Kublai’s lost fleet. In Hakata Bay, fishermen had found a few stone anchor-stocks, but these might have come from one of any number of uncounted wrecks. In 1980, he decided to focus on Takashima, the pretty, pine-covered island where the southern fleet had anchored. Mozai was interested in the bay. He adapted a sonar probe used for finding fish, learned to dive (at sixty-five!), built up a small team of divers and began to find interesting objects on the seabed: spearheads, nails, pots, but no ‘smoking gun’ proving that they came from the Mongol fleet. Then, in 1981, a farmer called Kuniichi Mukae brought him the proof. Seven years before, Mukae had been digging for clams when his spade struck something hard – a little square of solid bronze with writing engraved on it in the script devised by Kublai’s Tibetan mentor, Phags-pa. An archaeologist, Takashi Okazaki of Kyushu University, told Mozai what it said: ‘Commander of 1,000’. It was the official seal of one of Kublai’s senior officers.
Inspired, Mozai established a research institute, the Kyushu and Okinawa Society for Underwater Archaeology, and continued work. From layers of mud and sand, he and his team dug up swords, spearheads, stone hand-mills for grinding rice, more anchor-stocks, and round explosive catapult balls, proof that the Mongols had catapults on board, indirect proof that Suenaga and his friends had indeed been bombarded with thunder-crash bombs in 1274. In 1984, the ageing Mozai handed over to one of Japan’s very few marine archaeologists, Kenzo Hayashida, who in 1994 discovered three massive wood-and-stone anchors in one of the island’s bays. Carbon-dating showed the trees from which the anchors were made had been cut in 1224, plus or minus 90 years, which nicely covered the time when the fleet was built and sailed.
Other finds led his team out 150 metres into 15 metres of water, where, in October 2001, feeling their way into a metre of sea-floor gloop, they found 168 objects – bits of pottery, oven bricks, a bronze mirror, belt-fittings and at last, in July 2002, the remains of a large vessel, a scattering of ship’s timbers, all swirled together as if by a blender. The pots were Chinese, and they came from the long-established kilns at Yixing in Jiangsu – enough to convince Hayashida that these were the remnants of Kublai’s southern force.
Work continues, but – as he explained to me when he showed me round his laboratory in 2005 – some conclusions are clear. The ship was about 70 metres long, dwarfing anything else in the world at the time. European sailing ships would not approach anything of this size until the nineteenth century. Only as the age of steam approached did the last Western sailing ships exceed Chinese and Korean men-o’-war.fn2
But size is not everything. What really matters in ocean-going vessels is construction. And here, it seems, Kublai’s naval architects were so rushed that they cut corners. Randall Sasaki, of Texas A&M University, College Station, who has made a study of the 500 or so timber fragments, was surprised to see that the nail holes were very close together, many of them grouped as if the builders were following an old design with old materials. ‘This suggests the timbers were recycled,’ he says. ‘Also, some of the timbers were of poor quality.’
There’s more, from Hayashida: ‘So far, we have found no evidence of sea-going, V-shaped keels.’
These two pieces of evidence, combined with the catastrophic loss of even large vessels that should have been able to ride out a typhoon, suggest a startling but logical conclusion: in response to Kublai’s demands for mass building at high speed, his naval craftsmen improvised. They took any ships available, seaworthy or not. The good ones they put into service, the poor ones they refashioned with the same material. Except for the new ones built by the Koreans – none of which has yet been found at Takashima – the vast proportion of Kublai’s fleet were keel-less river boats, utterly unsuited to the high seas. Kublai’s ambitions led inexorably to a massive failure of quality control. Overseers may have said that orders had been fulfilled, that the boats were all ready. No one told Kublai that if things got rough, these boats would be death-traps. With his insane ambitions and his lack of naval knowledge, he had in effect scuppered his own fleet before it set out.
fn1 From Delgado, Khubilai Khan’s Lost Fleet (see Bibliography).
fn2 Kublai’s ships were dwarfed by the 145-metre leviathans built by the Ming emperor Zhu Di to sail the world in the early fifteenth century.