Down in Shanghai, Russian agents bribed skippers to run the Japanese gauntlet and ferry supplies into the Russian forces at Port Arthur. The waters of the Yellow Sea between the Shantung coast and Manchuria were soon littered with the shattered remains of Chinese junks and their cargoes, destroyed by Japanese patrol boats.64 Fortunately, Sir Alexander Tulloch had remained on dry land, where he regaled Morrison with stirring accounts of previous campaigns stretching back to the Crimea, where he had fought against the Russians as a 16-year-old boy soldier with the Royal Scots Regiment.
While the fighting grew ever fiercer in Manchuria, there was nothing for Bill Donald and Smiler Hales to do except hang around the bars of the Ginza, learn a little Japanese – ‘Nippon banzai!’ – visit teahouses, watch sumo wrestling and write about one another. Some of the correspondents, notably Lionel Pratt, were heavy drinkers. Despite their urging, Donald drank nothing stronger than a barmaid’s blush, a glass of soda water with a teaspoonful of port wine.1
Somehow Hales discovered that Sir Claude MacDonald had vetoed his pass to the front. ‘Smiler had the British Legation working against him on account of his South African writings,’ Donald informed his Australian readers. ‘All men must be recommended by their respective legations, or else the Japanese will not recognise them. The British Legation would not recommend Smiler.’2
Hales was no longer smiling: his jowls wobbled, his eyes bulged and his jaw jutted. Arming himself with a revolver, he set off to shoot Claude MacDonald. Donald restrained him.3 After that, Donald wrote, Hales ‘wandered round Tokyo for some time, swearing great round oaths’.4 Finally, he gave up and left Japan to try his luck with the Russian forces, which he hoped to join in Manchuria via Tientsin.5
By now, the Japanese had isolated Port Arthur and in June General Maresuke Nogi, commander of the Japanese Third Army, began to tighten the noose. Nogi had captured the same objective from the Chinese in 1894 with the loss of just 16 men. After breaching the two outer defensive lines in the hills to the east of Port Arthur, he was confident of another quick victory.
Admiral Alexeyev had fled to Mukden in May and command of the Russian garrison was now in the hands of an even bigger scoundrel, the corrupt and incompetent Baron Anatoli Mikhailovich Stoessel. Despite constant interference from Stoessel, two of his subordinates, Generals Smirnov and Kondratenko, built up a formidable array of defences, consisting of forts, miles of trenches and batteries containing many guns from the immobilised Pacific Squadron. Reaching the outskirts of the township, General Nogi threw wave after wave of Japanese troops into full-frontal assaults against these well-prepared Russian positions. The Russian line buckled but it did not break.6
On 18 July the second column – including such luminaries as Richard Harding Davis, John Fox Jr, George Lynch, an Irish writer, and Melton Prior, a famous war artist whose sketches had been appearing in the Illustrated London News since the Zulu War – embarked in the Empress of China for Moji on the route to Manchuria. They were promised they would witness the fall of Port Arthur. Landing on the Liaotung Peninsula, they set off mostly on horseback for the front, with George Lynch following on a bicycle. When he punctured a tyre, the ingenious Irishman mended the inner tube using 25-cent postage stamps.
At Port Arthur, however, the Russians were hanging on grimly and casualties on both sides were running into the thousands. General Nogi called in batteries of 11-inch howitzers, which hurled huge explosive shells into the town and blasted the blockaded Russian fleet at its moorings. Some of the ships were scuttled by their own officers who then retired ashore in the hope of avoiding further risk of annihilation.
The reporters could hear the cannons’ roar and knew they were tantalisingly close to a tremendous story but the Russians were proving difficult to dislodge, so their Japanese guides diverted the newsmen away from Port Arthur and took them north where they met up with General Yasukata Oku’s Second Army. At the Battle of Liaoyang on 26 August, the correspondents were kept at least 12 kilometres from the fighting. When a deputation protested that they might as well be back in Tokyo, General Oku replied that in future the distance would be cut to six kilometres.
After seven months of frustration and obstruction, Davis, Fox, Lynch and Prior knew they were beaten. They accepted defeat at the hands of the Japanese military establishment and quit the Second Army. John Fox recalled that his spoils of war consisted of ‘post-mortem battlefields, wounded convalescents in hospitals, deserted trenches, a few graves and one Russian prisoner in a red shirt’.7
The two Americans made their way to Chefoo and then headed further south. ‘Two days later we were threading a way through a wilderness of ships of all nations of the earth into Shanghai,’ Fox wrote in his marvellous book, Following the Sun-flag: A Vain Pursuit through Manchuria.
Shanghai – that ‘Paris of the East’ – with its stone buildings and hotels and floating flags; its beautiful Bund bordered with trees and paths, its streets thronged with a medley of modern equipages, rattling cabs, rattling rickshaws, and ancient Chinese wheelbarrows each with one big wooden wheel.8
Fox and Davis departed for San Francisco on 8 September without a backward glance at the war.9 Nevertheless, the Emperor Meiji overlooked their desertion and duly awarded both men a medal: the Order of the Crown, Seventh Class.10
Bill Donald was grateful he had missed this fiasco – he had returned to Hong Kong to get married. By then, the Russians were losing the land battle and the Tsar staked everything on one final gamble. On 11 September, he dispatched 38 ships of his Baltic Fleet, including four brand new battleships which had barely completed their trials, on a voyage halfway around the world to relieve Port Arthur. Steaming at a mere seven knots per hour to keep older, slower vessels in touch, it would take several months for the fleet to reach the war zone.
On 17 September 1904 William Henry Donald married Mary Wall, a blue-eyed blonde known as ‘Polly’, in a quiet ceremony at the Wesleyan Methodist Church, Wanchai. The bride had been born to Robert and Mary Wall at Workington, Cumberland, on 14 January 1882. Five years earlier, her father had left his family in England and worked in Australia for two years before returning to collect them. Like George Donald, he had then founded his own building firm, Robert Wall & Sons of Crows Nest, which had the distinction of adding the first skyscraper – the 120-feet-high Culwulla Chambers in Castlereagh Street – to the Sydney skyline. Bride and groom both wrote ‘contractor’ next to their fathers’ names on the marriage certificate.
‘I was born in England and met Don on a visit to Australia,’ Mary wrote to a friend many years later. The newlyweds didn’t really know each other: they had conducted most of their courtship by mail and neither realised that the other possessed a fiery temper. In fact, they had little in common except a family background in the construction industry. As we shall see, they were incapable of building a happily married life together.
There was no time for a proper honeymoon. Thomas Reid had retired as editor of the China Mail and returned to ‘Blighty’ and Donald found himself responsible for getting the paper to press every afternoon. The newlyweds set up home at ‘Goodwood’, 5 Babington Path, Hong Kong. With the additional burden of his work for overseas newspapers, Bill often arrived home late in the evening. Mary was just 22 and the realisation that her husband’s career came first did not augur well for their future happiness.
On 4 January 1905 General Stoessel surrendered Port Arthur after secretly accepting a Japanese bribe (and arranging safe passage for himself back to Moscow). ‘It is not hard to die for one’s country,’ he said in his last proclamation, ‘but I must be brave enough to surrender.’11
Mindful of George Morrison’s role in initiating hostilities, the Japanese invited him to accompany General Nogi on his triumphal entry into the captured fortress. Morrison knew Port Arthur well – he had made four visits there the previous year – and he was astonished by what he found. ‘No foreign officer can
explain the reason for the capitulation,’ he wrote in a report that stripped the Russian commander of all honour and dignity. ‘All accounts praise the courage of the Russian rank and file, who were in too many cases shamefully commanded by their officers. All accounts agree that no man who ever held a responsible command less deserved the title of hero than General Stoessel.’12
The war, however, was far from over. The strategy of General Alexei Kuropatkin, commander of the Russian Army, had been to trade space for time in which to replenish his forces with thousands of reinforcements along the Trans-Siberian Railway. In March, the greatest land battle ever fought took place at Mukden when more than 600,000 troops were locked together in an horrendous 12-day struggle. Almost half the Russian force of 380,000 were either killed, wounded or captured and the rest were saved from annihilation only because Kuropatkin ordered yet another retreat.
Meanwhile, Britain had honoured her obligations under the 1902 Anglo-Japanese Alliance and closed the Suez Canal to the Baltic Fleet. The commander-in-chief, Vice-Admiral Zinovy Petrovich Rozhdestvensky, was obliged to sail around the Cape of Good Hope. After passing Madagascar, the fleet supposedly disappeared. The Royal Navy, however, had kept the Russian ships under surveillance and knew exactly where they were.13 Contrary to the laws of neutrality, the French had permitted Rozhdestvensky to shelter in Camranh Bay in French Indochina. Japan was notified that the fleet had been at anchor since 15 April and was filling its bunkers with coal and loading fresh provisions.14
As Britain was bound to prevent interference by a third party, the Foreign Office remonstrated with the French who, in the spirit of the new entente cordiale between the two countries, simply replied that nothing of the sort had occurred. ‘The growing indignation felt by the Japanese respecting the use made by the Baltic Fleet of a neutral port is fully warranted,’ the Brisbane Courier editorialised. ‘It is only an historical accident that the Russian Armada is directed against Japan instead of Australia. If the precedent of Camranh Bay be tolerated, then it will be possible for any power to use Noumea or the German and Dutch coasts of New Guinea for the invasion of Australia.’15
Having failed to witness the land battles with the Japanese Army, Bill Donald decided to report the coming sea battle from the Russian side. He set off from Hong Kong for Camranh Bay. ‘Donald did not discover the “lost” fleet, the movement of which was closely monitored as it arrived in the South China Sea,’ wrote Professor Winston G. Lewis of Macquarie University who made an exhaustive study of Donald’s life. ‘He knew exactly where to find it and, in his own words, sailed south from Hong Kong “to endeavour to secure passage with it into action, if that be its ultimate destiny”.’16
Donald and a correspondent from the French newspaper Le Matin found the Baltic Fleet at anchor in Camranh Bay on 5 May. The Australian was ‘much struck with the imposing appearance of the vessels’, but a closer inspection revealed that they included obsolete coastal ironclads and 25-year-old cruisers with antiquated armour which would be useless against the modern Japanese Navy. His admiration ‘rapidly gave way to utter scepticism as to their capability to secure victory’.17
‘We knew the officers were drunkards and the crews were untrained, undisciplined and unpatriotic men who had no shred of interest in their work and no concern as to the outcome of the battle,’ Donald wrote. Admiral Rozhdestvensky was a harsh disciplinarian, who had hanged sailors and downgraded officers for trivial offences, but he could not keep his eye on the whole fleet and on many ships ‘the utmost disorder and most incredible looseness prevailed’. Donald watched the ships at gunnery practice and noted that the gunners – many of them artillery men unused to naval ways – failed to hit their targets more than once in a dozen shots in calm waters. ‘In the meantime, the officers drank merrily from large stocks of champagne, leaving the men to their carousals on vodka and other spirits.’18
The Russians declined to take Donald on board one of their ships as a war correspondent – just as well, considering the fate that lay in store for them. Rozhdestvensky knew that Port Arthur had fallen, so he set a course that would take his fleet west of Japan through the Tsushima Strait and then north across the Sea of Japan to Vladivostok. Togo’s flagship Mikasa, a pre-dreadnought battleship of 15,000 tons, was directly in his path with the modern warships of the Imperial Fleet.
‘Togo, the inscrutable, waited and watched, anticipating that Rozhdestvensky would act just as he did,’ Donald wrote. ‘Scouts posted well down south of Moji detected the advance of the Russians early on the evening of 26th May and were able to acquaint Togo by wireless telegraphy.’19
At 10 am on the 27th the Russians were approaching the island of Tsushima when the roar of guns told Rozhdestvensky that the land batteries were aware of his presence. He veered out of range, hoping that a heavy mist hanging low over the water would hide his ships from harm.
At two o’clock the Japanese naval war ensign – the blood-red disc of the Rising Sun with 16 sunrays – was hoisted in Mikasa to wild cheers. Admiral Togo had been raised on the Royal Navy principle of ‘fight the enemy on sight’ – kenteki hissen – and as the Russian ships appeared in view he signalled his fleet with a message reminiscent of Nelson at Trafalgar: ‘on this one battle rests the fate of our nation. let every man do his utmost.’ ‘The mists had now lifted and disclosed to the Russians the terrible trap into which they had run,’ Donald wrote.
On their port they saw indistinctly in the haze the first and second detachments of the Japanese fleet, while swinging round to starboard were the third and fourth. The fleets steamed alongside one another for a short time and when off Okinashima the Russians opened fire. The first shot from the Japanese was fired at 2.13 and soon an incessant and thunderous cannonade was proceeding. The marksmanship of the Russians was inaccurate, but most of the Japanese gunners found their marks and wrought havoc on the opposing ships, smashing the iron and woodwork and converting the decks into veritable shambles.
The battleship Oslhabya had armour-plating nine inches thick at the belt, eight inches at the barbettes, five inches around the casemates and six inches near the conning tower. The first straight shot from the Japanese wrecked the conning tower and killed several men. Peppered with huge ten-inch shells, Oslhabya was soon ablaze from stem to stern and became the first armoured battleship to be sunk by gunfire alone.
‘The sight of the Oslhabya on fire no doubt disconcerted the Russians as much as it cheered the Japs for shortly afterwards the former changed their course again, this time to the west,’ Donald wrote. ‘The first Jap division steamed with all speed abreast of the enemy, pouring in severe fire, while the second division veered round to the flank, thus completely surrounding the armada. There was little hope of escape …’
The Russian fleet was almost annihilated: 21 ships out of 38 were sunk and seven captured for the loss of just three Japanese torpedo boats. Admiral Rozhdestvensky suffered a fractured skull and had the indignity of being taken prisoner after his flagship Kniaz Suvorov was sunk. Britain raised her hat to the ‘plucky little Japs’ for their success in what became known as the ‘Trafalgar of the East’.
Donald’s stirring account of the Battle of Tsushima was actually written at his desk in the China Mail office from news agency reports from Tokyo and St Petersburg. He also drew extensively on his first-hand knowledge of the Russian fleet from his visit to Camranh Bay. His articles were published under his byline – the Brisbane Courier prefaced each dispatch with this announcement: ‘The following interesting particulars of the great naval battle of Tsushima are from the pen of the special correspondent of the Sydney Daily Telegraph, Mr W. H. Donald.’20
Tsushima decided the war in Japan’s favour. It was the most popular victory of the period, not only in the East but in Britain and the United States. The American President Theodore Roosevelt, however, feared that Japan might become too powerful if Russia were completely crushed. ‘[W]e don’t want the
Japanese to come trailing their men-of-war right across our ocean,’ he told The Times foreign editor, Valentine Chirol, during a meeting in Washington in October 1904.21 The president suggested that peace talks should be held between the belligerent nations at Portsmouth, New Hampshire. Both sides agreed. The Japanese had lost 100,000 men and run up huge debts, while the Russians fervently hoped that Count Witte’s superior diplomatic skills might save them from further humiliation.
Under the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth of 5 September 1905, Russia agreed to recognise Japanese control of Korea and transferred to Japan the Kwantung Leased Territory in Manchuria, including Port Arthur and the South Manchurian Railway. Japan also retained the sparsely populated southern half of Sakhalin Island off Siberia (later discovered to be rich in oil and natural gas). Both countries agreed to restore Manchuria to Chinese sovereignty and to evacuate their forces, although Japan was permitted to retain some troops to guard her rail network.22
The Brisbane Courier described Japan’s triumph as ‘a victory of outraged humanity against wanton aggression, despotism and that cruel bigotry which regards every land as the peculiar possession of white men’. The paper also recorded the fact that the Meiji Emperor had bestowed the Order of the Rising Sun, 6th class, on W. H. Donald in recognition of his services as a war correspondent during the hostilities.23
One of the unexpected consequences of the Russo-Japanese War was that thousands of Chinese students joined the growing clamour against the Manchu and thus provided the nucleus of a pan-Chinese nationalist movement. Angrily, Young China demanded to know why a relatively small Asiatic country like Japan could defeat one of the great powers, while China, with greater resources, greater manpower and a far greater land area, was controlled by Westerners. The long-standing anti-foreigner animus suddenly exploded and it was the Americans who provided the match.
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