Admiral Togo

by Jonathan Clements

  With Makarov gone, the notorious Viceroy Alexeiev assumed control of the Russian fleet. Alexeiev reinstituted a passive, waiting strategy; although since Tōgō was unaware of this, he maintained a constant, 24-hour series of patrols, happy to keep the Russians bottled up in Port Arthur for as long as the Japanese land forces were advancing. Alexeiev, sensing what was to come, cleared out of Port Arthur in early May before his escape route could be cut off, leaving the fleet under the charge of Rear Admiral Wilgelm Vitgeft. Although he had enjoyed a marine career of sorts in his younger days, Vitgeft was in the Far East as Alexeiev’s chief of staff, not as a naval commander. But with Port Arthur about to be cut off, Vitgeft was in the wrong place at the right time, the only available officer with enough experience. Vitgeft, too, favoured Alexeiev’s policy of sitting tight. In a perfect world, the Russian fleet ought to be able to make a run for it, smashing through Tōgō’s blockade, cutting a chaotic swathe through the Straits of Tsushima, and seeking sanctuary in Vladivostok. But for now, Vitgeft preferred to hide in Port Arthur and pray for relief via the Trans-Siberian Railway. Tōgō’s luck could not hold out forever.

  11

  The Battle of the Yellow Sea

  Since the outbreak of hostilities, Tōgō had led a charmed life. The only Japanese vessels sunk thus far during the fighting over Port Arthur had been old hulks scuttled at his orders, loaded with stones and cement, as blockships. This all changed in mid-May, when Alexeiev appeared to embark on a new strategy designed to test the rules of war.

  International law had been a pet subject of Tōgō’s ever since his days as a bedridden invalid with a stack of legal books. His knowledge had been put to the test over the sinking of the Kowshing and in subsequent courts martial on which he served. He had advised his men to maintain a keen knowledge of maritime law to avoid bad decisions in situations where the fates of nations depended upon it. He had observed the behaviour of other powers in the execution of war, most particularly those of the French in their dastardly attack on the Chinese at Fuzhou. He had, in a sense, fired the first shots of both the Sino-Japanese and Russo-Japanese wars, both of which were the subject of some debate over their declaration and pursuit. It was, then, perhaps with an element of poetic justice that Alexeiev played Tōgō at his own game.

  At first, the news was chalked up to misfortune. One of the Japanese torpedo boats struck a mine and sank on 12 May. The next day, the gunboat Miyako also struck a mine. Soon afterwards, the Kasuga rammed the Yoshino in the fog, causing Tōgō’s old flagship from the Taiwan campaign to capsize and sink in mere minutes with the loss of 319 lives. Once the fastest ship afloat, the Yoshino came to an embarrassing end, rammed by one of her own comrades.

  After so many weeks without a single ship lost, Tōgō began to suspect that the Russians were making their own luck. According to the rules of engagement set during the Hague Convention of 1899, floating mines could only be laid within the boundaries of territorial waters. This boundary, at the time, was defined as being within the range of coastal batteries – a directive to which the Russians had so far been adhering. However, as Tōgō had already demonstrated with his intermittent naval bombardment of the harbour, the modern range of heavy guns was substantially greater than that assumed in 1899. Tōgō had, perhaps a little too trustingly, assumed that the Russians would continue to adhere to the Hague Conventions, perhaps because the 1899 Hague Conference had been convened by Tsar Nicholas II himself.

  Instead, Vitgeft had sent minelayers beyond the officially recognised boundaries of his own territorial waters, using the cover of more mists to lay mines right in the courses patrolled by Tōgō’s own ships. On 14 May, Vitgeft’s deliberate bending of the rules paid off, when a mine floated into the stern of the majestic battleship Hatsuse at 10:50 a.m., the explosion flooding her engine compartment and disabling her port propellers. Moments later, a second mine blew a hole in the Yashima.

  The crews of the damaged ships waited meekly for their colleagues to tow them out of harm’s way. The Hatsuse had come off the worse; her stern was already underwater when she struck a second mine, which touched off her magazine and blew her apart. Another ship was able to get a line to the Yashima, but the attempt to tow her to safety was soon revised. She was filling up with water far too quickly to reach a safe harbour; and as time passed, it became obvious that there was not even enough time to beach her in shallow waters. As more water rushed in, she became all the harder to tow, leading her captain to sound the order to abandon ship that afternoon. The last survivors made it to the lifeboats mere moments before the Yashima sank beneath the waves. As if this were not bad enough, the depleted flotilla suffered another casualty on its way home, as the Tatsuta ran aground and damaged her hull.

  ‘This is a most unlucky day for the Navy,’ Tōgō wrote curtly in his report. He listed the catalogue of calamities in his report to the Admiralty, and added: ‘I am very sorry to report this to you, but I assure you we are doing our best to ward off future disasters.’1

  Two days later, there was another collision in the fog, costing Tōgō a support vessel. The day after that, the destroyer Akatsuki struck a mine close to Port Arthur and sank with the loss of twenty-three lives. It all amounted to the worst possible week.

  Not all the news was relayed back home. The loss of the Yashima was hushed up until the end of the war. Nevertheless, the loss of eight ships in less than a week was a resounding blow to Japanese confidence at home. Letters of support and condolence poured in to the Admiralty in Tokyo, including one in the spidery handwriting of a young schoolgirl. It read simply: ‘Mister Tōgō, please take great care of yourself.’2

  For the previous month, Tōgō had been aware of the next stage in the Japanese offensive. He had been instructed to cooperate closely with the Japanese land forces, and was to make ships available to ferry them across the Yalu and to survey suitable beachheads on the Liaodong Peninsula itself. In the meantime, a feint would be made against Vladivostok by a small naval squadron, in order to make the Russians think that the Japanese intended to approach the Trans-Siberian Railway from its eastern end, not from its southern terminus at Port Arthur. In fact, the plan was now and had always been to seize the southern Manchurian railway at Port Arthur and head north. Despite Tōgō’s heavy losses in mid-May, he was still successfully keeping the Russian fleet out of play while maintaining Japanese naval strength. The Japanese war machine would capitalise on that by advancing down the Liaodong Peninsula and placing Port Arthur under siege.

  General Nogi, commander of the forces intended for Port Arthur, landed at Dalian on the Liaodong Peninsula on 26 May. He had been there before during the Sino-Japanese war ten years earlier, and knew what to expect. Japanese troops advanced slowly southwards, closing in on Port Arthur, but not with the speed that one might have hoped. The Russians had strung the area with a fiendish new invention – barbed wire – which hampered Japanese charges and gave the first intimation of how war would be conducted in the early 20th century. Barbed wire had been employed against cattle for several decades, but it was at Port Arthur that it was first recorded in a military application.3 Moreover, several howitzers intended for the Japanese land attack had failed to arrive, sunk along with three transport ships in the Strait of Tsushima in June by the all-but-forgotten group of Russian ships that had been hiding in Vladivostok. This timely reminder forced Tōgō to send a few more ships to patrol the Strait, and further diminished his own naval presence.

  Viceroy Alexeiev was now at Ying Kou, a coastal town at the north-east end of Liaodong. Ying Kou was much removed from the fretful conditions of Port Arthur, blessed with an easy escape route north along the railway to Mukden and Harbin, it was still connected to the Russian homeland. Some thirty miles inland along the Liao river, it had been a treaty port since 1858, when it was seized by the British, who soon tired of its unnavigable waters and moved their interests downriver to the sea port of Niuzhuang. Regardless, Ying Kou was a place for Viceroy Alexeiev to live the high life
– it is perhaps no coincidence that Ying Kou was the epicentre of the Far East’s brothel industry, where young Russian ladies offered paid companionship and a home away from home for lonely officers.4

  But with news of the Japanese advancing ever closer to Port Arthur, Alexeiev graciously took a break from his champagne and caviar to send a stern message to Vitgeft. It was, he thought, time that the Russians took the fight to the Japanese. Despite such orders from the armchair admiral, Vitgeft was reaching that conclusion himself – it was only on 20 June that he received confirmation of the losses suffered by Tōgō in mid-May. On 23 June, Vitgeft left Port Arthur. His minesweepers came first, dropping buoys to mark a clear path for the full complement of the Russian fleet. Watching nearby, Rear Admiral Dewa immediately sent a wireless signal to Tōgō at 8:30 a.m., giving Tōgō sufficient time to bring up his entire fleet ready for action by 11 a.m.

  It was a false alarm. It was already late in the day by the time the two fleets drew near to each other. Vitgeft was spooked by Tōgō’s speedy maneouvres and realised that he was about to be surrounded by Japanese ships. As the sun began to set, Vitgeft turned and ran back towards Port Arthur. Instead of the ultimate showdown between Russia and Japan, the day turned into a scattered series of skirmishes. Tōgō’s large ships held back, while torpedo boats chased the Russians back to their shelter.

  At 9:30 p.m., Vitgeft reached Port Arthur to face a frantic series of twists and turns as he attempted to re-negotiate his own minefield. Tired and harassed, he gave up and decided to drop anchor outside the harbour an hour later. Japanese torpedo boats tried to take advantage of the easy targets, but were themselves thwarted by the bright moonlight. The day ended with only one casualty – the battleship Sevastopol, which struck a mine, quite possibly one of the Russian fleet’s own. However, the damage was not fatal, and the Sevastopol was able to make it back.

  The Japanese fleet remained watchful, fully expecting the Russians to try another breakout. On land, the army’s advance put it within range of the Port Arthur fortifications, intensifying the pressure on the harbour, which was now truly under siege from both land and sea. Among the Japanese, the younger officers began competing in ways to harass the Russians, with the winning entry surely that of a Sub-Lieutenant Yokō, who requisitioned one of the torpedoes from the Fuji and three volunteers. The men then swam with their torpedo, unaided, for three kilometres towards Port Arthur through the summer seas, hoping to blow up a Russian patrol boat at anchor, quite literally by hand. Yokō’s mission was a failure, but a great boon to Japanese morale.

  So too was the arrival of the Manshū, a liner bearing many of the journalists (foreign and Japanese) who had been obliged to kick their heels among the Tokyo Press Corps. For many weeks, they had been frustrated in their attempts to gain hard facts about the campaign and had soon tired of attempts by the Japanese to keep them occupied – including, in one patronising task, an attempt to get them all to contribute to a book of their best war stories. Now, at last, they were shepherded in sight of the Japanese fleet, whose off-shore location had been kept a carefully guarded secret.5

  It was only as the Manshū drew near the Elliott Islands off the Shandong coast that the captain informed the passengers that they were approaching Admiral Tōgō’s secret redoubt.

  There was considerable excitement on board, especially among the correspondents. We were now nearing ‘A Certain Place’ – the mysterious naval base whence all those sharp and incisive attacks on Port Arthur by the Japanese came from. Soon, the greyness passed away, and bright patches of blue sky gradually lit up the islands; but there was no sign as yet of any naval life in these waters, not even a scouting torpedo boat … . [A] wide bay suddenly opened out, a dense cloud of smoke hanging over it, and in the centre, near a lofty grey rock, with a crown of emerald grass on its summit, the victorious fleet lay at anchor. The sun was setting behind this rock, whose shape was as sheer as that of Gibraltar, turning everything into tones of russet and molten gold; the black pall of smoke above looked like a curtain about to descend and shut out the picture.6

  Some forty Japanese ships were clustered in the natural harbour, all ready for immediate action – their banked fires the cause of the smoke overhead. The foreign correspondents squinted eagerly at the ships’ name as the Manshū steered between them, reading the names on the drab, slate-grey hulls of ships made famous by Tōgō’s earlier actions. The Elliott Island group had been secretly converted into an impregnable fortress of the sea, ‘small islands threaded together by ten miles of booms, composed of steel hawsers and lumber, to avoid a torpedo rush by the enemy. Perfectly snug and comfortable, the Tōgō fleet had been there since the first attack on Port Arthur, and the Russians had not been able to locate them or dared attempt a raid.’7

  At last the foreign correspondents understood the nature of Tōgō’s prolonged siege of Port Arthur. Each time the Russian fleet prepared for an exit, the sight of their banking fires was relayed to a wireless post outside the harbour. The message then leapt in a matter of minutes from staging post to staging post along the coast of Shandong, allowing the fleet in the Elliott Islands to immediately deploy. From the first sign of a Russian move to the arrival of the Japanese fleet to curtail it, this speedy system allowed a time frame of barely four hours. By this method, Tōgō could almost magically appear to shoo the Russians back into Port Arthur at every breakout attempt.

  Ushered aboard the Mikasa itself, the journalists patronisingly pronounced its condition as rivalling that of a British ship, and that they had ‘never seen a deck more trim’. Tōgō himself was carefully ignoring them as he watched his men go about their duties, his hands on his hips. Nearby, several of his officers imitated their commander’s characteristic gesture, as if by copying his stance they might inherit his talents.8

  The journalists had arrived from a Japan that was crazily enthusiastic for victory against Russia; and their enthusiasm was a reflection of the feverish excitement in the Japanese press and among the Japanese public. The foreign journalists were no less awestruck – delighted at last to be permitted somewhere near the action, and only mildly resentful that they had been kept away from it until, it seems, the Japanese believed that they were assured of victory. Japan’s fight against Russia was the ultimate underdog story, but Tōgō in the flesh would prove to be a disappointment. If the foreign journalists were expecting a towering, flamboyant naval figure, perhaps with a piratical eyepatch or a stirring line in rhetoric, they were to be disappointed in the sight of Tōgō with his regulation haircut and his crumpled uniform.

  The myth of Tōgō, British-trained, fluent in English, unsurpassed in naval skill, known to his men as ‘The Devil’, was arguably far stronger and more malleable when he was out of sight. The truth of Tōgō, preoccupied, tired, reticent, resolutely Japanese-speaking, must have been a disappointment. He was not, in 1904 or at any other point in his career, the kind of man who enjoyed a PR event or a press call. In particular, in June 1904, he was a man responsible for the safety of thousands of subordinates, at a secret anchorage in hostile territory, facing a powerful foe in a state of war. Tōgō had other things on his mind, and refused to trot out his English as a party-piece to entertain journalists. He was, as his teacher had noted so many years before aboard the Worcester, a plodder: resolute, unstinting, anonymous, but nothing like the glittering celebrity that the foreign journalists had dreamed about in their space-filling speculations from the Tokyo press club.

  And so began another cycle of the Tōgō myth, as the journalists began to clutch at straws. His every move and every utterance was spun into new columns on samurai spirituality, or speculations on the oriental mind. Tōgō only had to sit in his cabin and smoke a pipe, or stare out to sea in a state of quiet contemplation, for his eager hagiographers to fill in the gaps with ruminations on his unassuming genius. As far as the press were concerned, Tōgō was already the hero of the Russo-Japanese war; and if the man had failed to live up to the growing myth, the reporters
of the foreign press were already in too far over their heads to say otherwise.

  The war correspondent and shipyard emissary H C Seppings Wright, who wrote an account of his time with the Japanese fleet, described the Tōgō of the summer 1904 as a gentleman in his prime:

  He is a short, well-built man with rather a slight stoop, and just on the shady side of fifty. We all turned to look at the man whose name was on the lips of everyone in the world. His is a kindly face, but it was marked with lines of care, the result of the anxious watching and thought of the last six months. Although it might be the face of an ordinary, studious man, it indubitably impresses one. The eyes are brilliant and black, like those of all Japanese, and a slight pucker at the corner suggests humour. A small drooping nose shades a pursed up mouth with the under lip slightly protruding. He has a large head, which is a good shape and shows strongly defined bumps, and the hair is thin and worn very short. A slight beard fringes the face and it is whitening on the chin, and the moustache is thin and black. Like most great men, he can keep his own counsel. It is said that he can sit for weeks by himself without any companionship except his pipe, for like Bismarck, he is an inveterate smoker.9

  On 26 June, the army had seized the heights of Wujiazi hill close to Port Arthur. Tōgō landed a naval brigade to help the soldiers, and the men had completed a gun battery by 7 July. The first the Russians knew of it was when a shell landed in the old quarter of Port Arthur and started a fire. A similar artillery-based conflagration broke out the following day on the slopes of White Jade mountain. On 9 July, the gunners on Wujiazi scored a powerful propaganda victory by damaging the battleships Tsetsarevich and Retvisan at anchor in Port Arthur’s harbour.