Admiral Togo

by Jonathan Clements

  The pressure was on Vitgeft, not only from the new bombardment, but from Viceroy Alexeiev, who had sent him a new, strongly-worded message that arrived on a Chinese boat from Zhifu, ordering him to proceed with all haste to Vladivostok. Vitgeft’s own captains pressed him with similar urgency – it had been bad enough for them in a state of siege, but they now felt like sitting ducks and would rather take their chances on the open water. It was all or nothing – in a state of war, the Pacific Fleet would find no fuel at any nearby ports. It was Vladivostok or bust.

  Vitgeft made his move on 10 August. Thirty-two warships and an equal number of torpedo boats raised steam in Port Arthur harbour, creating a massive belch of black smoke behind the mountains. The news was telegraphed immediately to Tōgō from the watching Japanese scout ships, and the Japanese swung into action.

  Presumably hoping to keep observers guessing for as long as possible, Vitgeft waited until he was out at sea before hoisting his signal. Although it is a simple statement of fact, for Vitgeft it carried a note of petulance, that he was acting contrary to his wishes as the local commander. ‘The Tsar,’ read his flags, ‘has ordered our squadron to sail to Vladivostok.’10

  Tōgō’s fleet had been out to the south-east when Vitgeft’s fleet was sighted. Although Vitgeft had left one ship behind, the clues were all there that he was not planning on returning to port. Specifically, Vitgeft’s fleet included a hospital ship, the Red Cross plainly visible on her side – he was taking his wounded with him. Vitgeft was forced to limp along at the speed of his slowest ships; two of his battleships lacked engine parts, and although replacements were available in the Far East, they were far to the south in Shanghai and hence of no use.

  Tōgō sighted the ships several miles away at half-past noon, and did nothing. If this was to be Vitgeft’s showdown, Tōgō was determined to let his adversary get far enough out to sea that there was no longer any hope of running back for Port Arthur. Tōgō ran parallel to the Russian ships, keeping them tantalisingly out of range. When Vitgeft changed course by eight degrees to avoid phantom mines, so did Tōgō. But as the fleets shadowed each other through the sea, the Russians suddenly began to gain the advantage.

  It was here that Tōgō took the decision that distinguished his naval genius from that of lesser commanders. Realising that the Russians were gaining, a lesser commander might have decided to swing his fleet right through the middle of the Russian lines. Anything in the Russian rear would probably be destroyed, although the foremost ships would probably get away. But Tōgō’s mission was to stop the flight to Vladivostok at any cost, not merely to reduce its numbers. Instead, he gave the surprising order to break off the pursuit, setting a new course away from the Russians. But Tōgō was not truly breaking off. Instead, he was bringing his fleet up to full speed and heading away from the Russians in an ellipse designed to bring him back into their sights ahead of the foremost ships. The Russians would have to continue on a straight course, east-south-east. The Japanese intended to fade from view and then swing back in front of them.

  The Russians kept on course for two hours, with Tōgō and his First Division matching them in a parallel course, watching the smoke on the horizon as the ships themselves slipped from view. As the minutes ticked past, Tōgō’s lead ship gradually pulled ahead of Vitgeft’s Tsetsarevich, and Tōgō allowed his helmsman to edge his course steadily nearer to that of the Russians’ presumed location, ready to cross the ‘T’ and bottle the Russians up in the Yellow Sea between the Shandong Peninsula and a long wall of Japanese battleships stretching back to the horizon.

  The drama, the tension, the heroism was not found above decks. There, the two fleets merely powered on their courses, gunners waiting at their posts, while officers peered through binoculars at their distant enemy. An occasional gunshot functioned as a rangefinder and was found wanting – neither fleet was capable of hitting the other at that distance. Only the growing noise of the engines and the tumultuous crashing of the waters gave any clue to the unknown struggle elsewhere. Below decks, in the engine rooms, the battle raged for seventy-five gruelling minutes, as stokers on both sides frantically piled on coal to keep the ships at full speed. They toiled in unbearable heat before raging red furnaces, feeding the warships’ insatiable hunger for fuel. Speed alone would determine the battle. If Vitgeft pulled ahead, his fleet would reach open sea before Tōgō could catch up. If Tōgō pulled ahead, he would block Vitgeft’s path entirely.

  At 5:15 p.m., Tōgō’s ellipse drew near and ahead of the Russian course. The sun was dropping low in the sky, and still the longawaited Battle of the Yellow Sea had not taken place. At 5:45 p.m., after a long day of feverish pursuit, Tōgō gave the order to swing in towards the Russians. The Japanese fleet appeared en masse on the horizon, dispiritingly far ahead of the Russians. Even as Vitgeft registered that he had lost his advantage, the sea around his ship began to erupt in plumes of water. The Japanese attack had begun.

  Tōgō’s plan, all along, had been to ‘cross the T’ of his enemy, and thereby allow each of his ships in turn to fire towards the advancing column of enemy ships. Even with the ability of modern turrets to swivel, a broadside from a line of ships side-on could put significantly more shells in the air than an enemy that approached the same vessels head-on.11

  While his crossed ‘T’ concentrated the Japanese fire on the lead ship of the Russian squadron, it also left the Mikasa herself exposed. Several shells slammed into the Mikasa, including a 12-inch round that smashed through the mainmast. The Russians seemed to be targeting the muzzle flashes from the Mikasa – if they weren’t, then the next shot that hit a gun crew was lucky indeed, as was the next, which killed their newly-arrived replacements.

  At 5:55 p.m., one of the Mikasa’s aft guns was hit, wounding eighteen officers and killing a sailor. This particular hit caused greater concern among the crew than many others, because the gun was being manned by a relative of the Emperor, Prince Fushimi Hiroyasu.12 Torn between his duties to his captain and to his Prince, Fushimi’s aide-de-camp abandoned his post at one of the forward guns and dashed astern. He discovered that the Prince had been wounded, but was well enough to be shouting at his fellow officers to attend to more severely injured personnel before wasting time on him. With great relief, the aide ran up to the bridge to tell Tōgō of this, although by that time, Tōgō had more pressing matters on his mind than the fate of one of his men, however noble-born. Amid the smoke and heat, the Russian flagship appeared to have gone crazy.

  At 6:00 p.m., a shell splinter had killed Vitgeft aboard the Tsetsarevich. Thirty-seven minutes later, a direct hit on the bridge of the Tsetsarevich killed the captain and most of the surviving officers and jammed the damaged ship’s helm hard to port that caused it to heel over by twelve degrees. The Tsetsarevich whirled around dangerously close to her own ships, while Russian vessels behind her made frantic course corrections to follow what they wrongly assumed to be some new tactic of the flagship. By the time the truth became clear – that the out-of-control Tsetsarevich was steering herself in a pointless, uncontrolled circle, the Russian ships were scattered in hopeless chaos, pointing in all directions and now concerned largely with not crashing into each other.

  Tōgō wasted no time in forming a semicircle around the confused enemy, but his vital extra hours of summer light were fading, and twilight was upon him. Consequently, Tōgō ordered the capital ships to cease fire, leaving his destroyers and torpedo boats to search in the dark for enemy stragglers. While Tōgō remained calm and collected, it would seem that some of his men were hysterical. Surviving Japanese accounts of that vital hour aboard the Mikasa do not largely deal with Tōgō’s cold, rational exploitation of the Tsetsarevich’s bad luck. Instead, they focus on the panicked to-ing and fro-ing of adjutants, checking after the health of Tōgō’s princely gunner, and also after Tōgō himself.

  Just before the Tsetsarevich lost control, another Russian shell had slammed into the forebridge of the Mikasa, where Tōgō habitually
stood. Tōgō was unharmed, but eight officers were killed and the entire compartment was filled with a deathly pink mist. Tōgō, too, was drenched with blood, although none of it appeared to be his own. He stayed on the top deck, where he had the best view of the battle. Several of his officers begged him to head up to the conning tower, where they could reasonably expect him to be in less danger from flying pieces of his own ship; but Tōgō waved them away, claiming that there was too much smoke at the level of the conning tower for him to appreciate the disposition of his own forces and those of the enemy.

  Admiral Tōgō’s manservant, Hiwatashi, was wounded in the leg, but kept begging able-bodied passers-by in the sick bay to check after the health of the Admiral. He was witnessed pleading tearfully to an adjutant to ensure that the Admiral did not expose himself to danger – a bizarre concern in the middle of a firefight with a fleet of Russian battleships. Eventually, the adjutant did clamber up to Tōgō and pass on the message, to which Tōgō replied with a wry smile that Hiwatashi should not worry, and that he would soon come inside, out of harm’s way.

  The guns fell silent, and the Japanese were able to put out the worst of their onboard fires. Smoke clouds, the best way of seeing a distant foe, were now almost impossible to discern. Instead, but for the occasional searchlight, the Yellow Sea was dark. The Japanese had suffered 216 casualties, the Russians at least 300, although their figures were never really audited. The result had been a rout for the Russians. A handful of ships made it back to Port Arthur, where they would stay until the city eventually fell to the Japanese army. Of the others, the crew of the Tsetsarevich somehow regained control of her steering, and steamed with three destroyers for Jiaozhou Bay on the south side of the Shandong province. Other ships ran as far as they could, to Shanghai, Saigon and Zhifu, where they were captured or interned. Two ships ran aground in the aftermath – the cruiser Bilni on the coast of Shandong, and the Novik, after a tough race against Japanese pursuers, on the coast of Sakhalin Island. Only the Novik came even remotely close to obeying Vitgeft’s final order to head for Vladivostok. With nowhere to refuel and no friendly harbours, the Pacific Fleet was soon as dead in the water as if Tōgō had sunk every ship. Despite this brilliant victory, there were still whispers below decks from the more fanatical Japanese that Tōgō had not taken enough of a risk.

  ‘Some of our officers, chiefly the younger ones,’ wrote one, ‘also think it strange that Admiral Tōgō did not turn the last battle to better account, for he might have captured some of the enemy’s ships.’ But clearer heads prevailed – Tōgō had not merely neutralised the Russian threat, he had also preserved the naval strength of a Japanese fleet that was entirely without reserves, ready to continue the prolonged war against expected Russian reinforcements.13 The rout of the Russian fleet would lure the trio of Russian cruisers in Vladivostok out of their harbour in what was presumably a search for stragglers and fugitives. The three ships ran into a Japanese patrol near Ulsan in Korea: one was sunk, and the other two beat a fast retreat for Vladivostok with heavy damage.

  Tōgō’s mission was largely accomplished. His fleet was still obliged to watch for a breakout from Port Arthur, and his patrols still accompanied transport ships in the area, but the threat from the Pacific Fleet was now removed. On 16 August, Tōgō was the joint signatory with General Nogi of a letter in which the two commanders asked the Russians within to surrender peacefully in the hope of avoiding a ‘useless sacrifice on a large scale of lives and property’.14

  General Stoessel, commander of Port Arthur, sent a brusque refusal, causing General Nogi to begin the first of several costly assaults on the town. While the siege dragged on, Nogi sent a message to Tōgō in recognition of the fact that Tōgō’s role was, for the time being, now largely cosmetic, but that it was in his interests to prepare for new eventualities:

  It may appear strange for an army man to express his views on naval matters, but tell the admiral that it is Nogi’s hope, if it is possible, that one or two vessels at a time will be sent home for repairs so secretly that the enemy may not suspect it and so enable our squadrons to recover their full strength before the arrival of the enemy’s reinforcement squadron.15

  Nogi was referring to the Russian Baltic Fleet, so conspicuously earmarked for action in the Pacific, but not yet under sail. True enough, the Baltic Fleet would probably not arrive until 1905, but Nogi remained unable to put a date on when Port Arthur might fall. In fact, the land-based capture of Port Arthur would wear on for another four months.

  Attrition still worked against the Japanese. On 18 September, the Pingyuan struck a mine and sank later in the day – once the pride of the Chinese fleet, the ship had served its new Japanese masters for a decade. Nogi made the remaining Russian ships in Port Arthur his top priority. From 19 September, he rained shells upon the surviving Russian ships until the heavily damaged vessels were forced to huddle even further out of sight. In early October, Tōgō wrote to Nogi asking if the ships were fully out of commission, but ten days later Nogi was obliged to inform him that the work was still continuing.

  On 6 November, Nogi’s men captured Erlingshan, a hill which offered them for the first time an entirely unrestricted view of the secluded Port Arthur harbour. There was literally nowhere left for the Russian ships to hide, as Tōgō’s congratulatory note acknowledged:

  For the great victory in which with unyielding spirit you have captured the important ground which commands the fate of the enemy squadron, the Combined Squadron tenders its sincerest congratulations to your army and expresses its deep sympathy with its numerous dead and wounded officers and men.16

  In only a few days after the taking of that vital hill, Nogi’s artillery sank eight Russian warships at anchor, leaving only a single gunboat, a handful of destroyers, and the battleship Sevastopol. This latter vessel made a futile, desperate escape attempt on 9 November. There was nowhere for the Sevastopol to run, and Tōgō had no desire to risk any of his principal ships in her pursuit. Instead, the Sevastopol was hounded to her grave in a week of night attacks by swarms of Japanese torpedo boats. On 15 November, she was waylaid by nine separate flotillas of torpedo boats, but somehow survived until the following night, when she was finally sunk. It was a messy end to the fleet that had once been the late Admiral Makarov’s pride. Nor did the loss of the last Russian ship put an end to Japanese casualties – three more Japanese ships struck mines before Christmas and suffered the same fate as the unlucky Pingyuan.

  It was after the loss of the Takasago, which struck a mine on 12 December, that Nogi repeated his suggestion that Tōgō head for home. This time, he did so with the bold note that Tōgō should look to his own fleet before he worried about the troubles of the Third Army. Tōgō steered the Mikasa close to shore, all the better to get a look at the twisted wreck of the Sevastopol, before going ashore to see General Nogi. The two men shook hands for the first time in the conflict. Both were exhausted by their efforts; Tōgō had hardly set foot on dry land for months, while Nogi had been left wan and thin by running a hard-fought siege that had already claimed the lives of two of his own sons.

  With Admiralty approval, Tōgō left his Third Squadron in charge of the blockade at Port Arthur, and returned to Japan, to Kure, and then by train to Tokyo to report in person to the Meiji Emperor. The Emperor’s concern was the same as General Nogi’s, that Tōgō and his fleet be ready for the inevitable arrival of the Baltic Fleet. ‘When the enemy’s reinforcement squadron comes,’ said Tōgō, ‘I swear I will set Your Majesty at ease by destroying it.’17

  The Emperor’s reply was directed not at Tōgō but at his navy minister. It was an order that Tōgō be kept in his post. Congratulated by his monarch, Tōgō then returned to his family home, where he steadfastedly refused to talk of his recent activities, but listened intently to tales from his wife and children of the home front.

  On New Year’s Eve 1904, Tōgō called on Nogi’s wife, where he received a reminder of samurai stoicism not unlike that of his own
mother:

  When I called with Kamimura at General Nogi’s during his absence, his wife brought a bottle of sake with cups on a stand and after persuading us to drink, congratulated us on our return after the victory. I expressed my condolence on the death in battle of her two sons … but our hostess replied quietly that [neither of] her children had … brought disgrace on the true name of a soldier and this gave her sufficient consolation. I was deeply impressed by her not showing any sign of sorrow and thought her an heroic woman of rare quality.18

  The following day, General Nogi was able to arrange some happier news. The slow, costly advance of the Japanese at Port Arthur had now found them in control of several strategic hills, and on 1 January 1905, the all-important signal station.

  General Stoessel still had ample food and ammunition to last many more weeks, but had lost the will to resist. Controversially, in a decision that would later see him imprisoned by the Tsar, Stoessel did not bother to consult with his officers, but unilaterally sent word to Nogi that he was prepared to surrender. The New Year’s celebrations in Japan were not yet over when the news arrived from China that Port Arthur was in Japanese hands. The Japanese were now free to press north along the South Manchurian railway, up towards Mukden, where Russian forces had been digging in all winter to await the inevitable push. That, however, would not be Admiral Tōgō’s problem. The land army would deal with the conflict in China and Manchuria. Tōgō’s responsibility would be the Baltic Fleet, eleven battleships, eight cruisers and nine destroyers under Admiral Zinovy Petrovich Rozhestvensky, now underway from Europe. But as to where the Baltic Fleet was, how far away, and when it might arrive in Asian waters, nobody knew, not even the Tsar.

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