The extent to which transport duties were responsible for weakening the fighting strength of the army can be seen from the fact that, during the fifteen months of war, 122 transport units were formed, and 8,656 carts, 51,000 horses, and 20,000 pack-animals purchased. For duty with these, 328 officers, 22,000 men, 1,700 hired civilians (Russians), and 9,850 Chinamen were employed. These 122 units were improvised under adverse conditions and from small cadres, and, as they had to be raised in a hurry, there was nothing for it but to appoint to them men and officers from the army.
The strength of units also decreased most marvellously in action. This was partly due to losses, but often also due to the habit of men leaving the firing-line to carry wounded to the rear. This was sometimes done with permission, sometimes without. Very often the men who retired did not have this excuse.
I have pointed out (in [Chapter VII].) that the army did not receive its drafts in time, and that we had to fight below strength; this shortage was still further increased for the following reasons: The war establishment of a company was 220 rifles; but from this number had to be deducted the shortage with which units arrived at the front,[18] the sick, and those detailed for camp and other duties—a procedure which, though unprovided for by Regulations, was permitted by officers in command. Accordingly companies often went into the very first fight at a strength of only 160 to 170 rifles. For a long time the personal supervision exercised by commanding officers to insure that units took the field as strong as possible was very slack. It seemed, on the contrary, as if their efforts tended all the other way, for they left men behind whenever they possibly could, particularly those who were most necessary—i.e., those on whom depended the payment and regular rationing of the men. Thus, with the exception of the regimental adjutant, the staff of a regiment rarely went into action; while of the men who are classed as combatants, the company clerks, armourer-sergeant, cooks, officers’ servants, the butcher, the cattle guards and the officers’ grooms, were always left behind. The formation of a force of mounted scouts took away a certain number of men, and stretcher-bearers and bandsmen of course did not fight. Finally, owing to the peculiar nature of the country, donkeys for carrying water were provided for each company, and these required men to look after them, and one or two entire companies from each regiment had to be detached as baggage guard owing to the insecurity of our communications. Commanding officers thought it necessary to leave behind so many men for the above purposes that the orders given for them to accompany the firing-line were either quite neglected, or only half carried out. It was soon found that eight bearers per company were far too few for carrying wounded, and men from the ranks were allowed to help their wounded comrades to the rear. From this cause companies often literally melted away during a fight. There were many instances where unwounded men went to the rear under pretext of carrying away the wounded, at the rate of six, eight, or ten sound soldiers to one wounded! The return of these willing helpers to the front was not so prompt as it might have been, and was difficult to control. The result was that a company hotly engaged usually only had 100 or less rifles after a few hours’ fighting, although its losses might have been inconsiderable.
Meanwhile, as we only asked for drafts strong enough to bring companies up to the established war strength, without taking into account the above extraordinary leakage, the drafts we received did not bring companies up to their proper strength in action.
The reason why the lines of communication in the field[19] took so large a number away from our fighting-line was that we had no proper communication units, and the large working parties necessary for the light railway, road and bridge work had to be drawn from the fighting troops. It was entirely owing to the care with which the commanding officers on the line of communications—especially those in the engineers—had been selected that we were able to fight, and at the same time to make roads of some hundreds of miles’ length for intercommunication between corps. For instance, at the end of 1904 and the beginning of 1905, when the 1st Army was south of the Hun Ho, out of 180,000 men, 7,000 were on the line of communications. At the beginning of July, 1905, when the strength of the 1st Army had gone up to 250,000, and the communications stretched back a length of 150 miles to the River Sungari, there were 10,000 men employed on them—i.e., 4 per cent. of the army’s strength. The length of the road made on the Hsi-ping-kai positions by the 1st Army alone amounted to 1,000 miles, with bridges of more than 20 feet breadth and 50 feet span, and nearly 40 miles of embankment. Though the greater part of this was done by hired Chinese labour, even in this comparatively quiet period the troops of the 1st Army were on “works” for a period of 30,000 working “man days.”[20]
The supply service, also, as has been mentioned, absorbed a large number of men. The field commissariat were unable, at the beginning of the campaign, to work the bakeries owing to the lack of men. All the bakeries, therefore, were taken over by the troops, who had to build the ovens, buy flour, and bake the bread themselves. Thus the eight field bakeries (of which four were in Liao-yang) which arrived in Harbin and Liao-yang without transport or men had at first to be taken over by the troops. But from May, 1904, onwards the Governor-General insisted on most of the work being handed back to the Commissariat Department. The energy of General Gubur, the Field Intendant of the army, in obtaining supplies locally rescued it from the difficult position in which it was beginning to find itself owing to the constantly increasing number of mouths and to the inadequate number of supply trains. Assisted by Generals Bachinski and Andro, General Gubur took full advantage of all the resources of the country. For this, again, officers and men were necessary to guard supply depôts and collect and escort herds of cattle, and were taken from the combatant troops. A large part of the forage and meat the troops obtained for themselves, but this entailed the provision of strong foraging parties, which went far afield and often remained away a considerable time, and of permanent guards to tend the regimental cattle. When the troops of the Pri-Amur district were concentrated in Manchuria, they left a number of men behind as “base details” to look after their buildings and property. Touch was maintained between these base details and the units at the front during the whole war; from them the troops received their warm clothing in winter, and to them it was sent back in the summer of 1905. This all meant the employment of soldiers. Finally, men had to be told off for topographical work, reconnaissance, and as escorts for officers and other persons, etc.
The number for all the above duties taken together, with the wounded and sick present with units, constituted on an average 400 to 500 men per regiment. This, added to the 369 authorized “employed” men above mentioned, brought the total up to 800. Obviously such a loss of numbers must be taken into consideration in appreciating the fighting work of the army.
Other things which contributed to the same result were the immense development of the different staffs and administrations, the auxiliary institutions, such as supply parks and hospitals, the congestion on the roads caused by the masses of baggage which had collected, and the fact that both our wheeled and pack transport carried less than it was supposed to owing to the hilly country and the all-prevailing mud. After heavy fighting our army corps, especially those consisting of three-battalion regiments, amounted to less than 10,000 to 15,000 rifles, and yet the immense organization, military parks, baggage, and transport, etc., for a full corps had still to be guarded. Even the regimental standards, which should have been a source of strength and encouragement in the fight, were in many cases prematurely taken to the rear under a guard of a company or half a company, the troops at the front being weakened by this number at the most important moment of an action. I was obliged to make a ruling that in action the standards should be kept with the regimental reserves, and that steps should be taken that they should be a symbol of victory in the most critical phases of a fight (as used to be the case in former wars), and a source of strength instead of weakness to the units which possessed them.
In September and October, 1905, instead of one Manchurian army, three were formed (the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd); they were all intended for operations in the Mukden area, and were based on the one railway which constituted their common line of communications. The powers of the army commanders were as laid down by regulation. Officers in command of armies were given (Field Service Regulations, 1890) almost all the powers formerly vested in the Commander-in-Chief. As regards fighting, it was laid down that “in conducting military operations the officer commanding an army should be guided by the instructions of the Commander-in-Chief, but should act independently.” This latitude would be very convenient in operating in Europe, where each army would have its own independent line of communications; but in the conditions which existed at Mukden—one common position and one line of communications for all—and with a difference of views existing between the army commanders as regards the conduct of affairs, the arrangement was, to say the least of it, extremely unsuitable. A difference of opinion upon some vital matter might easily arise, when it might be necessary either to order the army commander to carry out an operation which he thought unnecessary, inopportune, or even dangerous, or else to ask for him to be replaced. For instance, a fortnight before we assumed the offensive on January 25, after everything had been settled and all plans drawn up, General Grippenberg suddenly surprised me by his opinion—that the campaign was lost; that we should retire towards Harbin, hold that point and Vladivostok, and thence move with two armies in other directions. In which directions, he was unable to explain. The Commander-in-Chief’s instructions on many essential points, such as the danger of holding non-continuous lines[21] and the necessity for having strong army reserves, were not carried out because the responsibility for holding the defensive positions occupied by the armies rested on the army commanders. Thus my endeavours to send at least twenty-four battalions—if not the whole of the 17th Army Corps—from the 3rd Army into the reserve failed, as the officer commanding that army thought that his position in the centre would not be safe if the regiments of the 17th Corps, which was in advance, were replaced by reserve regiments of the 6th Siberians. As mentioned in the account of the operations of the 14th Infantry Division at Hei-kou-tai, notwithstanding my instructions to conceal our intention of attacking the enemy’s left flank as long as possible, General Grippenberg, for no apparent reason, and without even asking permission, assumed the offensive almost two weeks before the time that I had fixed by moving the 14th Division towards Ssu-fang-tai (on the heights by San-de-pu) on January 13, and by moving the 10th Army Corps into the advanced lines between the right flank of the 3rd Army and the River Hun on the 16th. By this the enemy was informed of our intentions before we began our forward movement, and the front of the 2nd Army was spread over thirteen miles.
With the exception of General Linievitch, our army commanders were unnecessarily sensitive to interference with their powers, and in cases where orders would formerly have been issued to corps commanders it now became necessary to reckon with the personal opinions of army commanders, and to guard against offending their susceptibilities. After the pomp and parade of General Grippenberg’s departure from the army, the relationship between the army commanders and the Commander-in-Chief became still more strained. How jealously they looked after their rights, and how strangely they interpreted their own powers, is illustrated by the following incident: On February 19 I sent for the three army commanders and their chief staff officers, in order to ascertain their views as to the plan of operations which should be undertaken under the unfavourable conditions brought about by the fall of Port Arthur and General Grippenberg’s unsuccessful operations at Hei-kou-tai. The following courses were open to Nogi’s army, no longer required in the Kuan-tung Peninsula: it might join the four armies already in the field against us; it might, together with the divisions formed in Japan and the troops in Korea, form a force of seventy to eighty strong battalions for operations against Vladivostok, or, landing at Possiet Bay, it might march against Kirin and Harbin, so as to outflank our position at Mukden. I had also been continually receiving reports from General Chichagoff to the effect that the enemy had invaded Mongolia, and, aided by numerous bands of Hun-huses, had begun to attack the railway in our rear, which had forced me to weaken the army by detailing an infantry brigade and four Cossack regiments to reinforce the railway guard and safeguard our position. In spite of these reports, Generals Linievitch and Kaulbars expressed the opinion that we ought not to change our plans, and should carry out the orders I had issued on January 25—namely, to fall on the enemy’s left flank. But when my Chief of Staff asked the officer commanding the 2nd Army—who was to commence the operation—how he proposed to employ his cavalry, Kaulbars,[22] looking upon the question as an interference with his authority, became annoyed, and said much that was unnecessary and quite beside the point. As it turned out, the Chief of the Staff had every reason to be anxious as to the employment of this Army, for its work in the battle of Mukden was anything but satisfactory.